Consumed or Reanimated?

The second installment of Van Wyck Brooks’ literary autobiography is called Days of the Phoenix: The Nineteen-Twenties I Remember (Dutton, $3.95). While the title is obviously symbolical, the reader is at a loss to know just what the “phoenix days” were in Mr. Brooks’ own mind. Does the author think the twenties were a period of fire in which the bird was consumed, only to rise again? Or were they a time in which the phoenix was already putting forth his brilliantly renewed plumage?

The reason for asking such puzzling questions derives from the double focus of the book. Part of the story which Mr. Brooks has to tell centers on the vital literary movement of the time, a vastly experimental one in which there seemed to be room for a thousand harmonies and almost as many dissonances. It was the time of the “lost generation,” but it was also a time of “makers and finders” (to adapt an old Brooks title). If Mr. Brooks were merely engaged here in writing about the human figures who surrounded him in the twenties, when he lived in Westport, Conn., and worked in New York, one could be almost certain that the phoenix was in process of coming alive again out of the ashes of the Genteel Tradition of the late nineteenth century. But as one reads on in Days of the Phoenix one is more and more aware of a coming shadow. At the very end of the decade Mr. Brooks experienced what he calls his crise a quarante ans, a period of black despondency when he came to doubt the worth of his own work. The phoenix that is the latter-day Brooks, author of The Flowering of New England, did not arise from the ashes of personal despair until the middle 1930’s, and by then the creativity of the twenties had given way. to the wastes of the proletarian cults.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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The second installment of Van Wyck Brooks’ literary autobiography is called Days of the Phoenix: The Nineteen-Twenties I Remember (Dutton, $3.95). While the title is obviously symbolical, the reader is at a loss to know just what the “phoenix days” were in Mr. Brooks’ own mind. Does the author think the twenties were a period of fire in which the bird was consumed, only to rise again? Or were they a time in which the phoenix was already putting forth his brilliantly renewed plumage?

The reason for asking such puzzling questions derives from the double focus of the book. Part of the story which Mr. Brooks has to tell centers on the vital literary movement of the time, a vastly experimental one in which there seemed to be room for a thousand harmonies and almost as many dissonances. It was the time of the “lost generation,” but it was also a time of “makers and finders” (to adapt an old Brooks title). If Mr. Brooks were merely engaged here in writing about the human figures who surrounded him in the twenties, when he lived in Westport, Conn., and worked in New York, one could be almost certain that the phoenix was in process of coming alive again out of the ashes of the Genteel Tradition of the late nineteenth century. But as one reads on in Days of the Phoenix one is more and more aware of a coming shadow. At the very end of the decade Mr. Brooks experienced what he calls his crise a quarante ans, a period of black despondency when he came to doubt the worth of his own work. The phoenix that is the latter-day Brooks, author of The Flowering of New England, did not arise from the ashes of personal despair until the middle 1930’s, and by then the creativity of the twenties had given way. to the wastes of the proletarian cults.