Evolution of a Critic

...More typical is his picture of two painters, friends of Alfred Stieglitz, talking art on a roof as they undertook a neighborly housepaint-ing job...

...The other part of the answer is hinted at in the last chapter, "A Season in Hell...

...To Brooks and his friends, "the newness" was more than revolt, more than fun...

...Brooks's account of pre-exurbanite Westport does much to correct, or modify, the now-orthodox picture of artists' life around New York in the jazz decade...

...Now we can see that Brooks had not reversed himself...

...It seemed as though somewhere around 1930 the young radical had overnight become a conservative, the inspirer of a new literature had turned into an apologist for the old...

...and it is fitting that Brooks's analysis of the analytical Henry James was a partial precipitant of the crisis...

...How were they to reconcile the later figure—the genteel, patriarchal, almost condescending author of the Makers and Finders histories— with the earlier one—the intense Harvard 1908 graduate who in The Wine of the Puritans and America's Com-ing-of-Age preached the need of a new vision and a wholly new literature that would be in the line of Whitman, idealistic, native, socialistic, and who then in the Twenties seemed a leader of the younger rebels against the art-denying and life-denying aspects of American society that they felt to be dominant...

...We see Randolph Bourne, the brilliant hunchback who died embittered by the war before the full bitterness of its aftermath had been felt...

...and by William James, experiences which led them, each in his own way, to dwell on the good in life...

...If in the Thirties Brooks struck the successors to the genteel tradition as himself genteel and even old-fashioned, it was partly because he had indeed been gently born and bred and had never rejected the fundamentals of his early training...

...Shortly after this, there came to Brooks "a time when the dome under which I had lived crumbled into ruin, when I was consumed with a sense of failure, a feeling that my work had all gone wrong and that I was mistaken in all I had said or thought...

...Brooks never really abandoned this view, as did apparently many of his younger fellow-writers of the Twenties who matured during rather than before the war...

...The spirit of the literary Twenties contained a curious quality: Under the excited feeling of liberation and fruition lurked a dread of the wasteland...

...When Brooks came back from his journey to hell, he returned, as it were, in the guise of the hopeful pre-World War I writer...

...Whatever the positive aspect of Brooks's thinking, his writings during the Twenties seemed to partake of this spirit of negation: They dwelt on America's failures and dreamt of no coming-of-age...

...Brooks represented not the new revolt to Moscow or to nada but the responsible protests of the best of the old gentility who wished to conserve the traditional humane values...

...With dark eloquence, Henry Adams had expressed this sickness of the century in his Education, which was first widely read in this decade...

...it was serious without being solemn, the harbinger of a new literature that would be public rather than private like that of much of the expatriates...

...He was expressing again that old American dream—Emersonian and Whitmanian, socialist and humane—the dream that good men could create a good society, and that their artists should lead them...

...For four years, he was lost to the world and to himself, moved about from sanatorium to sanatorium, the "houses of the dead, or, as one might say, the wounded, or about-to-be-reborn...

...But that did not typify Brooks's milieu, which seemed to have none of the harried gaiety of Fitzgerald's and Lardner's Great Neck life...

...According to Brooks's analysis, James's late writings were empty, sterile, non-human...

...The writers of the younger generation, mostly unaware of his long trials, which in any case they would probably have deemed beside the point, turned their backs 011 him as a leader who had deserted ihem—and flattered themselves that they were proved right by the fact that Brooks's new literary histories became best-sellers and Book-of-the-Month Club choices...

...The two volumes of reminiscences offer something more than a nostalgic picture of the past...

...When in The Ordeal of Mark Twain he criticized America sharply for frustrating and souring a great natural artist, the criticism was basically a loving rebuke to a child who could be expected to grow into a worthy adult...

...the beautiful were often convinced they were damned, or that they wanted to be...

...They help to solve the puzzle that many readers thought they saw in Brooks's development...

...It is good to hear more about this "responsible" side of the Twenties, which Brooks presents with all his usual charm and felicity...

...Sherwood Anderson, unable to settle down anywhere, suspicious of the East and anything that smacked of Yankee in-tellectualism, yet sharing with Brooks a love of America and hopes for its literature...

...We see Scott and Zelda once, arriving late at a party and falling asleep over their soup, before they awaken and order two cases of champagne...

...But we must not imagine that he was sliding into the soft positive thinking of our current orthodoxies...

...Hobart and William Smith Colleges This second volume of reminiscenses follows Scenes and Portraits: Memories of Childhood and Youth, starting with the publication of the exuberant, short-lived Seven Arts magazine in 1917, when to many in America and Russia a new world seemed a-borning...

...If to the younger generation the gravamen of Brooks's charge seemed to cut at the roots of American society, the fact remained that Brooks himself was no radical, that his dislike was not despair, that his complaints were sorrowful without being bitter...

...and so on, with rather full portraits of Brooks's closest friends, such as Waldo Frank, Paul Rosen-feld...

...I was pursued especially with nightmares in which Henry James turned great luminous menacing eyes upon me . .. , and with all the bad conscience of a criminal I felt I had viewed him with something of Plato's 'hard little eye of detraction...

...Out of his own personal ashes he arose with renewed creative vigor, apparently a changed man...

...The Ordeal of Mark Twain was followed by The Pilgrimage of Henry James, another case study of ashes from which no phoenix had risen...

...he was never an uncritical panegyrist or propagandist for The American Way...

...the reason was that James had had to cut off his roots and flee his native country because he felt that American society could not provide adequate nourishment for his art...

...Hendrik van Loon and Lewis Mumford, and equally memorable vignettes of a multitude of the decade's leading literary figures, Dreiser, Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Lee Simonson, Charles Beard and "the rude forefather of us all," H. L. Mencken...

...His experience recalls the briefer encounters with evil had by Henry James Sr...

...He had shed the negations of the Twenties and recaptured his old, affirmative vision of the promises of American life...

...The Brooks of The Flowering of New England and its four successors seemed to be a eulogist of the past instead of its critic, a tender-minded painter of pretty surfaces...

...These reminiscences suggest that there are two parts to the answer: Brooks's upbringing, and his personal crisis in the late Twenties...

...he had only changed his emphasis and his tone...

...He had absorbed the optimistic 18th-century humanism that was common among reformers in the confident, golden years before World War I. The world appeared to be a place that man had shaped for himself and that he could improve so as to serve his needs ever better—and America should be the great exemplar of this humane society...

...Most of the book tells of Brooks's years in Westport after 1920, where he was surrounded by novelists, poets, painters, critics and historians, who had come to find in Connecticut's quiet countryside the roots and the community that American artists were ever restlessly seeking...