The Portable Edmund Wilson by Edmund Wilson

The Portable Edmund Wilson Reviews

• 
  Jonfaith

  In his novels from beginning to end, Dickens is making the same point always: that to the English governing classes the people they govern are not real.
  
  While I age and sigh (waste and pine) I benefit from the company of elders, the shoulders of giants and the aegis of those carrying the fire. Prowling the depths of criticism is often a balm to my soul. Last weekend I read James Wood and Bakhtin and pondered the messy open-endedness of novels and the divine gift which is laughter. I felt at loss of how to represent our emotional memory and I was grateful for the chance, the leisure to even consider this a problem. I have been reading this fat volume of Wilson's for months, savoring bits and skipping a few which were culled from the larger works I'm going to read soon: Finland Station and Patriotic Gore. I truly loved the pieces on Dickens and Marx. It is my personal laurel to recognize that the critic persuaded me that I need to read the author. The reasons themselves percolate, overcharged. The reflections on Upstate New York likewise glow with an informed memory as do the strange visions of Israel. As with most anthologies, one is left savoring yet frustrated.
• 
  Robert

  The Edmund Wilson Reader is a tour de force comprising many tours de force: his essays on Ulysses, on Marx and Engles, on Dickens, on Hemingway are brilliant. So is his memoir of Edna St. Vincent Millay and his assessment of Leon Trotsky. Only a few literary critics have had Wilson's range and depth, someone who despite his brilliance worked as hard at literature as a construction worker. I suppose the same could be said of Samuel Johnson...and Harold Bloom...and George Steiner, but that's about it in terms of English-language literary criticism.
  
  For a single essay--let's say something on Henry James--Wilson would "work up" essentially everything James wrote (if he didn't know most of James' oeuvre already) and then propose ways of assessing James as a whole: the early versus middle versus late James, the social James versus the aesthetic/moral James, the American James versus the European/English James.
  
  Wilson did the same with even broader subjects: the Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, or American Civil War literature, especially Southern literature. And with Canadian literature. And so on.
  
  There was a time, starting with Samuel Johnson and perhaps concluding with Wilson or the much younger Harold Bloom, when literature understood broadly was taken as a kind of cultural imperative, a North Star embodying values and principles essential to understanding and guiding human affairs. A writer like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson's friend, understood that Wilson had made himself into an arbiter of how one assessed life seriously, by means of literature, and in the end, Wilson became the conservator, one might say, of Fitzgerald's literary remains. Glimpses of their relationship show up in this reader.
  
  Wilson's assessment of Hemingway and Joyce seem to me more or less permanently sufficient. Little more need be said. Hemingway wrote singularly superb short stories at the outset of his career; his art was of a very high order at that time; but then he experienced a kind of leaf fall, the pages of his works fluttering downward into self-parody and self-flattery.
  
  Sensibly enough, Wilson also tells us something we all know instinctively about Joyce: on first reading Ulysses one neither picks up on or sees the necessity of all the Homeric substructure. That stuff was more important to Joyce than to the average reader. Academic critics would cry, "No, no! That stuff is the essence of Joyce's genius!" Sorry, Wilson counters, Joyce's genius was devising the multi-vocal reality of modern consciousness. This often is called "stream of consciousness" but stream of consciousness hardly does justice to the stunning parodies, lyricisms, metaphors, discordances, and tonalities that Joyce devised for Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, and Molly Bloom...making them seem plausible by virtue of his effortless literary virtuosity.
  
  I read this volume by flipping through it, finding topics I considered irresistible, and diving in. The editing by Lewis Dabney is fine, but there's no reason to enslave oneself to it. We all have our interests, be it Baudelaire and Proust or Pushkin and Nabokov. Only someone like Wilson is interested in everything and possesses the discipline and intellect to master it.
  
• 
  Justin

  A one man history of modern lit crit, and MORE!. He seems to feel equally positively toward textual and historical interpretations. I most enjoyed the Dickens piece, the Marx/Engels piece, and the thing on US Grant's memoirs. The Marx/Engels in particular is one of the most vivid and sympathetic short portraits I've read. You see Marx outside of any handed down image you might've formed of him - telling jokes to his kids in his gruesome flat. Wilson gets at how the poverty, ugliness, and illness of Marx's day to day might have influenced the grotesque nightmarish imagery of Das Kapital, and indeed its entire worldview. Wilson was a red sympathizer/socialist himself though, so he isn't pat or simplistic about Marx's work and influence and assigning "reasons" to either. It's possible he went too far in his effort to humanize Marx - the "poor sick everyfamilyman tribute" occasionally borders on bathos.
  
  Thoughts on Being Bibliographed is the funniest, written from the perspective of a still-active writer not ready to be canonized and put under glass by the academics. (He obliged w/ the anthology for Princeton anyway.) Of course I liked his Weekend at Ellersie w/ Scott and Zelda, and his letters. I must now get the collection of his correspondence w/ Nabokov. Must also read Eugene Onegin, brilliantly explored here. The upstate NY sketches are charming, if over-heavy on the minutest scenery detail - funny when you get to his letter to Dos Passos that criticizes describing every building on a given block instead of a sample few.
  
  Love the Portables for commuting convenience reasons. After the Nabokov I'd like to read Shores of Light, at some point.
• 
  Stacey

  I haven't read this. I just read the following quote on the Henry James entry on Wikipedia.
  
  Edmund Wilson famously compared James's objectivity to Shakespeare's:
  
  One would be in a position to appreciate James better if one compared him with the dramatists of the seventeenth century—Racine and Molière, whom he resembles in form as well as in point of view, and even Shakespeare, when allowances are made for the most extreme differences in subject and form. These poets are not, like Dickens and Hardy, writers of melodrama — either humorous or pessimistic, nor secretaries of society like Balzac, nor prophets like Tolstoy: they are occupied simply with the presentation of conflicts of moral character, which they do not concern themselves about softening or averting. They do not indict society for these situations: they regard them as universal and inevitable. They do not even blame God for allowing them: they accept them as the conditions of life.[28:]
  
• 
  Matt

  
  Handy-dandy compilation of some of the best and lesser known works of a great man of letters.
• 
  Julio Pino

  "There are times when I think the second worst thing to happen to Abraham Lincoln---after being shot by Booth---was to have Carl Sandburg write his biography"---Edmund Wilson, on Sandburg's Pulitzer-Prize winning life of Lincoln. That was Edmund Wilson at his finest---tough like a diamond, caustic, and always ready with a memorable turn of phrase. The label of "national treasure" belonged to Wilson more than any other man or woman in the American literary scene in the twentieth century, while being so shy that F. Scott Fitzgerald nicknamed him "Bunny". How rare that a critic and historian of literature should dive into every topic under the sea and bring back treasure. There is Wilson the intellectual historian (TO THE FINLAND STATION; a study of the origins of Marxism); Wilson the literary critic (PATRIOTIC GORE, a massive survey of the literature of the U.S. Civil War); Wilson the polemicist: when the Internal Revenue Service accused him of not paying back taxes on his royalties he replied with a scathing pamphlet, THE COLD WAR AND THE INCOME TAX; and the Wilson of his collected JOURNALS, which touch on every item from his sexual conquests to the demise in quality of the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW. Like many outstanding critics, Wilson was a failed writer, with one mediocre novel to his credit, MEMOIRS OF HECATE COUNTY (though, to his honor, it was banned as obscene in many states, particularly in the South). Wilson also had his blind spots. In the Sixties he declared he knew nothing of Latin American literature and cared even less. No matter. THE PORTABLE EDMUND WILSON is the best one volume testimony of a literary lion.
• 
  Michael

  Passionate, flawed and dated. Totally worth reading. If you got nothing else to read.