Wilson's Turning Point

...does not exists...

...tor a scintillating overview, as well as an intimate glimpse of the man, The Shores of Light, the collection ol articles from the '20s and '30s, for the Wilson who was the most percept the critic of his day, and, finally , Patriotte Gore, tor the legacy lie lett to an America that, to this day...

...WILSON'S TURNING POINT BY BARRY GEWEN To anyone familiar with Edmund Wilson's Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972, the project to publish his persona] notebooks and diaries must so far stand as a severe disappointment The letters are sparkling, refreshing, constantly informative and entertaining, the journals seem to die in the hand hough they reveal secrets, they yield little joy Surrounding the disclosures, the occasional character sketches and the vignettes are great stagnant stretches where a reader must choose between skimming along the surface or wading through clotted depths Wilson himself began publishing his private writings in 1967, managing, before his death in 1972, to bring out two volumes Both of these were rather specialized A Prelude assembled his earliest scribbblings, from a diary he kept in 1908 when he was 13 and went to Europe for the first time, to the comments he recorded while serving in the Army during World War I It is hard to imagine anyone other than Wilson scholars and his most loyal devotees caring to dip into it The second, Upstate, contained musings from his later years Since this book centered on Wilson's squire's life in Talcottville, New York, not on his literary work, it too had a limited appeal—at least to his regular readers (Surprisingly, after excerpts appeared in the New Yorker, Wilson received more letters than on anything he had written there since the mid-'40s, when he denounced detective stories He explained to the magazine's editor, William Shawn "That is evidently a part of the world that doesn't get written about, and the people are overjoyed that anybody should know they exist ") The journals most eagerly awaited by Wilson's admirers were the ones that began after World War 1, covering his yearsat thecenterof the nation's intellectual lite In 1975 The Twenties was published, and five years later The Thirties Although Wilson had a chance to do some work on both of these, the final editorial decisions were made by Leon Edel, the Henry James biographer, who also supplied useful introductions and comments to the two collections Perhaps a clue to the problems these books present is contained in a fragment from The Twenties Wilson observed about similar volumes by others " The great writer's notes, carefully preserved and published after his death (Baudelaire, Chekhov, Butler), though they may have been merely mechanical and meaningless jottings [are] the products of an instinct to write in its most rudimentary habitual twitching " Edel's Introduction offers a parallel idea "The notebooks are often the equivalent of a painter's sketchbook " That is, journals are keyholes on the creative process, revealing the author at work, the development of his ideas, the linkages between the man and his art In Wilson's case, those linkages are largely absent One does not think of him as an instinctive, spontaneous writer whose perceptions derive from lightning flashes of sense experience, his strengths are analysis, precision, lucidity, rigor, ratiocination, the qualities of a critic, not a poet Unfortunately, the entries in the notebooks are too often poetical, impressionistic, even lyrical There are too many passages like this one "Sunset the oystershell harbor—the water roughened and shell-blue, the Long Point lighthouse and the buildings behind clear white like bits of shell—then a sail and the lighthouse sharp white on a uniform dim pink-gray of sea and sky " In his private moments, Wilson's normally virile, granitic, no-nonsense prose has a tendeno to turn passive, spongy At times he seems to be practicing descriptive techniques for a future novel, or trying out a style that he knows to be foreign to him The two volumes of notebooks do have biographical interest They teem with personal trivia, and researchers will be mining them for years to come No doubt the most precious nuggets are the passages that deal with Wilson's multitudinous liaisons, and after reading page upon page of what he did to whom where and how, one begins to question the old definition of an intellectual as a person who occasionally thinks about something other than sex These sections add a dimension to Wilson's writings, showing that his rebellion against his Puritan background, a major theme especially in the essays from the '20s, was more than a revolt of abstract ideas His views were the products of lived experience Nonetheless, as books, The Twenties and The Thirties scarcely are strong enough to stand on their own There has come," Wilson wrote in a famous 1943 article, "a sort of break in the literary movement that was beginning to feel its first strength in the years 1912-16, at the time I was in college at Princeton the movement on which I grew up and with which I afterwards worked The first prophets of that movement are patriarchs now-classics or pseudo-classics " The decade of the '40s was a difficult period for Wilson, a transitional time when his patrician self-assurance was badly shaken by the changes in Anglo-American writing His friends Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop had died prematurely, as had Sherwood Anderson John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway were past their peaks, while T S Eliot, over in England, was perfecting his act as a live pterodactyl James Joyce had bequeathed the mild Finnegans Wake, stillborn at birth, and nothing to equal the masterworks of the '20s was looming on the literary horizon More depressing, in Wilson's view, the most talented young men of the new generation were retreating to the universities, abandoning the field to Hollywood and Henry Luce Never had Wilson, the workaday literary critic, felt so isolated "And now what is the next logical step...

...A struggle was going on inside Wilson He was being forced to remake himself—either that or become the fossil many academics already considered him to be This is the stuff of which memorable journals are made Certainly, whatever else one might expect from the notebooks of this decade, they were bound to be different from the previous collections Their forthcoming publication, therefore, was a cause for hopeful expectation Now The Forties (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 356 pp , $17 95) has appeared, once again edited with an Introduction by Leon Edel, and it is undeniably different from The Twentiesand The Thirties It is worse In a Foreword preceding his Introduction Edel refers to the "meagerness of the entries" for about half of the decade, but nothing could prepare the reader for just how meager these notebooks are Wilson was still being privately lyrical in the '40s "the little white violets with their lower hps finely lined as if with beards in purplish indelible ink " Other things had not changed, either "Amount of thought one gives to sex, even at my age, when one no longer needs to " Yet what utterly overwhelms this collection are Wilson's notes for future writings These are not the kind of sketchbook impressions that enrich our understanding of an author and his work, they are long prepared sections that simply reappear, sometimes word for word, in published books and articles More than half of the entries in The Forties would later become portions of Europe Without Baedeker, Red, Black, Blond and Olive, and the article "Edna St Vincent Millay," the epilogue to The Shores of Light Except for the rather dubious goal of completeness, there is little point in reprinting them here The Forties is the first wholly posthumous collection, and Edel seems to have forgotten Wilson's explanation of his own editorial practices in preparing The Twenties "I have omitted such passages as I have already used in my books " Without these entries, on the other hand, the volume would hardly exist Crisis, apparently, did not send Wilson running to his diary His introspections were not committed to print About his stormy eight-year marriage to Mary McCarthy, which ended in divorce in 1946, he made few notes Nor did he record his feelings on the War or most of the other momentous events taking place m the world during these years The Forties provides only the most fleeting suggestions of his intellectual quandary and its eventual resolution, as when a look through a family photo album reminded Wilson that the past of the original White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans, the past he knew and was a part of, had dwindled into near-irrelevancy in the 20th-century United States Something deep stirred inside him "I have often felt, and then felt most poignantly, that since I have the ability to express myself in writing, which hasn't appeared to the same extent among the rest of my family, that I must tell about them so that they should be expressed and should not die out without their goodness, their enjoyments and their pathos being put on record " As the published writings that followed would show, the feelings he was experiencing were not familial so much as racial, tribal Wasp America had been disappearing beneath a flood of new arrivals since the turn of the century, to be replaced by what9 ("Pluralism," weallrecite, withlessthan total conviction ) Inevitably, for someone of Wilson's stock and background, there was sadness tinged with regret in the realization that we had become a nation of immigrants Much had been lost and the gain was uncertain Others in his position who reacted against America's social upheaval more bitterly than he—Henry Adams, John Jay Chapman, TS Eliot—retreated into a sour nativism Paradoxically, cosmopolitanism ofttimes became a means for shutting themselves off Wilson was as far from being a racist as was humanly possible In The Twenties he note damoment of personal anti-Semitism and promptly reprimanded himself Later, he became obsessed with minorities, the Jews in particular The method he found for preserving his heritage was altogether healthier than Adams' or Eliot's He wrote an elegy to it, producing the book, Patriotic Gore, that is probably his masterpiece t must have taken enormous strength of will for him to work his way out of the woods of the 1940s in this fashion, but retreat or surrender were never part of his nature Almost his entire career was spent doing battle, until, by the end of his life, he actually looked somewhat like a ferocious bulldog In the '20s, after getting out of the Army, he fought to escape his background, just as he would subsequently struggle to come to grips with it Wilson has left us a fascinating portrait of the kind of person he might have become if he had not made the effort In an otherwise sympathetic, even tender piece written in 1939, the now-forgotten essayist Logan Pearsall Smith, like Wilson a bookish, East Coast wasp, is variously described as a pedant, bore, snob, "the last and faintest incarnation of Eliot's Mr Prufrock " One imagines him playing the same role in Wilson's consciousness as the nice Jewish boy does in Norman Mailer's Smith once declared "People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading " To Wilson this statement must have sounded like chalk scraping on a blackboard He grounded his criticism on the links between literature and experience, applauding such devourers of life as Byron, O'Neill and D H Lawrence He was quick to praise the language of Hemingway, Mencken, Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein for Us echo of the streets, and to upbraid anyone he suspected of aridity or provincialism Wilson's hospitable intelligence ranged well beyond the literary works of which he was so outstanding a reader He wrote about burlesque, the Ziegfeld Follies, magicians, always with a connoisseur's eye, distinguishing the energetic, lowdown Minsky Brothers' Follies, say, from the sanitized uptown shows, or explaining the brilliance of Harry Houdini Professional excellence in any form excited him This passion for quality, this democratic receptivity, rested on an optimism that was unusual for his generation Though never a flag waver, Wilson, it is important to remember, was one of the few major writers in the '20s who did not leave the country Genuinely believing America had the potential to lead the world intellectually (so long as it did not succumb to "the indifferentism and defeatism of Europe"), he complained about the negativism of much current U S literature, even its masterpieces, decried the irony of sophisticates that masked a dangerous nihilism, and wondered openly "whether the time hasn't arrived for the intellectuals, etc , to identify themselves a little more with the general life of the country " When he let such sentiments carry him too far, he could sound like the most phihstine booster To John Peale Bishop he wrote in 1928, "I'm sorry to hear that you've been feeling depressed, but I don't wonder that you are What on earth vou want to live in France for, 1 can't imagine ' Escapism was contemptible to him in any form In a memorable 1929 article, "T S Eliot and the Church of England," he cut through the poses of many of his era's greatest talents to lay bare their particular refuges from the real world "In the case of H L Mencken, it is a sort of German university town in the case of certain American writers from the top layer of the old South, it is the old-fashioned Southern plantation with Ezra Pound, it is a medieval Provence with Dos Passos.it is an army of workers and MTS Eliot's case, it is a world of 17th century churchmen " Eliot, with his High Church pretensions and enormous critical stature, was a favorite target, against whom Wilson continued to conduct guerrilla warfare for years In the early '30s, Wilson's earnest commitment to the world around him led easily to that union of theory and praxis called Communism—his own highly individualized variety, to be sure—and just as easily away later in the decade, after he understood the true nature of Stalinist totalitarianism But the failure of the Commumst promise coupled with the profound changes in American literature he was witnessing were a double blow that left him reeling His life-affirming optimism drained away His mood turned negative, crotchety The essays of the '40s are his most dessicated and directionless The ghost of Logan Pearsall Smith beckoned Nevertheless, Wilson managed to avoid intellectual death, and he did it through a brilliant reversal, by turning himself inside out Previously, he had spoken from a coherent center, aristocratically defining his role as an educator who was broadening public horizons with his explications of modernist literature and Marxist thought For a more heterogeneous country that lacked a common tradition, he continued to make a contribution by speaking to the center, albeit one, he understood, that had not yet formed To the new pluralist America groping toward a national culture, Wilson became the most outstanding interpreter of the old wasp America In his autobiographical writings, in many of his essays of the 1950s, and above all in Patriotic Gore, his magisterial study of U S writing from the Civil War and post-Civil War periods, hehmned a civilization in us death throes, with all of its confusions, heroism and villainy To the end, Wilson remained a voluminous writer, and even in death his letters and journals continue to pour from the presses The reader wishing to familiarize himself with the work is confronted with a forest The task of exploration has now been made significantly easier with the publication of The Portable Edmund Wilson (Viking, 647 pp , $18 75), edited and with a fine Introduction by Lewis M Dabney, who is currently at work on a study of Wilson It is an excellent sampler, thoughtfully selected to convey the contours of a protean career For those who wish to go more directly to the source, I would suggest from mv own reading (1 do not pretend to have read all of Wilson) three volumes as starters Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972...