Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s \u0026 30s by Edmund Wilson

Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s \u0026 30s Reviews

• 
  Aaron

  Writing a Goodreads-style review for such an intellectual critique as Edmund Wilson conjures the image of what exactly Wilson would make of this contemporary mode of literary discourse. It's easy to envision the same critique that cringed at "school essay" writing of many literary reviewers driven to apoplexy at the shallow tossed off thoughts of today.
  
  However, Wilson's repeated exhortations to writers escaping their provincial perspectives makes me hope that Wilson could find something worthwhile in the Web 2.0 crowd-sourced production of opinion. What made Wilson most frustrating when, despite his advocacy for capturing the whole of America in writing, seems to write from a cartoonishly narrow perspective. This myopia is perhaps best captured when he writes "Persia, like Arcadia, is a country of which no one knows anything, we may be free, without fear of reprehension, to write anything of it we please; but that, in the case of Venice, we are certain to have among our readers many persons who have been there, and whom it will displease to find the scenes inappropriate or the manners reported inexactly." In this era of a panoply of voices such a claim would certainly be impossible.
• 
  Ben

  A man has withdrawn from the tumult of American life into the seclusion of a house in Baltimore. He is unmarried and has surrounded himself with three thousand books. From this point of vantage he watches the twentieth century with detached and ironic dismay. A not ungenial materialist, he reflects that all human activities are, after all, mainly physical in origin: inspiration is a function of metabolism; death is an acidosis; love is a biological phenomenon; idealism is insanity. But the body is capable of much enjoyment; why worry about its obvious supremacy? As long as there is Chicken a la Maryland and plenty of liquor from the boot-leggers, as long as it is possible to read Conrad and hear Bach and Beethoven occasionally, why should a man of aristocratic temperament be particularly disturbed about anything? Let the capitalist exploit the wage-slave and the wage-slave blow up the capitalist; let political charlatans and scoundrels pick the pockets of the Republic; let the women run the men to ground and the men break their hearts for the women; let the people go off to the wars and destroy each other by the billion. They can never rob Mencken of his sleep nor spoil a single dinner for him. Outside, it is all a question of Christianity and democracy, but Mencken does not believe in either, so why should he take part in the brawl? What has he to do with the mob except to be diverted by its idiocy? He may occasionally attend a political convention to gratify a "taste for the obscene" or entertain his speculative mind by predicting the next catastrophe, but, on the whole, the prodigious din and activity and confusion of the nation roars along without touching him particularly; it is all to him "but as the sound of lyres and flutes."
  
  Something like this is the comic portrait which Mencken has painted of himself; he has even pretended that it is the character in which he prefers to be accepted. But there is, behind this comic mask, a critic, an evangelist and an artist; there is a mind of extraordinary vigor and a temperament of extraordinary interest, and neither of these has ever yet been examined as seriously as it should have been. Mencken has been left far too much to the rhapsodies of his disciples and the haughty sneers of his opponents. Indeed, he has assumed such importance as an influence in American thought that it is high time some one subjected him to a drastic full-length analysis. The present writer has only space for the briefest of suggestions.
• 
  Paul Montag

  I have just finished reading The Shores of Light, a book of essays by Edmund Wilson written in the 1920’s and 30’s. I do not think it, overall, as interesting as the other works of criticism of his that I read immediately before it: The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, and most especially, Classics and Commercials. This volume does not deal with literature straightaway as much as the other volumes do. There is nothing in The Shores of Light like the masterful and lengthy essays in The Wound and the Bow on Dickens and Kipling and Edith Wharton, except perhaps for an extremely moving portrait of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Wilson says that at one point in the 1930’s his focus turned heavily to politics, and most specifically, to the Russian Revolution, an interest which ended in producing one of his most profound works, To the Finland Station. When he is writing about literature in The Shores of Light, especially in the latter half, it is more apt to be about poets than prose writers. And when he is writing about prose writers, he is apt to cover the same ones more than once, like Hemingway and Thornton Wilder. As with any book of essays, some entries will interest the reader more than others. I was not overly fond of his fictional sketches that appeared periodically as interludes, and which he wrote especially for this volume, but on the other hand I was grateful for his introducing me to the art of Peggy Bacon, and for including a brief little essay about Swift’s poetry, which includes one of the most interesting poems I have ever read. But there aren’t quite as many little treasures to be found like this poem of Swift’s as one would expect in a book of this size coming from an author whose tastes are as eclectic and discerning as Wilson’s. This would just further go to show, I think, how much at this period he was writing about politics. One of the more interesting essays is one he wrote about the climate of magazine publishing of his day, and what respective editors and authors need to know in pursuit of that trade. There are 640 pages in The Shores of Light, and yet one feels somehow that there is not as much variety as in the other works mentioned above, all of which are shorter, in most cases much shorter. And yet, for all that, what makes The Shores of Light, despite its rather heavy-going title, such an exquisite delight to read is the excellent writing of Edmund Wilson, which is both magisterial and easy going, honest and with a contagious rhythm. I read all the above-mentioned works straight through in the Library of America series, adding up to a total of 1,550 pages. I have never read so many pages of criticism in a row as this. Perhaps one reason The Shores of Light impressed me the least of these works is because I was growing weary of critical writing. But what I had not grown weary of at all was Wilson’s writing style. From the first page to the last of these volumes, his prose was a delight to read. He writes freely, without concern for toeing any party line, whether literary or political. His vocabulary is large, and his sentences, while sometimes elaborate, are clean and clear, with a charm coming from his unique perspective. While I would do well, it would seem, to read some fiction after so many pages in a row of criticism, I wonder how much time should be allowed to pass before returning to another book of his for how much pleasure his writing gives me.
• 
  Geoff

  Great find on the sale rack at Politics & Prose- best bookstore in DC. This thing's a monster, probably will be on the "currently-reading" shelf awhile...
• 
  Lysergius

  Wonderful criticism full of wit and insight. A must for any serious student of literature.
• 
  Sean

  Reading The Shores of Light.