It is not a slight, though it may sound like one, to say that Edmund Wilson’s best book — the one that most perfectly captures his mythic place in American literature — is his “Letters on Literature and Politics.” Wilson’s essays and reviews, his book-length studies of Marxism and the Civil War, are of course the substance of his achievement. But it is in his letters — ingeniously edited by his widow, Elena Wilson — that Wilson’s literary personality is most fully revealed. For those letters make clear that, in a period when modernism was making literature a capital-M Mystery, Wilson approached it as a profession: something to be worked at, day in and day out, until mastery was honestly earned. In his correspondence, we can see Wilson debating Proust with John Dos Passos and Pushkin with Vladimir Nabokov; but we also find him sending books out for review as an editor at The New Republic, and negotiating his next assignment from William Shawn at the New Yorker. The menial and the sublime form a harmony, and reflect glory on one another. Wilson was a better critic for being a working journalist, and a more sensitive historian of ideas because he lived so pragmatically in the world.

This worldliness, if that is the right word, is what justifies the inevitable comparison of Wilson with Samuel Johnson. The sensibilities of the two great critics were quite different, and the literary milieux in which they lived almost incommensurable. Between Johnson’s saturnine Toryism and Wilson’s uneasy Marxism, a world-historical gulf is fixed. But Wilson does share with the Doctor a sense that all literature is his province — that, like the freeman of a guild, he has the right to go anywhere and work at anything. In neither case, of course, does this intimacy cheapen. Though he knew all the tricks required to make a living out of literature, Wilson was the opposite of the kind of hack for whom any literary subject is just fodder for the next article. In his essay “The Literary Worker’s Polonius,” he distinguishes the rare “reviewer-critic” from the more common species of book reviewers, “people who want work” and “people who want to write about something else”; there is no doubt in which category he belongs.

But Wilson’s worldliness also places him, again like Johnson, at the opposite pole from the Romantics, who girded themselves up for writing as for a sacred battle. And because the Modernists were Romantics at heart, Wilson was never really at ease with the literature of his own time. This is the surprising verdict suggested by the splendid new Library of America volumes of Wilson’s work: “Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s” (1,025 pages, $40) and “Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s” (1,000 pages, $40). Between them, these long-overdue additions to the Library include almost all of Wilson’s major literary criticism. Here are the full-dress essays of “Axel’sCastle,” “The Triple Thinkers,” and “The Wound and the Bow,” as well as the more casual articles and reviews collected in “The Shores of Light” and “Classics and Commercials,” as well as a sampling of uncollected pieces. This is the heart of Wilson’s body of work — though one might hope for future Library editions of “Patriotic Gore” and “To the Finland Station” — and it is good to see this work enter the American canon, where it certainly belongs. Indeed, since the Library of America itself grew out of Wilson’s dream of an American equivalent to the French Pléiade editions, these volumes are an especially appropriate tribute.

The new Library of America editions, however, do more than honor Wilson. As is so often the case, in those black covers and thin pages, the work itself looks different. Following Wilson’s criticism over three decades, it becomes clear that he was always driven by a basic, unsolvable problem, which remained the same even as his critical idiom evolved. Whether Wilson’s language was Marxist or Freudian, whether his subject was Symbolism or Naturalism, he was always haunted by the question of how literature could earn its place in the world.

It is not a question that a creative writer would ask — to the poet and the novelist, their activity is self-justifying — and it is not, perhaps, a question that a European critic would ask. For Wilson, as much as he rebelled against the conformism and provincialism of pre-World War I American culture, could not deafen himself to the American commandment: Thou shalt be useful. Thus we find him, in his 1927 essay “The Muses Out of Work,” adjuring young poets “to study a profession, to become a banker or a public official or even to go in for the movies. What is wrong with the younger American poets,” he insists, “is that they have no real stake in society.”

When one considers that Wilson delivered this advice during the moment of American poetry’s greatest flourishing — it was the age of Frost, Stevens, Moore, Crane, and Williams, not to mention Eliot and Pound — his sermonizing seems ill-timed, to say the least. But the problem is not simply that Wilson had no real taste in poetry — though he didn’t, as his encomia to Edna St. Vincent Millay amply prove. (“Edna Millay seems to me one of the only poets writing in English in our time who have attained to anything like the stature of great literary figures,” Wilson wrote in 1952, and only the fact that he was once in love with Millay can excuse him.) Wilson’s anxiety about the writer’s “stake in society” is the constant subtext of his criticism, and he never stopped asking the forlorn question that echoes through “The Muses Out of Work”: “Does it really constitute a career for a man to do nothing but write lyric poetry?”

Wilson does not, of course, ask this question in the mocking, hostile spirit of the Philistine. It genuinely haunted him, all the more so because he was so deeply drawn to literature and the literary life. His work can be read as a series of attempts to still this inner doubt. Nothing else explains why he was so powerfully attracted to Marxism, even after he had seen through Stalin and the Soviet Union. Wilson’s romance with Russia began, like that of many American intellectuals, in 1929, when the Depression made the survival of the American system doubtful. To his credit, Wilson recovered from that romance more quickly than most, and by the mid-1930s he was loudly insisting, to the dismay of the party-line Stalinists, that the Soviet Union was “a nightmare of informing and repression.”

Even at his most committed, Wilson was never one of those commissar-like critics who demanded that literature bow down to politics. “The insistence that the man of letters should play a political role, the disparagement of works of art in comparison with political action,” he wrote in “The Historical Interpretation of Literature,” were “originally no part of Marxism.” On the contrary, for Wilson, the relationship between Marxism and literature ran the other way: “the man who tries to apply Marxist principles without real understanding of literature,” he wrote, “is liable to go horribly wrong.” Wilson’s Marxism was, in fact, a literary-intellectual phenomenon more than a political one. It offered Wilson a way to dignify literature by showing that writers, too, were representatives of their age, that they were not cut off from the ennobling currents of history.

That is the burden of Wilson’s best essay in Marxisant criticism, “The Politics of Flaubert,” from “The Triple Thinkers.” It is a palpable relief to Wilson to be able to argue that Flaubert, one of his literary idols, was not just the monkish devotee of le mot juste, but a fully engaged critic of the 19th century. “What cuts Flaubert off from the other romantics and makes him primarily a social critic,” Wilson writes, is that he refuses to escape into “the futility of dreaming.” Wilson sees in Emma Bovary, not an individual creation or an expression of Flaubert’s own soul, but a placeholder for the French bourgeoisie. His reading turns the novel into a class parable: “The romantic individualist deludes himself with unrealizable fantasies,” while humanity falls “victim to the industrial commercial processes, which, unimpeded by his dreaming, go on with their deadly work.”

The real question raised by this essay is not whether Wilson is right or wrong about Flaubert. The best critics, like the best imaginative writers, are not right or wrong — they simply, powerfully are. Rather, “The Politics of Flaubert” makes one wonder why Wilson was so driven to promote Flaubert, as he saw it, from a sectary of “romantic individualism” to a hard-boiled analyst of “industrial-commercial processes.” We have here, it seems, another expression of the same anxiety that informed “The Muses Out of Work” — the belief that the writer is crippled in his manhood if he does not have “a stake in society.”

The most striking manifestation of that anxiety, however, comes at the end of “Axel’s Castle,” Wilson’s first major book of criticism, published in 1931. The book was remarkable at the time, and remains impressive today, for its willingness to grapple with six of the most difficult modernist writers: Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Proust, Joyce and Stein. But it is a grapple, not a meeting of true minds, and with the passage of time it is easier to see how Wilson’s lack of sympathy with the writers he called Symbolists limited his comprehension of them. He is best on Joyce, whose formal experimentation rests on a substantial bedrock of 19th-century social realism.

Writing about Valery, on the other hand, Wilson cannot conceal a certain impatience. He contrasts Valery and his generation of French writers unfavorably with the preceding one, whose leading light was Anatole France: “In general it may be said that the strength of Anatole France’s generation was the strength to be derived from a wide knowledge of human affairs, a sympathetic interest in human beings, direct contact with public opinion and participation in public life through literature.” Against this catalogue of virtues, the qualities Wilson recognizes in Valery’s generation — “the strength of solitary labor and of earnest introspection” — look a little wan and unwholesome.

In the conclusion to “Axel’s Castle,” in fact, Wilson seems to long for the suicide of Symbolism, of Modernism, even of literature itself. He praises Rimbaud, one of the patron saints of Symbolism, for having the courage to burn almost the whole edition of “A Season in Hell,” quit writing forever, and journey to Africa, where he started a new life as an arms dealer. This mysterious renunciation, which is one of literature’s great losses, seems to Wilson a bold and brave act — as though, having grown to man’s estate, Rimbaud put aside a childish thing like writing. “Rimbaud’s life,” Wilson argues, “seems more satisfactory than the works of his Symbolist contemporaries … who stayed at home and stuck to literature.” It is a shocking instance of the self-contempt of the intellectual — especially shocking coming from Wilson, who is outwardly so confident of his own literary vocation.

Yet it was Wilson himself who taught us, in “The Wound and the Bow,” to find in a writer’s secret guilt the engine of his genius. And it is clear that Wilson’s subterranean doubts about the value of literature, and about the manliness of the writer’s calling, were the source of his great strengths as a critic: his fearlessness, breadth, and appetite, even the Augustan vigor of his prose. As the ’30s turned into the ’40s, and the exigencies of revolution gave way to the laxities of consumerism, the aging Wilson was clearly less tormented by such doubts, and the tension of his writing diminishes accordingly. The Wilson of the New Yorker period, with his crotchets (about detective novels, Hollywood, best sellers, the Luce organization) and his slightly irrelevant enthusiasms (for the criticism of George Saintsbury and the satires of Max Beerbohm), is a less necessary figure than the Wilson who wrote for the New Republic in the 1920s and 1930s — though hardly a less entertaining one. The critic as bookman is a smaller figure than the critic who, for all his love and knowledge of books, remained fruitfully skeptical of them.

akirsch@nysun.com