A Maker and Finder

...Psychologically unable to complete the book, Brooks went mad...

...In The Life of Emerson, a work of the mid-'20s, Brooks tried to do something positive, "life-affirming," but he cheated by slipping past the terrible personal tragedies of Emerson's early maturity...

...A Bostonian coming late to Shakespeare, and finding his work better than he expected, said, "Not ten men in Boston could have written Shakespeare's plays...

...Brooks promoted his appeal through the magazines he edited, the Seven Arts and the Freeman, and through the friends he gathered around him-Waldo Frank, Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, Newton Arvin-who became his companions-at-arms...

...In other words, a culture from which writers and artists take their unpredictable strength, and which their imaginative genius, critically sensitive to total developments in the country, constantly renews and redirects...

...In his first novel, Morton's Hope, Motley described the young Bismarck, "peppered all over with freckles, scarred, with an eyebrow shaved, in his chaotic coat, without collar or buttons, and with his iron heels and portentous spurs...

...The Pilgrimage of Henry James was negative in a complementary way...

...Gradually, mysteriously, he recovered and went to work on The Flowering of New England...

...In The American Renaissance, Matthiessen showed exactly how profound and spiritually ambiguous the American classics really were...

...The literary-political period when Brooks was most influential was a troubling one, full of excesses and distortions...

...Brooks fitted in perfectly...

...The whole complex history-for Brooks was a very complex man-is told once again in Raymond Nelson's new book, Van Wyck Brooks: A Writer's Life...

...Practically no one read Morton's Hope, but Van Wyck Brooks read it, along with 5,000 other books, when he was writing, the five-volume Makers and Finders series, of which The Flowering of New England was the first...

...His father was a failed mining stock promoter, whose wife and sons had the humiliation of living dependently with a rich Stimson grandmother...

...After the Hitler-Stalin Pact Brooks moved abruptly Right, and in The Opinions of Oliver Allston expressed his long-time hatred of "life-denying," "coterie" writers by making them somehow guilty (as did Archibald MacLeish in The Irresponsibles) of bringing about the War...

...American literature received nearly as short shrift then as it did in Brooks' day...

...Mike Gold, the New Masses...

...Her first novel, Moods, had a hero very like Thoreau...

...Wells, describing himself as a socialist, though in the spirit of William Morris' News from Nowhere rather than Marx's DasKapital...

...Critically it does not go much beyond James R. Vitelli's Van Wyck Brooks of 1969, or biographi-cally much beyond James Hoopes' Van Wyck Brooks of 1977...

...Yet at the same time it is marvelous-ly written, constantly revelatory, rising frequently to passages of great eloquence, as in the pages on Harriet Beech-er Stowe and Uncle Tom's Cabin...

...He was chairman of the League of American Writers in Connecticut, until Communist chicanery made him resign...

...Brooks grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey, a suburb with a hundred millionaires...

...For instance...

...Makers and Finders is a unique literary work of art...

...Nelson's work is well-balanced and well-written, but it contains no biographical surprises or bold critical assertions...

...The most minor book could yield a vivid turn of speech, a picturesque incident, a half-glimpsed social truth...

...The series is nostalgic, pain-avoiding, sex-avoiding, celebratory, uncritical...

...Alarmed by rising fascism and the Spanish Civil War, the Communists turned patriotic, organized the Popular Front, rediscovered American themes for Left purposes, named their American brigades in Spain after Lincoln and Washington...

...Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land...

...Matthiessen and Perry Miller...

...About Brooks I had already learned a great deal from my friend Newton Arvin, who had been his protege on the Freeman...

...Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden...

...During nearly five years in a string of asylums, each cure seemed worse than the last...

...In The Flowering of New England he does not discuss The Scarlet Letter or The House of the Seven Gables directly...

...These two men attracted brilliant young scholars who became Americanists with a vengeance...

...But largely due to Brooks it also produced what we now have almost lost and cannot afford to lose: the sense of a collective American culture, socialist in spirit, firmly grounded in a rich recoverable past, hopeful of a future everyone can help make...

...Nelson says that previous studies "are specialized and more or less pointed to controversy," and not based, as his is, on interviews and unpublished manuscript sources...

...Whether for good or bad, students in Japan and Bangladesh wrote dissertations on Melville and Emily Dickinson hardly distinguishable from those being mass-produced here at home...

...Often their masterpieces are strangely by-passed, especially when they contain darknesses that made him uncomfortable...

...For Brooks himself, The Flowering of New England came at an opportune time politically...

...He was widely admired...

...Driven back to America by World War I, Brooks wrote America's Coming of Age and Letters and Leadership, calling upon young writers to overcome the polarity of "high-brow" and "lowbrow" that had kept our culture sterile...

...It articulates the whole vast history of American culture from 1800-1915 by devoting each chapter to a separate moment in American time and space, often under the aegis of a single personality-"The Boston of Gilbert Stuart," "The San Francisco of Ambrose Bierce," "New York in the Eighties," "Chicago in the Nineties...

...Bernard de Voto, then living in Cambridge, made his critical reputation out of angrily refuting Brooks in Mark Twain's American and The Literary Fallacy...

...Daniel Aaron in Men of Good Hope...

...When the Boston historian John La-throp Motley was a student in Germany, he roomed with Count Otto von Bismarck, who remained a life-long friend...

...This applies the Makers and Finders method to a life as varied in scene, as rich in literary friendship, as troubled in domestic and financial affairs as those of most of his historical characters...

...Eliot, and succumbed to the same Anglophile es-theticism...

...During that year I took a graduate seminar in American literature at Harvard given by F.O...

...I had entered Harvard as an undergraduate in 1925, 21 years after Brooks, and encountered some of the same teachers-C.T...

...But his approach was still largely negative and denunciatory...

...Every piece of glass was an invitation to suicide...

...Again the major novels were hardly discussed...

...The fastidious man who hated to appear even on a beach without a necktie walked on all fours and ate grass...

...Technical economics and philosophy he always found uncongenial...

...Both authors acknowledge generous help from Gladys Brooks (Vitelli was helped by Brooks himself), and were allowed to work with Brooks' files in his study (Hoopes for three months...

...The dazzled boy returned with a conviction of European cultural superiority from which it took him 30 years to recover...

...But Makers and Finders is only a small part, and not the most dramatic part, of the Brooks story...

...Cope-land, Bliss Perry, Dean Briggs, and above all Irving Babbitt...

...He created a sensation in The Ordeal of Mark Twain by making America's favorite author into a blundering boy, a cultural ignoramus false to his own best impulses, destroyed by Puritanism, the feminizing Genteel Tradition and the national obsession with money...

...Everyone with a feeling for literature or human personality or the American past should revisit these volumes from time to time as he does Gibbon or Bos-well's Johnson or Jane Austen or Tristram Shandy...

...Harry Levin in Power of Blackness...

...Miller, in his series on the New England mind, did the same for Calvinism and Transcendentalism...

...Brooks called Arvin "a quiet man with a violent mind...

...In fact, Hoopes' biography covers the same ground as Nelson's at about the same length and even contains a similar group of family photographs...

...Yet he hated Eliot all his life, tagging him along with Pound and Joyce as a "coterie" writer, a malign influence in the universities...

...Scofield Thayer wanted him to edit the Dial...

...They now had to do for America what Goethe had done for Germany, though he did not say just how...

...At Harvard as an undergraduate Brooks overlapped with T.S...

...After a visit to London, the elder Henry James reported that "Carlyle is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease...

...Brooks admitted that to fit them into this pattern he had to "shred" the lives of major writers...

...God was making a pit in which He would first bury Brooks, then all mankind, then crawl in Himself...

...The books are Tolstoyan or Proustian in their huge cast of interrelated characters, all distinctly rendered as they lived...

...Even indirectly these novels receive less attention than Hawthorne's eccentric sister-in-law Elizabeth Peabody, who sat with her hat askew on every radical platform in Boston for 40 years and ended up as Miss Birdseye in James' novel, The Bostonians...

...Miller and Matthiessen were meeting Brooks' challenge by doing what he could not bring himself to do...

...Fascinated by personal relations, he liked to have writers talk about each other...

...Daniel Boorstin in The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson...

...This meant a final break with the universities, although not with most of his friends, and Brooks, who lived until 1963, went on to publish 14 more books...

...I saw him with his soup-strainer moustache and Polish aviator haircut on the platform with Thomas Mann and Earl Browder at the 1937 Communist-run American Writers Congress...

...Until 1925 the young Brooks, the "other" Brooks, was conspicuous for denouncing in the harshest negative terms the very American writers he was later to celebrate, and on premises that made him a leader in setting the tone of the rebellious '20s...

...She gave them a full year's travel in Europe, however, when Van Wyck was 12...

...Van Wyck Brooks loved such personal connections, such visual detail...

...Brooks also was appreciative of regional identities, as well as amused by the provincialism that can go with it...

...He never quite escaped its influence...

...Thoreau took pains to return the axe with a sharper edge...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia The axe Henry David Thoreau used to build his cabin at Walden Pond was borrowed from Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May, who wrote Little Women...

...Eight or 10 hours of reading might go into the writing of a single page, for each one was a glowing mosaic of names, allusions, landscapes, marked or unmarked quotations...

...The faults of Makers and Finders are so well known that graduate students in American literature feel no need to read it...

...Brooks said that by cutting himself off from American society James doomed his art to tenuousness and irrelevance...

...We would not want to return to it...

...Published in 1936, it became a best-seller...

...Henry May in The End of American Innocence...

...Neither of the two earlier books is specialized or partisan...

...A lion in any biographer's path is Brooks' own three-volume memoir...

...Van Wyck Brooks was very much on my mind...

...I stress the "once again" because of a curious claim Nelson makes in his Preface, perhaps in answer to the query, "Why another book on Brooks at this time...

...When I returned to Harvard in the mid-' 30s to study and teach, the presence of Matthiessen and Miller had radically changed the situation...

...Huckleberry Finn got only passing glances...

...After the War, with the Marshall Plan, the Fulbright professorships and Henry Luce's proclamation of an "American Century," American studies programs like that at Harvard were set up at many European universities and-with Matthiessen as prime mover-at Max Reinhardt's castle in Salzburg...

...In one of two expatriate years in England, Brooks wrote a book on H.G...

...Disdaining the apparatus of conventional scholarship, Brooks posed authors in the flattering light of their own best phrases...

...Not of the Harvard group, though close to several of its members, Alfred Kazin in On Native Grounds defended modern writers against Brooks' attacks while gratefully praising him for his vision of the American past...