ORRIS DICKSTEIN
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ated outsider critical of American culture, which finds its fullest expression
in his treatment of Twain, was personally difficult for him to sustain. It
ed to a nervous breakdown later in the 1920s, which kept him from
working for five years - significantly, just as he was completing a
biography of Emerson.
As he recovered, Brooks abandoned criticism and social prophecy for
a more anecdotal kind of literary history - a "pageant of genius," he
later called it. His biography of Emerson turned lyrical. He celebrated
much about American life that he had once denounced and, in his best–
selling
Makers and Firlders
series (1936-1952), wove a richly detailed
tapestry of the usable past he had once been so hard pressed to discover.
By the early forties, he was attacking Eliot and other modern writers and
critics in vituperative terms as "coterie-writers," as if only the past had
produced any literature of value. As Wilson drily noted, for Brooks the
"modern" writers were still the writers of the Wells and Shaw generation
who had excited him before the war. The man who had once looked to
Europe as a standard now became an uncritical promoter of American
literary nationalism. The aging young turk wrapped himself in the Great
Tradition. "A homeless generation has obvious needs," he wrote in a
1934 preface to his earlier work. "It needs to be repatriated. It needs to
find a home."
Like the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs, Brooks criticized his early
books without entirely renouncing them. In his later preface he at–
tributed their pessimism to the Oedipal vivacities of youth. Puritanism, he
says with some justice, "has ceased to menace any sentient being; and,
properly apprehended, it stands for a certain intensity that every writer
values." The bold new scholarship of Perry Miller was just over the
horizon, and the rebel causes of 1915 seemed remote. In
America's Com–
ing-of-Age,
Brooks had followed Santayana in finding this special intensity
in Whitman . In Emerson he then saw only the vaporous idealism of
someone "imperfectly interested in human life." Looking for a writer
more grossly embodied, a writer with more
mud
on him, he settled on
Whitman, who, though "saturated with Emersonianism ... came up
from the other side with everything New England did not possess:
quantities of rude feeling and a faculty of gathering humane experience
almost as great as that of the hero of the
Odyssey .
...
He challenged the
abnormal dignity of American letters.... Whitman - how else can I
express it - precipitated the American character."
Can any writer ever really do this much, or even represent this much?
Brooks's early books, beautifully written, remain of permanent interest,
yet it's hard to escape the impression that he is using a method inherited
from Matthew Arnold to work out his own inner conflicts, Arnold's
