Alert Bullfrog
Sklar, Robert
Alert Bullfrog The Bit Between My Teeth: a literary chronicle of 1950-1965, by Edmund Wilson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 694 pp. $7.50. Edmund Wilson: a study of literary vocation in our time,...
...Edmund Wilson: a study of literary vocation in our time, by Sherman Paul...
...Rather than elder statesman, this is the role he aspires to...
...It is inspiring," Wilson writes of Igor Stravinsky, "to have the spectacle of such a sustained career—the artist always himself and always doing something different, but always doing everything intensely with economy, perfect craftsmanship, and style...
...But gradually the tone becomes stronger and more assertive, reaching a climactic moment in Wilson's discussion of Doctor Zhi-vago, "one of the great events in man's literary and moral history...
...Wilson has given us a composite portrait of those whom he calls "the resistant minority," particularly the old men among them who have pursued their own course, as he says of Cabell, with "courage and consistency," with "steadfastness and self-respect...
...In the essays of the early Fifties the predominant tone is nostalgia for the lost "pleasant world of his youth," as he says of Max Beerbohm...
...What Wilson has given us, in short, is an elderly crank's guide to a great many other elderly eccentrics...
...The moment was ripe for his elevation in 1962, when he published his study of American literature in the Civil War era, Patriotic Gore...
...And so Wilson celebrates the bold and original minds, the creators of new worlds and more compelling fantasies, no matter how far they deviate from the literary or moral or political orthodoxies...
...But Wilson wrote an introduction to that book so bitterly antagonistic to his country that the moment was passed...
...and subsequently his small tirade, The Cold War and the Income Tax, sealed his fate as a crank and an outsider...
...But it would be a mistake to suppose from this that Wilson is out of touch, or old-fashioned, or unable to cope with the new...
...Walter Lippmann and Reinhold Niebuhr are distinguished examples of figures who play this role, and Edmund Wilson might have been another had he not fought so vigorously against it...
...237 pp...
...Instead Wilson is interested in James Branch Cabell, Algernon Charles Swinburne, the Marquis de Sade, Edward Gorey, Mario Praz, Max Nomad, Boris Pasternak, and several score others who seem to share in common only the fact that they are neither young nor modish...
...So it is rather as an elderly eccentric than as an elderly statesman that Wilson, celebrating his seventieth birthday, and now the subject of an intellectual biography by Sherman Paul, presents this collection of his occasional essays covering the past fifteen years...
...He is one of those persons, as he says in criticism of T. S. Eliot, who accepts no orthodoxy, and thus is unable to recognize a heresy...
...Rather The Bit Between My Teeth strikes me as one of the most calculated among all Wilson's books in its choice of subject matter, its tone, and its treatment...
...So at seventy Wilson is still very much himself, not an institution but an individual personality, who appears in the jacket photograph —to borrow from his own stock of images—much like a bullfrog: alert, curious, enigmatic, and one who can make his voice heard...
...Reviewed by Robert Sklar For a people so oriented toward youth, Americans pay exceptional deference to a large number of elderly sages...
...Hardly half a dozen figures about whom Wilson writes were born in the present century...
...this is why, at seventy, he works on with the bit between his teeth...
...Yet Wilson has never been able to escape attitudes which make him less magical and less liberating, particularly a deadening sense of disgust with the human race that expresses itself, here as in essays of thirty years ago, in ugly and stifling images from the insect world...
...Anyone looking for "a literary chronicle of 1950-1965" in a conventional sense certainly will not find it here...
...What matters even more than the nature of the art is the nature of the artist...
...Finally it is the artist as a unique personality, a magical creator of freedom, or as Wilson says of Mario Praz in his final essay, "a genie" who brings the good things in life—cosmopolitan culture, past glories, freedom from narrow prejudices, a conviction of being at the center of the world, an appetite for rich materials...
...Wilson makes clear that Pasternak's novel is a criticism not only of the Soviet Union but of all societies where centralism and conformity threaten "the great literary tradition of bold thinking and original art," and among them he places the United States...
...5.75...
...You will look here for Saul Bellow or Norman Mailer or Allen Ginsberg in vain...
...University of Illinois Press...
...Already it has been compared unfavorably to his more formal literary studies, like Axel's Castle and Patriotic Gore, which fit the statesman mold far more than the immense gatherings of journalistic pieces like The Shores of Light, Classics and Commercials, and this new one...
...This was not Wilson's purpose in the early postwar days when he wrote the first of these essays, and it is of great interest to follow his design as it takes form over the years...
Vol. 30 • May 1966 • No. 5
