NABOKV-L post 0011649, Wed, 3 Aug 2005 06:09:02 -0700

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Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2005 14:27:30 -0400
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[1] What HeLiked[2] The career of Edmund
Wilson.by Louis MenandPLUS: From “EuropeWithout Baedeker,” Wilson
reports for The New Yorker on London after theSecond World War.
MISSIONARY
New Yorker, United States - 14 hoursago
... writers, among them Fitzgerald (a Princeton classmate and close
friend), Dos Passos (another close friend), Hemingway, Cummings,
Bogan,Millay, Farrell, NABOKOV ...
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050808crat_atlarge[3]

[4]

MISSIONARYby LOUIS MENANDEdmund Wilson and Americanculture.Issue of
2005-08-08 and 15
Posted 2005-08-01

EdmundWilson disliked being called a critic. He thought of himself
as ajournalist, and nearly all his work was done for commercial
magazines,principally Vanity Fair, in the nineteen-twenties; The New
Republic, inthe nineteen-twenties and thirties; The New Yorker,
beginning in thenineteen-forties; and The New York Review of Books,
in thenineteen-sixties. Most of his books were put together from
pieces that hadbeen written to meet journalistic occasions. He was
exceptionally wellread: he had had a first-class education in
English, French, and Italianliterature at Princeton, from which he
graduated in 1916, and he keptadding languages all his life. He
learned to read German, Russian, andHebrew; when he died, in 1972,
he was working on Hungarian. He was also anextremely fast and an
extremely clear writer, talents that, in the magazinebusiness, are
prized above many others, and that would have made up for anumber of
shortcomings if he had had shortcomings to make up for. These
strengths, along with an ingrained indifference to material comforts,
allowed him, from almost the beginning of his career, to write about
only the subjects he wanted to write about.

Wilson had no interestin criticism as such. He wrote a few essays
about the critical literaturethat had influenced him—Marxist and
historical interpretation—but he paidlittle attention to the
criticism being written by his contemporariesunless they were good
writers themselves, in which case he read theircriticism as a form
of literature, which is how he preferred to readeverything. He
detested what he called “treatise-type” books—theoreticalor
social-scientific works—and avoided them, unless, again, they seemed
to him to have literary or imaginative power. He read Marx but not
Weber;he read Orwell but not Hannah Arendt. It was his practice,
when he took upan author, to read the whole shelf: books,
uncollected pieces,biographies, correspondence. When he lost
patience with a book, he skippedaround, and what he ignored he
ignored without shame. “I have been bored byHispanophiles,” he wrote
in The New Yorker in 1965, “and I have also beenbored by everything,
with the exception of Spanish painting, that I haveever known about
Spain. I have made a point of learning no Spanish, and Ihave never
got through ‘Don Quixote.’ ” Though he wrote well-known essayson
Dickens and on Henry James, he was uninterested in most Victorian
fiction and didn’t bother to finish “Middlemarch.” He had a good
knowledge of the theatre (he wrote a number of plays, and his first
wife, Mary Blair, was in the Provincetown Players, Eugene O’Neill’s
company); he had a selective knowledge of art, a very selective
knowledge of classical music, and virtually no knowledge of the
movies.He loathed the radio.

“A history of man’s ideas and imaginings inthe setting of the
conditions which have shaped them”: this was the wayWilson described
his ambition in his first major book, “Axel’s Castle,” in1931 (the
words appear in a dedication to his Princeton mentor Christian
Gauss), and he was always keenly conscious of the conditions that had
shaped his own ideas and imaginings. He liked to say that he was a
man
of the nineteenth century —he was born in 1895, in Red Bank, New
Jersey—and to explain that his values and assumptions, his whole
understanding of literary and intellectual life, were products of a
particular moment. Because “Axel’s Castle” has served many readers as
aguide to the work of Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Valéry, Proust, and Stein,
thebook’s six subjects, it is natural to associate Wilson with the
literarymodernism that flourished between 1910 and 1930. This is a
fundamentalmisapprehension. Wilson was not a modernist (a term he
despised), as theconventional style of his own poetry and fiction
makes plain. He admiredthe writers he treated in “Axel’s Castle”—
Joyce and Proust especially—buthe believed that they were going down
a path of introversion andart-for-art’s-sake, an honorable path but a
wrong one, and his hope inwriting about them was that the scope and
sophistication of theirachievement would be an inspiration for the
more socially engaged Americanwriting he envisioned for the decades
to come. Wilson was not shaped byEuropean modernism; he enlisted
European modernism in a mission alreadymounted—the mission to
deprovincialize American culture.

Wilsoncame out of the Progressive era. His father was the New
Jersey stateattorney general under Governor Woodrow Wilson; before
his career waswrecked by what was then called neurasthenia (meaning,
essentially, malehysteria), he made a name for himself by cleaning up
the rackets inAtlantic City. At Princeton, Wilson was taught about
the necessary virtueof cosmopolitanism by Gauss, a professor of
Romance languages and, later,a dean, who had known Wilde, and who
had a dog called Baudelaire. When theUnited States entered the war,
Wilson enlisted and served in Europe as awound-dresser in Army
hospitals, an experience, he later said, thatknocked any social
élitism or sense of privilege out of him forever. In1920, he began
his journalistic career, with a job at Vanity Fair,followed, soon
afterward, by a position at the magazine that was bornof
Progressivism, The New Republic, where he was an editor, off and on,
for many years, and where the essays in “Axel’s Castle” first
appeared.By then, Wilson had firmly in his sights the twin enemies
of everyProgressive intellectual: unregulated business and the
genteel tradition.His vicars were not Proust and Eliot; they were H.
L. Mencken and GeorgeBernard Shaw, scourges of bourgeois smugness and
Philistinism. Wilsonhated American chauvinism and gentility, and
everything he associated withthem—prudery, pedantry, commercialism,
and militarism. That hatred is thestarch in his prose.

Wilson’s professional life has three chapters.In the beginning, he
was a player in the drama that he wrote about, acommentator on times
that he was helping to shape. He not only explainedcontemporary
writing in “Axel’s Castle”; he knew and advised manycontemporary
writers, among them Fitzgerald (a Princeton classmate andclose
friend), Dos Passos (another close friend), Hemingway, Cummings,
Bogan, Millay, Farrell, Nabokov. He published Eliot in Vanity Fair;
hemet Joyce in Paris. His other big book of this period, “To the
FinlandStation” (1940), explained the Marxist revolutionary
tradition. In thedecade during which he worked on the book, Wilson
reported on thecondition of life in the Depression (his pieces were
published as “TheAmerican Jitters,” in 1932); he engaged in
political activities and drewup a radical manifesto; he guided the
editorial direction of The NewRepublic until the magazine’s loyalty
to Stalin drove him away. Hepublished two major collections, “The
Triple Thinkers” (1938) and “TheWound and the Bow” (1941); a number
of the essays in them—on Dickens,James, Wharton, Kipling, Pushkin,
and Flaubert—changed the reputations oftheir subjects.

The books and essays of this phase have a specialcharge, given to
them by Wilson’s notion of writing as an arena wherethere is the
possibility of heroic performance—and by the hope, or thedesire,
that his own books and essays might be performances of thiskind.
Many of them were read that way. Alfred Kazin, whose first book,“On
Native Grounds,” was passionately indebted to Wilson’s prose, andhis
friend Richard Hofstadter used to read aloud to each other thefamous
ending of the chapter on Proust in “Axel’s Castle”:

Proust is perhaps the last great historian of the loves, the
society,the intelligence, the diplomacy, the literature and the art
of theHeartbreak House of capitalist culture; and the little man
with the sadappealing voice, the metaphysician’s mind, the Saracen’s
beak, theill-fitting dress-shirt and the great eyes that seem to see
all about himlike the many-faceted eyes of a fly, dominates the
scene and plays host inthe mansion where he is not long to be
master.

The tribute toHemingway—in an essay, in “The Wound and the Bow,”
that was so critical,in parts, that Hemingway threatened to file a
lawsuit over it—produces thesame sort of effect:

Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrorsof the modern man at
the danger of losing control of his world, and he hasalso, within his
scope, provided his own kind of antidote. Thisantidote,
paradoxically, is almost entirely moral. Despite Hemingway’s
preoccupation with physical contests, his heroes are almost always
defeated physically, nervously, practically: their stories are moral
ones. He himself, when he trained himself stubbornly in his
unconventional unmarketable art in a Paris which had other fashions,
gave the prime example of such a victory; and if he has sometimes,
underthe menace of the general panic, seemed on the point of going
to pieces asan artist, he has always pulled himself together the
next moment. Theprinciple of the Bourdon gauge, which is used to
measure the pressure ofliquids, is that a tube which has been curved
into a coil will tend tostraighten out in proportion as the liquid
inside it is subjected to anincreasing pressure.

And there is the one-sentence paragraph thatcomes at the end of the
terrible catalogue, in “To the Finland Station,”of the misfortunes
and the deaths of Marx, his wife, and theirchildren:

Such pain and such effort it cost to build a strongholdfor the mind
and the will outside the makeshifts of human society.

It was an entire generation’s romance of Marxism in a sentence.

Then, around 1945, Wilson walked out of the arena. Many of his
literary friends had died or were, creatively, past it; possibly the
chronic catfight that was his third marriage, to Mary McCarthy, wore
himdown. (“Two tyrants under a single roof” is how one writer
described them.They were married for seven years, and separated in
1945.) He continued toreview for The New Yorker and to maintain
extensive literary andintellectual friendships. But he abandoned his
dream of a great Americanculture. He had imagined himself a soldier
in the struggle to create aliterature that could stand on equal
terms with the literatures of Europe,and he had always, at heart,
imagined that one writer in particular wouldfulfill this hope. That
writer was Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald’s burnoutand death seemed to
confirm, for Wilson, everything that Shaw and Menckenhad predicted
about the fate of culture under bourgeois capitalism. “Therehas come
a sort of break in the literary movement that was beginning tofeel
its first strength in the years 1912-1916, at the time I was in
college at Princeton: the movement on which I grew up and with which
Iafterwards worked,” Wilson wrote in 1944, four years after
Fitzgerald’sdeath. Writers had been corrupted, he believed, by “the
two great enemiesof literary talent in our time: Hollywood and Henry
Luce.” It was not thatthe movement had died. It had never happened.

Disaffection becameWilson’s customary response to contemporary life
and literature. Heclaimed, only a little hyperbolically, that the
only American novelistwhose work he followed was J. D. Salinger. In
his journalism, he turned tothe old, the marginal, the neglected,
and the obscure. The period beginswith his reporting for The New
Yorker from the ruins of Europe, collectedin “Europe Without
Baedeker” (1947), and includes “The Scrolls from theDead Sea”
(1955); “Red, Black, Blond, and Olive. Studies in FourCivilizations:
Zuñi, Haiti, Soviet Russia, Israel” (1956); “Apologies tothe
Iroquois” (1960); the third of the major works, “Patriotic Gore”
(1962), a study of the literature of the American Civil War, most of
itby minor writers; a book on Canadian literature, “O Canada”
(1965); and “AWindow on Russia for the Use of Foreign Readers”
(1972). There are also twoclassic cases of late-life peevishness:
“The Cold War and the Income Tax”(1963), which arose out of Wilson’s
failure to file income-tax returnsfrom 1946 to 1955, an act of
carelessness to which he attempted to givethe glow of principle; and
“The Fruits of the MLA,” a two-part article forThe New York Review of
Books designed to vaporize a harmless andwell-intentioned cottage
industry, the publication of scholarly editions.(The articles did
prepare the way for the Library of America, anenterprise that Wilson
conceived.)

In his last years, he turnedto autobiography, and this marks the
third phase of his career, much ofwhich is posthumous. Wilson
completed two volumes of memoirs, “A Prelude”(1967), covering his
life through the First World War, and “Upstate”(1971), about
Talcottville, a remote New York town, where he spent part ofthe year
alone in an old house that had belonged to his family. (Hisfourth
wife, Elena, called the area a “kingdom of asbestos shingle and
patched and mended asbestos shingle,” and she refused to spend much
timethere.) Five more autobiographical volumes appeared after
Wilson’s death,each named for a decade, beginning with “The
Twenties” (1975). That’sseven volumes, and they are not slim. “The
Fifties” (1986) is six hundredand sixty-three pages; “The Sixties”
(1993) is nine hundred andsixty-eight. A volume of selected
correspondence, “Letters on Literatureand Politics,” came out in
1977, edited by Elena Wilson, with theassistance of Daniel Aaron. It
is the best window on Wilson and his times,and one of the great
editions of twentieth-century letters.

Unlike some posthumous productions, the memoirs are not merchandise
cobbled together by the estate. Wilson wanted them published, and he
engaged a distinguished biographer, Leon Edel, to handle the job
afterhis death (against the recommendation of Roger Straus, Wilson’s
publisher,who thought, given the material, that Edel was too much of
a prude).Wilson’s model, apparently, was Casanova’s “Memoirs,” the
subject of anessay in “The Wound and the Bow”; he may also have had
in mind thejournals of Gide and the Goncourts. His books are not in
that class. Theirchief problem—to invoke what, under the
circumstances, seems the fairstandard—is that they do not read as
literature. They are drawn mostlyfrom Wilson’s notebooks, which he
used as, simultaneously, a diary, averbal sketchbook, a repository
for anecdotes and recollected party talk,and a reporter’s notebook.
A lot of the diary entries reappeared inWilson’s fiction, “I Thought
of Daisy” (1929) and “Memoirs of HecateCounty” (1946); a lot of the
reporting reappeared in books like “Travelsin Two Democracies”
(1936), about his first visit to the Soviet Union, and“Apologies to
the Iroquois.” Though Wilson obviously planned all along tomake the
journals public, since he used pseudonyms when writing abouthis
affairs, they are mostly unprocessed notes. They need someone like
Wilson to explain what it all means.

This last phase ofpublication has made things difficult for
biographers. A life of Wilson byJeffrey Meyers came out in 1995. A
new one, by Lewis Dabney, more thantwenty years in the making, will
be published by Farrar, Straus &Giroux this summer. A much shorter
book, called “Critic in Love: ARomantic Biography of Edmund Wilson,”
by David Castronovo and Janet Groth,is scheduled to appear in the
fall. A biography of a highly guardedwriter—Saul Bellow, for
example—has an obvious appeal, since there areself-presentations to
unravel and secrets to reveal. But Wilson was one ofthe most
unguarded of men. He was often brusque and aloof with people, buthe
spoke his mind, sometimes imprudently and frequently in print; andin
his diaries he does not seem to have censored much. Unlike, say,
Bellow, he gave no time or consideration to the project of crafting a
personality. Kazin once teased Wilson about wearing a dress shirt
when
he went to the beach in Wellfleet, which is where he spent the parts
ofthe year that he was not in Talcottville. “I have only one way of
dressing,” Wilson said. It is a challenge, in other words, to find
muchto say about Wilson’s private life that has remained, in fact,
private.

But the autobiographical phase can’t just be lopped off from the
rest of the oeuvre. Wilson’s life was one of Wilson’s subjects, and
hemust have intended that later readers would take him the way he
tookProust and Marx and Casanova—as a historical figure, the
criticalreflector of an age. The disorderliness of the life is
almost the reverseimage of the work, which is so assured and direct,
but it does tell us afew things, one of which is that Wilson’s
hostility to gentility andinstitutional authority was not a literary
affectation. He was, in hisway, a bohemian, though a bohemian with
many firm opinions—“the man in theiron necktie,” Cummings called
him. After his separation from Mary Blair,in 1925, Wilson became
involved with a taxi-dancer, whom he picked up in adance hall on
Fourteenth Street. Her name was Frances Minihan; she was thedaughter
of Ukrainian immigrants, and married to a car thief. She is Annain
Wilson’s great, unnerving story of erotic obsession, “The Princess
with the Golden Hair,” published in “Memoirs of Hecate County”—a
womanwho was completely outside his social and professional circles,
and withwhom he seems to have had a uniquely uncomplicated and
loving, thoughultimately impossible, relationship. Wilson’s second
wife, Margaret Canby,died, in a fall at a party, in 1932. They had
been married for two years,and lived part of the time, for various
reasons, on opposite sides of thecontinent. The marriage to McCarthy
was a mistake that neither side wantedto be first to admit. When they
fought, he would retreat into his study andlock the door; she would
set piles of paper on fire and try to push themunder it. Wilson’s
fourth marriage, to Elena Mumm Thornton, came closestto conventional
domesticity, but they did not live all the year together,and Wilson
still pursued other women, with whom he achieved varyingdegrees of
sexual intimacy.

Wilson was an intent observer ofanatomical detail, and he left
written records of quite a few pudenda.There is something chilling
about the records, and there could besomething chilling about the
man who made them. It is the opposite ofarousing to read Wilson’s
description of sex with the unhappy PenelopeGilliatt in the
Princeton Club in 1970, when he was seventy-five. Butalthough these
passages are not usually moving to read, they represent amoving
element in Wilson’s personality. Wilson was not a sexual
conquistador. He adored the women he had affairs with; and though he
struggled and fought with his wives, he loved them. One of the things
welearn from Dabney’s book is that on Valentine’s Day Wilson sent
homemadevalentines to the women in his life. He was, with them and
other closefriends, Bunny—a nickname that his mother gave him, and
which, despiteinitial resistance and some obvious incongruousness,
he sweetlyadopted.

The women and the sex were important to Wilson becauseeverything
else in his life was often a mess. He had three children, eachfrom a
different marriage. He moved a lot, usually from one shabbyrented
place to another, and, thanks to the divorces and, later, the
negligence about taxes, money was a serious problem right up to the
end.He was a functioning alcoholic but an angry drunk (one cause of
theproblems in the early marriages). His figure was not
prepossessing. He wasfive-six and, by early middle age, stout and
habitually short of breath.Isaiah Berlin was startled to meet him,
in 1946, when Wilson wasfifty-one: a “thick-set, red-faced,
pot-bellied figure not unlikePresident Hoover.” His voice was
described by contemporaries as a shrillboom, and he was uneasy in a
classroom and a dreadful public speaker (ashe was aware). When it
came to most physical activities, he was inept. Hedid not, for
instance, know how to drive a car. But he was an ardentlover. Sex
seems to have been one place where he felt natural and incontrol, a
zone of wholeness in a world that, for him, was characterizedmostly
by tension, rupture, and decay. The other place he must havefelt
that way, of course, was his writing.

People havesometimes looked in that writing for the wrong things.
In 1948, StanleyEdgar Hyman published a book on criticism called
“The Armed Vision,” whichbegins with a chapter on Wilson. Hyman was
a New Yorker writer whocontributed to the Talk of the Town section;
he also was a professor atBennington. The argument of his book was
that contemporary critics haddeveloped “a formal methodology and
system of procedures that can beobjectively transmitted” and that
were turning literary study into ascience. Wilson figured in the
book as an unscientific primitive.

Hyman’s discussion of Wilson’s work suggests an obsession, the kind
nursed by a writer who knows himself to have a superior intellect, a
person whose teachers have always told him how smart he is, and who
cannot understand why everyone is reading this mere plot summarizer
whohas never bothered to rigorously interrogate the philosophical
underpinnings of his discourse. What readers evidently don’t realize,
Hyman continually seems to be saying, is that educated people already
know this stuff. Wilson’s indifference to theory and methodology “is
merely another evidence that the attempt to interpret, ‘translate,’
andpromote major literature on no more solid a basis than sharp
reading andeclecticism cannot result in more than flashes of insight
at its best andin the shoddy popularization of ‘100 Great Books
Digested’ at its worst.”He also accused Wilson of borrowing from the
work of other scholars andcritics without acknowledgment.

The plagiarism charge was nonsense.Wilson wrote the first American
review of “The Waste Land”—after the poemhad appeared in The Dial
but before Eliot published the notes in the bookedition which have
guided interpreters ever since—and he wrote one of thefirst reviews
anywhere of “Ulysses.” Wilson did not borrow from anyonewhen he
wrote those reviews because there was, at the time, no one toborrow
from. The reviews were the basis for the chapters on Eliot andJoyce,
nine years later, in “Axel’s Castle,” and they are stillremarkable
for the accuracy and clarity of the analysis. Wilson had accessto
Joyce’s private “schema,” a table of the Homeric parallels around
which the novel is constructed, but so did Stuart Gilbert, whose
later,book-length study of “Ulysses” Hyman accused Wilson of
stealing from.Though it’s not part of Hyman’s argument, the essay on
James, “TheAmbiguity of Henry James,” is an example of Wilson’s habit
ofacknowledgment. The essay is still often cited for the argument
that “TheTurn of the Screw” is really a story about the sexual
neuroses of thegoverness, who hallucinates ghosts that no other
character can see. Infact, that interpretation had already been
proposed by a critic named EdnaKenton, in an essay she published
many years earlier in a journal calledThe Arts. No one remembers
Kenton, but Wilson had written to her when herarticle appeared, and
he credited her by name in the first paragraph ofhis essay. And “The
Ambiguity of Henry James” is about much more than “TheTurn of the
Screw.”

Wilson respected scholars and tookscholarship seriously. He did not
respect academic literary criticism, andthe emergence of the
university English department as a home for criticswas possibly one
of the reasons for the turn in his career around 1945. Hefound
academic close reading, the sometimes fetishistic attention toform
and language, insipid. Most academics, for their part, had littleuse
for him. In 1943, Wilson was asked to write an essay on theinfluence
of Symbolist poetry for The Kenyon Review, an organ of theNew
Criticism. His reaction to the invitation sums up the nature of the
antagonism. “It is difficult for me to think of anything I should be
lesslikely to write than an essay on the influence of Symbolist
poetry,” hecomplained in a letter to Allen Tate, a friend who was
also a closeassociate of the editor of The Kenyon Review, John Crowe
Ransom. “I willgo even further and say that it seems to me absurd in
the extreme for TheKenyon Review at this time of day to devote a
special number to thesubject. And I will even go on to explain that
I would not write anythingwhatever at the request of The Kenyon
Review. The dullness and sterilityand pretentiousness of The Kenyon,
under the editorship of Ransom, hasreally been a literary crime.”
Then the buried lead: “Mary and I have bothsent Ransom some of the
best things we have written of recent years, and hehas declined to
print any of them. . . . Of Mary’s book he published astupid and
impudent review apparently composed by the office boy; my bookshe
has not reviewed at all.”

Wilson did not engage well withliterature at the level of the text.
He was also not at ease or reliableat the meta-level. He had a
journalist’s suspicion of abstractions, and hedid not think
theoretically. When he tried for the broad view—when heundertook to
explain the demise of verse as a literary technique, or todescribe
the alternation of periods of realism with periods of romanticismin
modern literature, or to interpret art as compensation for a psychic
“wound”—his criticism got reductive very quickly. But he was
unsurpassedat the level of the writer and the work. When he gives
his tour through“Das Kapital” or “Finnegans Wake” (a book he was
excited by) or “DoctorZhivago” (which he also admired
extravagantly), it is as though the book’sinterior had suddenly been
lit up by a thousand-watt bulb. Even readers whothought they already
knew the book can see things that they missed, andthey realize how
partial and muddled their sense of it really was. Andthe
hyper-clarity of the description is complemented by a completegrasp
of the corpus, each of the writer’s strengths and flaws laid outwith
juridical precision, no matter how large or problematic the bodyof
work. The result is something better than microscopic analysis;
anyone can look through a microscope. The result is a satellite
picture.This is why Wilson continued to be read long after many of
the criticsHyman believed to be on the path of science were out of
print: ConstanceRourke, Maud Bodkin, Christopher Caudwell, Caroline
Spurgeon, I. A.Richards. Brendan Gill, who was a friend of Wilson’s
at the time “TheArmed Vision” came out, remembered Wilson making
only one comment aboutit, while he was washing his hands in the
men’s room at the offices of TheNew Yorker. “That Hyman is bad
news,” he said. When a paperback edition of“The Armed Vision” was
published, in 1955, the chapter on Wilson wasomitted.

Wilson took literature as it is—that is, he took what thewriter was
saying to be what the writer was saying, and not somethingthat
required extra-literary equipment to decipher. Hyman was perfectly
correct in reading Wilson as the anti-type of the advanced sort of
critiche respected. Wilson thought that literature is determined by
history andby psychology: that was always, to use the journalistic
term, the hook inhis pieces. But he did not think, or he did not
give attention to theidea, that literature is overdetermined, that a
text is shaped by forcesin the language and the culture that can
multiply and ambiguate itsmeanings, and that can make it a party to
the very conditions that itsauthor is attempting to criticize or
transcend. From the point of view ofcontemporary criticism, this was
a limitation. Wilson maintained thisfaith in the literary, though,
because he meant his criticism to have,itself, the force of
literature. He did not distinguish the duty toexplain from the
desire to persuade.

When Edmund Wilson “missedhis target,” he could do so “by many
miles,” Berlin once said. He wasprobably thinking of the portrait of
Lenin in “To the Finland Station”:the intellectual as heroic man of
action. Wilson subsequently reversed hisopinion of Lenin, and then
compared Lincoln and Lenin, as types of themodern dictator, in the
introduction to “Patriotic Gore.” And though it issubtitled “Studies
in the Literature of the American Civil War,” “PatrioticGore” has
little to say about the poetry of Whitman and Melville, andnothing
to say about many other important figures, including Frederick
Douglass. The comparison of Lincoln with Lenin (and with Bismarck)
echoes, of course, the view of Lincoln’s assassin: Sic semper
tyrannis.And “Patriotic Gore” fits neatly next to Wilson’s other
books of theperiod—on Zuñi and Haitian culture, and on the Iroquois.
It considers theSouth to be one more little fish swallowed up by the
capitalist leviathan.One of the book’s longest and most sympathetic
chapters is on AlexanderStephens, the Vice-President of the
Confederacy. “There is in most of us,”Wilson says, “an
unreconstructed Southerner who will not accept dominationas well as
a benevolent despot who wants to mold others for their owngood.”
That was apparently his idea of what the Civil War was about.

Though he did study Haitian writing, Wilson showed no interest in
African-American writers, apart from some complimentary remarks about
Baldwin. Despite his work on Joyce and Stein, he was never a follower
ofthe avant-garde, in literature or in any of the arts. The writers
hefollowed were serious but mainstream, something that is apparent
from thecollections he made of his book reviews—“Classics and
Commercials” (1950),“The Shores of Light” (1952), and “The Bit
Between My Teeth” (1965). Thefigures he wrote about most frequently
were Shaw, Saintsbury, MaxBeerbohm, Van Wyck Brooks, Thornton
Wilder, Elinor Wylie, Evelyn Waugh,André Malraux. His neglect of
American literature after 1950, when he hadtwenty-two years as a
reviewer left, is almost fantastic. His neglect ofcriticism is only
a little less so. He reviewed nothing by Cleanth Brooks,Richard
Blackmur, William Wimsatt, William Empson, Northrop Frye, Leslie
Fiedler, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, or Lionel Trilling, except for
Trilling’s first book, on Matthew Arnold. These were critics who
sharedmany of Wilson’s interests, but he either regarded them as
academic andsterile or considered them unworthy of occupying a
portion of the turf hecommanded. He told Kazin that he had found
nothing of interest in “OnNative Grounds.” (This did not prevent
their becoming friends.)

His judgments could be as idiosyncratic as anyone’s, and he tended,
whennegative, toward the absolute. People who were delighted by his
blanketdenunciation of detective fiction (“As a department of
imaginativewriting, it looks to me completely dead”) may also have
been cheered byhis dismissal of “The Lord of the Rings”
(“long-winded volumes of whatlooks to this reader like balderdash”),
but they were probably not thepeople who took satisfaction from his
“dissenting opinion” on Kafka (“Heis quite true to his time and
place, but it is surely a time and place inwhich few of us will want
to linger”). Although he spotted and supportedNabokov’s talent early,
he found “Lolita” distasteful—“Nasty subjects maymake fine books; but
I don’t feel you have got away with this,” he wroteto Nabokov, who
was in despair about finding a publisher—and “Pale Fire”made him
irritable. The dismissal of “Lolita” was only the beginning ofthe
end of that friendship. Nabokov thought that Wilson’s enthusiasmfor
“Doctor Zhivago,” which appeared in English translation in 1958,
showed a lack of critical refinement; and in 1965 Wilson published a
review of Nabokov’s translation of Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” in which
herecklessly challenged Nabokov’s knowledge of Russian. Nabokov
replied inprint, and the absurd public feud went on for several
years. Two tyrantsunder a single roof.

Why shouldn’t there be errors and omissions?Wilson was opinionated
and arbitrary about the subjects he covered becausehe was a writer,
not an expert. He was not obliged, as professors are, topick out a
single furrow and plow it for life. His whole career wasdevoted to
the opposite principle: that an educated, intelligent personcan take
on any subject that seems interesting and important, and, bydoing the
homework and taking care with the exposition, make itinteresting and
important to other people. There is no point incomparing
Wilson—either unfavorably, as Hyman did, or favorably, aspeople
contemptuous of English professors sometimes do today—withacademic
critics. He operated in an entirely different environment. “Towrite
what you are interested in writing and to succeed in gettingeditors
to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty closecalculation
and a good deal of ingenuity,” he once explained. “You have tolearn
to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; youhave
to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through
pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you
have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of
editors
the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on
the
fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically
toreject.” He wrote in a world where print was still king, and
literature wasat the center of a nation’s culture—circumstances that
gave glamour toliterary journalism. He sensed that that world was
coming to an end beforemost people did, and he declined to
compromise with the future. In the lastweek of his life, he was
taken to see two movies, “The Godfather” and “TheFrench Connection.”
As always, he recorded his observations in hisjournal. “Bang bang”
was all he wrote.

Links:
------
[1]
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050808crat_atlarge
[2]
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050808crat_atlarge
[3]
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/articles/050808crat_atlarge
[4] http://www.newyorker.com/main/start/

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