Brooks, Van Wyck 1886–1963: Critical Essay by RenÉ Wellek

When I was in this country for the first time, some time in 1928, I read Van Wyck Brooks' America's Coming-of-Age and admired his penetrating observations on the literary conditions of America and his trenchant criticisms of many of the main authors of nineteenth-century America. I, as a Czech, relished the strongly critical attitude of Mr. Brooks to his own literature, as I myself had grown up in a similar critical atmosphere, which reacted against the idols and ideals of the nineteenth century and had begun a process of severe self-scrutiny which tried to discover the limitations of the existing literary tradition, the secrets of its vitality and the possibilities of its further development. (p. 292)

When I returned to this country in 1939. I read The Flowering of New England which had been praised by an admirable critic as "not only the best history of American literature, but one of the best literary histories in any language." I was deeply disappointed: the old critical spirit of Van Wyck Brooks had completely disappeared and nothing had remained but a belletristic skill of patching together quotations, drawing little miniatures, retelling anecdotes and describing costumes and faces. Some defense could be put forward for this skillful patchwork only if one thought of its wide appeal and hoped it might set people to reading some of the neglected writers of the Transcendentalist movement, but the pretensions of this book and its successor, New England: Indian Summer, seemed absurd. These books pretend to be a literary history of America, but in them one could find scarcely any discussion or analysis of actual books and nothing about the continuity of literary themes and forms. Nor is there anything coherent and critical about the ideas of these writers or their relationship to the past or Europe, except a few vague and frequently incorrect remarks. The composition is based on purely external divisions and criteria. For instance, there is a chapter which jumbles together Rowland E. Robinson, who wrote Uncle Lisha's Shop, John Dewey, Eugene O'Neill, Miss Millay and culminates in a long discussion of Mary E. Wilkins, all for no other reason except that these writers come from New England outside Boston. There is scarcely any underlying generalization behind these ambitious books except the trite metaphors about the "spring time, summer and Indian summer" or a "second March," represented by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, John Dewey and Gamaliel Bradford. "Withering and rotting," "bursting into bloom," "simulating death," "suspended animation" etc. are the few catchwords on which something like a continuity is built. Otherwise it is merely a picturesque mosaic of names, towns and places, and isolated ideas. It was distressing to think that these books which were upheld as ideal literary histories had scarcely any claim even to the name of literary history and showed absolutely no consciousness of the problems involved. One could really write a melancholy book on the rise and fall of literary historiography, I suppose not only in America.

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