Ink Chorus: A Writer’s Notebook!

Our book today is a stiff-legged, sniffy, fascinating little thing, From a Writer’s Notebook, a quasi-commonplace book brought out by Van Wyck Brooks in 1958. You can feel the prickliness of the endeavor even from the title, can’t you? “From a Writer’s Notebook,” so carefully distinguishing the author from his proletariat readers – the writer’s droppings, his merest obiter dicta obligingly dispensed to lowly non-writers so they can treasure the wisdom of the master.

Brooks came by such an attitude as naturally as anybody can. He graduated from Harvard in 1908 and published a book a year for the next sixty years, which would give just about anybody a certain arch quality. And besides, the strange hybrid animal that is the writer’s notebook tends to make just about anybody who indulges in it look like a mandarin yutz.

So Brooks can veer from the gloomy (“There are writers who, as writers, ought to die, and the only way to contribute to this end is not to mention them”) to the pretentious:

A seed catalogue – Stumpp and Walter’s – says that if you wish to develop new and beautiful varieties, you must save the weak seedlings. The strongest seedlings are pretty certain to run true to type. Using the words “weak” and “strong” as most people use them, is this not generally true of writers also?

… to the flagrantly hypocritical: “When a writer begins to be successful, when he begins to soar, outwardly but especially inwardly, then, to save him from infatuation, he needs to be pelted with bitter apples.” And since the thing is a notebook, it can narrowly skirt the expectation of greater cohesion we’d demand of almost any other kind of book. After all, a notebook is just jottings, right? Thoughts and impressions recorded on the fly, of interest to readers now only due to the breathtaking profundity of the author. One result is that the pages can get a bit tiring at times:

People who are too agreeable and cultivated lull one insensibly into a kind of fatuity. One gets into a fool’s paradise. That is another reason why, except in small doses, “good society,” – at its best – is not good for writers. For the literary mind needs to be misunderstood; it requires something harsh in the air that surrounds it.

But it’s not all hopeless, mainly because underneath all his backhanded professions of his own genius, Brooks actually was a genius, and it’s fascinating in these pages to watch that genius latch onto all manner of subjects, literary and otherwise, and try to chase those subjects down to some kind of comprehensibility that doesn’t conflict with a lifetime of codified opinions. For instance, Brooks is never more aphoristic than when he’s making offhand comments about other writers; those are always the highlights for me, every time I re-read pieces of A Writer’s Notebook, that and the very real sense of being in the presence of a fiercely active mind, although not a particularly reflective one. When Brooks digs deep into an author’s life and personality, he very often finds himself staring back out of the details – but he doesn’t make the connection. About T. S. Eliot, for example, he writes: “Because he is dictatorial Eliot appeals all the more to an age that desires orthodoxy and desires to conform. How could such an age not wish for a literary pope?”

Nobody in the world coveted that mitre more eagerly than Van Wyck Brooks, and the sense that either he doesn’t know that or he’s daring you to mention it, well, that sense just adds to the fun.