There is only
one biography of literary historian Van Wyck Brooks. It
was published in 1977, some 14 years after Brooks’ death, when author James
Hoopes was with the English Department at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. Today he is a professor of Ethics in Business at Babson College
in Massachusetts.
I suppose this
is, and was, a measure of the regard for Brooks and his writings in the 50
years since his death. For a literary historian who won the National Book Award
and Pulitzer Prize, and was one of the most influential critics of his day, it
seems rather odd that he is generally forgotten and disregarded today.
Reasons exist,
for this, of course. Brooks talked about the feminization of American
literature, which by the late 1960s and early 1970s didn’t exactly earn
laudatory responses in academia or the literary set. By “feminization” Brooks
didn’t mean that women writers were coming to dominate literature. What he did
mean, however, that writers were losing what little strength and direction they
had, was then and is now politically incorrect enough to cause offense.
As biographer
Hoopes points out several times in Van
Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture, Brooks was seeking a
national American literature, a national American culture, something between
literary/academic writing and low-brow popular entertainment. And he wasn’t
finding it. Without it, without a strong center, ultimately the culture couldn’t
hold, he believed.
Considering the
general state of culture, academia, and politics today, perhaps he had a point.
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| Van Wyck Brooks |
Hoopes spent a
considerable amount of time researching Brooks, including living for three
months in Brooks’ last home and having access and support (but not control) by
Brooks’ second wife, Gladys. He’s written a considered, balanced account of
Brooks’ life and especially his literary works. Hoopes disagrees with much of
what Brooks believed and write, and he notes his differences. But he’s still
conscious of what Brooks contributed to American literary history and the
influence he had on numerous writers and critics.
Perhaps because
this book was published in the 1970s, there is a psychological flavor to it.
For a time, well into the 1990s and not entirely gone today, psychological
biographies were popular among academics, and my own first experience with this
genre of biography was Frederick Karl’s William
Faulkner: American Writer, published in 1989. What a psychological
biography can do is require a writer to make assessments, and projections, that
might possibly be on the mark but may also be overblown, especially if the
writer doesn’t have a background in psychology. In the case of Van Wyck Brooks, Hoopes seems to generally
have avoided that problem.
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| James Hoopes today |
In addition to
the biography of Brooks, Hoopes is the author of Oral
History: An Introduction
(1979); Consciousness
in New England: From Puritanism and Ideas to Pyschoanalysis and Semiotic (1989); Pierce
on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce (1991); False Prophets (2007); Hail
to the CEO: The Failure of George W. Bush and the Cult of Moral Leadership (2007); and Corporate
Dreams: Bug Business in American Democracy from the Great Depression to the Great
Recession (2011).
Where Hoopes
excels here is his discussions of Brooks’ books – the context, how they were
published, and what happened afterward. He also notes the controversies Brooks
could engender – historian Bernard De Voto, for
example, seems to have had a permanent case of vented spleen when it came to
Brooks, and possibly because of Brooks’ criticism of Mark Twain, whom De Voto
devoted a large chunk of his career to writing about. Nothing is as ugly as a
literary spat.
Because it’s the
only biography of Brooks, we can’t compare it to other works. While Hoopes is
clearly not enamored of his subject, he does provide a fair and balanced
account.
Related:
Photograph: A group of writers, movie
stars, and artists meet with President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. Van Wyck
Brooks is standing at far left.
