Rather than appearing on the book page, this column would probably work better as an obituary or an article on nostalgia. Who died? What’s vanished? The old-fashioned American man of letters — those critics who between roughly 1918 and 1968 served as the vital middle men between our best, most imaginative writers and the literate, book-buying readership that was eager to learn of their work.
Names like Malcolm Cowley, Lionel Trilling, Clifton Fadiman, Lewis Mumford, Van Wyck Brooks, Alfred Kazin, Harry Levin, Joseph Wood Krutch, and even Edmund Wilson are probably unknown to young writers today, but older ones will remember the enormous influence they once had, writing in such mainstream publications as The New Yorker, The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly.
Malcolm Cowley was the first to bring William Faulkner’s work to wide public attention. Edmund Wilson championed Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the European modernists. One of Van Wyck Brooks’ books, The Flowering of New England, went through an astonishing 42 printings between 1936 and 1940, a success it’s impossible to imagine a book on literary history enjoying today.
Yes, the term “man of letters” sticks in the craw now, and no retrospective changing it to “person of letters” can hide that the most influential critics of that era, with a few exceptions like Diana Trilling and Mary McCarthy, were male — and white men at that, based mostly in New York. The literary establishment? These men reigned at its top.
What makes their work still worth remembering is that, unlike what critics are left today, they were not academics; literature to them was something too important and alive to be merely studied — it was something to live and experience to your very core.
Edmund Wilson was king here; if anyone ever deserved the label man of letters it was he. In a long career, he managed to turn out not only some of the most cogent literary criticism of the 20th century, but innovative novels, powerful reportage and groundbreaking books on literary history. He looked like a literary stuffed-shirt, full of his own importance, and it’s tempting to call him a sexist, but he was instrumental in bringing to readers’ attention the work of such writers as Virginia Woolf, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dawn Powell. He was also one of the first public intellectuals to celebrate lowbrow culture, with a special fondness for magicians like Houdini and the world of burlesque.
Wilson is as famous for the writers he disparaged as he is for the writers he championed. He thought Frost was a fraud, saw no point to Kafka, ridiculed Tolkien (“Oh Those Awful Orcs!” he titled his review of The Lord of the Rings), and, when he wrote an essay in The New Yorker explaining why he thought mysteries, even the “good” ones, were beneath literary contempt, received record amounts of hate mail from all over the country.
Cowley’s career paralleled Wilson’s, and he had much the same kind of influence, particularly in bringing to prominence the writers of the Lost Generation working in the Paris of the 1920s. He published a long essay in the 1950s called A Natural History of the American Writer that I wish some publisher would reissue as a book, since nothing quite like it has ever been written.
“I should like to discuss present-day American writers as objects in nature,” he begins, with tongue only partially in cheek. “Though more informally, I should like to write in the spirit of Margaret Mead when she describes the various tribes of New Guinea.”
And this he does, in a hundred pages of witty, insightful observations, with mini chapters on “What Writers Are and Why,” “Childhood and Adolescence,” “How They Earn Their Livings,” “The Working Day,” “Their Domestic Habits,” “Some Vices Attributed to Writers,” “Their Public Status.”
What’s fascinating, reading this today, is how much has changed in the literary life in the 70 years between now and then — and how much hasn’t.
“The quality of a writer’s work,” he writes, “is praised or condemned by their professional colleagues, but not by the public at large, which is interested chiefly in hearing that an author’s last book had a very large sale and earned a great deal of money; in that case he may be admired in the same fashion as a politician who was elected by a very large majority.”
The man of letters I have a sneaking affection for is Van Wyck Brooks. He made his reputation in the 1920s by attacking American literature for what it lacked, then switched gears in the 1930s and began celebrating what it offered. His major work, the multi-volume Makers and Finders: A history of the writer in America, 1800-1915, not only explores the American tradition in literature, but all but creates it. “The search for a useable past,” a phrase he made famous, was the slogan of his life’s work.
Brooks, in researching his books, apparently decided to try to read every single American writer who published a book during his bookend years — an era when, in Edith Wharton’s words, writing was still regarded as “something between a black art and a form of manual labor.”
While there’s much here on Twain, Whitman, Emerson and the other giants, he’s particularly good on those lesser, all-but-forgotten writers whose work might be lost if not for him — people like Mary Austin, Lafcadio Hearn, James Huneker and, yes, Davy Crockett.
Brooks’ prose style can be clunky — he tried writing about each writer in the writer’s own style — but who of all the critics that have come after him has taken on the challenge that he did? Who, in other words, has read everything written between 1915 and 2015, let alone tried to assign writers their place, big or small in the proud American literary tradition?
In the years since such popularizers as Brooks were in their pomp, literary critics, with no role to play in mass culture, have mostly retreated to academia, even those who, like Harold Bloom, are known to a wider audience than just professors. Public intellectuals who still have a following are almost exclusively devoted to politics or social issues now, not literature.
And it goes even further than this; the old-time professional book reviewer, someone who could make a modest living reviewing books for newspapers and magazines — with the market for their work disappearing — will soon be a dinosaur from the past. “Good riddance!” some writers will say — they know how capricious and arbitrary reviewers could be. But they served a vital function in the literary infrastructure, bringing writers to the attention of a reading public who wouldn’t know of them except for their reviews.
(A first novel, back when I began in the early 1980s, could easily receive 20 full reviews in 20 different newspapers; today, even an established novelist would be lucky to get four or five.)
What’s replaced reviewers? Likes on Facebook, stars on Amazon — five if you’re lucky, one if you’re not, put there by random readers or the author’s pals. It’s more democratic, sure, and maybe we don’t need critics to tell us what to think anymore, but, from a writers’s perspective, I’d rather have my novel take its chances with Edmund Wilson than I would “M.C.” or “Pat” or those other half-anonymous reviewers who are allowed only a few sentences to sum up even a massive book.
So put me down as a member of a very small club: the writers who still find inspiration in reading Wilson and Van Wyck Brooks. I’d urge young writers to give them a try, not only to glean insights into the writing process, but to get a sense of the tradition you’re trying to become part of, and to appreciate what it was like, the era when American literature was so vibrant and important that some of the best minds in the country could spend their working lives acting as its champion.
W.D. Wetherell is a novelist, essayist and short story writer who lives in Lyme.