"Belligerent Muse" by Stephen Cushman

“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” One hundred and fifty-eight years after the last battle and the final surrender, it seems we’re still living with the effects of and trying to understand the American Civil War.  

Poet and English professor Stephen Cushman has been fascinated with the Civil War since childhood. He understands that any historical event, like a war, is understood generations later through the writings of those who lived it and then those who wrote about it. The subtitle of his 2014 book explains what he was about when he wrote it – Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Out Understanding of the Civil War.

 

The ”belligerent muse” in this case is war. Cushman points out that “war destroys, but it also inspires, stimulates, and creates.” The Civil War brought destruction, especially in the southern states, but it continues to be the source of an enormous outpouring of memoirs, reports, journals, historical texts, biographies, and fiction. In this book, Cushman says that we should not simply see these writings as “transparent windows opening into the past, but also as literary engagements with the momentous events of the war itself. In other words, they were writing to understand themselves the events they were living through.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The Axis of the Human Heart – Rod Dreher.

 

Civil War Art: Antietam by James Hope – Kevin Pawlak at Emerging Civil War.

 

A Conductor at Twilight: Michael Tilson Thomas’ Last Days – Teez Rose at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Meet Meredith Angwin, the grandmother changing the energy industry – Emmet Penney at The Spectator.

Somewhere in England, a short story by Glenn McGoldrick (and it's a dark one), is free to download on Amazon today and tomorrow.

“English Literature in the 16th Century” by C.S. Lewis

We know C.S. Lewis as a popular theologian, a writer of children’s stories like The Chronicles of Narnia and science fiction stories, the man who gave us Mere Christianity, A Grief Observed, and The Screwtape Letters. We know him as one of the Inklings, a small group of Oxford dons (and a few others) who met regularly at The Eagle and Child (or Bird and Baby) Pub and C.S. Lewis’s rooms in Oxford to discuss their works in progress, life, religion, and everything else. 

What we often forget is that, before he was a Christian and even after, before his wartime broadcast for the BBC, and before Narnia, Lewis was a scholar. He was a Fellow and Tutor of English Literature at Oxford, and he was chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University.

 

In 1944, he gave a series of lectures at Cambridge under the general title of “English Literature in the 16^th Century.” He eventually edited the lectures and published them in 1954 as English Literature in the 16^th Century (Excluding Drama). Almost 70 years later, HarperCollins has republished the volume under its 1954 title. It’s a broad choice of subject, made somewhat easier by the “exclusion of drama,” which means the lectures did not include any discussion of Elizabethan drama, including Shakespeare’s early plays.

 

Still, the subject is large. And Lewis’s grasp of the subject is large, if not astounding. He covers poetry, theology (and it’s a period of a lot of theology), political writing, philosophy, and fiction. And while academic readers may chafe somewhat, the text is highly readable and accessible by general readers – likely a reflection of how the book started life as a lecture series. At times, it seems almost conversational.

 

C.S. Lewis

The broad strokes of understanding are simply described. Literature in the 16^th century was marked by a battle between the Scholastics and the Humanists, which the Humanists eventually won (I don’t think Lewis viewed that as a positive development). The was marked by the theological battles between, first, the Catholic establishment and the English translators like John Wycliffe, and then the religious wars between the Protestants and the Catholics. Sir Thomas Moe and John Wycliffe were martyred a year apart and for different reasons. Lewis also devotes considerable attention to one of the most important works of the 16^th century – The Book of Common Prayer.

 

Lewis notes that, for Scotland, the century began as an almost golden age in literature, while for England it was what he calls the “Drab Period.” No one, he notes, would have expected the Drab Period to eventually give way to the amazing English literature of the last half of the century. But it did, and he says he can’t offer a reason for why it happened.

 

In detail, he covers the greatest writers of the century – Edmund Spenser, Tyndale John Knox, More, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, Shakespeare (his sonnets).and many others. His descriptions and understanding make it clear that he’s not only read these authors, he’s read about these authors. The breadth and depth of Lewis’s scholarship is astonishing.

 

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century is not only an in-depth introduction to the great and not-so-great works of the period; it’s also a display of Lewis’s scholarly knowledge and understanding. And it was this incisive mind that also gave us his well-known works on Christianity, which Lewis himself might see as of a piece.

It Was a Marvelous Year: “The Making of Poetry” by Adam Nicholson

Adam Nicolson has written a story fully worthy of its famous protagonists. 

In June 1797, William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy rented a house for a year near Bristol in western England. After they had arrived at Alfoxton House, Samuel Taylor Coleridge found his way there (via a walking tour) for a visit. The visit would last a year; Coleridge rented a place nearby for himself and his family. The Wordsworths and Coleridge spent an enormous amount of time together, talking, inventing new poetic projects, and taking long walks through the Quantock Hills. 

What came out of that year was some of the most significant poetry in the English language: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Christabel,” “Kubla Khan,” “Lyrical Ballads,” and “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.” Yet much more happened than the writing of great poems, astounding as they were (and are). The two poets emerged from that period with an understanding of themselves and of poetry as a vital force in life. By the fall of 1798, both Wordsworth and Coleridge would be set upon the courses that made them both famous.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Grant and Twain” by Mark Perry

I knew the story of Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain, or, more precisely, I knew the barebones of how Twain helped Grant publish his memoirs. I learned it years ago, when I found a first edition of two-volume The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant (1885) in a local antique store and noticed that the publisher was the one Twain had helped to create. From reading several Twain biographies, I knew about the publisher Charles H. Webster & Co, and that Twain played a significant role in the Grant memoirs.

I knew the story, but I didn’t know the story. Author Mark Perry tells that story in Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America (2004). The subtitle may sound a bit overstated, but it’s not; as large as each of them loom in American military and literary history respectively, their friendship resulted in something of almost mythic proportions.

Grant’s work would come to be seen as the best military memoir since Caesar’s Gallic Wars; its straightforward, concise style would set the example for every military memoir that came after. And it was the Grant-Twain friendship that helped Twain to finally break the writer’s block on a story he had started and then set aside a decade earlier, one called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The story of Grant and Twain’s friendship and collaboration is a significant and remarkable chapter of American literary history. And Perry tells it a lively, highly readable, and intriguing fashion.

Grant and Twain provides the basic story of the lives of both men. Grant, several years older, was born and raised in Ohio, attended West Point, and served in the U.S. Army during the Mexican-American War. He left military service and lived in St. Louis, where his in-laws resided (right next to the suburban St. Louis biking trail I’ve traveled hundreds of times). He wasn’t much of a success at farming, and he re-enlists when the Civil War began. He was in command at some of the bloodiest engagements in the western theater of war – Shiloh and Vicksburg. President Lincoln appointed him commander of the Northern armies and he began to doggedly tear away at Robert E. Lee’s position in Virginia. 

After the Confederate defeat, Grant was elected President twice. His administrations were marked by horrible scandals and corruption, but none ever touched Grant himself. He moved to New York City and became a partner in an investment house partially owned by his son.

Twain was born and raised in northeastern Missouri, with a biography inevitably tied to the Mississippi River. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he joined a rather irregular Confederate unit, but he soon realized he wanted no part of military life. His brother was appointed to a federal post in Nevada, and Twain accompanied him, trying prospecting and other activities before settling in on one in which he excelled – newspaper reporting. He returned east after the end of the war, continued writing, married, and settled in Hartford, Connecticut. Twain was always on the lookout for money-making ventures, virtually all of which lost money, and often major amounts of money. And so, he would take to the lecture circuit, becoming one of the best-known public speakers in America.

Grant’s investment house collapsed in 1883, and the former general and American hero faced bankruptcy. Worse still, he was diagnosed with tongue and throat cancer, and he faced the prospect of death and having nothing to provide his wife Julia and family with. He reluctantly accepted what had been urged upon him for years – to write his memoirs. He found a publisher and began the work.

Twain knew something about publishing in the Gilded Age, and he realized that Grant’s publisher knew nothing about the important role serialization could play, both to provide income and to set the stage for the entire edition of the memoirs. He convinced Grant, shortly before he was to sign his publishing contract, to switch to the publishing firm operated by Twain’s nephew. It was a wise move. Grant’s first publisher thought the memoirs could bring Grant as much as #25,000 or even $30,000. Twain saw that as a ridiculously low number, and he was right; Grant’s family would realize more than $300,000 from the serialization and publication.

And thus began a race against time – for Grant to finish his manuscript before his medical condition incapacitated him. Twain served as one of the editors, but he made virtually no changes; Grant had a natural writing style that almost seemed to edit itself. And in the process, Twain was inspired to resurrect that story he had put away years before, because he couldn’t figure out how to get Jim the runaway slave and Huck Finn to go southto find freedom for Jim.

Mark Perry

It's a stirring story. Everyone involved became convinced that the only thing that kept Grant alive as long as he did was the intense focus on the writing.

Perry received degrees from the Northwestern Military and Naval Academy and Boston University. He has written extensively on military history, foreign affairs, and intelligence and security. His books include Four Stars: The Inside Story of the Forty-Year Battle Between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America’s Civilian Leaders (1989); A Fire in Zion: The Israeli-Palestinian Search for Peace (1994); Conceived in Liberty: William Oates, Joshua Chamberlin, and the American Civil War (1999); Lift Up Thy Voice: The Sarah and Angelina Grimke Family’s Journey from Slaveholders to Civil Rights Leaders (2002); Grant and Twain (2004); and Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (2007); among others. He also co-founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. 

Grant and Twain tells the story of how two men became friends, fellow writers, and business partners to the benefit of both – but especially to the benefit of posterity.

Top illustration: Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain.

“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” by James Hoopes

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.

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.

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:

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

Photograph: A group of writers, movie stars, and artists meet with President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. Van Wyck Brooks is standing at far left.