America's Coming-of-Age by Van Wyck Brooks

First published: 1915

Type of work: Literary criticism

Critical Evaluation:

Virtually from the beginning of the American republic our writers have uttered a consistent complaint and issued a consistent call. They have complained of the inhospitable atmosphere of American life to literary creativity, and they have called for a national literature equal to the country’s great material accomplishments.

Thus in the year after Emerson had declared in “The American Scholar” that the time was ripe for us to establish our cultural independence from Europe, James Fenimore Cooper in THE AMERICAN DEMOCRAT spoke harshly of the repressive effects of the democratic system upon men of superior ability and individualistic bent. A dozen years later Herman Melville, tempted to satisfy his public’s desire for more South Sea adventure tales but impelled by his genius toward the darkly symbolic, unpopular, and epic, wrote in a letter to Hawthorne, “Dollars damn me.” And in 1879 Henry James, soon to become a permanent expatriate, wondered in his book on Hawthorne how that writer had cultivated so rich a talent on so thin a cultural soil as the United States.

Walt Whitman, however, thought of America as itself the greatest poem of all, and in his poetry, his prefaces to the several editions of LEAVES OF GRASS, and his essays he prophesied a national literature created by a new breed of poet-prophets the like of which the world had never known. As the century closed William Dean Howells expressed a similar, if subdued, optimism for the future of American literature.

Therefore Van Wyck Brooks’ AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE, which in 1915 seemed a radical and revolutionary treatise can be viewed in retrospect as but one of a series of pronouncements on a vital but hardly unexplored subject. Yet because of its own quality and pertinence, and because it came at exactly the right cultural moment, it had tremendous impact upon its time and has continued to influence a phase of our literary thought. In length not much more than an extended essay, AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE undertakes no less a task than the analysis of the ailing condition of American civilization, the specific diagnosis of its ills, and the etiology of the disease. Operating by means of perceptive surmise, shrewd inference, and brilliant deductive leaps rather than by careful, reasoned argument based on amassed evidence, AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE carries the reader along on the movement of its emotional force and rhetorical eloquence. The technique is reminiscent of that used by Marx and Freud, wherein manifest logical flaws in the various parts are overcome by the weight and sense of revealed truth in the whole.

At first reading and to many of its contemporaries, AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE appeared to be a stern denunciation of the United States, its civilization, and its accomplishments. Yet beneath the book’s sharply critical, even abrasive tone, one hears the urgent and hortatory voice of a youthful idealism and optimism which has been disappointed but not destroyed. In effect, it conjoins the bitterness of the complaints made by Cooper, Melville, and James, with the stirring affirmation of the call sent out by Emerson, Whitman, and Howells.

As has been pointed out, the essential motivation behind AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE, a motivation impelling much of Brooks’ work during his long and distinguished career, was the ambition to merge art and life, to effect a synthesis between culture and society. As Brooks begins by declaring, and as his book declares throughout, America’s failure to achieve this synthesis has blighted its culture. Our culture, he avers, splits in two, divided between the “highbrow” and the “lowbrow”: on the one side the ideal, the theoretical, the intellectual, the artistic; on the other the mundane, practical, philistine, commercial. This dichotomy originated in the Puritan theocracy, which erected a rigid barrier between divine and earthly realms, was embodied during the nation’s formative years in the contrasting figures of Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin, and was passed down through them. The result, Brooks claims, is a civilization located around the polarities of a detached and dessicated “culture” and a mindless, money-grubbing activism. Without contact with life, the intellectual risks dehumanization; without culture, the businessman is confined to mere earning and spending.

With the exception of Whitman, who alone of American writers merged the two halves of our civilization—combining in his work a great personal talent with intense social engagement—Brooks finds all our major writers wanting in some vital aspect. His common charge against them is remoteness from life, the inability or unwillingness to portray American social reality and, by portraying it, to change it. Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and Longfellow succeeded only in being decorative and/or pious. The rare talents of Poe and Hawthorne were restricted to the creation of their own special, private worlds. The Transcendentalists, led by Emerson, spoke about society and experience but only further emphasized the existing schism between the spiritual and material. Ultimately Emerson’s writing assumed the likeness and function of the baccalaureate sermon: both, simultaneously, beautiful and remote. Lowell’s large gifts fell short of fruition because he lacked both passion and sufficiently strong original ideas. Even Whitman was at last too affirmative to drive America forward, leaving us only with a rough map for progress. As a consequence, business continues to absorb the best American talent and we have formed as a national ideal that of the “inspired millionaire.”

In contrast, Brooks concludes, European civilization has been profoundly affected by such men as Heine, Nietzsche, Arnold, Morris, and Wells, who confronted their nations with distinct sociocultural issues and alternatives. Although the personality of a people is formed, defined, and enriched by these confrontations, none such have occurred in America. The intellectual’s chief duty is therefore to formulate crucial issues and force them upon the nation’s attention. Only in this way can a merger be made between the two equally sterile modes of life: the “highbrow,” the acquisition of culture, and the “lowbrow,” the acquisition of money.

LETTERS AND LEADERSHIP and “THE LITERARY LIFE IN AMERICA” reiterated and amplified what Brooks had said in AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE. The separate works were collected and published in 1934 under the title THREE ESSAYS ON AMERICA. Although the later essays continued to insist upon the poverty of American literature and culture, Brooks made these significant new points:

1. He broadened his view of the dominant forces in American civilization to include the pioneering experience. Because the pioneering life wholly emphasized material achievement, it completely repressed the spiritual and reflective element which might have produced a viable body of art and literature.

2. He argued that because the intellectual and practical life are so completely divorced in America, we can welcome the most radical foreign writers, such as Ibsen or Nietzsche, without absorbing them or being much affected by them. We make them “mere literature.”

3. He complained that in contrast to such European critics as Lessing and Sainte-Beuve, the most influential American critics—More, Babbitt, Brownell, Woodberry—are persistent in their distaste for any literature which grapples with life and real experience. The sociologists and philosophers like Dewey and James, who might have replaced the literary critics as “our awakeners,” lack the necessary poetic vision, the inspiring sense of the ideal.

4. He declared that the impotence of American literature of the past fifty years indicates the deeper malady of the whole culture, a malady reflected by the arrested or blighted careers of some of our most promising writers: Twain, London, Bierce, Adams. Nor does the work of more recent writers, Dreiser, Frost, Robinson, and Masters, able but drenched with morbidity, offer much hope. We need and await a school of strong-willed, affirmative writers to lead us out of our cultural wilderness.

Literary historians are unanimous in regarding AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE as among the crucial documents of its time. It became the most important statement of the liberal position in literary criticism and a rallying point for the younger generation of disaffected intellectuals. Others took their impetus from it, and with the death of his close friend Randolph Bourne, Brooks became chief spokesman for a group of sociocultural critics that included Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, Lewis Mumford, and Matthew Josephson. They spoke through such magazines as The Seven Arts, The Freeman, and The New Republic. H. L. Mencken carried on the same conflict against Puritanism and philistinism, although on his own front and with his own weapons, while the issues which Brooks had joined in AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE were explored with unrelenting thoroughness and unrelieved grimness in Harold Stearns’s influential symposium Civilization in the United States. In one sense much of the writing of the 1920’s, a decade unsurpassed in America in its creative richness, can be viewed as a dramatization of the ideas in Stearns’s volume, and before it, Brooks’.

No doubt the work of Van Wyck Brooks also left its mark on a number of the most eminent literary critics who emerged during the 1920’s and 1930’s: V. L. Parrington, T. K. Whipple, V. F. Calverton, Granville Hicks, and F. O. Matthiessen in his early phase. Indeed, according to Bernard De Voto, Van Wyck Brooks not only influenced the literature of the 1920’s and our thinking about it more than any other man, but is also the prime source of what De Voto terms “the literary fallacy,” the belief that a culture can be measured by its literature.

Much of Brooks’ long later career can be interpreted as having its roots in AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE. Certainly his two other most controversial works of the period, THE ORDEAL OF MARK TWAIN and THE PILGRIMAGE OF HENRY JAMES derive from it. Fusing sociocultural analysis and insights borrowed from depth psychology, Brooks attempted to demonstrate in the first book how the career of a potentially great writer had been stunted by his repressive environment, and in the second how another promising artist had fled to avoid the debasement of his talent only to find himself deprived by the loss of contact with the homeland.

Although Brooks has been severely attacked for what in his later work appears to be a retreat from the extreme but provocative positions taken in AMERICA’S COMING-OF-AGE and the books on Twain and James, he himself insisted in THE OPINIONS OF OLIVER ALLSTON and THE WRITER IN AMERICA that his idealism was as strong as ever, but that he preferred to give it more positive expression. Thus in the five volumes of his “Makers and Finders” series, beginning with THE FLOWERING OF NEW ENGLAND in 1936, Brooks tried with considerable success provide the nation with that very commodity he had long before found lacking, in his own words “a usable past.” There is perhaps basis for the charge of inconsistency and reaction, but it can also justly be said of Brooks that he is one of the few American critics of the twentieth century who created a body of work of his own which in some measure fulfills the demands he had made upon others.