Critic of the Century
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
One of the pleasures of reading Edmund Wilson is his sheer abundance. While he will always be associated with the golden age of 20th century American literature – as a friend, critic, sponsor, and sometimes antagonist of writers from Fitzgerald to Nabokov – his own work has an almost 18th-century energy and amplitude. He was a man of letters in the best sense, willing to try his hand at just about every genre: drama, verse, fiction, journalism, travel writing, memoir. His plays and poems are the least part of his achievement, and are seldom read today, but at least one of his novels survives: “Memoirs of Hecate County,” whose graphic portraits of sex drew on Wilson’s own diaries, and got the book banned when in first appeared in 1946. It is rare for a writer as genuinely literary as Wilson also to have an appetite for hands-on reporting, but during the Depression years, he crossed the country reporting on everything from vaudeville shows to the Scottsboro Boys’ trial, in articles he later collected in “The American Earthquake.” After World War II, he continued to travel around the world to report on social and intellectual issues – as in “Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls,” which first introduced the biblical scrolls to a wider public. And he turned to memoir and local history in autumnal works like “Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York,” a study of the region where he spent much of his last years.
But Wilson’s greatest achievements remain his works of literary criticism and intellectual history, where he made use of his unrivaled talent for bringing abstract ideas to concrete life. In an age when criticism was becoming academic and jargon-ridden – a development that Wilson combated, especially toward the end of his career, in polemics with the professoriate – his approach remained grounded in his experience as a reviewer and journalist. For Wilson, literature and politics were not academic subjects, but had the urgent interest of front-page news. Fortunately, most of his best work is still in print. Here is a short list, decade by decade, of the books that made Wilson Wilson.
Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15 paper)
Wilson was a young literary editor at the New Republic when, in the late 1920s, he began a series of articles on the difficult, fascinating writers who were in the process of transforming literature. “Axel’s Castle” was the book that resulted, and it fulfilled a critic’s most important and difficult job: identifying the best new writing, and teaching people how to read it.
Wilson’s book was the first, and is still among the best, studies of six of the century’s most innovative and important writers: Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and Stein. By showing how these figures both inherited and overturned the 19th-century legacy of Symbolism and art-forart’s-sake, Wilson helped define Modernism long before it became a topic on a syllabus.
To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History
(New York Review Books, $17.95 paper)
If the Jazz Age 1920s saw Wilson nurture the best of his generation’s literary talent, the Depression 1930s led him, like most of his contemporaries, to take an urgent interest in politics. Typically, however, Wilson’s initial enthusiasm for Soviet communism – which soured around the time of the first show trials – matured into an intellectual quest to understand the sources of Marxist thought. In “To the Finland Station,” Wilson wrote his generation’s great political romance, grounding the history of the communist movement in lucid analyses of its intellectual ancestors, above all Karl Marx. By the time Wilson describes Lenin’s arrival at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station in 1917 – the first act of the Bolshevik Revolution – his nearly novelistic sense of character makes it possible to understand how an idea became powerful enough to change history.
Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30)
Over a long career contributing to magazines, Wilson reviewed many books that went on to become American classics, but he was just as eager to weigh in on passing trends and literary politics, or write entertaining attacks on dumb bestsellers. Of the three fat collections of his reviews, covering the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, “Classics and Commercials” is probably the best. Whether he is writing about new masters like Joyce and Sartre, old masters like Thackeray and Gogol, or the mystery story (see “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” and “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?”), Wilson shows that, in the right hands, literary journalism is an art form.
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War
(W.W. Norton, $19.95)
By the early 1960s, Wilson had largely retired from a new generation’s literary battles, devoting himself instead to writing about history, his own and the nation’s. The famously bleak introduction to “Patriotic Gore” envisions Cold War America as a giant sea slug gobbling up its rivals, neither more nor less moral than any other empire. But in turning back to the Civil War – a period not famous for its literary achievements – Wilson found even in minor writers the eloquent expression of vanished ideals, both Northern and Southern. In his unsentimental character studies of figures ranging from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Mary Chesnut, Abraham Lincoln to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Wilson overturned conventional views of the Civil War era, and revealed the fascination of its psychological and philosophical turmoil.
Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya: The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971
(University of California Press, $19.95)
For Wilson devotees, there is no substitute for the massive “Letters on Literature and Politics,” now out of print, a vastly entertaining day-to-day record of his working life. But the correspondence between Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, his friend turned rival and finally enemy, has a drama all its own. When Nabokov first arrived in the United States, a refugee from communism and World War I, he approached Wilson almost as a supplicant. The established critic helped the refugee novelist meet editors and publishers, and engaged him in vigorous debates on Russian literature and politics. (Nabokov challenged Wilson’s idealized view of Lenin – “this pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom” – but without success.) As Nabokov became famous in his own right, however, their correspondence grew more prickly, with Wilson briskly dismissing “Lolita” (“I like it less than anything else of yours I have read”). Finally, their friendship exploded in an extended public controversy over Nabokov’s eccentric translation of “Eugene Onegin”; the correspondence trailed off into silence, with only a few late notes to recall their former intimacy.