Edmund Wilson, _The Devils and Canon Barham_

I DISCOVERED EDMUND Wilson, the closest thing the United States ever had to Samuel Johnson, in graduate school--his Axel's Castle, a study of some key high modernists (Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Joyce, Proust, and Stein) was on the reading list for one off my area exams. 

Wilson was not fashionable then (late 1970s) and as far as I can tell is even less fashionable now, but I couldn't get enough. So, instead of mastering Foucault and Lacan, which would have been a much shrewder move, I was scouring Chicago's used bookstores for the likes of Patriotic Gore, The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, A Window on Russia, To the Finland Station, and The Dead Sea Scrolls, all of which I devoured. 

I particularly enjoyed the volumes collecting his literary journalism: The Shores of Light (the 1920s and 1930s), Classics and Commercials (mainly the 1940s), and The Bit Between my Teeth (1950s up to about 1965). The old knock on C. A. Sainte-Beuve (the closest thing France ever had to Samuel Johnson) was that he was insightful about canonical writers but bad at judging his own contemporaries; Wilson, however, was brilliant unto prescient at identifying those of his contemporaries who would be of interest later (as his choice of subjects in Axel's Castle, published in 1931, shows). He was just as fascinating about writers whom later generations largely forgot: James Branch Cabell, Mike Gold, Elinor Wylie, Kay Boyle, Archibald MacLeish.

The Devils and Canon Barham is the last in the series--I only found it a few years ago and only read it recently. It's shorter than the other volumes, with just eleven pieces, but it has all of Wilson's characteristic virtues, especially his ability to make lesser-known writers (Harold Frederic, Henry Blake Fuller, Richard Harris Barham) sound worth tracking down. It also contains Wilson's last great attack, "The Fruits of the MLA." 

Wilson's pet project in his later years was an American equivalent of the French Pléiade editions--compact, well-bound, affordable, and expertly edited versions of the collected works of the nation's classic authors. The project eventually came to fruition in the Library of America, but in Wilson's lifetime the path to its accomplishment was blocked by the Modern Languages Association, with its endorsements of this or that scholarly edition--the Ohio Hawthorne, the Northwestern-Newberry Melville--as definitive. The problem was, as Wilson's angry and hilarious broadside repeatedly demonstrates, was that these editions turned out to be bulky, expensive, clogged with textual apparatus, and not at all the kind of thing anyone but a graduate student would care to spend time with. 

Fortunately, the Library of America did eventually come along, and I see that it, oh so fittingly, has republished The Shores of Light and Classic and Commercials along with other Wilson volumes of the 1930s and 1940s. The Bit Between my Teeth must not be too far behind, nor The Devils and Canon Barham much behind that. That will be a great day.