Edmund Wilson's Instructions

...Literary form for Wilson, Delmore Schwartz wrote in 1942, "is the wrapping paper which covers the gift...

...She has succeeded in organizing the correspondence in such a way that it constitutes, as she suggests, a kind of "epistolary autobiography" (which gains further coherence from Daniel Aaron's informative Introduction...

...then, later to use the scattered articles for writing general studies on those subjects...

...Indeed, while Wilson often stated that one read the letters of writers primarily for revelations about "how people lived at a given time and place," we read this collection not to learn about "people," but to discover how an extraordinary man and his friends (most of them of the literary world) thought and worked...

...likens Mizener's difficulties to those he himself had with the memoirs of Lenin's family...

...The Letters give us a sense of the satisfactions and accomplishments of this kind of vocation...

...summons up the legends about Henry James as a warning against distortion...

...I don't think he understands that with such books 1 am always working with a plan and structure in mind...

...It is one of the most striking revelations of the letters that such objections were not carried over into Wilson's personal.and professional relationships with a great many critics, scholars, poets, and novelists who depended on him for sympathetic understanding, practical advice and tough editorial correction...

...The sense of himself as a witness or recordkeeper of his times, the felt obligation to introduce and explain cultural events, and the desire to improve the reading habits of others are communicated on virtually every page of his Letters on Literature and Politics: 1912-1972 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 768 pp., $20.00...

...less rationalistic...

...because he was very provocative in his writing...

...A distinction Wilson made in an early letter to Dos Passos—between "long-range and short-range" writing—was meant to help them both allocate their time to different activities: works of lasting literary value and political writing on contemporary problems...

...Shaw's so great wit and wisdom, for I know that he speaks the truth and esteem him highly...

...He was too shy, according to Edel, "to invade privacies to 'get a story.' He preferred to write about the arts...

...libraries into the modern world...

...James got something out of it...

...Yet for Wilson the separation was not really politics vs...

...After the Armistice, he worked for Vanity Fair, ran the theater department for the Dial, was intermittently literary editor of the New Republic until 1940...

...Many will have read elsewhere the sound criticisms of Fitzgerald's work repeated here in letters to and about his old friend...

...I am more of a journalist than you, and like to astonish with startling discoveries and novel juxtapositions...

...That was the case with The Twenties, a volume based on notes and diaries of the time and brought out posthumously in 1974 by Leon Edel, general editor of the Wilson Papers...

...it included first-hand accounts of a personal relationship that became material for a novel—I Thought of Daisy—published in 1929 and, again, in a revised version, 35 years later...

...the traits of a whole society...

...How well this plan worked out in practice may be seen in the progress of Patriotic Gore, published in 1962...

...I don't know why I always adopt this Pepys' Diary style when I begin to tell about a play...

...Still, he is always telling his correspondents to wait for the books, rather than read the articles that precede them, and his endless revision of the books suggest that he seldom had the satisfaction of considering them finished...

...His advice to Arthur Mizener, then writing a life of Fitzgerald, by turns links the novelist's task to that of the biographer, who is "as responsible for the portrait that emerges as Scott was for...

...He wrote for the New Yorker from 1943-72...

...The great appeal of Wilson for my generation, graduating from college in the early '40s, lay in the possibility raised by his very existence—that a writer could earn a living as a true free-lance, choosing assignments, defining projects, independent of the university on the one hand and the news magazines on the other...

...EDMUND WILSON'S INSTRUCTIONS Christmas Book Issue BY RUTH MATHEWSON From Princeton, when he was 17, Edmund Wilson wrote to a friend that he had just seen "Shaw's new masterpiece, Fanny's First Play...

...they also show us some of the costs...

...Or see Poe's journalism as "a bright vivid shaft that picks out the objects in the American literary landscape just as the search-light on the Albany nightboat picks out houses along the Hudson...

...they were not, strictly speaking, "discoveries" at all...

...permanence—he saw everything he wrote as socially urgent...

...In this pronouncement may be seen the early evidence of characteristics that were to shape Wilson's long career...

...Wilson's very celebrity, as well as his using and reusing his experiences in his writing, might have worked against the success of these letters, giving the reader a sense of dejd vu if not of saturation...

...One of the letters of Wilson's last years tells of dancing on his gouty leg at Iroquois ceremonies (He brought knowledge of us, wrote an Indian friend, "out of the anthropological...

...to Farrell—"Jim, if you want me to read your complete works, you will have to write shorter and more to the point...

...The interest in them lay instead precisely in that "atmosphere," those "juxtapositions" he urged on others...

...Pepys' Diary is a tome you should read...

...And, despite the unavailability of much of the correspondence on the Dead Sea Scrolls, we see Wilson going after that story for 20 years...

...and I marveled much at Mr...

...He concludes reassuringly: "You won't have any such baffling problems with Scott...

...He was trying to put questions...

...He also influenced some of the scholars...

...He may have been too reserved as a young man to track down a news story, but getting the "news" out of literature, the "story" out of the author he was reading or reviewing became a constant concern...

...Versions of the book's chapters ran intermittently in the New Yorker between 1948-61 and Wilson (who was never to have any permanent academic affiliation) also used this material as the subject of his Gauss Seminars at Princeton in '52-53, a Saltzburg Seminar in '54, and a Lowell Lectureship at Harvard in '61...

...The challenge was to make his journalism contribute to his longer standing projects...

...Wilson was also suspect in many English departments because he was a skillful "introductory critic," as Stanley Edgar Hyman called him, not only to the difficult moderns but to Pushkin, Dickens, Kipling, and many others...

...to Waldo Frank—"I believe you are disrespectful to the English language itself...

...instructs Mizener to put himself in the reader's place...

...it is necessary to spend some time taking off the wrapping paper and undoing the difficult knots of the cord tied around it, but the main thing is the gift inside, the subject matter...

...To Allen Tate, with whom he carried on spirited arguments for decades, Wilson gave many ideas for enlivening the Sewanee Review...

...Harry T. Moore is mistaken," he wrote in 1971, "to think that Patriotic Gore is a 'shapeless hodgepodge...

...The discoveries he made—of influences among symbolist poets, for instance, or biographical information on Dickens, or forgotten novels of the Civil War—were not "startling" to literary scholars...

...Gatsby...

...Teachers feared, with some justification, that students would find Wilson's essays a substitute for the originals...

...Sometimes a single letter ranges among Wilson's interests, bringing together elements rarely associated in our minds...

...Edmund Wilson was a journalist, but he defined that honorable profession in more protean terms than anyone in our time...

...Wilson was never a real newspaperman, although his first job was as a reporter for the New York Evening Sun in 1916, between graduation and enlistment in the Army...

...Who else would compare the wandering of the Negro characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin with the visits of Chichikov in Dead Souls for "their progressive revelation of...

...Always impatient to find out what a novel or a poem had to "tell" us about life, he found it a "grave fault" that the hero of Flaubert's Sentimental Education was a "non-conductor" of the momentous events in the novel, and complained to Morton Zabel in 1938 that "there was a good deal of bunk about the technical apparatus of non-participant observers...

...It was not the archeologists, but this "scholarly amateur," Yigael Yadin announced, who brought the scrolls to the attention of the lay public...

...keeps you in suspense and progresses, but Conrad cannot seem to do either...

...They were] alibis for not showing the main characters from the inside...

...To Dos Passos—The Adventures of a Young Man should be "sharper...

...Other comments are not so familiar...

...Fortunately, most of these letters are new to us, and the writer's widow, Elena Wilson, has exhibited great skill and economy in editing this anthology...

...I am an old concision fetishist...

...As he grew older, Wilson resented suggestions that his methods made for formlessness...

...In reaction against the impressionistic criticism of the day before yesterday," he wrote to R. P. Blackmur in '29, "there is a tendency entirely to eliminate any intimation of what the work under consideration looks, sounds, smells, or feels like...

...So home and to bed...

...My own strategy," he wrote in 1944, "has usually been, first to get the book for review, or reporting assignments to cover, on subjects in which I happened to be interested...

...He asks Blackmur to provide in his New Republic reviews more about an author's "atmosphere" than Hound and Horn and other journals did...