Grand American Tour

THE CONFIDENT YEARS (1885-1915) 627 pp.)--Van Wyck Brooks--Dutton : ($6).

One of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by an American writer is now complete. At 65, Van Wyck Brooks has produced the fifth and final volume of a 20-year labor of learning: Makers and Finders: a History of the Writer in America, 1800-1915.

In many ways The Confident Years (1885-1915) is the liveliest and most disciplined book of the five. If it lacks the cameo charm of The World of Washington Irving, it also avoids the saccharine traces of The Flowering of New England. Moreover, the closer Brooks gets to the present, the more aroused he becomes. The book follows his by now familiar pattern. Hopping blithely from region to region, and painting bold frescoes of their literary manners, it brings scores of writers to life in sharp, sympathetic vignettes. Each chapter is richly coated with anecdote and local color; in fact, the book has more of the quality of storytelling than of toughly analytical criticism.

Tea & Cats. The era Brooks finds confident did not begin very promisingly. In New York, Novelist Edgar Saltus and Playwright Clyde Fitch were turning out popular confections. Saltus believed that only three qualities mattered in fiction: "Style, style polished and style repolished." Fitch was a chameleon "who changed his color with the feminine tastes of the time." In Philadelphia, Agnes Repplier tatted spinsterish essays on tea and cats. Down South, Lafcadio Hearn haunted the French quarter of New Orleans, looking for the exotic.

The Midwest showed signs of vigor. Hamlin Garland had begun to portray farm life as something more, or less, than an idyl. In the Far West lived the gnarled misanthrope, Ambrose Bierce, writing creepy Gothic tales that pointed back to Poe and forward to Faulkner. But in general, Brooks acknowledges, it was a time of decidedly minor craftsmen, a dry season between fertile ones in American writing. The turn came as the old century flickered out.

Snobs & Farm Girls. Stephen Crane struck the first modern note with tight-lipped stories that anticipated Hemingway and all the little Hemingways. Out West, Frank Norris and Jack London spoke up bluntly. Norris, remarks Critic Brooks, "had Zola's nose for the odor cf stale bedding and of creosote"; London wrote rowdy stories in which "one heard the perpetual crunch-crunch of bones."

Brooks has kinder words for most of these writers than he has for Edith Wharton and her skilled and snobbish novels about rich New Yorkers. "She was always ready with cold stares," complains Brooks, "for those who encroached in any way on the small caste-prerogatives that she valued so much . . ." He turns with a warmer eye to the lumbering Hoosier, Theodore Dreiser, with his industrial America, his farm girls looking for jobs and fun in the big city, his drummers spreading the gospel of the fast buck. For all his muddled clumsiness, Dreiser was the spiritual father of almost every important U.S. writer since. He persuaded a generation of them that the novelist's job is to tell the truth about life as ordinary people live it.

Man: Upright or Fallen? If U.S. literature consisted only of minor figures, Van Wyck Brooks would be its perfect historian. He is fine at netting the minnows: expatriate Logan Pearsall Smith, who thought to win immortality through "a perfect phrase"; Gertrude Stein, who "looked and walked like a corpulent monk" and ended by writing baby talk. But with the big fish, Brooks stumbles almost as badly as he did with Hawthorne and Melville in earlier volumes. Stephen Crane's stories and Dreiser's novels ask for far more rigorous analysis than Brooks pauses to give them.

He is much more interesting at the end of The Confident Years, when he launches a major attack on the "religion of art," of which he considers Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot the high priests. Modern writing, as Brooks sees it, is split between the "religion of art" and the Jeffersonian tradition; Eliot and Pound have sneered at the Jeffersonians, who have tried, for their part, to realize "the vision of a good life and world that had sprung from the Enlightenment and the age of revolutions." That Pound and Eliot are gifted poets, Brooks does not question. He insists, however, that the difference between the Jeffersonians and them is nothing less than a dispute over the nature of man, "whether he [is] 'upright' or 'fallen.' " The continuance of the American tradition, says Brooks, depends on who wins the dispute. Jeffersonian Brooks is fairly confident: "A race for whom Huckleberry Finn was a hero could not be made to believe sincerely that human beings were nothing but 'miserable sinners.' '

Public Faces. Now that Brooks has finished his grand tour of American literary history, the strengths and weaknesses of his five volumes are abundantly clear. Anyone looking for profound criticism--of say, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Leaves of Grass, Sister Carrie--will not find it here. Nor is it impressive as intellectual history. Brooks croons over Emerson for pages, but is singularly vague in defining his philosophy of transcendentalism. He refers to Dreiser's concern over the relation between morals and success, but does not say what that relation was. Nowhere does he approach the lucidity and incisiveness of Vernon Parrington's Main Currents in American Thought.

Yet in a more limited way Brooks's five volumes are remarkable. No other U.S. critic has ever read so many half-forgotten books, or dredged up so many half-forgotten writers. No other U.S. critic has so richly painted the regional background of a literature that, until recently, was mainly regional in tone. And no other U.S. critic has worked so hard, and so successfully, to show what it felt like to be a writer in America; to bring the writers to life--if not often in the life of their secret hearts, at least in that of their sunnier public faces.

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