Measuring the Loss

...Yet, as is often the case with the objects of another man's affection, one cannot always share his high opinion of their intrinsic worth...

...In part, loo, this attitude is traceable to Wilson's increasingly retrospective view of his own accomplishments...

...One of the best things in Professor Paul's book is his analysis of Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), a book that he persuades one to take more seriously as a work of art than any other critic has succeeded in doing, and that he eloquently identifies as a crucial turning-point in Wilson's intellectual progress: his deepest avowal of revulsion in the face of the world that was emerging from the Depression and the War...

...WRITERS^WRITING Measuring the Loss By Hilton Kramer Twenty years ago, when the New Criticism was first bestirring the English Departments in a big way and thereby preparing the ground for all those Pyrrhic victories it has since sustained over the teaching of literature, the name of Edmund Wilson was in very low repute...

...in the Introduction to Patriotic Gore, in The Cold War and the Income Tax (1963), and now again, in the interviews he has included in The Bit Between My Teeth, Wilson has repeatedly enlarged upon this revulsion—what Irving Howe has correctly termed "a radicalism of nausea"—thus succumbing to the bleak decision to "hold [himself] separate" that he had hoped to avoid when he was younger Commenting on Wilson's family house in Talcottville and the symbolic importance it has assumed in his writing, Paul remarks: "Like so much of the past that stirs in his memory, it measures loss Is this, perhaps, the key to all Edmund Wilson's writing since his Memoirs of Hecate County closed the door on that ampler vision that had generated his earlier work...

...By the time Classics and Commercials appeared in 1950, an attitude of total condescension was well established toward the writer who dared to question Kafka's genius and lavish praise on the essays of Paul Rsenfeld...

...With what awful dismay they must have viewed his winning of a Dew and ever larger readership as, from The Shores of Light (1952) onward, he continued producing bocks—some of them very stout volumes indeed—in unabated profusion, tackling sometimes difficult or unpopular subjects (like the Dead Sea Scrolls or the American Indians), reviving unread—even unreadable—authors (like Swinburne and James Branch Cabell), yet taking on major literary events like Doctor Zhivago and the NabokovPushkin affair with an easy and imperturbable authority...

...Like Van Wyck Brooks, Wilson ended the '20s—so different in actuality from our cliche image of it—in a state of nervous collapse...

...Professor Paul writes from entirely within Wilson's view of his own development, and amplifies the stages of that development more interestingly than one would have thought possible, so extensive has been Wilson's own retrospective commentary...

...Most valuable, perhaps, is Paul's detailed recapitulation of the ideological dilemmas that acted as a spur to Wilson's writing in the '20s...

...Edmund Wilson has done more than survive his detractors...

...Measuring the loss: This is indeed the recurrent preoccupation in The Bit Between My Teeth, the impulse that moves Wilson to reconsider writers now fallen from favor, to excoriate the corruption of language, to cast a sympathetic light on the work of friends—whether novelists like Dawn Powell and Morley Callaghan...

...The care he lavishes on his chosen subjects is, more than anything else, an expression of love and of love's natural corollary: the desire to shield the objects of one's affection from the erosions of time...

...1 do not know exactly when it began, bin sometime in the late '50s or early '60s one noticed more and more references to Wilson, in conversation even more frequently than in print, as a sort of natural phenomenon of our native culture—a Pike's Peak or Niagara Falls of American letters...

...or critics like Newton Arvin and Van Wyck Brooks—which he feels would otherwise be lost in the downward drift of current opinion...

...In speaking of Praz as an artist and a collector, as "a genie who brings us Rome in huge armfuls—its cosmopolitan culture, its accumulations of the ages, its happy freedom from narrow prejudice, its conviction of being at the center of the world, its appetite for rich materials...

...In part this was due, no doubt, to the sheer length and copiousness of Wilson's career: His first book—The Undertaker's Garland, written in collaboration with John Peale Bishop—was published in 1922, and his latest—The Bit Between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950- 1965 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 694 pp., $7.50)—is the fifteenth title he has brought out in as many years...

...It is going to be as difficult for future biographers of Wilson to modify the self-portrait he has himself given us as it has been for biographers of Henry Adams to compete with the Education in establishing the "real" Adams...

...And, what is more important, one is often haunted by what is being missed in this affectionate preservation of the past—that "immersion in the vital present" that so appealed to the younger Wilson, that gave his writing for so many years the quality of being indispensable to the future...

...Wilson invokes an ideal that he obviously shares with Praz and that, just as obviously, he sees sinking from view in the quicksand of the present world...

...Thus, even before he produced his greatest single work in Patriotic Gore three years ago, Wilson had not only recovered his reputation but had ascended to a kind of Olympian plateau...

...The author of Axel's Castle and To the Finland Station was abominated as a popularizer, and his presence on the staff of the New Yorker, where he had lately succeeded Clifton Fadiman as chief book critic, was widely adduced as proof of his incorrigible middlebrow taste...

...In A Piece of My Mind (1956...

...Undoubtedly such a modification will come, but it is not what has been attempted in the first book to be devoted to Wilson's career: Sherman Paul's Edmund Wilson: A Study of Literary Vocation in Our Time (University of Illinois Press...

...how much he wishes to come to terms with her, to love what he feels responsible for...

...More than most of our writers, he has actively assisted in historicizing himself—first by memorializing his friends, and then by writing about himself and his work in an almost elegiac vein—and in doing so with a clarity and humor and unconcealed distaste for the present that increase his distance from the concerns of the moment even as they signify his loyalty to values now in decline...

...he has swamped them with an accomplishment that mocks their most sweeping strictures...

...To ridicule the man who had suggested that verse might be a "dying technique" became a ritual exercise among young poet-critics who were just discovering l r j a t , far from being a moribund accomplishment, verse—both its creation and, even more, its explication—might actually be a mealticket to the expanding academy...

...The '30s, of course, promised such a politics, but the betrayal of that promise induced a pessimism and a stoic resignation that far exceeded anything Wilson had envisioned in the '20s...

...How he longs for a politics that would marry him to her and make him master in the house...

...His luminous autobiographical writings cannot, therefore, be considered altogether separate from his critical writings, for the one provides his readers with a context—a world of feeling as much as of ideas—that deeply illumines the other...

...America...

...And it is this (almost umbilical) relation between his reminiscences and his recent criticism that also gives the latter a somewhat elegiac air and keeps it from having the quality of immediacy, of actualize, that distinguishes his work of the '20s and '30s especially...

...No one has sufficiently honored Wilson, I think, for being such an affectionate writer...

...If his name cropped up in the literary quarterlies or the lecture hall, it was as the avatar of all that had been discredited by the New Critical enlightenment How irritating it must have been to these votaries of the new academic orthodoxy to see Wilson's star rising to new heights in the '50s...

...237 pp., $5.75...

...Discussing the imaginary dialogues Wilson brought together in Discordant Encounters (1926), Paul writes: "[Wilson] would like to do something valuable, but he does not want, as he says, to 'hold myself separate.' What appeals to him in the situation of the younger men of Discordant Encounters is the immersion in the vital present, an immersion, alas, achieved by an uncritical acceptance of the drift of things...

...Try as he will, [Wilson] cannot quite give himself up to the vulgar vitality that he believes he must respond to in his role of American critic...

...One senses this impulse even in his essays on Boris Pasternak— the homage one superior survivor in an age of barbarism pays another, his spiritual semblable—just as one finds it, somewhat more relaxed, in the final essay on Mario Praz...

...The conflicting demands of high art and mass culture, and the search for a politics that could successfully mediate between the two— assuring the democratic prerogatives of the latter while preserving the preeminent status of the former—is shown, beyond question, to be at the heart of Wilson's work from the first decade of his development...

...The "vulgar vitality" that Wilson struggled with in his earlier days has, in the interim, grown even more egregiously vulgar and less obviously vital, and yet it is impossible to believe that a writer who holds himself separate from it can ever speak to us with complete authority...

...America...