Edmund Wilson at Sixty

...Wilson must be writing with tongue in cheek, there is still his vitality and even his pridefulness to sustain our old cherished Wilson image...

...Wilson saw no point in either the First or Second World Wars...

...As things go nowadays among serious writers, it is an uncommonly large production, and when we add to the quantity of the published work its special quality which has won Mr...

...Wilson has proceeded, the uncommon impulse to truth which lies even in the excess of his rationalism, and, not least of all, because Mr...

...With a perfection of taste and the most luminous understanding, Mr...

...But this revelation, after all, was blatant...

...There are few writers of whom it is as true as it is of Edmund Wilson that their work is an act of faith in the value and permanence of literature and, by extension, of faith in the continuity of culture and of mankind...

...Wilson expresses...

...People should be done with such nonsense, accept the laws of their biological being and, like the animals, mate on the principle of natural selection for the preservation and improvement of the species...

...In the critical work, we have been willing to accept this simplicity because of the high ground on which Mr...

...Wilson confirms the autonomy and irreversibility of reason...

...An awareness of the reciprocal process of good and evil, reason and non-reason, fact and intuition, principle and strategy in the human experience—this is what has always been missing in Mr...

...There is Mr...

...Wilson has formulated over the years...

...only those who willed themselves blind could avoid it...

...The acerbity into which his rationalistic impulse can lead Mr...

...The fact that the volume is subtitled "Reflections at Sixty" should not be taken to suggest that this is a meditative book or mellow, but only that it reflects old concerns of Mr...

...Even his brief period of Communist sympathy represented not an abdication of mind, as was the case with so many intellectuals of his own and a succeeding generation, but a too close and rational reliance on the texts, without enough imagination of the morbid constructions that could be put upon the Marxist doctrine...

...Wilson's steadfastness of purpose must be understood, of course, as something even more than the steady and fitting employment of his talents, though that in itself is a sufficiently remarkable achievement...

...Wilson often addresses himself quite openly, has no dialectical or dynamic role in his view of man's nature...

...Through this hazardous quarter-century in which mind has played such a largely defensive role in our intellectual life—in political thought, in education, in psychology—Edmund Wilson has continued to maintain himself strikingly impervious to anti-intellectualism, whatever the subtle disguises in which it has appeared...

...Surely, and all magically, this is not the world of "The Author at Sixty...

...Twenty-five, even thirty years ago, when the Axel's Castle pieces first came out in the New Republic, Mr...

...In the famous "Princess with the Golden Hair," for example, the non-rational element in the story is presented as such an extreme of psychopathology, on which reason makes its observations at such a chilling remove from feeling, that in the end, quite without the author's intention, the observing intellect itself begins to suggest the psychopathological...

...This is the primitive level on which Mr...

...Wilson's that takes so much of life into such full and imaginative account...

...It is also an outrageous book...

...Wilson's lack of a sense of literature as a function of conflict within the multitudinousness of life and of culture as a synthesis of disparate and even antagonistic forces within the nature of man...

...Wilson's work...

...Or there is Mr...

...The stringent rationalism which was always implicit in the criticism becomes explicit in Mr...

...it becomes something of a tyranny...

...Love, he tells us, is a romantic obfuscation of the procreative instinct...

...Or there is Mr...

...It is the last chapter in the book, it is called "The Author at Sixty," it is a remembrance of Mr...

...Mind turns out to be a good deal more than an instrument of order, more even than an authority...

...Yet, it would be wrong to leave the impression that, as a whole, A Piece of My Mind is as dismaying as these very dismaying ideas I pick at random...

...Rather, it appears as an absolute, an autonomous force by whose existence (and, sometimes, by whose acceptance) Mr...

...Wilson—in his good old-fashioned rationalism...

...Nevertheless, it has been within very strict limits of both feeling and thought that he has mapped these travels...

...He is very glad —which we are, too, of course—that he got through both wars unscathed...

...Wilson's profound belief in literature...

...Wilson for his commitment to reason as a means of ordering the universal chaos, I am afraid it is the excess of this virtue which we must blame for the note of irritability which so frequently sounds through his work and, even more important, for his incapacity to take into sympathetic account the often antithetical manifestations of man's life as an individual and in society...

...In addition, the volume contains one piece—the longest in the book, in fact—which quite justifies its author in the face of whatever strictures we may propose about the other essays...

...If we honor Mr...

...When F. Scott Fitzgerald spoke of Edmund Wilson as his intellectual conscience, he was indeed singling out his old friend for his firm and courageous refusal of the seductions of commerce and fashion...

...Wilson his acknowledged pre-eminence in American literature, we are bound to welcome a book of reflections at this point in such a fine and full career...

...it is never in dialogue with wisdom or good sense...

...Wilson on sex...

...Wilson's...

...Surely no critic of our time has journeyed more widely than Mr...

...In fact, more and more in these years since Fitzgerald's death we have had to see that an immunity to corruption is capable of existing in inverse proportion to a belief in mind...

...Wilson's usual world, that is, it is not our humanity which produces the wonder of literature, but literature which redeems us from our humanity...

...Wilson, is a "bad habit" whose genesis we should try to understand by furthering our zoological research into the behavior of the insect kingdom...

...A commitment to mind is not to be confused with intellectual integrity, that much-overused concept of intellectual morality...

...But the criticism has been no less flawed by Mr...

...Wilson is naturally more disturbing in his fiction than in his criticism...

...One of the reservations one has held about Edmund Wilson's work is that he deals with literature—and with culture in general—as if it bore the same relation to our human fate that, in the religious life, the divine dispensation bears to the concept of personal salvation...

...Wilson repudiated Communism quickly, as soon as the realities of the Soviet dictatorship revealed themselves from behind the rational program of Marxism...

...Let it never be said of the man who wrote "The Author at Sixty" that he sees life too simply under the aspect of reason or that he has no tenderness for human complexity...

...Wilson on religion...

...But a person can be splendidly inviolable in his beliefs and still minimal in his respect for intellect...

...In Mr...

...I have space to canvas, and but briefly, only a few of the opinions Mr...

...Wilson deals with and dismisses the religious impulse, refusing the obvious fact that, whatever the tangled web reason may have woven through the long years in its effort to support the religious emotion, the rationalizing process has had at last the virtue of admitting that the emotion has validity...

...Wilson and claimed for himself and us more valuable territories of cultural experience...

...Religion, he says...

...Wilson on the subject of war...

...Both his productivity and the nature of his work have represented a large moral assertion—an assertion, against the uncertainty and falsities of his time, of Mr...

...since reason must reject the supernatural, it must also reject religion...

...And there has gone along with this commitment to literature what is not always its corollary, a ruling commitment to mind...

...Wilson has so often given us so useful a first view of difficult literary matters...

...Even where we are shocked and look in vain for evidence that Mr...

...actually, one of the attractions of A Piece of My Mind is its youthful vigor and even headstrongness...

...And there is always our pleasure—if we could but sidestep the pitfalls into which it has tempted Mr...

...chairman, American Committee for Cultural Freedom With A Piece of My Mind, a collection of reflective essays on reaching the age of 60, Edmund Wilson publishes his eighteenth volume...

...I know nothing else of Mr...

...Wilson's thought the schematic approach of rationalism has not always brought its correction so readily, or at all...

...Unhappily, in other spheres of Mr...

...Axel's Castle, which today must seem to tell us far less about Yeats or Proust or Joyce than we think is required, at the time of its publication helped us with quite literal difficulties of a kind we recall now only with some effort...

...Wilson was already a unique figure in our literary life, a model of the dignity possible to the profession of criticism, and as his work has developed he has permitted us to hold fast the proud image he created so early...

...rests upon theology and theology depends upon a belief in the existence of a god or gods...

...Wilson's young manhood, and it is a truly remarkable piece of peculiarly difficult autobiographical reconstruction...

...War, says Mr...

...This is not, however, a recommendation...

...Wilson's present volume, where the opinions are unprotected by the usual conventions of the formal literary essay and where, as the title of the book indicates, Mr...

...Wilson is having his say without too much care for amenity or modification...

...Even folly, to which Mr...

...Wilson tells the story of his family, in particular the story of his father, a brilliant and successful lawyer who was the victim of recurrent depression, from whom he felt great distance in his younger days but to whom he is drawn more and more closely upon mature reflection...

...A Piece of My Mind is a statement of some of the basic ideas—about religion, nations, war, education, science, sex—that Mr...

...This is a rare experience in American culture...

...For it is one thing to be outraged by sound ideas for which we are not prepared, but it is quite another to be inescapably confronted with unsound or insufficient ideas the intimations of which we had preferred to ignore...

...With no word for what the triumph of Nazism would have meant for a person of his preferences and commitments, he writes: "I have never, in later life, regretted for a moment that I made no serious sacrifice for either of them—causes in which I did not believe—and have survived to occupy myself with something in which I do believe: literature...