Books: Mellow Miniatures

THE TIMES OF MELVILLE AND WHITMAN (489 pp.)—Van Wyck Brooks—Dutton ($5).

When Van Wyck Brooks reached those middle years in which a writer dreams of consummating his career with a masterwork, he began his ambitious literary history of the U.S. The Flowering of New England, first volume of the history, provoked one of the bitterest intellectual battles of our time.

The book appeared concurrently with Brooks’s wholesale excommunication of modern writers as “defeatists” and “fatalists.” Coming from a critic who had hitherto bewailed America’s indifference to her contemporary writers, Brooks’s charges seemed a betrayal. The little magazines gave him a merciless drubbing, and Critic Edmund Wilson caustically rapped The Flowering for “chortling, beaming and crooning in a manner little short of rapturous over those same American household classics … whose deficiencies . . . he had [previously] so unflinchingly brought to our notice.”

Seemingly unperturbed, Van Wyck Brooks worked his way back to The World of Washington Irving, an urbane, nostalgic tribute to a period in American life full of immediate fears and long-range assurance. New England: Indian Slimmer traced the last eruption and eventual decline of the New England genius.

Now, filling in the gap between The Flowering and Indian Summer, comes The Times of Melville and Whitman, a rich portrait of U.S. literary life shortly before & after the Civil War. Hopping nimbly from region to region, Brooks lovingly sketches their literary manners—the rash of reform movements in New York, “attractional harmony and passional hygiene . . . water cure and Graham Bread”; the burly tall tales of the Far West where Joaquin Miller, “the greatest liar living . . . half a mountebank and all the time a showman,” turned out crude, vigorous sketches of pioneer life; the sad whimsies of the post bellum South, where Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “imagination lingered over the relics of the ancient South, the tumbledown battered houses and forlorn plantations. . . .”

Fragrance Without Substance. But while lighting up obscure corners of the past and its unremembered versifiers and belle-lettrists, Brooks seems unable to evoke the accumulating tension of U.S. life during the ’50s and ’60s. The Civil War itself plays no role in his book except insofar as it impinges on Whitman’s personal development. In his eagerness to recreate the fragrance and colors of the past, Brooks impatiently skips those struggles of the mind and body that comprised its substance. There is more in this book about Miss Woolson’s literary mannerisms than Lincoln’s world-shaking ideas; more about Joaquin Miller’s escapades than Melville’s struggles with the ultimates of morality.

Characteristically, Brooks is far more successful in bringing to life Whitman’s optimistic, spacious, fervent democratic faith than Melville’s tortured, Jacob-like wrestling with his own soul. He casts a wishful haze over mid-19th Century American life.

Yet at the base of this book there is a vast erudition. It is written in a stately, orotund prose that many readers have applauded; though Brooks is sometimes addicted to lush rhetoric. (Sample: “The coral bowers caught the light and flashed it back from their gilded tendrils and the white sea-sand shone like a pavement of gold, while fish of every form and hue sailed through the amber-tinted water like fan-tailed moonbeams and sunbeams and firebrands of gauze.”)

The Happy Trend. Critics can now strike a temporary assessment of Brooks’s overall project. Most of it is finished; the rest seems likely to record mainly Brooks’s growing antipathy to modern disorder. His work is neither literary criticism nor intellectual history. Brooks is not interested in the genesis and clash of ideas as was Parrington in his Main Currents in American Thought. Nor has he created a balanced picture of America’s literary past. He largely ignores its psychological underside, its strain of “haunted minds” (from Hawthorne to Melville to Faulkner) which is at least as important as the “emotionally uncomplicated and singularly happy” trend stemming from Irving. But he does succeed in painting miniatures of neglected segments of the U.S. literary past; and his explorations of the vogues of forgotten literary circles are unparalleled.