EDMUND WILSON

...In the tireless persistence of his critical thinking Wilson resembled Sainte-Beuve, but his craggy, crotchety independence and his aloofness from schools and systems were characteristic of English criticism at its best...

...He had total allergic immunity to the dust on long-neglected books...

...Bernard DeVoto, who resembled Wilson in prickly independence of mind, confidence in his own judgments, and a taste for good whiskey, was vastly pleased when Wilson, in the 1950s, turned his attention to American Civil War literature...

...But these reappraisals and adjustments seem unimportant somehow when one examines again this remarkable study of the intellectual background of the Revolution...

...In spite of his trim technique, I'm afraid he was rather trashy...

...A shelf of novels by Albion W. Tourgee, say, or George W. Cable was no roadblock to the survey of Civil War fiction for his book Patriotic Gore...

...I told him that I sometimes got up at four o'clock in the morning to read old reviews of my books...

...Something very much like this may be aptly said about the collision of Wilson's mind with Michelet's...

...He accurately described the book as "a handful of disconnected pieces written at various times when I happened to be interested in the various authors...

...Their disagreements, which began amiably, appear to have ended, unhappily, in mutual antagonism, a clash of two proud and learned men...

...McCann, a free lance writer, edited "Ambrose Bierce's America...

...Later on, when he wrote the chapter on Bierce for Patriotic Gore, his opinion, I noticed, was somewhat revised...

...His work had its roots in journalism, and to the last he remained a literary journalist...

...Wilson, though a man of enormous erudition, never identified himself with the universities...

...Mike Nichols asked him one day why James Thurber, who was acting in a Broadway show made from his own writings, felt "he has to tell us about the people who come back stage to see him...

...When all is said, the real test of the book's enduring stature is simply this: Can it be read and reread with profit and pleasure now, thirty-two years after it was published: The answer is an unqualified "yes...

...Jason Epstein, who visited Wilson on Cape Cod not long before he died, noticed a forty-volume set of Walter Scott...

...Perhaps he is a bit late," DeVoto declared, "but he will turn out a masterpiece...

...To his wife, Elena, who is Russian, Wilson addressed an affectionate letter, as the book's introduction, praising her "undiscouraged patience with my effort to understand Russian customs and states of mind...

...He simply plowed through the stuff...

...Epstein asked...

...Wilson's capacity to organize large bodies of material and to infuse them with his passion for biographical con-gruities, and his readiness to identify his own mind and methods with those of his subjects were never put to more effective use...

...His interest, of course, was aroused early and continued throughout his life...

...His glancing shots at academia probably reflected an amiable penchant for mischievous fun as much as a distaste for costive pedantry...

...A piece on Pushkin was first published in 1943...

...The traditional man of letters has all but been replaced by academic specialists, mass media pundits, and cultural emissaries...

...Mr...

...Read them," Wilson said, tartly...

...reviewed by William McCann Edmund Wilson would doubtless have been pleased with the discerning eulogies by Wilfrid Sheed (who wrote a particularly good one), Malcolm Cowley, Jason Epstein, and others...

...But Wilson's respect for solid learning, wherever found, must have made him uneasy at times in these skirmishes...

...Wilson's method is to find the basic intention and mood of a work and then connect them with the author's life...

...I don't think, though, he is really very good...

...DeVoto didn't live to see the book, but in the opinion of many readers (this one among them) Patriotic Gore is indeed Wilson's masterpiece, though perhaps as many prefer Axel's Castle or To the Finland Station...

...I have also been charged with having given much too amiable a picture of Lenin, and I believe that this criticism has been made not without justification...

...Wilson replied that "depressing though it might seem, getting older, for a writer, did not necessarily give you self-confidence...

...and his role, which claims for itself, on the one hand, no academic sanctions, involves, on the other hand, a more direct responsibility to the reader," he describes as well as anyone can his own objectives...

...Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Evgini Onegin," he wrote, "is something of a disappointment...

...the last essay in the book, "Solzhenitsyn," appeared in August, 1971...

...A Window on Russia comprises a baker's dozen of Wilson's magazine articles on Russian literature and literary figures...

...What are you going to do with them...

...I had no premonition," he says, "that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known, and Stalin the most cruel and unscrupulous of merciless Russian tsars...

...The longest, and I think the most interesting, essay is "Turgenev and the Life-Giving Drop...

...and the reviewer, though a personal friend of Nabokov—for whom he feels a warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation—and an admirer of much of his work does not propose to mask his disappointment...

...Here his identification with the old Anglo-Saxon America as exemplified in the remote village of Tal-cottville, New York, and his family home and friends is set down with memorable skill and directness...

...A postcard arrived in a few days from Well-fleet...

...And when Wilson asserts that Michelet "is simply a man going to the sources and trying to get down on record what can be learned from them...

...Their tributes, however, would perhaps have reminded him of Walter Raleigh's half-serious remark, "You can't tell whether an author is alive until he's dead...

...In the new introduction for To the Finland Station (the book was first published in 1940), Wilson recoils to some extent from an earlier enchantment with the Russian revolutionary movement...

...An interest in the writings of Ambrose Bierce gave me the motive and the temerity, years ago, to write to Wilson protesting his omission of Bierce from an essay on writers of tales of the macabre and the supernatural...

...Edmund Wilson was the last American (V.S...

...For fifty years Wilson's intellectual voltage and omnivorous appetite for print in a half-dozen languages never flagged...

...Well, Edmund Wilson is gone now, a writer with an imposing physical presence (described by one acquaintance as "the engaging appearance of a British ship captain closely related to Henry James"), and a ubiquitous critic who, in an age of specialization, could write about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Iroquois Indians, or a Hungarian dictionary, and be well prepared to take on the experts when he published...

...From the collision of Michelet's mind with Vico's," Wilson wrote, "it is hardly too much to say that a whole new philosophical-artistic world was born: the world of re-created history...

...We are not likely to see his kind again...

...I had meant to mention Bierce in my article," Wilson said, "but, when I came to write, forgot about him...

...It was characteristic of Wilson that after arduous study and mastery of the subtleties of the Russian language he confidently challenged Vladimir Nabokov in a dispute over the English translation of Pushkin...

...Pritchett survives in England) to represent a long, distinguished line of broadly and humanely based journalistic critics, whose great predecessors were Charles Sainte-Beuve and William Hazlitt...

...And if any lingering doubt remained, it was erased by the last book Wilson published before he died, Upstate...

...His exposition of theories and doctrines is masterly, and it is so adroitly and effectively woven into absorbing biographical material, on Michelet, Renan, Taine, Anatole France, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Marx, Engels, Lenin, as to support the impression of one critic that "we are left with the very Emersonian and rather un-Marxist feeling that it is individuals who count in the last resort, that history is made by men of their determination, their passion, their steadfastness...

...His attack on the Modern Language Association in 1967 for what he called "the ineptitude of its pretensions" to edit and reprint the American classics did not endear him to the academic fraternity...

...Bierce's Civil War stories, at least, were not "trashy...

...In one of the best short essays on Wilson ever written, Norman Podoretz in 1958 said that "his work cannot be fully understood unless we remember that his voice has always been the voice of old Anglo-Saxon America, even when it was insisting on the greatness of Joyce and Proust and Valery, even when it was declaring its intense admiration of Marx and Lenin...

...From the first chapters, on Jules Michelet, to the last, on Nikolai Lenin, the book is still resonant with intellectual excitement...

...Each work of Wilson's that appeared later confirmed the astuteness of Podoretz's perception...

...As Alfred Kazin said, "His great gift is an ability to get into the body of the work discussed, and his capacity for exposition is such that as he presents it the mere summary of a novel seems to throw light at every point...

...Despite his generally acknowledged eminence as a critic, Wilson experienced periods of dejection and self-doubt...

...Some of the best appraisals of his work come from university men like Lionel Trilling and Gilbert Highet, though there are professors, as Frederick Crews reminds us, "who may well have formed their taste on Axel's Castle and their politics on To the Finland Station, but who are now sufficiently wise to call Edmund Wilson superficial...