Review of The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950–1965, by Edmund Wilson. New York: Farrar, Straus andGiroux, 1965. 694 pp.

Edmund Wilson has published another book—his twenty-eighth. It is also the third of his “literary chronicles,” which are not chronicles so much as samplers or anthologies of the reviews, essays, or causeries written by him over a designated period of years. The Stores of Light covered the great excitements of the 1920s and ’30s; Classics and Commercials, the ’40s. The new collection contains forty-four essays—668 pages of regular Wilsonian discourse on authors, books, and topics that seemed to Mr. Wilson worth writing about during the fifteen years front 1950 to 1965. And furthermore, very much as usual, the greater number of the selections first appeared in the New Yorker, it is a retrospective exhibit of the post–World War II Wilson. Inevitably it invites a reader who has followed Edmund Wilson from the Twenties on to the present to look further back—indeed, all the way.

Wilson’s first book, The Undertaker’s Garland (1922), in which he collaborated with his friend John Peale Bishop, was a collection of stories and poems celebrating the death of much that the society of pre–World War I had held precious, including Christianity and God. It was not well received.

After publishing a somewhat more successful novel, I Thought of Daisy (1929) and a last book of poetry, Poets, Farewell (1929), he achieved his first enduring success in a book of literary criticism, Axel’s Castle (1931). This notable work gives Wilson’s interpretation of the Symbolist movement, which he tends to view as a corrective of the excesses of Romanticism and Naturalism, a new technique of literary art, revolutionary in nature, that for better or worse will replace the old.

For thirty-five years since the appearance of Axel’s Castle Wilson has been writing books about books—that is to say, articles and extended reviews that when collected become books about books or—by what often seems to be Wilson’s ingrained preference—books about the writers who write the books. Such is, of course, one of the little peculiarities of a literary critic’s occupation. As Allen Tate remarks, in his essay, “IsLiterary Criticism Possible?”, the end of literary criticism is “outside itself . . . [and] it cannot in the long run be practiced apart from what it confronts, that gives rise toit.” This would seem to make literary criticism rather opportunist or in a sense dependent, even parasitic. Not until an Eliot writes a Waste Land can a Wilson or a Tate write a criticism of it. But surely he did not write it to get the benefit of their criticism. It is not the literary artist but the critic who steps in and makes theconfrontation. Is he then an interfering busybody? What is his accepted role? In a time when “confrontations” would not be arranged or somehow called for, there would be no literary critics. There have been such times. “In certain past ages,” writes Mr. Tate, “there was no distinct activity of the mind conscious of itself as literary criticism; for example, the age of Sophocles and the age of Dante.” But the public presentation (i.e., “publication”) of a Greek tragedy at Athens in thefifth century B.C. was a functional part of a religious festival conducted under state auspices. A play by Sophocles was not at that time abstracted as “literature.” That abstraction—and therefore literary criticism—developed later, in the Hellenistic period, when secularism was winning over religion and decadence was setting in. Especially was this true in the “planned city” of Alexandria with its great library and museum where artworks of the fifth century could be and were studied, anthologized, and criticized as “literature.” As for Dante, I take it, that Mr. Tate sees the Divine Comedy as having a somewhat similarly organic relationship to late medieval culture—a relationship, however, that was soon to be altered by Renaissance and Reformation.

If the modern critic is only an opportunist, browsing passively among the new books, he may be a good reviewer or literary reporter, but will then fall short of being a true literary critic. Obviously our leading critics are not so passive. They are not mere sensitive plates that, when exposed to poetry or fiction or history, do nothing more than faithfully record a reduced image of the object set before their camera eyes. Their performance—as Mr. Tate suggests in his essay—ranges back and forth in the middle ground between “imagination” and “philosophy.” They are partly, at least, engaged in what the Victorians called “criticism of life.” They are interested not only in correcting or shaping the public’s aesthetic taste but in discovering and exposing the social elements, hidden or rampant, that affect public taste. As Eliseo Vivas said recently of the late Richard Weaver, they are concerned with “the plight of modern man,” whose condition nobody can pretend is flourishing. By this route literary criticism becomes social criticism, and accordingly we can hardly appraise “literary” judgments without noticing how critics choose their occasions and what sort of cultural predispositions they bring to the seat of judgment.

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Edmund Wilson himself has made it clear, in various personal statements, autobiographical interpolations, and straight reminiscences, what predispositions he has brought to his role as literary critic. From his college days on, Wilson has been pretty regularly attracted to the radical side. Like his father and uncles before him, he went to Princeton for his higher education. His father, a brilliant and successful lawyer and a Republican, was appointed attorney general of New Jersey by a Republican governor and found himself serving under Democrat Woodrow Wilson when that professor-in-politics succeeded the Republican. The father did not much like Governor Wilson, but Edmund junior, then a freshman at Princeton, “read and listened to Wilson’s speeches and accepted him as a shining champion in the war against sordid business, a reformer-intellectual in politics.”1 After graduation from Princeton, Wilson worked as reporter on the New York Evening Sun and lived the regular life of a Greenwich Villager. After World War I, during which he served—as did his contemporaries Dos Passos and Hemingway—in a hospital unit, Wilson soon found a place as literary editor of the New Republic,after first serving for two years as managing editor of Vanity Fair.All the while he was moving toward a more actively radical role. In what he referred to later as “the radicalizing thirties” Wilson went with his friend Dos Passos to the Kentucky coal mines on one of those “visits of protests” which then as in subsequent decades it was de rigeur for Northern radicals to make to the South.

When the Great Depression of the 1930s settled on the country, writers and artists of his generation, Wilson says, were not depressed but stimulated.

One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden collapse of the stupid, gigantic fraud. . . . And it gave us a new sense of power to find ourselves still carrying on while the bankers, for a change, were taking a beating.2

But before he gavehimself up entirely to exultation over the woes of the prostrate financiers, Wilson published in 1931 his important critical work, Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930.And thus celebrated what seemed to him a defeat of Capitalism by a discussion of the triumph of Symbolism in literature, as exemplified in the writings of Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Proust, and Valery. It is a book that Wilson has not subsequently excelled in clarity, balance, and general persuasiveness; and in its emphasis on European writers (with American expatriates included) it signals Wilson’s early resolve to devote himself to what he described, years afterwards, as the general “cross-fertilization” between the Anglo-American and other cultures. The dedication to Dean Christian Gauss, his Princeton mentor and friend, states quite definitely that he derived from Gauss, principally, his idea of what literary criticism ought to be: “a history of man’s ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions whichhave shaped them.” And here, in truth, is a kind of determinist principle, owing perhaps as much to Hippolyte Taine as to Gauss, that fromthis time on is Wilson’s chief reliance in his literary criticism. It serves him well enough when, as in the case of Proust, he can discover a psychic wound that operates, along with a social environment, as somehow the efficient cause of the masterwork; less well, but still with some plausibility, in the case of Eliot, whom Wilson sees as a frustrated New England Puritan, somewhat like Prufrock, and who in turn is precisely like Henry James’s ‘‘middle-aged heroes of The Ambassadors and ‘The Beast in the Jungle,’ realizing sadly too late in life that they have been living too cautiously and too poorly.” Where the determining cause cannot lie so readily located and described, Wilson may be far off the mark at times, as he is in his treatment of Yeats, who cannot, like Eliot, be so easily connected with the French Symbolist poets, despite his friendship with Arthur Symons and his visits to Paris in the Nineties. At the very beginning of his Yeats essay, for example, Wilson holds that the metaphors in Yeats’s “On a Picture of a Black Centaur” and in Mallarme’s famous sonnet, “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui”illustrate the same kind of poetic performance—that Yeats is “close” to Mallarme and other fin de siècle French symbolists “even in his lateryears.” After quoting the poems in full, he comments:

The centaur, the parrots, the wheat and the wine [of Yeats’s poem] are, like the swan, the lake and the frost of [Mallarme’s], not real things (except that the centaur is something Yeats has seen in a picture), but accidental images which, by an association of ideas, have come to stand for the poet’s emotion.

Whatever different interpretations may be givento the images, they are certainly not “accidental in either poem.” Yeats’s poem, written in 1920, when at last he was happily married and engaged in working out the symbolic system that was soon to be published in his A Vision,is not quite as mysterious as at first it may seem, since he plainly says that the new wine he has found will put to sleep that horse-play which formerly stamped his works “down into the sultry mud.” It is evidently a personal poem, not an exercise in “absolute” poetry. As Mr. Richard Ellman says: “This gnomic poem reflects Yeats’s satisfaction over the progress of his art and over the revelations of his wife’s automatic writing.”3 Mallarme’s sonnet, though composed like Yeats’s poem, with the same studied care for the effects to be obtained, is not to be taken as referring to a personal experience. It might well be called, like some piece of music by Chopin or Debussy, an “Etude,” and be given a number as Opus Such-and-Such.

But it is more important, after all, to note that Axel’s Castle,favorable as it seems for the moderns whose cause Wilson is championing, leads to a surprise ending in which the admiring critic all but withdraws his support. Yeats, Valery, Joyce, Proust, all “difficult” writers, maintained their integrity during World War I and so, in the Twenties “fell heir to the prestige which had been sacrificed by other poets and novelists who had abandoned the detached study of human motives and the expression of those universal emotions that make all classes and peoples one, to become intolerant partisans.” But their symbolist techniques, their various new literary procedures, valuable as they might be, nevertheless shut them off from the general reader and made them difficult of access even to scholars, in some instances. Thus, Wilson holds, they have made poetry and fiction a shelter to retreat into, not a park or “piazza” or commons where the public may enter and stroll for their social benefit. They are more and more dissociating themselves from society. And that is why Wilson ends his book with a discussion of “Axel,” the long dramatic poems by Villiers de l’isle Adam, which he offers as the ultimate example of the ivory tower or subjective withdrawal from the real world. A different alternative is provided by the extraordinarily precocious French symbolist poet Rimbaud, whose disillusionment brought him to retire both from literature and Europe, to end his days in desolate Abyssinia, among the remote and primitive people of that country. Either kind of withdrawal—that of the “Axel” type of Symbolists or that of Rimbaud—puts literature and culture itself in danger, Wilson believes. Can there be any other hope but that Symbolism and Naturalism may somehow come to terms and combine their resources?

One can see where this line of thought can easily take the literary editor of The New Republic circa 1930 A.D.

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“From the fall of 1930 to the spring of 1931,” wrote Wilson in a postscript attached to the book version of his New Republic article, “An Appeal to Progressives” (N.R., January14, 1931), “I spent a good deal of time reporting political and industrial events, and thereafter, till 1940, writing astudy of Marxism and the Russian Revolution. . . .” The fruit of these 1934–40 labors was To the Finland Station, which spreads its historical net far back of the Russian Revolution and is accurately described in the subtitle that Wilson gives it: “A Study in the Writing and Acting of History,” ifone bears in mind that the writers and actors are revolutionists and, in Wilson’s view, the heroes of the history that he is studying. It might indeed be taken as a twentieth-century parallel to Thomas Carlyle’s Heroes and Hero Worship, for to Wilson as to Carlyle, history is the biography of great men. Again his eye is on the “author” rather than the author’s “works.” This is a blessing to the reader, for the “works” of Marx and other revolutionists, if taken as “literature,” are dolorous and dull to the nth degree and if taken as “action,” or their realization in human events, afford in their constantly repeated patterns of violence and destruction some of history’s most ghastly spectacles. Wilson’s interest in the temperaments, ideas, and careers of the revolutionists relieves him of the task of exploring the ghastliness; and his long experience as reporter-reviewer-critic enables him to make excellent use of his great power to digest, summarize, and point up bysuitable illustration and comment the sprawling masses of material where he must search for history.

But skill would not be enough. What sort of stubbornness or devotion would keep Wilson for six years at a seemingly dreary task, made more discouraging by the rise of Stalin and the evident failure during the Thirties of the Russian Revolution to deliver the goods expected by the liberal zealots of the New Republic?

In his “Appeal to Progressives,” cited above, Wilson ended his article by urging American “Progressives” to speak out “with confidence and boldness.” “I believe,” he wrote, “that if the American radicals and progressives who repudiate the Marxist dogma and the strategy of the Communist Party still hope to accomplish anything valuable, they must take Communism away from the Communists, and take it without ambiguities, asserting that their ultimate goal is the ownership by the government of the means of production.” For some time, in fact, he apparently had been thinking that American traditions, institutions, and experiments offered a better field for realization of the Marxist Utopia than Russia. In To the Finland Station he is, in effect, offering his own revised version of Marxist socialism (or some kind of socialism) to his fellow-citizens of the United States. The more disagreeable aspects of Marx the man get much emphasis. Lenin is the real hero of the book, with his arrival at the Finland Station, in Leningrad, to overthrow the Kerensky liberal government, as the dramatic climax of the narrative. Stalin is the villain. Trotsky is not exactly a villain, but is ultimately a failure, and Wilson pointedly reminds us that Trotsky was responsible for the massacre of the Kronstadt sailors, who shortly before that had been heroes of the Revolution. “One realizes,” Wilson says, “that Trotsky’s enthusiasm for freedom is less a positive than a negative affair, that it is expressedmainly in indignation against other people who will not let his side be free.” (But is that not true, one wants to ask, of other Marxist Communists and Socialists, wherever found?)

The defects of Marxist doctrine get some attention, too. The famous “Dialectic,” Wilson argues, is an insubstantial “myth”—and he means for “myth” to be taken as at least mildly pejorative. What happened was, he says, that, following German Marxist scholarship too sheepishly, the Marxists thoughtlessly retained Hegel’s thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, a triad which parallels the Christian “myth” of the Trinity, in ‘Wilson’s opinion. Elsewhere, Finland Station is slanted for the American consumer by reminders of the American experiments in community socialism: by members of the Robert Owen persuasion at New Harmony, Indiana, and other places; by Frances Wright at Nashoba in Tennessee; by the Icarians, at Nauvoo, Illinois; by John Humphrey Noyes at Oneida, New York. Only the last of these—it lasted thirty-two years—could be called a modest success. And, finally, Wilson’s opening attraction, his highly interesting treatment of the so-called “bourgeois revolution” of the early nineteenth century, in which he includes not only the French historian Michelet, butthe litterateurs Renan and Taine, puts Marxism and Marx in more seemly academic company than they commonly enjoy—better, at any rate, than Stalin or Khrushchev would provide.

Some of the more decisive predispositions of Edmund Wilson can be inferred from the two important ventures just discussed—one in straight literary criticism, the other in history, biographically approached. Like the narrator of I Thought of Daisy, Wilson’s hope is that “by way of literature itself, I should break through into the real world.” That Wilson gets into literature by way of journalism—“the serious profession of journalism,” as he describes it in the sober reminiscences of “Thoughts on Being Bibliographed”—is important in his career, since his connection with one of the principal periodicals of the Left gave him a chance to practice his skill both in literature and in affairs. His sense of mission led him to work furiously in both fields. As Mr. Sherman Paul very correctly says in his recent book:

He considered it a part of his double task that the cultural situation required of the critic: that he explain the difficult new art of the time (which he had done in Axel’s Castle)and that he “bring home to the ‘bourgeois’ intellectual world the most recent developments of Marxism. . . .”4

By 1940, when To the Finland Station was published, a Stalinized Russia had wrecked Wilson’s faith in the Bolsheviks and in Marxism in practice. Events in Russia had in fact changed the shape of the book while it was in composition. The Second World War disturbed Wilson even more than the first, and his comments on “the most recent developments of Marxism” became scattering and incidental. When he returned to literary criticism in 1941 in The Wound and the Bow, an extended application of his theory of the “psychic wound” as a causal element in art, Wilson found occasion, during his discussion of Hemingway, to upbraid his literary contemporaries for their folly in swallowing Marxism as a quasi-religion which could consecrate forthem the barbarities of the Soviet GPU and the Moscow trials. Soon, then, in 1946, came his novel, Memoirs of Hecate County, to portray what he might be cynically viewing as the disintegration of the American society in which he had so hopefully grown up. For a long time afterwards, his writings, most of which appeared in The New Yorker, reflect what he seems to take as the literary and intellectual deadness of the Forties, which he must satirize, directly rebuke, and only rarely find much to be happy about. In Classics and Commercials, his “chronicle” of this period, Katherine Anne Porter is one of the few that he finds worth unreserved praise.

Finally in, 1962 comes Patriotic Gore, under which sardonic title Wilson reviews in one large volume what he calls “the literature” of the Civil War—not the military record, except in passing references, but the books, whether novels, stories, poems, diaries, memoirs, biographies, whatever may shed atrue light on the nature and subsequent effects of the great trouble between the North and the South. The resulting book may well stand, to many readers, as Wilson’s best. It is certainly a rare novelty to discover in it the strong-minded and strong-stomached admirer of Joyce and Proust writing fifty-odd pages of excellent critical discourse on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and just about an equal number on the voluminous and highly argumentative writings of Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederate States—that strange obstructionist pigmy whom Wilson too innocently takes to be a great statesman. It seems to give Wilson a special glow of satisfaction to come upon that older pre-Marxist, pre-Joycean, pre-Freudian America to which his family belonged. Would not that glow, in a Southern critic, be called “nostalgia” by the ex-denizens of Bleecker Street and environs? And why did Wilson not read those old books long before—if not at great Princeton, somewhere?

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But before this, in A Piece of My Mind. Wilson had set forth a kind of credo, which, however, is somewhat of a non credo. He begins the small book by making it clear (though it had long since been apparent) that he professes no religion and does not accept the formulas, no matter how rationalized or made to seem symbolical, of Christian theology. At the end, after a fine reminiscence of his father, he pictures himself as sitting alone in the isolated stone house that his family built very long ago in the forest wilderness of upstate New York. It is “curious,” he reflects, to find the old house, with “its elegance of windows and doorways,” still in place, so isolated.

In a sense ithas always been stranded [he writes]. And am I, too, I wonder, stranded? Am I, too, an exceptional case? When, for example, I look through Life magazine, I feel that I do not belong to the country depicted there, that I do not even live in that country. Am I then, in a pocket of the past? I do not necessarily believe it. I may find myself here at the center of things—since the center can be only in one’s head—and my feelings and thoughts may be shared by many.

Is this the famous ennui, or taedium vitae, of thedissociated artist? Can it also affect a literary critic? Very nearly so, I would think. The modern power state, with all its industrialism and science, really does not know what to do with a literary critic any more than it knows what to do with literary art. Even if it is socialized, even if it is Marxized, it still does not know. Wilson sees this. He has written about it. He feels his alienation, but he will not give up. He will fight back!

What with? That is the great question. With pen and ink, of course, typewriter and paper. Writing.

But what about, in times like these? And for whom?

The last question is easiest to answer: for the readers of the New Yorker and their like, whoever they may be. As to “What about?” we get that answer from The Bit Between My Teeth, which follows the pattern of the previous “Chronicles” selected pieces written for the New Yorker, with a fewfrom the New Republic, the Nation, New Statesman, or Encounter, no doubt worked over for book publication. And one needs first to be aware of what Wilson does not choose to write about. For he has habits, and still avoids authors and subjects that he has tended to avoid in the past. For example, there is Faulkner, who since his canonization by a Nobel Award in 1950, has been written about by nearly everybody, but has been touchedupon by Wilson in only one rather brief article, published in 1948 and reprinted in Classics and Commercial. In thenew book Faulkner gets mentioned only in passing references, one of which relates Hemingway’s maudlin story of how, entering Mississippi during his travels, he realized that he was getting into “Faulkner country” and so sat up all night with his “gun” on his hotel table, lest Faulkner, his rival, send some tough character to do him in. Also avoided, here as in the past, are books about the racequestion, the Korean fracas, the Cold War, the space race, and such banner headline topics and, on the literary side, most American authors and subjects located outside the area bounded approximately by the Hudson and Delaware rivers on the west and south and the Atlantic on the east.

And the authors and subjects that Wilson chooses, in the new“Chronicle,” as in the past, are the American authors and subjects withinthe favored Northeastern region and the European authors across the water. And particularly he chooses for discussion, of course, those authors of the Twenties and Thirties, previously discussed by him, who invite comment by the appearance of some memoir or new edition. For Wilson, still the journalist, deals and perhaps must deal with what is current. Except for special reason he does not go digging up old books. One guesses that Patriotic Gore, which covers an amazing quantity of out-of-print books, would not have been written but for the Civil War Centennial, which made enough noise to break into Wilson’s repose at Talcottville or Wellfleet.

So in this new “Chronicle” in Wilson’s familiar and always engaging style, we have some brilliant pieces that deal with Scott Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Max Beerbohm, “Teddy” Roosevelt (his pre-presidential correspondence), Holmes and Laski (their correspondence), Bernard Shaw, Auden, Mario Praz, Swinburne, Kingsley Amis, and—as it were, specially featured—seventy pages on the Marquis de Sade and fifty-three on Pasternak and his Doctor Zhivago.Besides, there are several causeries (two of them represent Wilson interviewing himself) in which we get a very rich Wilsonian flow of critical opinion on a number of matters, including the very important matter of the debasement of the language by our loose general toleration of solecisms and jargon. Highly interesting too, is Wilson’s “My Fifty Years with Dictionaries and Grammars,” even though it has had some of its shine knocked off by Vladimir Nabokov’s documented assertions (in Encounter, February, 1966) that Edmund Wilson’s knowledge of the Russian language is not something that an eminent literary critic ought to expose in public.

These pieces, with others I have mentioned, deserve much more discussion than the nature of this article can permit. I must turn to the main question which is whether literary criticism as practiced by Edmund Wilson can affect the cultural drift of our life for better or worse—if indeed at all. I think the answer is, in part, that literature and its critics no longer enjoy the advantages of eighteenth-century London or nineteenth-century Paris. Starting in Greenwich Village in the Twenties, Edmund Wilson could, like the famous hero of Addison’s poem, ride in the whirlwind—but he could not like that reputed hero direct the storm. No one could, with such instruments of direction as Princeton, New York, and their trans-Atlantic uncles, cousins, and aunts then provided an ambitious young writer. In his “A Modest Self-Tribute,” which stands like a preface to this latest collection of essays, Wilson says that “the primary key in my reading to my work as a critic” was the youthful discovery of a translation of Taine’s History of English Literature in his father’s library. From that admired master he came to feel that “writing about literature . . . meant narrative and drama,” and the example of the master has served him well. He has also carried through on a considerable scale his desire “to concentrate synoptically, as they say of the Gospels, to bring into one system, the literatures of several cultures.” It is a large, bold effort, and it has produced much that cannot be taken as ephemeral. But his books by their very omissions or outspoken complaints reveal—the newest one among them—that Wilson sees no new Yeats or Joyce or Proust or Eliot rising in America or Europe. And though the socialism he has advocated is now far advanced in the United States and abroad, the cultural and political results are a vast disappointment—in fact, little short of disaster or even destruction. There is something Edmund Wilson must have missed. Perhaps he did not go far or deep enough.

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It might be useful to turn, for a brief comparison, to one of Wilson’s contemporaries whose posthumous book of essays also was published in 1965. I refer to Life Without Prejudice, by the late Richard Weaver.

Wilson in his book rightly deplores the present horrifyingly ungrammatical use of “based upon” and the tedious and dull misapplication of “massive,” “kudos” and other clichés and solecism. They corrupt the language.

Weaver in his title essay makes a close study of the misuse, often calculated and deliberate, of the word prejudice, in the ideological warfare now disrupting our life. The corruption is not only of the language but of mind and morals, for, if the word is properly understood, a life without prejudice would be a life without principle.

Wilson, late in life, studied the “literature” of the Civil War and produced a remarkable book about his findings. Although the study was educative and perhaps tempered somewhat his Northerner’s traditional indifference to the South, the main result for Wilson personally was to deepen his already great disgust for war.

Weaver, in middle life, spent three years studying the Civil War—both the history and the literature. He recommends the study of the Civil War, especially as it affected the losing side, because he thinks there is no “better way to counteract the stultifying ‘Whig’ theory of history, with its bland assumption that every cause which has won deserved to win.” Furthermore, he says, “in a dozen ways I came to recognize myself in the past, which is at least an important piece of self-discovery.” His study changed his life.

Wilson, returning to the old stone house in upstate New York, wonders if he, like the house, is “stranded.” Weaver, in his “Up from Liberalism,” says that on returning to his native South he learned how to shake off the “dogmatic, utilitarian, essentially contumacious doctrines of liberalism and scientism” that had oppressed him. With the return, he experienced a “recovery of lost power or of lost wonder and enchantment.”

Wilson has looked in various directions for a secular faith, without finding either Marxism or liberalism or existentialism really satisfactory. He is left with his books, the old books on his shelves, the new ones that keep streaming in. Books are good, but they are not a religion or even a metaphysic. His windows, then, do not open upon his native United States, the old Republic of his forefathers, or even upon the world. They are closed, and he is in his excellent library. We may visit him there, just by taking the trouble to read him—which is never a trouble but always a pleasure. And thus we may have a cozy evening with Edmund Wilson, a fine Ivy League and Greenwich Village evening, over cocktails. But when the good talk is over and we have to go home, we may still have gained little to arm us against the murk outside, the modern dark.

Notes

  1. “The Author at Sixty.” A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Cudaby, 1956), 234.
  2. “The Consequences ofthe Crash” The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and the Thirties (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Young, 1952), 498–99.
  3. See The Identity of Yeats (London, Macmillan, 1954), 261–66, where Ellman gives an extensive discussion ofYeats’s poem
  4. Sherman Paul, Edmund Wilson: A Study of Literary Vocation in Our Time (Urbana, IL: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965), 126.