Man of letters

IN his 1928 essay “The Critic Who Does Not Exist,” Edmund Wilson surveyed the landscape of American criticism and didn’t like what he saw: an abundance of factions with narrow agendas to push, little coteries gathered around H.L. Mencken or T.S Eliot, each speaking its own language, but no one critic or common tongue that might transcend the babel of competing voices. “What we lack . . . in the United States,” Wilson complained, “is not writers or even literary parties, but simply serious literary criticism.”

Yet Wilson, whose early criticism has been collected in two volumes by the Library of America, was perhaps being coy in his title. That critic did indeed exist, and his name was Edmund Wilson. Wilson’s vision of criticism was a touch grandiose, but he believed that the critic should interpret literature in all its fullness and reach. Finely attuned to the aesthetic dimensions of writing, he also looked beyond the page into society, biography and history -- a perspective that complemented his talents as a journalist and a historian of ideas.

Wilson drew on a venerable tradition: the “old nineteenth century criticism of Ruskin, Renan, Taine, Saint-Beuve,” he called it in “Axel’s Castle” (1930), his pioneering account of literary modernism, “[which] was closely allied to history and novel writing, and was also the vehicle for all sorts of ideas about the purpose and destiny of human life in general.” Yet he was hardly averse to the newfangled: He introduced American readers to Ernest Hemingway and Eliot, among others, and digested all of Proust fresh off the press.

At his best, Wilson has a novelistic drive and intensity so hypnotic that you forget you’re reading criticism altogether. He once wrote of great novelists that they “must show us large social forces, or uncontrollable lines of destiny, or antagonistic impulses of the human spirit, struggling with one another,” and he did exactly that in “To the Finland Station,” his epic 1940 study of socialism and its founders.

In Wilson’s work -- the essays and reviews in “The Shores of Light,” “Classics and Commercials,” “The Wound and the Bow” and “The Triple Thinkers” (all of which, along with “Axel’s Castle,” are included in the present collection) and late masterpieces such as “Patriotic Gore” (1962), an idiosyncratic survey of the literature of the Civil War -- the prose is distinguished by its slow, steady force. His sentences gather and rise at a fluid, orderly pace; he doesn’t overwhelm you with gaudy effects or needless flash. This is a style that has a way of creeping up on you; its effect is marvelously cumulative.

An independent man of letters, Wilson mastered the difficult art of freelancing while writing for Vanity Fair, the New Republic and the New Yorker, his home base after World War II. Wilson approached his trade as a journalist: He would find a group of subjects or books that interested him and write up his findings in his articles and reviews. He didn’t compose his books so much as assemble them from this vast output, expanding and trimming his pieces where needed. His method, which he outlined in 1943, is still instructive (budding critics, take note!): “You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have 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 to reject.”

“To the Finland Station” is surely Wilson’s masterpiece, but “The Shores of Light” is perhaps his most indispensable volume, a record of a critic watching American culture become modern. These reviews and essays of the 1920s and ‘30s form, as Wilson put it, “a general picture of the culture of a recklessly unspecialized era, when minds and imaginations were exploring in all directions.” As recklessly unspecialized as the period he was writing about, Wilson ranges from pieces on such contemporaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Andre Malraux to figures from the American canon, such as Henry James and Edgar Allan Poe. And the range extends beyond books -- into vaudeville, the American theater, the magic of Harry Houdini (Wilson had a lifelong affection for magicians) and politics. We witness his turn to radicalism as he considers the promise of an America rent by the Great Depression and mass despair. A showcase for the young Wilson’s breathtaking eclecticism, “The Shores of Light” is the work of a man fully engaged with his times.

Alas, “the fashions of the month or the week” have not been particularly kind to Wilson, and appreciating him over the years hasn’t been easy. His books have been available mostly in badly printed editions that have gone in and out of print, so we can be grateful to the Library of America for bringing out these anthologies of his early and middle criticism.

Beautifully produced volumes with acid-free paper and clean, unfussy type, they are an especially fitting monument, since it was Wilson who in the 1960s advanced the idea of a series “bringing out in complete and compact form the principal American classics.” Wilson is himself an American classic -- now a fact of our literature and not merely a commentator on it. *