Edmund Wilson: The Man and His Work
Edited by John Wain
New York: New York University Press
192 pages $12.00
“Nobody in this volume,” writes editor John Wain, “is here to praise Edmund Wilson, and leave it at that,” thus signaling what ought to be a welcome end to a mood of uncritical reverence for a prodigious worker whose dedication to letters was exemplary, but whose limitations as a student of literature cannot be ignored and should not be glossed over out of misplaced piety.
“His work, and his personality,” Wain goes on to say, “were designed for combat.” But habits of reverence are hard to break and so we read in an essay by Clive James, especially commissioned for this little book, that, “As a critical mind Wilson is so great we have not yet taken his measure.” This is simply not true. There is nothing particularly profound about Wilson’s critical thought, and one shouldn’t confuse output with inscape. But how far can you trust someone who has just written, “Nobody now could wade through Vachel Lindsay’s ‘Roan Stallion’? The sad truth is that while Wain and his collaborators have praiseworthy intentions, they mostly fail to engage Wilson on meaningful grounds and much of what they say about his work has already, like the poem James alludes to, been written by somebody else.
For instance, Larzer Ziff’s “The Man by the Fire: Edmund Wilson and American Literature” reads like a rather muddled summary of Sherman Paul’s elegant Edmund Wilson: A Study of Literary Vocation in Our Time (1965). Combine Paul’s book with C. P. Frank’s less speculative but more methodical Edmund Wilson (1970) or Leonard Kriegel’s equally useful Edmund Wilson (1971) and you have about as complete an account of Wilson’s career and miracles as we are likely to need in the foreseeable future.
But coming to terms with Wilson is a different matter. Like his predecessors Ziff comments at length on the notorious perversity of Wilson’s critical perambulations, namely his obsessional and increasingly retrograde preoccupation with third-rate literature, only to come up at the end with what seems to me to be a trivial and unworthy explanation: “His undoubted sovereignty as a critic and historian may not have sufficed to balance the neglect of his fictions, and in his criticism, therefore, he developed a corresponding sensitivity to the neglected.” If that is all, then we have a Wilson with whom we can sympathize, but not an opponent we can respect. I prefer to think that Wilson had a quarrel with literature, and that is what we must confront.
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