“An Autobiography” by Van Wyck Brooks

It doesn’t seem like a traditional autobiography at all, this An Autobiography by Van Wyck Brooks (1886 – 1963), this literary historian who had so much to do with the shaping of our understanding of American literature from the 1920s to the 1970s. It is more a memoir, a memoir packed with recognizable names from American literature and culture, people whom Brooks knew extremely well or at least well.

Walter Lippmann. Sinclair Lewis. John Steinbeck. Carl Sandburg. Padraic Colum. F. Scott Fitzgerald., Ernest Hemingway. Maxwell Perkins. Robert Frost. Amy Lowell. Ezra Pound. Theodore Dreiser. Sherwood Anderson. E.E. Cummings. William Carlos Williams. Marianne Moore. Lewis Mumford. T.S. Eliot. And many, many more.

Brooks includes some of his own biographical information, but not as much as might be expected. And for a good reason: his life was the literature he read, studies, and wrote so voluminously about.

When Brooks was at Harvard in the early 1900s, he says there was a sense that America had a past literature generation, a past national literature, but that it was much better than the generation he was living in. That sense of loss, however, would, within a few years, give way to the flowering of an American literature that was not foreseen, a literature that would include the poetry of Frost and Eliot and the fiction of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, and more.

After college graduation, Brooks worked at Doubleday – thanks to connections of Maxwell Perkins, and then goes to California, where he serves as the secretary to the president of Stanford. He is married there, and he and his wife soon travel to London, where he meets Walter Lippmann and first hears of his plans for a new magazine called The New Republic.

He returns to the United States at the outbreak of World War I, and what is already forming in his mind is a series pf works that would become the many books he wrote about writers in America.

Van Wyck Brooks

He moves to Westport, Connecticut, in 1920, and he stayed there for 20 years. His circle of friends and neighbors included Sherwood Anderson, Fitzgerald and Frost. He becomes the literary editor of a magazine called The Freeman, a forerunner of the libertarian magazine of the the same name, and worked there with Dos Passos. Nearby was another literary magazine, The Dial, that published the poetry of Cummings Moore, and Williams. Brooks would edit and published articles by such authors as Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck.

He also edited Carl Sandburg’s biography of Abraham Lincoln, and defended Sandburg against on number of critical attacks that dogged the writer and poet for much of his life. Sandburg, Brooks said, was “one of those yea-sayers and lovers of life who were suspected and disliked by the smaller, more intense spirits of the coming generation.” Those same spirits would eventually target Brooks as well.

Two parts of the autobiography were published during Brooks’ lifetime; the third was edited by his lifelong friend John Hall Wheelock after Brooks’ death and published as a complete work in 1965. Wheelock wrote the foreword; editor Malcolm Cowley wrote the introduction.

Brooks is largely forgotten today; his style of writing and his themes are largely ignored by most critics and literary historians today (which is not necessarily an insult to Brooks). But he was one of the key people who shaped a national literary consciousness in the 20^th century, and his autobiography helps to explain how that happened.

Related:

Van Wyck Brooks, Washington Irving, and Literature

Van Wyck Brooks, William Prescott, and History

Van Wyck Brooks and The Flowering of New England

Van Wyck Brooks: A Tale of Two Publications

“The Times of Melville and Whitman”

“The Ordeal of Mark Twain”

Van Wyck Brooks and American Literature

Top iIllustration: Portrait of Van Wyck Brooks by Frances O’Brien, University of Arizona Museum of Art.

Van Wyck Brooks, William Prescott and History

Almost 30 years ago, I bought a three-volume set of The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella by William Prescott (1796-1859) from an antique shop in our local St. Louis suburb. I had been reading in depth in Spanish and Latin American history and literature, and I came across the set while browsing through the store’s books.

The volumes were the eighth edition, published in 1841 and priced at $80. At 175 years old today, the books are still in fine condition, slightly worn but with marbled pages, fine leather binding, and acid-free paper. We should all look so good at 175 tears old.

Imagine my surprise (and delight) to find an entire chapter on this work in The Flowering of New England (1815-1865) by Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), the writer and literary critic. Brooks won the 1936 National Book Award for Non-Fiction and the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for History for this work.

What he says about the Prescott work is illuminating. A number of writers, authors, and academics in the Boston area had been focused on writing history for some time, history having replaced religion as a main literary and cultural interest. But it wasn’t until 1837, with the publication of this work by Prescott, that Boston took its place on the nation’s world’s cultural and literary map. Within the next two to three years, the critics in Europe had weighed in, and declared the work an unmitigated success. The work would continue to be published throughout the 19^th century.

Prescott was nearly blind, Brooks says, and he would often memorize draft chapters at a time, editing them in his head before having them written down. And only one or two of his friends knew he was working on his history. He would go on to write a considerable number of historical works, including The History of the Conquest of Peru and The History of the Conquest of Mexico. Bound sets of his collected works were well sold into the early 20^th century.

Van Wyck Brooks

Prescott wrote the kind of history that is decidedly not popular today among academics – a broad, sweeping narrative that told a military and political story. But in 1837, it was an innovation in historical studies. “The freshness and freedom of the descriptions,” Brooks writes, “the unity and proportion of the structure, the quiet and modest authority of the apparatus, the lustre of the language were new notes in American history-writing…”

In other words, Prescott told a thumping good story.

We do have writers today that have this kind of historical sweep. Peter Ackroyd in Britain is one, David McCullough and the late Stephen Ambrose are others. When I was at LSU, the History Department was considered one of the best in country, and it was led by T. Harry Williams, an expert on the Civil War who also happened to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Huey Long.

We don’t see as much of the “big sweep” views of history as we did in earlier years. Our understanding seems to have become more specialized and atomized – knowing more and more about less and less. Part of that is a function of the information explosion.

But having more and more information available doesn’t necessarily seem to make us more knowledgeable, understanding, or wise.

Related: Van Wyck Brooks, Washington Irving, and Literature

Top photograph: William Prescott.

Van Wyck Brooks, Washington Irving, and Literature

Imagine reading the following in a contemporary literary study:

“Through the opening years of the nineteenth century, and even as late as the forties, while literature in America dawned and spread, (John James) Audubon haunted the frontiers, north, south and west, that encircled the centres of culture and their men of thought. His ‘Episodes’ were a cyclorama of the primitive scenes of theses frontiers, and he spoke words of good cheer for the future of the race.”

The passage is from The World of Washington Irving by Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963), the writer and literary critic who won the 1936 National Book Award for Non-Fiction and the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Flowering of New England (1815-1865). I’ve been reading The World of Washington Irving, and the more I read, the more I am struck by not only how much literary studies have changed but how much the United States has changed since Brooks published the work in 1944. (This edition is marked with the “This is a Wartime Book” emblem, denoting that it had met government regulations for conserving materials during the war.)

Brooks and his style of literary study have long been out of fashion. In fact, he was out of fashion for the last 10 years of his life. But he had been enormously influential, and how he understood the development of American literature is how several generations of students and teachers understood it (including my own generation).

Consider that passage, and what academics today would find wrong with it. It sounds pretentious. It’s far too generalized. It is based on questionable assumptions. It disenfranchises women and minorities (“their men of thought”). And what would an artist like John James Audubon have to do with literature anyway?

Washington Irving by John Wesley Jarvis (1809)

The passage, and the book in general, assumes something else – a national consensus about who we are (or were) as a country. It sounds almost as if Brooks is describing a “manifest destiny” for American literature. How overblown, vague, imperialist, sexist, racist, capitalist, and florid could the man get, right?

In our own time, literary studies tend to be more about 50 Shades of Grey and how Lady Gaga interacts with her social media fans. No self-respecting academic today would write the kind of studies that Brooks did. Yes, that’s an exaggeration, but not much of one.

As I read The World of Washington Irving, I’m constantly reminded how impoverished we’ve become. Brooks didn’t ignore the issues we take deadly seriously today – like race and slavery or what happened to native Americans – but he didn’t exclude everything else so as to exclude or downplay other important developments. He took a broad, knowledgeable sweep, and he seemed to effortlessly draw upon literature, biography, history, science, art, politics, and geography, sometimes all in the same sentence.

And I think, this is how it used to be. But this is not like it is. How it is seems less than what it was. And this isn’t only my imagination. Something profound has been lost.

Van Wyck Brooks in 1909

Brooks began his literary career as a poet, publishing (while he was still a student at Harvard) Verses by Two Undergraduates with John Hall Wheelock. Brooks’ literary studies included Mark Twain, Henry James, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, H.G. Wells, William Dean Howells and others. What he’s best known for is a series of studies on the writer in America, focusing approximately on the 19^th century (1800-1915).

His literary output was enormous, and it was recognized. He received honorary degrees from 11 universities, including Harvard, where he earned a degree in 1908. He was roughly a contemporary of T.S. Eliot, and their years at Harvard overlapped. Brooks was also a lifelong friend6of poet John Hall Wheelock (1886-1978), who worked at Scribner’s Publishing and became senior editor in 1947.

Brooks on the cover of Time, Oct. 2, 1944

The World of Washington Irving is a delight to read. Irving, Brooks says, was America’s first true “American writer.” And he details Irving’s career, surrounding it with the deep context of what was happening in American writing and literature at the time (I didn’t know, for example, that Irving’s Sketch Book, for example, was loved was Byron, Shelley, and the other Romantic poets, and that it was used as a first reader for students of English all over the world for more than a century).

But Brooks’ book is also something of an archaeological artifact, buried under 70 years of debris, broken crockery, old coins, dust and dirt – the remains of a popular intellectual tradition that we’ve sent to the ash heap. And I wonder if Washington Irving’s writings are taught today in literature classes. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and other selections from the Sketch Book were still taught when I was in high school.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be considering some of Brooks’ other writings, too see if my initial impressions bear up. But in the meantime, I’m left with the uncomfortable feeling that what’s in our used bookstores and used book sales may be more important that what we find in our college bookstores and Barnes & Noble.

Top painting: The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, by John Quidor (1858). The portrait of Van Wyck Brooks in 1909 is by John Butler Yeats, father of William Butler Yeats.