I started this
series on the writer and literary historian Van Wyck Brooks
(1886-1963) more than three months ago. This post is the conclusion, and
perhaps it’s fitting that it ends with his defense of his work, The
Writer in America, published in 1953.
In a series of
seven related essays, Brooks takes on the critics – essentially, the “literary
form” crowd who believed that literary history was only about form (they’re
still with us today); why he wrote his “Movers and Shakers” series of literary
histories; the tendency to over-psychologize writers and their works; the
question of a “national literature;” and the stewardship of a writer’s talent.
What he writes,
it seems to mem is not unreasonable. But it stirred up a hornet’s nest with the
form critics who held academic sway and the time and still generally do.
Here’s Brooks in
his own words:
On critics’
obsession with literary form: “One feels criticism itself has followed the path
of scholasticism and has traveled too far from its source in literature.” (This
would only get worse in the 1980s and 1990s, with the advent of postmodernism’s
“deconstruction” and the obsession with form as a lever of power.)
On poets in
academia, Brooks quotes Dylan Thomas: “Why do so many American poets teach?
They graduate from college, and then they stay in college. When do they learn
anything?” (One could say the same of today’s political class in the United
States, the people who have spent their entire working careers in government.)
On
psychologizing writers and their works: “In our hour of insecurity, the
critical spirit tends to admit only the writers of the past who throw some
light on our personal problems, differing widely in this way from the spirit that
prevailed when the young grew up in a world that seemed secure.” (And so today
we likewise junk whole sections of the literary canon, or even the notion of a
canon, and write learned treatises on minor and obscure writers because they
seem to fit the temper of our times better than “dead white European males.”)
Brooks spends
time on discussing the literary culture’s fixation with always finding new (and
younger) writers but doing nothing to helped older writers mature and become
better. This was a major difference between American and European literary
culture, he believed. What he may not have understood was that this fixation
with youth (he called it a “cult”) would get far worse, and would extend beyond
literary concerns to American culture in general.
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| Van Wyck Brooks |
This helping
writers mature idea is generally what Brooks called “the stewardship of a
writer’s talent.” He saw this as largely ignored by literary critics “in their
recent preoccupation with the grammatical and rhetorical minutiae of literary
texts.” And then he says this, which struck not only at the literary culture of
his own time but our contemporary culture as well:
“How many
writers’ conferences, how many summer schools, how many classes, how many books
and magazines dwell each year, with fanatical concentration, on the ‘form’ of
writing, never diverting a moment’s thought from the question, How to write
well, to the question, How to live well to be a writer?”
His words were
noted but not heeded. We’re still obsessed with form. Publishers are still
obsessed with the cult of youth and the next new thing. We still obsess with
our personal problems, paying attention only to those writers who give us
insight into them. Our poets still (largely) teach. And we still neglect the
stewardship of writing talent.
As Brooks
pointed out repeatedly, as long as we continue to do these things, our literary
culture remains immature, a teenager expected his opinions to count for
everything and demanding that every expectation be met.
Related:
Top photograph by Petr
Kratochvil via Public
Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
