Edmund Wilson, _The Fifties_

 WHEN I WAS in graduate school in the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were a few critics/theorists whose names, when dropped, would elicit wise head-nods from one’s peers: Adorno, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson. I was too cowardly to mention my own great allegiance, except when I had had too many drinks, but there was a secret shrine in my heart for Edmund Wilson. 

Wilson was a bit dated, not very theoretically rigorous, had tended to publish in the New Yorker and similarly unscholarly publications. His politics were left, but in an Old Left way, and well short of 1980s sophistication about race and gender. His prose was lucid and graceful, which seemed a sign of shallowness at the time. You knew Derrida and Jameson were the real deal because you could barely understand what they were driving at.

I loved the lucid and graceful prose, however; I loved that he had learned as many languages as he had and could read the great Russian novels and the Hebrew scriptures in the original languages. I loved that even when writing about relatively minor figures—James Branch Cabell and Henry Blake Fuller, say—he read the whole corpus of their work. An essay by Wilson on anybody was a portrait in the round, a full tour.

The north side of Chicago had a used book store on every other block in those days, and with a few years of diligent scouting I acquired and devoured Axel’s Castle, The Wound and the Bow, The Triple Thinkers, To the Finland Station, A Window on Russia, The Dead Sea Scrolls, and my very favorite, Patriotic Gore. I read through the collected reviews and literary journalism: The Shores of Light, Classics and Commercials, The Bit Between my Teeth, The Devils and Canon Barham. 

His journals had been published, too, edited by Leon Edel. I started in on the first volume, The Twenties, in keen anticipation, but didn’t get far. Wilson had a habit, in those days, of writing long passages of natural description—a writing exercise recommended to him by a beloved professor of his at Princeton, Christian Gauss. I can take a certain amount of landscape writing, but not pages and pages, and I just bogged down.

Having heard that he to some extent had abandoned the habit in his  later years, I last year started in on The Fifties. It was like meeting up with an old, old friend. Here was the Wilson I loved, ruminating on what he was reading and the people he was meeting, which included not only various informants behind such books as Apologies to the Iroquois and The Dead Sea Scrolls, but also W. H. Auden, Dawn Powell, André Malraux, Vladimir Nabokov…Max Beerbohm, of all people. 

Should I try The Sixties? I think so. I may even try The Forties to see whether he had already started getting away from the landscape compulsion.