Most Americans do not know orhave never heard of Van Wyck Brooks (the middle name is pronounced "Wike"). Among the most highly educated Humanities major Americans, one may hear the name and say, "I think I know the name...." but nothing else. Brooks is someone I have read references to over the years, but only in a way which spoke of him as old-fashioned, out-of-date, and antiquarian to anyone in the late 20th Century through the present. I knew of Brooks most particularly as someone who wrote about Emerson, Thoreau, and the other 19th Century New England intellectuals and writers. I had a soft spot for him, though, as he was one of the few literary critics of the early to mid-20th Century who liked and admired Sinclair Lewis' writings, seeing Randolph Bourne's insights put into novel form (see page 177 of Mark Schoerer's detestable in opinion, not research, biography of Sinclair Lewis). For me, Brooks' kindness to Lewis, unlike so many other critics of the era in which Lewis wrote, made Brooks at least a name worth remembering. But still, I never read Van Wyck Brooks' works.
Until now. And I must admit, I am smitten.
Two weeks ago, I was in Downtown Books, a used bookstore in downtown Albuquerque, and found, quite by accident--which is the main reason to frequent used books or new books bookstores, by the way--a Brooks book entitled The Opinions of Oliver Allston, a book Brooks wrote in the early 1940s. It is a book of observations in the creative guise of a fictitious person, "Oliver Allston," as if Brooks was writing a literary and intellectual biography of a real person, when it was just himself. The book has an intellectualism suffused with airiness, meaning a literary feeling one is flying and gliding along, which is akin to W. Somerset Maugham's The Summing Up (1938). The book is also vastly superior, and equally more creative, in style to the laborious third-person style Henry Adam employed for his Education autobiography. One feels the mischievousness in between the lines and in the self-criticism in Brooks' work, particularly in the chapters on Socialism and Communism, which is all the more remarkable for the World War II period. Brooks is saying, in effect, I have no fear of you Red-baiters, who were already on the rise as World War II was in progress. Brooks, in his late 50s, and beyond fear of economic deprivation, spoke plainly about the hope and positive aspects of socialism at least, while making clear he detested the loss of democratic values inherent in most Communist revolutions of the era. As one reads Brooks' novelistic book of letters, one marvels at Brooks' flights of fancy and insight. But, as with Maugham's wonderful book, when one tries to quote from the book, one is mostly at a loss for words. It is a strange feeling, but one I have found, in my old-ing years, more and more comforting. All that is solid melts into air, I suppose, from a literary perspective.
Then, a week ago, I was in another used bookstore, Uncle Charlie's Covers, in Bernalillo, just north of us here in Rio Rancho, NM, and found a first edition of Brooks' New England: Indian summer: 1865-1915, published in 1940. I admit to my surprise I am savoring it page by page. Brooks' insights about the post-Civil War period are remarkable for his time, in recognizing the rise of corporate capitalism as a given, and recognizing how it was ripping through our cultural and economic life, especially for workers and those on farms and in rural areas. Sounds familiar, somehow....:) Brooks' insight as to the novels of that time, with their echoes from Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the like, and the ideas and works of Margaret Fuller, Julia Ward Howe, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others, screams of a Marxist analysis, but without any of the cant and dogma so prevalent at that moment of 1940. Brooks even mischievously quotes Henry Adams' Education autobiography, where Henry speaks of Grandfather John Quincy Adams and said by "rights" the grandfather "should have been a Marxist..." (see Adams' chapter on Darwinism for this quotation) in the way JQA envisioned American infrastructural development, sharing of land and resources for common goods, and the like.
Brooks' analysis of the 19th and early 20th Century writers who came from or came to New England speaks to a literary and intellectual history for our nation which needs reaffirmation in this time of oligarchies making us feel more divided than we are--even as one recognizes Brooks limited himself to the northeast, and did not write about the western writers, starting with Jack London, though, peeking at the index, I see multiple mentions of the California scholar who came east to Harvard, Josiah Royce. Nor did Brooks write about southern authors such as Faulkner, though, Faulkner does not arise until the 1920s, and, in this interview for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which NBC produced in 1955, Brooks speaks very highly of Faulkner.* Brooks' insight is how the first intellectual and literary figures emanated from New England, not New York, not the South, not elsewhere. And even today, it remains indisputable the American literary and intellectual grain begins in Boston--notwithstanding Jefferson and Madison in Virginia--as did American intellectual demands for morality in action, most acutely with the Abolitionist movement. Brooks is also wonderfully illuminative regarding Wendell Phillips, the only leading pre-Civil War Abolitionist who, after the Civil War, gravitated to fighting an even more losing battle against "wage slavery." Brooks also speaks at length, sprinkled throughout the book, of the rise of the now also forgotten and derided William Dean Howells, the Ohio transplant who came to Boston the way Islamic religious people come to Mecca, though Howells stayed for decades before decamping to New York City, which, Brooks rightly says, became the cultural center by the second decade of the 20th Century. I am a major Howells fan, and find his trajectory of becoming more radical as he aged most remarkable. If one is not familiar with Howells' business novels, such as The Rise of Silas Lapham, A Hazard of New Fortunes (I seem to recall a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker where he shows the continued relevance of Hazard, but could not find this morning) or the radical Traveler from Alturia, one is missing an important set of insights into the history of our nation from any sociological or economic standpoint. And one basks in the presence of Brooks' great writing while one is enlightened. Brooks is acutely aware of economic forces challenging New England's cultural dominance, particularly how the shipping industry declined in New England, and lost ground to New York and other ports by the end of the 19th Century. Brooks sees the loss of the clothing industry to other parts of the nation as part of New England's relative decline. Brooks also notes, without any racism whatsoever, the rise of the melting pot European immigration into the New England area changed the "Yankee" (Scots-Irish) culture that defined an earlier 19th Century New England.
But I return to where I begin, which is why would Brooks be relevant today? I think one place to begin to find Brooks' relevance is Brooks' demand for sentiment in the face of his knowledge and cynicism. Another is Brooks' insights into highest parts of American culture from 100 to 150 years ago, and deeper, in his The Flowering of New England, which I suppose I will read next after I complete this one, which I am only in the first 20% through of a near 500 page book. His insights help us understand patterns in American life that continue even with a more ethnically diverse nation. I read echoes of his analyses in modern journals such as New York Review of Books, for example, and among those who analyze the latest novels of new immigrants and those whose voices have been oppressed for so many centuries. Lin Manuel Miranda would "get" Brooks and find Brooks' non-racism almost astonishing, and therefore hopeful, considering white Americans' deep racism in the era in which Brooks grew up and thrived. Brooks' insights regarding the literature America was producing as our nation developed into a global Empire has remarkable staying power. This 1996 New York Times review of a Brooks biography, saved online remarkably, speaks to my view that Brooks is well worth reading.
As I close this meandering post, I admit to finding it amusing that Brooks was born and grew up in, and married, in Plainfield, NJ, not far from where I grew up. Brooks was, however, smitten with New England from his attending Harvard, graduating in 1908, as we learn in Wikipedia. I, too, was smitten with Harvard (still am), but I have not had any pretense of ever attending or teaching at Harvard--though, as I have written, the Son should have been accepted there. The Son was and remains certainly "Harvard material," at least for the undergraduate years, and one day, a professor there. Overall, I am glad to have finally met Brooks, and learned I still have much to read in days when I find myself simultaneously wanting to remove myself from the noise of ignorance and rise of fascism and even Confederate style Nazism ascendant in our land--and as I wonder more and more, am I even "white" anymore? I find comfort in reading about the people who inhabited the intellectual and literary life to which I wanted myself to aspire--even as I know Henry Adams, if he met me, would detest me for being of "Jewish" heritage.** I do, however, believe we are in a moment of great artistic ferment in terms of streaming television, and the rise in diverse voices who need to be heard. I stand aside as an older semi-white male and marvel at the justly angry and creative youth, and wish them well. I hope some will find Brooks and ingest and incorporate him, as he is an ancestor worth knowing.
* The interview is worth a watch, for those daring enough to consider watching, as he speaks in the midst of the Red Scare and President Eisenhower, about statesmen behaving like "boys," which first he says is unprecedented, but then, steps back to say Teddy Roosevelt was a more boyish-boy than Ike. Brooks harps on Jeffersonianism, and had that then-mistaken view of Andrew Jackson being a precursor of FDR, when of course FDR was more a Hamiltonian with a Jeffersonian sensibility--which Herbert Croly had called for in his 1909, The Promise of American Life. Brooks speaks more highly of the then-New Critics in literary criticism than he should have, considering their disdain of Sinclair Lewis. However, Brooks gets the limits of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in a manner that would be considered revolutionary in our present days. Brooks sees Hemingway's violence as immature and Fitzgerald's adoration of the rich as woefully immature. Brooks declines to speculate much about what the future would bring, and therefore shows a wisdom beyond mine, for example. It was a pleasurable, though highly sentimental and nostalgic, half hour to spend watching. By the way, the interviewer, Hiram Haydn, was a famous editor of the early to mid 20th Century who edited many writers, from William Faulkner and William Styron to, believe it or not, Ayn Rand.
** See Edward N. Saveth's American Historians and European Immigration: 1875-1925, and particularly the devastating chapter on Henry Adams' crazed anti-Semitism; and I mean crazed, as he seems to use the word "Jew" to mean "modern," something he feared and detested. It was so strange to consider in light of my adoration of Henry Adams. Thank goodness the anti-Semitism only showed up in the private letters Adams wrote to others and not his essays, novel, or histories.
UPDATE: September 22, 2019. I ended up finishing New England Indian Summer and The Flowering of New England, and loved both. I just found and am starting to read The World of Washington Irving, which Brooks called his prequel to The Flowering of New England. This last opens with a mini bio of Parson Weems, he of the apocryphal George Washington biography about cherry tree cutting. It is another delightful start. UPDATE: September 29, 2019. Brooks' chapter on the South left me a bit disappointed, as Brooks appears to have thrown in slavery as an afterthought and, while he recognizes its horridness and cruelty, he seems more enamored with Jefferson and less sympathetic to Hamilton than later scholars would finally correct. It is funny how some of the things he states appears to recognize the limits of the historical consensus at the time, but he appears timid in moving beyond that historical consensus, and appears to not know how the Southern historians had created this misunderstanding. I am somewhat dreading the later chapter focused on Thomas Jefferson, because I know he liked to call himself a Jeffersonian in a way I did as a teenager, before I read more of Vidal and then other scholars showing me that Jefferson was a wily political figure who became more and more unwilling to end slavery. As readers may know, I have long been a champion of Alexander Hamilton since high school, and was a Herbert Croly acolyte in believing the two men's philosophies can be melded for a better America. Otherwise, Brooks' book remains a delight, as it is filled with extraordinary information and analysis.
UPDATE: September 22, 2019. I ended up finishing New England Indian Summer and The Flowering of New England, and loved both. I just found and am starting to read The World of Washington Irving, which Brooks called his prequel to The Flowering of New England. This last opens with a mini bio of Parson Weems, he of the apocryphal George Washington biography about cherry tree cutting. It is another delightful start. UPDATE: September 29, 2019. Brooks' chapter on the South left me a bit disappointed, as Brooks appears to have thrown in slavery as an afterthought and, while he recognizes its horridness and cruelty, he seems more enamored with Jefferson and less sympathetic to Hamilton than later scholars would finally correct. It is funny how some of the things he states appears to recognize the limits of the historical consensus at the time, but he appears timid in moving beyond that historical consensus, and appears to not know how the Southern historians had created this misunderstanding. I am somewhat dreading the later chapter focused on Thomas Jefferson, because I know he liked to call himself a Jeffersonian in a way I did as a teenager, before I read more of Vidal and then other scholars showing me that Jefferson was a wily political figure who became more and more unwilling to end slavery. As readers may know, I have long been a champion of Alexander Hamilton since high school, and was a Herbert Croly acolyte in believing the two men's philosophies can be melded for a better America. Otherwise, Brooks' book remains a delight, as it is filled with extraordinary information and analysis.
