The Ordeal and the Pilgrimage

...artists were the pathfinders of society, and by means of literature they would meet the social and religious problems which he felt were at the heart of the civilized modem world...

...intellectual centers where men-of-letters may shed their loneliness and by contact contribute to the friction of ideas that creates intellectual situations...

...When Brooks first wrote of the critical resurgence of his time, he pointed out how much Americans were disposed to see the critic as a traitor...

...Here, Brooks, a master polemicist, has followed his own advice to critics to find the deep, irreconcilable "opposed catchwords...

...More often, however, there is no mediation but only opposition, as in the "creative life" vs...

...and the times, to which in the memoirs he attributes his paternity, called him forth...

...middlebrow...

...In a country where Brooks believed the writer seldom matures and most often goes down to defeat, he managed to drive on to the end...

...By the time of World War II, however, he himself, in the almost bottomless bitterness that accompanied his deposition by the modernists, had become a cultural patriot and national celebrant who attributed to other writers death dealing motives...

...He did not need Herbert Croly, whose The Promise of American Life (1909) was the tocsin for criticism, to tell him to be "as uncompromising and as irritating as one's ability will permit" and to tell him to abandon the ethics of statesmanship in a time of intellectual war...

...As the editors of the Dial said when giving Brooks its award, "he has believed that the creative life is the only life tolerable to intelligent men and women, that the life which is not creative is spoiled and stunted and unworthy...

...His nervous breakdown, following his own strenuous self-examination in the literary case-histories of Mark Twain and Henry James, did not permit it...

...In a critical sense he had been, and this "biographical" volume is his most autobiographical work...

...in their opposition, as we sometimes forget, is the real motive of American criticism...

...Brooks does for himself in the memoirs what he had done for American writers in the five volumes of Makers and Finders-tells a story of literary contacts, weaves a tapestry of the literary life...

...One measure of his value, and 'of the period that entertained his ideas, is to compare him with a counterpart today, some one like David Riesman...

...and in what follows we realize that his melodramatic way of seeing is supported by an equally melodramatic way of feeling...

...As John Hall Wheelock recognized in the tension of Brooks' restraint, Brooks contained "an extraordinary vehemence of thought and feeling...

...He was part of the critical coming-of-age because...

...Brooks is perhaps the last American writer to feel so intensely the American problem of Europe and America...

...here is his finest work of art and his largest contribution to the usable past by the creation of which he hoped, finally, to redeem our culture...

...His strict discipline of reading and writing, the subjects of his subsequent studies (Emerson, Howells, Helen Keller, and John Sloan), even his monumental history of the writer in America and his memoirs suggest that for Brooks writing itself had become a value and a therapeutic exercise...

...and especially in France, "the most perfect example of a social organism the world knows," one finds the model of what Brooks means by national or organic culture...

...The memoirs, which he published in 1954, 1957 and 1961, and which have now been issued as his Autobiography, are reticent, even where Brooks, as in the chapter on his breakdown, seems most revealing...

...Brooks sounds his note when he says that "the happiest excitement in life is to be convinced that one is fighting for all one is worth on behalf of some clearly seen and deeply felt good against some greatly scorned evil...

...and they have not, I think, seen in Brooks' breakdown and withdrawal the means which enabled him to shed the responsibilities of a public role that had become alien to him and to return to his proper personal course...

...The intellectual price Brooks paid for breakdown involved the repudiation of his vigorous early work and, as James T. Farrell noted, his transformation from a cultural nationalist to a cultural chauvinist...

...So Brooks, not without permanent rancor, returned by way of illness to take up the only feasible part of his program...

...The pull of Europe defines what he wants: a tradition in which the intellectual is respected and by which he is sustained...

...Another measure, one that does justice to Brooks' entire career, is the fact that having made us aware of the high responsibilities of the literary vocation, he tried throughout a long life, as Edmund Wilson noted in its early phase for the instruction of his contemporaries, to keep faith with his profession...

...This, and the few acerbities, tell us that the "literary life" Brooks lived was for much of his life not the "creative life" with which he associated it and to which he aspired...

...So, for example, he gives us "highbrow" and "lowbrow," and the mediating term...

...he is, as he claimed for his alter ego Oliver Allston, "an artist himself...

...To think melodramatically is finally to think conspiratorially, and from the moment in the '20s when he had begun to call names, Brooks was preparing for that ugly performance in the'40s, when he came from cover and used patriotism to coerce assent to his views...

...Reviewed by SHERMAN PAUL Department of English, University of Illinois Author, "Louis Sullivan: An Architect in American Thought" Van wyck brooks never accepted the challenge of autobiography...

...Long careers have curious turns, though those of Brooks' tum about the same idea...

...They remember the leader more often than the artist...

...Europe, in Brooks' view, has the "collective spiritual life" that America lacks...

...The "acquisitive life" is Brooks' polar term for the "creative life...

...Thereafter, as he admitted in the memoir treating this watershed of his life, writing was his secret asylum and way of taking flight...

...The clue to Brooks' way of thinking may be found in his remark that "Allston liked to contemplate extremes and try to fill, imaginatively, the space between...

...In Makers and Finders he found his true calling and did true work...

...The memoirs, of course, have the charm of all of Brooks' loomcraft...

...Had he chosen to write an autobiography its theme would have been the ordeal of the lost leader and the successful pilgrimage of the artist...

...Brooks' friends seldom mention this, nor the fact that the strongest book of this half of his career is Opinions of Oliver Allston (1941), where he took tactical advantage by playing dead...

...There one finds at play a "complicated system of critical and traditional forces...

...But they are almost entirely even in tone, as if (to change the metaphor) the ground-note of memory had harmonized all the discords of his life...

...Brooks was always a fierce partisan of the active soul, having early spoken for its needs in The Malady of the Ideal and having, in his own generation, fought successfully its principal enemy, puritanism...

...the "acquisitive life...

...One need only read America's Coming-of-Age (1915) and Letters and Leadership (1918), the books with which Brooks did so much to create a "resisting background," to see the quality of mind and way of thinking that as much as anything broke him...

...But the new literary generation after the war, the "junior pessimists" as he first called the "coterie writers," did not respond to his suddenly old-fashioned summons...

...This Brooks is still affectionately remembered by the associates he rallied...

...Brooks' accomplishment is that of a visionary leader: to have suggested a new personality-type and a new style of life...

...schools-guilds of artists for instruction and headquarters (such as The New Republic, The Seven Arts, "291" tried to become) for the direction of cultural life...

...Not Harvard, where he was graduated in 1907, but his own extensive reading in literature and art history and travel to Europe, that "paradise of culture," awakened his sense of the grandeur of this role...

...For a few years during World War I, Brooks' personal needs and those of his generation were one, and he rose to leadership on the strength of his personal manifesto...

...like so many of the sensitive young men of the time, he resented the pre-emption by business of all of our energies...

...Gentle Brooks' He was wonderfully so...

...Whether he wrote studies of failure ("cautionary tales") or of success ("exemplary tales"), Brooks' single theme, as he himself announced in the title of his most vociferous book, was Letters and Leadership...

...and yet he remained aggressive to the end, even in the memoirs where, by offering himself as the representative man of his generation, he was able to justify himself and have the last word...

...This creative life, assuredly, is not the "autonomous" life Riesman offers us...

...Perhaps the most truly autobiographical element in them is the lack of self-confrontation...

...So Brooks proposed, in lieu of expatriation, to make America another Europe...

...The creative life, as Brooks envisaged it, was a life of spiritual exuberance and social leadership...

...Perhaps Brooks' friends prefer to remember the early leader because in this role Brooks represents the possibilities of renewing society, not by political means (his unacknowledged enemy was Croly), but by cultural means...

...In his tactics, at least, he never retired, as Paul Rosenfeld complained in the '20s, from the battle line...

...This conception of the artist as prophet, whose obverse for Brooks was his notion of "failure,' was part of his large 19th-century heritage...

...It is understandable that the emotional difficulties of solving this complicated problem contributed both to Brooks' breakdown and to the conception of an organic New England community that flowered out of it...

...During the years from 1909-25, he was very much the "American scholar," or, since he himself had not yet recognized his place in the Emersonian tradition, a "great personality" such as he admired, one who dominated his age and transformed its character...

...Brooks believed in the "visionary leader...

...it made good socially the enfranchisement proclaimed by Emerson when he said in The American Scholar that "the one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul...

...To one who knows from primary sources the cultural periods of his work, the memoirs are unsatisfactory, not because, like some recent memoirs by members of his generation, an intimate knowledge is colored by current scholarly interpretations of the past, but because so little, finally, is told...