The Facts of Wealth

Wescott might resent Wisconsin, a Kenneth Burke and a Malcolm Cowley might shudder at Pittsburgh, a Thornton Wilder might regard New Haven, Conn., as limited, but neither Wisconsin, nor Pennsylvania, nor Connecticut, held their young rebels to an eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt go into business.” In running from America, the artists of Van Wyck Brooks’ “days of the phoenix” unwittingly proved the freedom of a civilization which willingly permitted them the exodus, and even sent dollars to them to sustain them abroad. And, as Malcolm Cowley was later to notice, the America that let its young depart was ready to take them back again when Fascism put an end to conversations at the Rotonde and the Dome.

Mr. Brooks has a Concrete mind, and he arrives at his conclusions by intuition, not by reasoned analysis. As he says about his early books, “I had always worked by following my nose.” Because he has a concrete mind, he is much more convincing when he is following a line of action, or setting forth a scene, than when he is busy talking about the “perverseness” of Albert Jay Nock’s politics or about a “Jeffersonianism” which he confuses with socialism. The pictures of people, as walking, talking individuals, in Days of the Phoenix, are brilliant. Such characters as Padraic and Mollie Colum, Hendrik Van Loon, Joel Spingarn, Lee Simonson, H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock himself are depicted with a good novelist’s sensitivity to nuances of personality. There is a particularly magnificent portrait of Mr. Brooks’ brother-in-law, John Francis Stimson, who went to Tahiti in 1912 and spent his life collecting Polynesian legends and compiling Tahitian dictionaries and grammars.

WP

About the Author

William H. Peterson

Featured Tags

Wescott might resent Wisconsin, a Kenneth Burke and a Malcolm Cowley might shudder at Pittsburgh, a Thornton Wilder might regard New Haven, Conn., as limited, but neither Wisconsin, nor Pennsylvania, nor Connecticut, held their young rebels to an eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt go into business.” In running from America, the artists of Van Wyck Brooks’ “days of the phoenix” unwittingly proved the freedom of a civilization which willingly permitted them the exodus, and even sent dollars to them to sustain them abroad. And, as Malcolm Cowley was later to notice, the America that let its young depart was ready to take them back again when Fascism put an end to conversations at the Rotonde and the Dome.

Mr. Brooks has a Concrete mind, and he arrives at his conclusions by intuition, not by reasoned analysis. As he says about his early books, “I had always worked by following my nose.” Because he has a concrete mind, he is much more convincing when he is following a line of action, or setting forth a scene, than when he is busy talking about the “perverseness” of Albert Jay Nock’s politics or about a “Jeffersonianism” which he confuses with socialism. The pictures of people, as walking, talking individuals, in Days of the Phoenix, are brilliant. Such characters as Padraic and Mollie Colum, Hendrik Van Loon, Joel Spingarn, Lee Simonson, H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock himself are depicted with a good novelist’s sensitivity to nuances of personality. There is a particularly magnificent portrait of Mr. Brooks’ brother-in-law, John Francis Stimson, who went to Tahiti in 1912 and spent his life collecting Polynesian legends and compiling Tahitian dictionaries and grammars.