My junior year
in high school included a course in American literature, paired with the
required course of American history. My teacher was a rather flamboyant
character, who talked in exclamation points and believed that Jacqueline Susann’s
Valley
of the Dolls was one of the greatest works of literature of the 20th
century.
Well, no. I was
16 at the time, and even I knew better.
But she was a
good teacher, and she loved the subject she taught. And what I remember most
was the readings and the course projects we had to do. My poetry project was on
Spoon
River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, and it remains a favorite to this
day.
It was
delightful but not quite a surprise (I expected it and would have been
surprised otherwise) to find Willa Cather in The
Confident Years: 1885-1915 by literary historian Van Wyck Brooks
(1886-1963). Published in 1952, it was the last of a series of five books in
his “Finders and Makers: The History of the Writer in America.” The first four
were The World of Washington Irving; The Flowering of New England; The Times of Melville and Whitman; and New England Indian Summer (see below for
my posts on each of them). The Flowering
of New England won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in
1936.
While his
general theme can be seen in all of his works, it is in this last volume in his
series (although not the last book he wrote; he was quite prolific) where it becomes
explicit. And it was this: that the years from 1885 to 1915 were the last in
which there was an English / colonial / pioneer / American cultural
substructure. It was changing, but there was still enough cultural consensus
that people knew what was meant by a phrase like “American literature.” The
United States would still have a literature, and we might call it American, but
the consensus was gone.
A number of
prominent critics disagreed with him, and Brooks grew increasingly unpopular in
literary criticism circles from the late 1940s on. Fifty years after his death,
one can argue that he was more on target than his critics after all. There is
no longer an American literature, at least as it would have been understood a
century ago.
 |
| William Dean Howells |
The Confident
Years acknowledges that underscoring the very idea of American literature was a
faith in human goodness. “It was precisely in this faith,” Brooks writes, “that
America came into existence, affirming the capacity of men to govern
themselves, and the main body of American tradition, as literature expressed
it, exhibited this faith to the beginning of the first world war.”
That faith in
human goodness, as admirable and inspiring as we might find it, couldn’t
survive two world wars, the Holocaust, and a host of other atrocities that
accompanied the 20th century and continue into the 21st.
Painting: New York, oil on canvas by
George Bellows (1911); National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
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