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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 Benét 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.