Portrait of America (1800-40)

Parson Weems has been remembered by generations of Americans only as the man --presumably a dust-dry, thin-lipped little pedant--who invented or at least popularized the most famous lie in U.S. history: the fable of George Washington and the cherry tree. As revived by Van Wyck Brooks in The World of Washington Irving, the Rev. Mason Locke Weems appears to have been an attractive and useful citizen. A cheerful, ruddy-faced clergyman who had given up his parish to become a book agent (the Episcopal Church in the South was demoralized after the Revolution), Parson Weems for 31 years bounced over the early U.S. roads with his Jersey wagon loaded with good books. He carried a quill pen stuck in his hat, an inkhorn in his lapel, and his fiddle on the wagon seat beside him. "He stopped now and then at a pond or a stream to wash his shirt and take a bath, suspending his linen to dry on the frame of the wagon."

Parson Weems sold his books at fairs, races, sittings of county courts from New York to Georgia--between times "beating up the headquarters of all the good old planters and farmers . . . regardless of roads horrid and suns torrid." He sold Paradise Lost, The Vicar of Wakefield, Robinson Crusoe, Cook's Voyages, the works of Voltaire, Tom Paine and Bunyan and Bard's Compendium of Midwifery, which he touted as "the grand American Aristotle."

He also sold his own productions, which were bestsellers. Parson Weems wrote them at odd moments along the road--biographies of Washington, of Franklin, of Penn and--his best book--of General Francis Marion, the "little, smoke-dried, French-phizzed" Swamp Fox. They abounded in doubtful anecdotes, unblushing fabrications and factual errors, but they were also buoyant, impulsive, racy and full of the spirit of their subjects. After Washington's death Parson Weems wrote to his publisher: "Washington, you know, is gone! Millions are gaping to read something about him. I am nearly primed and cocked for 'em."

Thrill of Discovery. The World of Washington Irving, in which scores of such half-forgotten U.S. reputations are refurbished with vividness, discernment and charm, is the third published volume of Author Brooks's masterful study of the growth and character of the American mind. But chronologically, it is the first, dealing with the first 40 years of the last century. If & when the series is completed, The Flowering of New England, which appeared first (TIME, Aug. 24, 1936), will be No. 2; New England: Indian Summer (TIME, Aug. 19, 1940) will be No. 4; The World of Washington Irving, No. 1.

Hence, for any plain reader who may have been scared away by Author Brooks's reputation as the nation's most distinguished literary critic, Irving is an excellent place to begin his history. Van Wyck (rhymes with bike) Brooks is no mere dissector of dead tomes. In Irving, as in its two predecessors, the task which he has set himself is nothing less than to recreate the whole intellectual and artistic atmosphere of the period. Few Americans will read it without a thrill of discovery at learning how much more lively, vigorous and original an intellectual life the youthful U.S. enjoyed than previous apologetic, Europe-conscious historians have led the world to believe.

Every Farmer a Reader. At that moment in American history when Parson Weems decided to write his biography of Washington, the American mind had begun to find itself. It had been regional, New England or Southern, and highly conscious of differences between states. It was becoming the mind of a nation. A sense of the worth of American life swept over the country with the force of a discovery in science.

Those were the days when a traveler could write: "I have traveled more than four thousand miles about this country, and I never met with one single insolent or rude American. There are very few really ignorant men in America of native growth. Every farmer is more or less a reader. . . . They are all well-informed, modest without shyness, always free to communicate what they know, and never ashamed to acknowledge what they have yet to learn. . . . They have all been readers from their youth up; and there are few subjects upon which they cannot converse with you, whether of a political or a scientific nature."

Daisy and Forest. One such farmer was John Bartram. A gentle, mystical Quaker, Bartram was plowing one day when he first noticed a daisy. As he studied its petals, he thought of how many plants and blossoms, of whose uses he knew nothing, he had destroyed in his years of tilling the soil. Bartram hired a man to plow for him, went to Philadelphia, bought a Latin grammar, studied it until he could read the naturalists, then set about classifying the native growths of the woods near home. He was responsible for the naturalization in England of more than 150 American plants.

His son William carried on his work in the building of the Bartram Botanical Gardens on the banks of the Schuylkill outside Philadelphia. There foreign travelers stopped (70 volumes of travels in America were written in these years by French authors alone) before venturing into the forest which, with scarcely three consecutive miles of cleared land and only five cities of more than 10,000 people, lay in a vast ocean of green the length and breadth of the continent.

First U.S. Novelist. The greatest American city, Philadelphia, with 70,000 people and the memory of Benjamin Franklin, was rich and orderly, but shocking to idealists from abroad in its spendthrift luxury. Ladies of fashion paid their hairdressers as much as -L-200 a year, and Statesman Gouverneur Morris had "two French valets and a man to buckle his hair in papillotes." But Philadelphia was also the home of many a scientist, painter and writer, including Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist, who inspired Keats, Shelley, Scott, Poe, Hazlitt, Cooper, Hawthorne.

A dumpy little man, silent with strangers, responsive among friends, dead at 39 of consumption, Brown was a far better writer than later generations admitted. He filled his novels with seductions, crimes, violence and a robust 18th-Century sentiment, as well as the ghostly trappings of Gothic romances. But the novels "were singularly original, poetic and impressive," and Brown "added a third dimension to the Gothic novel; he suffused his mechanical devices with true horrors of the mind. . . . He was a precursor, in more than one respect, of Poe, Melville, Hawthorne and Henry James. Brown represented, in other words, the native American wild stock that produced these splendid blossoms in the course of time."

Lawyer's Legend. New York was more aristocratic, less intellectual. But the little city (pop. 60,000 in 1800) of yellow brick buildings and whitewashed brick houses at the tip of Manhattan Island was already friendly to painters and actors. Washington Irving, aged 17 in 1800, used to climb out the bedroom window of his home on William Street, after family prayers at night, to sneak to the theater.

A published author by the time he was 20--though much of his town-gossip writing was pale as the moon in the morning--Irving was popular, attractive, the bearer of a charmed life from the time he suddenly got the idea for The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (he was crossing a bridge in Westchester) to the time he was captured by Mediterranean pirates. With his successful older brothers making life easy for him, Irving took his lawyer's career lightly. He had only one client, and neglected him. But he knew the old Dutch legends of the Hudson, cheerfully lampooned the Ten Eycks and Author Brooks's forebears the Van Wycks, hunted and fished through the farms and forests of Scarsdale and Tarrytown. He excelled at descriptive writing, became a model of English prose more popular than Addison.

Yellow Rivers and Red Men. Irving traveled not only in Europe, but to the U.S. West, attracted by Painter George Catlin's letters to New York papers about Indian life, which were the talk of the city in 1832-33. Catlin lived for eight years among the Indians, visited 48 tribes. He "could scarcely bear to leave the plains, where nothing suggested home but the sun and the rats, where frogs had horns and dogs were wolves and rivers were yellow and men were red and where there were no laws save those of honor." When he first visited the Mandans on a steamboat, 2,000 miles up the Missouri, the chiefs and braves thronged his lodge. Awaiting their turn to be painted in strict order of rank, they sometimes spent the whole morning, from sunrise to noon, arranging their war dress and war paint.

Of such richly colorful material, woven into a narrative that is never schematic, and yet never a mere miscellaneous grab bag of historical information, is Van Wyck Brooks's book constructed. Its individual word-portraits--of Alexander Wilson, the dour ornithologist and bird-painter, of Davy Crockett, teller of tall backwoods tales, who thought they made a book "jump out of the press like a new dollar from a mint-hopper," of Fenimore Cooper, whose father gave him 23 farms in New York State when the future novelist was expelled from Yale--are equal to Brooks's best.

The Author. Van Wyck Brooks's literary career began with a trip to England when he was twelve. Born in Plainfield, NJ. in 1886, the son of a New York stockbroker, he read Ruskin in England, dreamed of himself writing a history of painting some day. He never wrote it, and his first published work, like that of many of his generation, appeared in St. Nicholas.

Graduated from Harvard in 1907 (a Phi Beta Kappa, he did four years' work in three, edited the Advocate, contributed to the Harvard Monthly, and published a volume of undergraduate verse), the 21-year-old Brooks stopped in New York to ask William Dean Howells how one should set about being a writer. ("He knew as well as I that there was no answer.") After a try at newspaper reporting, he took steerage passage to England.

Hunger and Heartbreak. He lived for a year and a half in the slums of London. He lived on tea and buns, learned what it felt like to faint from hunger. He rented an abandoned studio, slept on the models' stand, with a moth-eaten bearskin for a blanket. When his salary at a press-clipping agency was upped to 30 shillings a week, he was in clover. In Sussex, in a farmhouse that had once been a priory, in a big sunny room with casement windows, he wrote his first, brilliantly titled, critical book, The Wine of the Puritans.

In his early works the young critic was primarily concerned with defining an American past that would be for U.S. writers what their own ancient cultures were for the writers of older countries: a steady source of inspiration, a practical guide. The task was all the more difficult because it seemed to him that even the best of American writers had fallen so far short of the possibilities of their genius. As he worked on his biographies of Mark Twain and Henry James, finding more & more evidence of the personal tragedies of individual writers, and more & more signs of the faltering of their boldest ventures, Van Wyck Brooks produced studies of intellectual failure which were as terrifying to creative writers as the horror stories of Poe.

"How Good People Are." Meanwhile his own career went forward like the life of one of the men of letters he wrote about. For a year he was assistant to Editor Walter Hines Page on World's Work. For two years he wrote definitions or a dictionary, articles for an encyclopedia. Like Edwin Arlington Robinson, he could draw a map of New York City, showing the location of every free lunch counter. One of his good friends was John Butler Yeats, the painter, father of William Butler Yeats. The old man lectured to him on the value of idleness, painted a fine portrait of him that now hangs over the fireplace of his house in Westport, and told him the one most important thing he had learned in life: "How good people are." In 1911, in Carmel, Calif., he married charming Eleanor Kenyon, who bore him two sons (one is now a naval lieutenant).

In the 1920s, his somber little critical masterpieces--The Ordeal of Mark Twain, The Pilgrimage of Henry James, America's Coming of Age--won him a measure of fame, a solid standing, a powerful influence with his contemporaries. But they left him profoundly dissatisfied with his own work and increasingly unhappy about it. In the mid-'20s his health and nerves broke down, and he spent the next four years in hospitals, a victim of the melancholy that had gripped and paralyzed so many American writers before him.

The Love of Life that flows through the books Brooks has written since his recovery is a quality that had been missing from American literature since its greatest days. Brooks once wrote of Llewelyn Powys, who recovered from tuberculosis, that he was like a hare that had escaped the hunter, or a trout that had escaped the hook "and now exults in the sun-soaked earth and windswept water." The phrase is truer of his own writing. The mellow humor that pervades it and the good-natured approval of the people, of their work, their strivings, the pleasure in their triumphs, the sympathy with their struggles and hardships, give his books life and animation on subjects and people that had been synonymous with academic dullness and highbrow hairsplitting.

Brooks does not so much write his books as compose them out of the novels, poems, diaries, letters of the period he writes about. It is a tribute to his scholarship that he can quote chapter and verse for every phrase in them, to his style that the reading flows along with no patchwork effect. To bring writers and writing back to the main body of life, as they were in Longfellow's time, to link the struggles of artists to the daily work of mechanics and farmers, to fill the background of his books with the ordinary stuff of daily living of most of the people--housekeeping, planting, building, harvesting, buying and selling, keeping well and keeping busy--this is the contribution that his method has made.

The Little Colonel. Stephen Vincent Benet once called Van Wyck Brooks the little colonel of literature. Now 58, a ruddy-faced, grey-mustached man of middle height, he is as straight as an old soldier, somewhat resembles one in his severely simple working life and the spare common sense of his words. With the earnings of The Flowering of New England he built a square white brick house on the top of an isolated hill four miles from Westport, Conn. It has high ceilings, soft-toned walls, many windows, large rooms, a view of the Sound, books, comfortable chairs and the pictures collected by a writer who, liking artists, says "they are just like writers without the nonsense."

There Van Wyck Brooks awakens early each morning, reads before breakfast, writes from 7:30 till midday, reads again in the afternoon. He uses a quart of black ink a year, has trouble getting the kind he likes. He is as nervous about starting each new book as he was about the first one. He follows no pattern in his writing, never outlines his work, does not know until he is half-finished with a book what form it is going to take. He is now halfway through the reading for the next volume of his history, which will deal with the lives & times of Melville and Whitman.

New and Forgotten Stories. Brooks published The Flowering of New England first in his series because, finishing his life of Emerson, he was saturated with knowledge of the daily life of old New England. Happy in his subject for the first time in his life, he produced a book equal to those he wrote about.

In The World of Washington Irving he had no writers of the caliber he wrote about in The Flowering of New England. Hence he has made more of the minor figures, preachers in the Western wilderness, poets and songwriters in the South, genuinely gifted and strangely ignored men of genius, like the half-forgotten Charleston novelist, William Gilmore Simms, of whom an English traveler once said: "Simms not a great man! Then for God's sake, who is your great man?" Where the achievement of The Flowering of New England was to make old information fresh and meaningful, the achievement of The World of Washington Irving is to bring to life enough new and forgotten stories to inspire a generation of novelists.

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