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Van Wyck Brooks: The Historian as Artist
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15018 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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Date : |
9 / 1988 |
4,913 Words |
| Author
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Wilfred M. McClay
Wilfred M. McClay is an assistant professor of history at
Tulane University in New Orleans. |
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
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