THE WORLD OF EDMUND WILSON

...Even in an instance when the tone required is softer and more intimate than any in Wilson's formidable repertoire, his effort gains in poignance what it loses in ease...

...They have been edited, incidentally, with the flair of the devoted amateur by Wilson's widow, Elena...

...That is why when he is writing about literature Wilson is never very far from writing about politics, and vice versa...

...The classical model is Marcus Aurelius, who spells it out as the ideal of being always the same and the same to everyone: in more modern terms it might be said that Wilson represents a "unified sensibility...

...In 1964, writing from Paris, Wilson tells Dos Passos: "I have never regarded myself as a liberal, because the word does not mean anything definite . . . . You've been railing against 'the liberals' all your life, and my impression is that your conception of them is a projection of some suppressed alter ego that you perpetually feel you have to discredit...

...How should I remain au-dessus de la m~lde when better men have assumed burdens as dismal as any involved in modern .warfare," he wrote...

...You used to assail this myth from the radical side, and now you assail it from the conservative...

...When one learns from these pages the universality and indifference with which be applied this rule (it was visited upon Gilbert Highet one day, Vladimir Nabokov the next and went on for more than fifty years) it even becomes possible to enter into Wilson's point of view about it...

...And, though he admired Pound's poetry, Wilson was so little fond of his critical writing that he once asked John Peale Bishop to stop Pound from contributing any more of his ill-written ill-spelled "incoherent and all but illegible" articles to the New Republic...

...It is the sort of close scrutiny every first novelist would give his right arm for...

...To Malcolm Cowley, in 1938, Wilson expresses the depth of his feeling about both literature and politics--and his sense of the necessary distinction between them: "What in God's name has happened to you...

...period and discovers that it is not the period that makes the difference but the genre...

...Edmund Wilson: Letters 'on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972 to professional standards manifests itself in these letters frequently in the passion he shows for accuracy, for getting it right...

...In either case it is remarkably sound, and it seems to have had a beneficent effect on Fitzgerald's work...

...When Wilson is talking to...

...How are we to explain this...

...One checks the letters of that same...

...But he was always first and foremost a literary man, and these letters are the record of a professional, toiling endlessly in the service of what was for him an almost religious calling...

...they are, after all, commended to our attention for their commentary on literature and politics over a fifty-year period...

...Wilson's personal, stylistic imprint --reason without frills, plainspoken thoroughness of expression--is present and persistent, whatever the individual letter's content and tone, whether we find him offering (at sixteen) to exchange candid opinions on books with his school chum, Alfred Bellinger, or joking with his friend Dos Passes about their mutual cardiac conditions at the age of seventy-five...

...Commonweal: 313...

...The letters all, of course, bear the imprint of Wilson's orderly mind, and nearly all of them possess enough individual interest so that they may be savored a bit at a time...

...I am not 'between for and against Marxism.' The Marxism of the so-called Communist countries is today mostly mere cant to cover their exploitation by the Russians...

...I think politics is bad for you because it's not real to you: because what you're really practicing is not politics but literature...

...and I wish you would purge your head of politics--revolutionary and literary alike--and do the kind of valuable work of which you're capable...

...Yet he already understood the duty he must pay to the claims of life-i.e., remaining engag# in the social and political affairs of the world...

...There are powerful letters, too, in which Wilson goes to bat for writers he admires who are in trouble: e.g., Mary McCarthy when she ~as at loggerheads with the Partisan Review, and Ezra Pound at the time of his incarceration in St...

...He did it in the interest of professionalism and critical detachment...

...The special attention Wilson pays in all his writing to the interstices between literature and life make the selection of letters focusing on just the two subjects, literature and politics, very apt in his case...

...Elizabeth's...

...and it is only messes up a job like yours to pretend it's something e l s e . . . " Some of this ire had been occasioned by Cowley's praise of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not on what Wilson suspected were Marxist grounds rather than those of literary merit alone...

...Who but Edmund Wilson would use a c~don (correctly, of course) in a sentence designed to 12 May 1978:312 tell someone of his warm feeling for her...

...There is criticism both particular ("You handicap your stow, for one thing, by making your hero go to the war and then completely leaving the war out") and general (Wilson says, "I do think the most telling poetry" and romance may be achieved by keeping close to life," but advises Fitzgerald to "Cultivate a univenml irony and do read something other than contempory British novelists...

...Wilson's style serves him admirably for the bulk of the letters included...

...He seems to have known early on that he was going to turn out to be Edmund Wilson...

...In spite o! the fact that the biographer is given his materials in the shape of letters, memoirs, etc., he is just as responsible /or the portrait that emerges as Scott was /or the Great Gatsby...

...He will enter the most minute cavil into the most affirmative letter of praise (or, more often, whole pages of corrections into a mixed bag of .positive and negative reactions...

...I liked your poems in Poetry and your remarks about the revolutionary symbolists...

...He is forever urging this one of his correspondents to reprint an old piece too good to let perish, that one to contribute a new translation of this or a fresh introduction to that--all the while urging them, as he urged himself, to "Be Strong...

...I was told some time ago that you were circulating a letter asking for endorsements of the last batch of Moscow trials...

...Again one is struck by the disinterested nature of Wilson's interest...

...Back in Wellfleet after his European trip (which included a trip behind the Iron Curtain into Hungary), Wilson again writes DOn Passos on political subjects...

...his friends and associates on paper, he can display all these things...

...whether the person he is addressing is a Wellfleet neighbor or T. S. Eliot...

...There are so many letters one would like to quote if space would permit: Wilson's wicked and hilarious description of The New Yorker's fiftieth anniversary party, for example, or the moving letter he wrote to Zelda on the occasion of Scott's death, or the equalty touching, elegaic letter to Dos Passes upon the death of his wife, Katy...

...There are wonderful letters to his lifelong friend, John Dos Pas~, on both subjects...

...Again and again he is obliged to apologize in response to their wounded outcries--saying he'd meant no harm, that what he had said or written shouldn't have been taken personally, In his view, getting it right was all that counted...

...Pound, on the other hand, seems always to have irritated Wilson personally...

...There is nothing abstract about the commentary these letters offer on either subject...

...Daniel Aaron has provided an excellent introduction, and there is a graceful foreword by Leon Edel who, in accord with Wilson's request, is editing the comprehensive collection of letters still to come...

...Perhaps because it is so largely a product of the wiUuand because that is a word (and a trait) which has largely been dropped from the modern vocabulary, Wilson's manifestation of it in these letters makes a very powerful impression...

...Much of it he did simply because he couldn't help himself...

...Like Matthew Arnold, Wilson saw literature the way most people see government --as wielding the kind of power that shapes the culture...

...To F. Scott Fitzgerald, who gratefully acknowledged him as "my literary conscience," Wilson writes a long critique---affectionate but critical--of Fitzgerald's first published novel, This Side o[ Paradise...

...But the problem in these countries as well as here at home is to Commonweal: 311 prevent the apparently inevitable tendency toward centralization and nationalization from crushing individual initiative and any leeway for minority groups...

...Adventures of a Young Man gets the same kind of close, helpful going-over Fitzgerald's novel got...

...His comparative naturalness and ease in the letters is a refection of the fact ~hat he regarded letterwriting as a branch of literature, and he assumes a comfortable literary persona in them almost from the beginning...

...In the 1960s the political interchange between the two heated up considerably as they took each other's measure in the light of the various social revolutions then dominating the world scene...

...Nevertheless, it is in the aggregate that they achieve their greatest impact, for here is the record of a lifetime spent in the steadfastness of one pursuit, one set of values, a lifetime that achieves, finally, something close to heroism...

...Farrar, Straus, $20 [768 pp] The first reaction is surprise--here is all the spontaneity, vitality, and humanity of the personal voice that seemed so unaccountably absent from Wilson's journals of the Twenties...

...he asks Cowley...

...You seem to mistake my point of view...

...I am thinking of his rather halting attempt (as he sailed for Russia on the Berengaria in 1935) to tell Louise Began that "I want you to know how appreciative of you and how fond of you, my dear, I really am: I have never had this kind of companionship with a woman for any length of time ever before in my life...

...In his journals of the Twenties, Wilson had not yet learned to turn the entries into literary art as he was later to do so superbly in Upstate...

...He is always coming up with suggestions for increasing the sum of the world's art...

...Wilson himself may give the best explanation when he tells us that, for him, transforming life into literature is a way to control a chaotic world, to free the "worried intelligence and balked emotions" induced in the sensitive by exposure to that chaos...

...Mary McCarthy happened to be his wife in that period...

...The early letters are amazing for the purposefulness they show Wilson displaying about what he wants from life and how he is going to go about getting it...

...But it is perhaps a mistake to look to these particular letters for the private man except as all letters give that away...

...He is genuinely puzzled and surprised that the recipients should take his remarks about their work amiss...

...Wilson's devotion to literature and To Arthur Mizener, April 4, 1950 It is important, in writing a biography, to remember that you are telling a story and that the problems of presenting the material are in many ways just the same as those of presenting a subject of fiction...

...When he is talking to himself, he permits himself to speak only in a nearly unaccented, impersonal tone...

...Some of this he got paid for in the course of his various posts as editor at Vanity Fair, the New Republic and elsewhere (though, as one learns from his letters of negotiation with his employers, _9 not, in many cases, by any means well-paid...

...My single aim has been literature," he wrote a school friend, Stanley Dell, from war-torn France, when he was only twenty-one...