Nobody knows better than a scholar how fleeting a thing is fame. Those of us who spend a good portion of our days rooting around in research libraries often find our work to be a bittersweet undertaking, for every day yields evidence of how little account the present takes of the past. Perhaps that indifference is inevitable. It is even possible, as Nietzsche argued, that a certain insensibility is healthy in any civilization. But it is no sign of health among scholars, particularly when the academic cold shoulder is directed toward the distinguished works and authors of earlier eras.
There is no discovery more poignant than the experience of coming upon an old, neglected book, its drab binding cracked and worn, tucked away among the more recent (and more frequently cited) monographs, that turns out, upon further inspection, to be a gem. Possibly one has vaguely heard of the book before, having seen it and its putative thesis neatly summarized in some influential bibliographic survey of the literature in one's field. Perhaps it was even the sort of book one was expected to "know"--that tricky scholar's word--without troubling to read it. What a surprise then to discover that here, in the seemingly bare ruined choirs of a forgotten tome, one can hear the strains of a beautiful and forgotten music.
America's Coming-of-Age
Such is the pleasure with which a wanderer in the stacks will encounter the literary-historical works of Van Wyck Brooks--The Flowering of New England, 1815-1865 (1936); or New England: Indian Summer, 1865-1915 (1940); or other installments in his five-volume Makers and Finders series, one of the most ambitious individual efforts ever to depict and reconstruct the literary life of the United States. But the historical standing of this somewhat obscure author is considerably better than that of many others time has left behind, for he at least has a niche set aside for him in most of the cultural histories of the United States treating the early years of this century. Brooks was a leading figure in the insurgency of the Young Intellectuals of the 1910s and 1920s, a group of cultural and political radicals who sought to overthrow the genteel Anglo-Saxon manners, morals, and aesthetics of the late nineteenth century, and to supplant them with a more vibrant, authentic, experimental, and cosmopolitan approach to American life.
That Brooks had a leading role in this undertaking has never been doubted by observers then or since; no less an authority than Edmund Wilson proclaimed that the young Brooks was "[his] generation's principal source of ideas on the cultural life of the United States," and Wilson's position has been strongly supported by such very different observers as Malcolm Cowley, Alfred Kazin, or Bernard DeVoto. Since the cultural rebellion of those early decades has nearly always been romanticized and lionized by the chroniclers of our cultural history, Brooks' name has managed to survive on the strength of his authorship of a single youthful work which he later found deficient.
That work was his manifesto-essay America's Coming-of-Age, published in 1915 by B.W. Heubsch. With this work, as Cowley later observed in a book appropriately titled After the Genteel Tradition, "Van Wyck Brooks [set] the tone of the era." And indeed, this compact and elegantly written essay, which elicited such powerful emotions in its own time, remains a gold mine of insights and provocative
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