“The Writer in America” by Van Wyck Brooks

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.

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:

Van Wyck Brooks, Washington Irving, and Literature

Van Wyck Brooks and “The Flowering of New England”

“The Times of Melville and Whitman”

Van Wyck Brooks’ New England Summer

Van Wyck Brooks, William Prescott, and History

Van Wyck Brooks: A Tale of Two Publications

“The Ordeal of Mark Twain”

Van Wyck Brooks and American Literature

“An Autobiography” by Van Wyck Brooks

Van Wyck Brooks’ “The Life of Emerson” 

Van Wyck Brooks’ “The Confident Years: 1885-1915”

"America's Coming of Age" by Van Wyck Brooks

“Van Wyck Brooks” by James Hoopes

Top photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Van Wyck Brooks’ “The Times of Melville and Whitman”

Van Wyck Brooks published three related works of literary history over the span of about a decade (while he was publishing other works as well). The World of Washington Irving depicted U.S. literary culture, and some history, in the first 20 years or so of the 19^th century. The Flowering of New England 1815-1865 showed the seeds that were being planted for a national literary culture, although it was still largely a regional phenomenon.  New England Indian Summer 1865-1915 concerned the lingering influence of New England on national literary culture, but a major shift was underway.

We are more than familiar with the writers and poets who emerged from New England during the 19^th century described in these books, because they became part of the American literary canon. Irving. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nathaniel Hawthorne. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Emily Dickinson. Henry David Thoreau. Henry and William James. And many more.

But the geographical center of the country was shifting, and the literary cultural center was shifting at the same time. As the United States expanded westward, its writers and poets followed.

T

Mark Twain

his is the world described by Brooks in The Times of Melville and Whitman (1947). It is the world of pre-Civil War San Francisco, which drew writers like Bret Harte and Mark Twain. This is the world of Herman Melville, whose Typee: A Peek at Polynesian Life captivated readers across the country and well beyond to Europe, years before he wrote Moby Dick. This is the world of Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass transformed American poetry forever.

Twain, Melville, Whitman: America’s writer, the Great American Novel, America’s poet. Between them, they created what became known as an American literature.

Herman Melville

Brooks particularly highlights the role of Twain. “Mark Twain, with his fathomless naivety prepared the ground, as Whitman did, for a new and unique American art of letters,” he writes, “in a negative way with The Innocents Abroad, in a positive way with the Western writings in which he contributed to establish and foster this art.” Those “Western writings” included Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn.

But the new national culture still had its New England influence. Melville was influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne (and also by Shakespeare, especially in Moby Dick, Brooks says). And Whitman’s poetry, as heavily influenced by his political work, his newspaper work, and the growth of trade and industry as it was, was also influenced and promoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Walt Whitman

Literary culture broke out of the essential regionalism of New England and simultaneously become more geographically western and national.  

Brooks wrote a time when there was still a sense of national consciousness among the political, literary, cultural, and business elites. Six decades later, that sense is largely gone. In academia, the idea of a literary canon is considered quaint and rather prehistoric, and would likely result in protests by students and professors alike.

But to read a work like The Times of Melville and Whitman from today’s vantage point is to see how much has been lost. And we are the poorer for it.

Related:

Walt Whitman Built Free Verse and Freedom into His Poetry – Investors Business Daily.

Walt Whitman in Brooklyn – Newspapers and “Leaves of Grass” – Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top illustration: The great comic scene of the buffalo climbing the tree in Twain’s Roughing It.

Literature as National Consensus

For years I regularly haunted used bookstores and book sales. I generally looked in the fiction and poetry sections, but for quite some time I bought books of speeches, speech textbooks, and books about rhetoric and oral communication. This has to do with the fact that for a long time, speech writing was a significant part of my career.

If you visit used bookstores and especially sales of old books, you will inevitably find old textbooks. I found the textbook I had in my senior English class in high school (longer ago than I care to think) and I immediately plunked down a dollar to buy it.

Another textbook find was the 1940 edition of Prose and Poetry of America, originally published in 1934 and edited by H. Ward McGraw. My find was what two additional editors, Julian Maline and William McGucken, described in the preface as the Catholic edition. They were both Jesuit priests, and found in McGraw’s textbook the basis for creating a version for Catholic schools. From the looks of things, they kept most of what McGraw had included, adding only a few additional writers. (They even commended McGraw for being particularly careful to avoid offenses to Catholic students.)

To continue reading, please see my post today at The Master’s Artist.