Arts and Letters

One of the most gallant spirits of our time, Van Wyck Brooks, has left us; and it is hard for a friend to measure with measured words the place he filled in American letters, or even, without presumption, to sound his praise. By his own affirmative presence, Brooks stiffened the spine of his contemporaries and gave them confidence to go on adventurously with their work, even after the Confident Years of their youth were followed by the Time of Troubles that has been our mental habitat and our moral burden ever since.

The outward story of Van Wyck Brooks's life was told by himself in the three autobiographies that began with Scenes and Portraits. He was born on February 16, 1886 into a prosperous middle-class family; and he spent most of his boyhood in Plainfield, one of that chain of New Jersey suburbs where many of his literary contemporaries, including Randolph Bourne, lived their early years. In his mixture of Dutch and English stocks, he drew on the same traditions as Whitman and Melville; and by his attachment to New York, after his Jersey beginning, he resembled James Fenimore Cooper.

Brooks's first formal essay into literature was by way of a little anonymous book of verses written by himself and John Hall Wheelock as Harvard freshmen in 1904. Though he quickly buried the poetry, the poet survived. After sailing through his university courses in three years, he wrote his first prose essay, The Wine of the Puritans, published in 1908. Curiously, the quickening notes of that little essay were followed by tentative sallies in quite other directions: studies of the writer as art critic in John Addington Symonds, of the Romantic nineteenth-century temperament in "Obermann" and Amiel, of the socially sensitive utopian in H. G. Wells.

Those who remember Brooks as the paragon of the selfless gentleman should not forget his early revolt against his conventional family values by the very act of espousing literature as a career. Yes: in his youthful makeup there was more than a touch of the defiant bohemian, for he gloried in crossing the Atlantic alone by steerage, and in London he adored the garrets of Gissing's Grub Street; indeed he accepted the discipline of poverty almost as a monastic novice submits to fasts and penances. Though the second part of his life was released from serious economic strain, Brooks devoutly believed that a bread-and-water diet belonged to the young writer's vocation.

Soon after Brooks's return from a second trial of Europe in 1914, his hesitant probings and searchings came to an end. In America's Coming of Age, published in 1915, Brooks found the theme he was to spend the rest of his life developing: the challenge of the American adventure and the nature of the American writer's commitment and achievement. Those who have grown up in the literary world Brooks helped to create cannot possibly imagine the tonic effect of that book. In his harsh rejection of our more popular leaders, Brooks presented a new way of looking at America, a new duty to perform, a new ideal to aim at. Out of exasperation over the current mediocrity of literary America, Brooks doubtless tended to exaggerate the failures of our great writers, even Whitman and Emerson. But his open quarrel with our timidly genteel past stirred his contemporaries to prove themselves capable of more manly effort.

For all that, Brooks had an old conflict within himself as to whether Europe, rather than America, was not his own true spiritual home. And his next two books, The Ordeal of Mark Twain and The Pilgrimage of Henry James, were attempts to settle that issue. Both books have been subject to such disparaging commentary during the last generation that even those who once read them are now more likely to remember the savagery of the criticism rather than the reasonable arguments of the original texts.

Neither book did justice to the positive literary achievements of Mark Twain and James; that must be confessed, and Brooks himself later confessed it. But the writing of these studies prepared Brooks to re-examine with fresh eyes the archetypal figure he had once rejected, Ralph Waldo Emerson himself; and in writing The Life of Emerson Brooks found himself falling in love—passionately, delightedly, unreservedly in love—with his own country. In that book he prefigured the style and contents of his central life work, the Makers and Finders series.

Having reached this point by 1926 one would like to say that Brooks married his new theme and lived happily ever afterward. But before that could happen, he was destined to go through a period of blackness not altogether unlike that which Herman Melville encountered at a similar moment of his life: a period of inner terror and intellectual paralysis, when all the unsolved problems of his life shattered him to his very foundations. The steadfast courage of Eleanor Stimson Brooks, his first wife, stood by him through that ordeal. But once Brooks had fully emerged, though he could talk freely about the humiliations he had endured, he took that episode in much the way that Longfellow had taken his tragic losses; the dark side of life, the very aspect his contemporaries were energetically probing and even wantonly magnifying, he resolutely put behind him. As with Orpheus, a secret voice told him it would be fatal to look back upon that Season in Hell. So, with greater concentration than ever, he settled down to the main task of his life, as if to remind us that man's spirit is not fated to be imprisoned and tortured forever in the collective psychosis of our age.

In the new series, Brooks found a new style for presenting American literature and history. While writing his Emerson, he had discovered how vividly the author's own images could illuminate both the inner spirit and the outer scene; and the picture Brooks now painted of America had a vividness of color and a richness of detail no other writer had even dreamed of achieving, partly because it drew for its substance upon the five thousand books of every genre that Brooks read in scholarly preparation for this work.

With the publication of The Flowering of New England, in 1936, Brooks at last won popular acclaim. But at first acceptance was offset by critical dissidence; for as the other books in the series followed, the method and purpose of the work were consistently misunderstood, and its positive achievement extravagantly underrated by the pundits of the academic world. Brooks's historic panoramas were damned for failing as a systematic criticism of our literature, something Brooks never intended them to be; and his critics overlooked the fact that these surveys were something astonishingly different, a new kind of history, a poet's history, replete with living images of people and places and events, as brilliant as a patchwork quilt. In doing justice to every part of the literary scene Brooks enlarged the entire range of American experience. Therein lay his originality as historian. By his own efforts he had created the usable past that his younger self had demanded. When he died on May 2, 1963, his life's mission was greatly fulfilled.

Even before the Makers and Finders series was brought to completion in 1952, Brooks had the good fortune—not least through his second marriage, to Gladys Rice Brooks—to enjoy a blessed Indian summer: a season of golden, windless, haze-softened days, before grim winter suddenly closed in. Though he was always shy of revealing himself, his own autobiography, and still more his study of William Dean Howells, tell much about him, for all their delicate discretions. There, and in his two books of aphorisms and notes, The Opinions of Oliver Allston and From a Writer's Notebook, one finds a certain appetizing tartness under the skin, as in an Anjou pear, which contrasts with the sweet juiciness of the flesh itself.

Beneath Van Wyck Brooks's desire to admire whatever was admirable and to seek agreement and harmony with others, was an iron armature of well-defined beliefs; and in defending them against anti-democratic or nihilistic ideologies he could be both intransigent and implacable; for, allying himself with the wise and magnanimous spirits of all ages, he was not afraid of being out of fashion in his own fashion-addled time. In this last sentence you will perhaps note with a charitable smile, as I myself did after writing it, that I unconsciously did homage to the characteristic phrasing and rhythm of Brooks's autumnal style.

Those who have imputed a narrow chauvinism to Brooks's preoccupation with America's special gifts neither knew the man nor understood his work; for no one ever included in his circle of friends a wider variety of people from every land and culture, or was more sympathetically receptive to their spiritual contributions, were they Russians, Japanese, Chinese, or Hindus. If one part of Brooks's mind was indelibly American, another part was equally at home in any part of the planet. Though he was proud of his countrymen, he was even prouder of the human race, for he believed in the capacity of the creative spirit to transcend all historic and cultural limitations. Brooks's whole life testified to that capacity and that hope.

We in the Academy and the Institute have a special reason to be grateful for Brooks's fellowship and leadership. Elected to the Institute as early as 1925, the very first of the younger generation to be approved by the founding members, he warmly embraced its duties and its privileges, especially the privilege he valued most, that of periodically beholding and conversing with his fellow writers and artists. As Secretary and Chancellor, as indefatigable committeeman, he gave himself to our activities, as he had always generously done for every writer and artist who called upon him for understanding, criticism or literary aid. For Van Wyck Brooks literature was a religion, and its practice a sacred calling; and he himself served it faithfully both as prophet and priest. Never cowering before the inimical forces of our age, never retreating, never despairing of ultimate victory, Van Wyck Brooks answered to his own definition of a great writer: "A great man writing."