Edmund Wilson Reconsidered

“Literature is the most significant record of men’s struggles which we possess...” wrote Edmund Wilson, the American critic, who died in June 1972 at the age of 77. It would be difficult to think of another writer, American, European or Asian in recent times, who was more deeply committed to the values of literature than Wilson himself. He was a many-sided personality in the world of letters, a multiple-minded writer, with an amazing zest for new areas of sensibility, an inexhaustible curiosity about new fields of knowledge. He was as keenly interested in the poetry of the Beatniks and the plays of the Broadway experimenters as he was in the Dead Sea scrolls and the ruins of ancient Rome. But his versatility had nothing of the touch of the dilettante; his wide range was not achieved at the expense or depth of knowledge or authenticity of understanding.

In his lifetime, Edmund Wilson published over 25volumes of essays in criticism, reviews, poems and plays, novels and short stories, travelogues and reminiscences. His unpublished work comprises more than two thousand pages of diaries and notes, besides a lot of unfinished jottings and personal correspondence with his literary contemporaries. “The letters and records of writers of genius are,” according to Wilson himself. “one of the ways we have of finding out how life was really lived in any given time and place.” Some of his diaries and notes are edited by his life-long friend and colleague, Leon Edel, and brought out in 1975 in a substantial volume entitled, The Twenties.

The posthumous Twenties volume is both revealing and disappointing at the same time. Revealing because it tells us not only about what Wilson thought of many of his companions and contemporaries, with all the spontaneity of his reactions, but also about what he thought of himself. We see his companions here not so much as literary artists with a lot of promise ed by performance, but as human beings with foibles of their own, some lovable and some not so lovable. These include such well-known names as Scott Fitzgerald, and his wife Zelda, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill, and other rather less known ones like Frank Crowninshield, John Peale Bishop and many others. More than all these, one gets an insight into the character of the diarist himself – Edmund Wilson the writer in the making, the chrysallis of a journalistic contributor.

Commenting on his reputation for “sober judgment”, Wilson makes an honest confession: “I remember that such small reputation as I had achieved was apparently based on the supposed sober judgment of a few literary articles and reviews, yet, except when I was writing about literature, nobody could have worse judgment than I and the sober judgment, which, by an effort, I was able to master in print was nothing more than compensation for the disappointments and human limitations of a life which never hit the mark or suited the means to the end....”

Disappointing because the notes and jottings collected here remain rather disjointed, despite the skilful and conscientious efforts of the editor to present a coherent picture by supplying the missing links, explaining the private context, and explicating the obscure personal references. Not having had the benefit of revision by the author himself, a rare stickler for accuracy and elegance, as well as for clarity, these notes can not help appearing a trifle slipshod and amateurish, compared to the bulk of his other published works. But the sensual quality of a youthful intellectual’s responses is much in evidence – his healthy appetite and all his other full-blooded animal urges. They have certainly the merit of being uninhibited.

“A writer strains desperately to express something definitely,” as Wilson says, “and all that results is incomplete sketches and inconsecutive fragments – which, after his death, are inordinately prized for their personal flavour.” These words fit his diaries to a nicety. The personal flavour is their best, if not their only, recommendation.

They have a few other points, as well, to recommend them to the reader. The Wilson-addict wilt find in them appetizing bits of the compulsive traveller, the voracious reader and the restless intellectual hungry for ideas as well as for facts. There are musings that go hand in hand with the markings.

He sees enough places of historical interest to turn his thoughts to happiness. Before setting out to catch a glimpse of the cloying flamboyance of Venice and the rather subdued grace of Florence, he makes this quip:

“The melancholy thing about happiness is not that it doesn’t exist but that it doesn’t last.”

These few quotations may not be typical of Wilson’s best work or even indicative of what he was capable of in his period of maturity. But they should serve as a random sampling from a writer deeply involved in the human condition–in its varied aspects, man, society and nature.

Wilson was, in fact, that rare bird (in America more than in England or Europe) a literary critic who was a historian and sociologist, a writer with the sensibility of a poet and the intellectual equipment of an accomplished linguist. He was a literary journalist, with the authority and objectivity of an academic specialist. He could be described as an encyclopaedist with the eagerness and humility of a freshman at college.

Literature had no doubt been his favourite subject of study from childhood. But this meant for him not only the literatures of America and England, but of the world in general and of Europe in particular. It was his deep regret that the literatures of Spain and Latin America (and maybe also of the Orient) in the original were nearly a closed book for him. He could count French, German and Russian, besides Latin, Greek and Hebrew in his linguistic armoury. Literary and humanistic, rather than linguistic and philological, was, however, his intent in the learning of languages. He was keenly interested in dictionaries and grammars, but he was not laborious like a lexicographer nor could a Browning think of him for a grammarian’s funeral.

To be convincingly authoritative, it was not necessary for Edmund Wilson to be dull and dry-as-dust as seems to be the practice with some of the more respectable dons. This was true from the days of his youth when he began playing the sedulous ape, as a contributor to the college magazine at Princeton. His lively mind and lucid style were invariably in evidence in whatever he wrote – a polemical tract in the New Republic, a literary feature in New Yorker, or a critical essay in Encounter, not to speak of his more ambitious works. The 25 and more books that he authored or edited in the course of a writing career of over half-a-century (from the early ’Twenties to the early ’Seventies) cover the best part of the gamut of human experience. They include literary criticism and social reportage, historical research and archaeological studies, thoughts on culture and musings on civillisation, biographical sketches and travelogues, besides short stories and novels, poems and plays.

Like a few great writers before him, e.g. William Hazlitt, Washington Irving and Taine, Wilson was apt to describe himself as a journalist. And he was that in the best sense of the word, which admits of no trace of derogation. He represent­ed in himself the happy marriage of journalism and literature, bringing together the contemporary sensibility of the one and the high seriousness of the other.

A creative writer manque– that is how a critic is often described by some writers, especially those who might have felt the lash of his whip. But it would be not only grossly unfair but factually erroneous to stick this label to Edmund Wilson. For one thing, he was a successful creative writer in his own right, who had chosen to sharpen his wits on the whetstone of criticism. He might not have been a poet of the first rank, like T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings or John Carlos Williams, but he wrote poems (Poets, Farewell).He was no fiction-writer of the stature of Hemingway, Faulkner or Fitzgerald, – but he wrote two significant novels (“I thought of Daisy” and “Memoirs of Hecate County”). You could not call him a Samuel Beckett, a Tennessee Williams or a Eugene O’neill, but he wrote a good number of experimental, intellectual plays (This Room and This Gin and these Sandwiches, The Duke of Palermo and other plays). For another, the best of his criticism has the quality of creative writing, in its freshness of approach, integrity of imagination and originality of enunciation.

Does the perfect critic exist? One does not know. And you never can tell, from the contemporary scene. But you can easily think of what you expect of him. He must have most, if not all, of the following characteristics:

1. Wide learning; 2. Catholicity of tests; 3. High literary standards; 4. Sensitivity to language; 5. Spirit of justice, tempered with sympathy and understanding; 6. Flexibility of mind to deal with a variety of writers and their writings; 7. Sharpness of insight to separate the grain from the chaff, to see the fashionable and phoney from the genuine and lasting; 8. A lively awareness of contemporary values; 9. A deep sense of the past for seeing things in the correct perspective; and 10. An unimpea­chable integrity of intellectual character.

The search for the “ideal critic”, like that for the philosopher’s stone may often prove elusive and fruitless. But it cannot be easily given up on that account. Edmund Wilson was ever busy, discovering “the critic who does not exist!” He knew that no criticism could make or unmake the creative artist. But he had a high conception of the function of criticism and the equipment essential for a critic. His views on the subject were well-defined.

“…I am strongly disposed to believe that our contemporary writing would benefit by a genuine literary criticism that should deal expertly with ideas and art, not merely tell us whether the reviewer “let out a whoop” for the book or “throw it out of the window.”

“In a sense, it can probably be said, “observes Wilson, “that no such creature exists as a full-time literary critic–that is, a writer who is at once first-rate and nothing but a literary critic; there are writers of poetry, drama or fiction, who also write criticism, like Coleridge, Dryden, Poe, and Henry James; and there are historians like Renan, Taine, Saint-Beuve, Leslie Stephen, and Brandes, whose literary criticism is a part of their history.” He regrets that in America neither kind of criticism has been very highly developed, adding, “I fear that we must take this as a sign of the rudimentary condition of our literature in general.”

He then proceeds to explode the overblown myth that the poets and other creative writers are, ipso facto, the best critics of literature. They are not; nor can they be, unless they specially equip themselves for a task that often proves as thankless as it is strenuous. We know only too well how casual and unreliable a critic, a poet, otherwise ill-informed, could make, in his familiar state of self-hypnosis.

“The poets, the dramatists and the novelists,” maintains Wilson, with his refreshing candour, “too often lack the learning and the cultivated intelligence to give us, in works of art, the full benefit of the promising material supplied by experience and imagination; and it may in general be said that where our writers of biography and history fail is precisely in their inability to deal adequately with works of literature.”

That America could, in this century, boast at least one first-­rate and full-time literary critic in the person of Edmund Wilson is no small credit to its modern writing. But, Wilson was quite an untypical American, as a writer and as a man. For all his wholesome patriotism, he was no flag-waving New Englander, to be easily excited over the achievements of the current immortals among his country’s men of letters. He had too much of the classical restraint and sense of form to fall in love with the slovenly and the slipshod, passing under the guise of the modishly formless. The best of the American writing should, according to him, be found good enough by supra-national standards. It should certainly be able to stand up to the best of Europe, he would argue.

In paying tribute to new talent, where it was due, Wilson did not choose to overlook any weakness inherent in it. He wrote copiously and even generously about contemporaries like Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. But he was not afraid to be harsh, where it was felt necessary in the interest of truth. Of the former, a personal friend of his, he had this to say:

“ .... he has been given imagination without intellectual control of it; he has been given the desire for beauty without an aesthetic ideal; and he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to empress.”

Hemingway once said in a letter to Wilson: “You are the only man writing criticism, who or whom I can read when the book being criticised is one I’ve read or known something about. I can read almost anybody when they write on things I don’t know about.” As good a compliment as any that could be paid to a critic worth his salt.

Not identified with any intellectual coterie or esoteric school of thought, Wilson had pressed onto service, in his own critical endeavour, all the possible methods that might yield the most fruitful results. The psycho-analytical and the historical methods adopted by him, act as checks and balances against one another. He was ready to see the good in the scientific method of Dr. F. R. Leavis and company, though in a limited way. But he did not discard the biographical method of the earlier scholars. An ardent admirer of Lenin, whom he regarded as the greatest hero of our time, he was much in sympathy with the Marxian interpretation of literature. More than familiar he was with the economic argument advanced by the advocates of dialectical materialism. He, no doubt, granted that it could explain the social forces behind the emergence of a particular work of art, but it did not, for him, provide the key to its aesthetic appeal. The breadth of his critical interests was, in fact, one of his chief assets–or liabilities (?) as some others would have it. He could be called a conservative liberal and a pragmatic idealist in the field of criticism.

A serious study of comparative literature, which is fast coming into vogue the world over, had a vigorous advocate in Wilson, when such a study was far from being fashionable in his early days. His belief in its liberalising influence was quite unconnected with the prospect of affluent fellowships and well-endowed chairs in the subject.

In his attempt to go to the root of the matter, in the study of literature, Wilson could be quite unconventional. He developed the habit of breaking down formal and superficial barriers, such as those between prose and verse and between one language and another Thackeray’s Vanity Fair would, for instance, yield him after parallels in subject matter, to Pope’s Rape of the Lock than any other book of verse. He could make an unexpected comparison between the genius of Dickens and Kipling and underline the tortured psyche, throwing light on many new areas.

It would not, however, be an easy task for us to define Wilson’s role in American life and letters to a nicety. Like GBS in his time, he had been something of an non-conformist and a free-thinker, ever at loggerheads with the Establishment. While at home, he was never tired of pricking the average American out of his complacency and casualness. He was the intellectual gadfly. While in England, he would stand up to the insular approaches and mandarin attitudes of the English middle class. In Europe of which he loved France, Italy and Soviet Russia, he would not hesitate to affirm the new values of American life, with its naturalness and youthful vigour. “We must try to stick close to the realities of contemporary American life, so new, and so different from anything that has ever been known…” he wrote in 1929. Many years latter he lived to say in The Cold War and the Income-Tax something more damaging on the American system than anybody else before him.

He was an important advocate of “lost causes” (like decency, gentleness, privacy and contemplation), not afraid of being branded “an old fogey”. He deplored the progressive decay of the reading habit in the younger generation. For him, literature is something that is read for pleasure not worked upon for research or grappled with for a prestigious fellowship.

It was tempting for journalists to compare Edmund Wilson with Dr. Samuel Johnson for their unrivalled stature. But Wilson was never so dogmatic or perverse in his likes and dislikes. He reminds one of Matthew Arnold in his gallant fight against provincialism and philistinism and in his classical ideal of per­fection. But he was not half so vague or pontifical. Restrained and objective like Leslie Stephen he was never so distant or matter-of-fact. Learned and meticulous like George Saintsbury, whom he so much admired, he was neither so bookish nor so digressive. He could be scholarly without being scholastic. He wore his learning lightly and could be fair and precise, without being heavy and academic.

For over five decades, Edmund Wilson was the self-appointed watchdog of values in American literature. Never did he lose sight of the forces of national history and the trends of world literature. In the unceasing appraisal of imaginative writing, the link between aesthetic appreciation and social awareness, he had few equals. He was found wanting in originality by some for not establishing a new school of thought in criticism. So was Dr. Radhakrishnan in the realm of Indian philosophy. Both were interpreters par excellence. Both had a flair for lucid and balanced exposition. Edmund Wilson was a humanist no less than a critic; a thinker no less than a writer.