The Man by the Fire: Edmund Wilson
In common with other notable creators, Edmund Wilson possessed a sensibility that at its intensest achieved a fusion of time and place so that a particular period took on the architectures of an edifice—had corridors, chambers, and neglected corners—and a particular locale breathed forth a history, manifested itself temporally. At the end of his career he sought to embody the fusion in his life as well as in his writing. (p. 44)
The fusion that he acted out as well as rendered in prose at the close of his career informs the great body of Wilson's writings on American themes almost from the start. The crucial term of place that entered into it was, of course, America, and the crucial term of time was the twenties. (p. 45)
The man of letters is the product of his times and his direct presence is not available to those who did not undergo the same shaping. The profoundest influence the twenties had, then, on Wilson as a critic of American writing was to fix in his mind the inescapable interdependence of a man and his generation, a reflexive relationship of equal power with that between a man and his physical surroundings. He rejected the notion of the isolated artist and looked always for his times and his associates in him. Van Wyck Brooks's studies of American literary history interested him because they provided writers with such contexts, and he himself early developed a sense that his good fortune in being a part of the twenties may have been different in degree but was not different in kind from the sense of generation that sustained earlier American writers. During Wilson's youth the story of American literature was frequently represented as the tale of isolate souls, a saga of giants crippled and marooned in a sea of hostility: Melville self-exiled in New York as effectively as if he had gone to the Galapagos, for example; or Whitman insulated by a mindless coterie in shabby Camden. His experience in the twenties told Wilson that this could not be so even before his researches showed him that it was not so. He knew what food the artist must have had if he had grown to the strength he exhibited.
Closely connected with this belief was his perception that the American writer had never been either so exclusively non-European as Brooks would have it or so recently American as Percy Lubbock would have it. Lewis, Dos Passos, Faulkner, and Hemingway, Wilson maintained, 'have obviously owed as much to European writers and European travel as Hawthorne and Howells had done and, if the stories of Sherwood Anderson grew up, like his native grass, without any foreign fertilizer, so had those of Mark Twain, who belonged to the Howells era.'
Wilson converted these convictions into a splendid lesson in The Shock of Recognition which appeared in 1943, the year in which he pictured himself dramatically as a survivor of the warm twenties in a time of general frost. That remarkable anthology buried once and for all the persisting view that the American literary past was a series of flashes—some brilliant, most but a spark—emitted by men of talent against a wall of darkness. Wilson's 'chronicle of the progress of literature in the United States' took its title from Melville's assertion, prompted by his reading of Hawthorne's stories, that 'Genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.' Always mindful of the universality insisted upon by Melville, Wilson nevertheless centered his anthology … on documents that revealed the awareness the American had of his fellow writers and of his region. (pp. 49-50)
In The Shock of Recognition documents are introduced and ordered in such a way that the whole which emerges is larger than the sum of its parts, which is to say that although it is an anthology it is the very best in its genre and therefore ultimately leaps out of its genre. The selections cohere into an original, imaginative, single work. Wilson's headnotes are masterpieces of that constantly abused sub-species of literary scholarship, and the length that limits the book's current availability is the result of a firm insistence upon reproducing the whole of every selected piece.
Patriotic Gore arrived almost twenty years later as the second and last of Wilson's book-length works devoted to American writings, and it is, of course, a critical history rather than an anthology. Still, the resemblance between the two is strong with Patriotic Gore tending toward anthology even as The Shock of Recognition tends toward history. As has been noted, when Wilson centered exclusively on American authors he departed from the perspective he brought to other literatures in a concentration on the culture that was continuous with the literature, and one strong mark of this is his care to provide long quotations not so much in lieu of critical interpretation nor in documentary support of it as in evocation of the faded accent. He shapes social context and analyses personality finally to form an opening into which he introduces the voice of the subject concerned as the ultimate tone of the values under discussion. Patriotic Gore is akin to an anthology, one in which the incisive headnotes and long selections of The Shock of Recognition are replaced by long, involved headnotes and brief but eloquent quotations. (p. 51)
For all of Wilson's alert modernity, Patriotic Gore has … a curiously old-fashioned flavor reminiscent of that of the nineteenth-century bibliophile who wrote about ignored books that intrigued him from the assumption that his task was not so much to call the attention of scholars to them as to attach them once again to the consciousness of a reading public. In providing this flavor Wilson is implicitly correcting the widening battalions of professors of American literature who in unearthing minor authors and exposing them in monographs written in a quasi-scientific academic code are, in effect, moving those authors from a simple earthen tomb to a hideous plastic crypt. Wilson's voice is for the ears of the general reader, in whose existence he believed because his career had been devoted to creating him, and it says to him, here in my pages that which flowered so briefly may still be recaptured, but, despite my efforts, the fading is inevitable; my final justification is that it has accounted to me for some part of myself and may so serve you.
Only American writing seems to have tempted Wilson to so personal an approach, to have brought him so close to the authorial glance from the library window or the undramatic melancholy of a cleric of the past century contemplating the paling rhetoric of a once consequential synod of yet an earlier century. He unhesitatingly used the pronoun 'our' when talking of that writing; he was an American addressing Americans about a wider reality they could share if they would but take care. Although The Shock of Recognition and Patriotic Gore have informed readers beyond America, and, it can confidently be assumed, will continue to do so, unlike Edmund Wilson's work in other areas these books have a further meaning for Americans. They are the literary equivalent of a message to the faithful which the ecclesiastical outsider understands and may even admire but which assumes for its fullest effect a common cultural experience as much as an intelligent mind. (pp. 51-2)
The American literary genius who spoke most tellingly out of the past to Wilson and who served for him as they symbol of devotion to craftsmanship and concern for the maintenance of a rigorous standard of literary culture was Edgar Allan Poe. He, if any single writer, was Edmund Wilson's daemon.
For all the wraithlike quality Poe had, even for his contemporaries, his first and perhaps most important lesson for Wilson was solidly practical. Wilson could look back over a modest list of first-rate American writers but Poe alone among them sought to sustain himself through journalism as Wilson sought to sustain himself. (p. 55)
What the scholarly and the gentlemanly took to be Poe's duplicity in marketing the same or a slightly altered piece as separate works, or in reprinting successive versions of a composition as separate compositions, Wilson saw as not just a valid professional procedure if the writer would wrest a living from his sensibility but as a strategy to be followed. It is to Poe, therefore, more than to any other single example that we may attribute the unapologetic recurrence of certain of Wilson's essays, initially paid journalistic reviews, in different collections of essays under different titles. The world may not owe the man of letters a living, but the man of letters owes one to himself. (pp. 55-6)
Nowhere can one find Poe the model reviewer more strikingly set forth than in The Shock of Recognition, a great pupil's tribute to his master. To read the Poe review of Margaret Fuller in the context Wilson supplies is indeed to experience at least the minor shock of recognizing what Poe meant by the superiority of a subjectiveness that 'paints a scene less by its features than its effects.' The quotation Poe supplies leaps into relief and the reader realizes the way in which words affect him. In The Shock of Recognition Poe's quotation from Fuller is a quotation within a quotation since Wilson, as it were, is quoting Poe, and the reflexive images that are sent vibrating link minor contemporary with major contemporary, the past with the present, the subjective with the modern, and American provincial with the world.
But finally as one contemplates Edmund Wilson's writings on American literature one is forced back to the observation that his interest extended itself at greatest length when it encountered the minor and neglected rather than the major; that, without losing his strongly modern sense of presence or forgetting the range of literatures he had traversed, Wilson did, nevertheless, in Patriotic Gore, yield to the attractions of the regional and the antiquarian; that, whereas in dealing with other literatures he is concerned with the transparency of national boundaries, dealing with American literature Wilson becomes hypnotized by the pertinacity of local boundaries—not just those which mark off the New Englander from the New Yorker nor even those that separate the upstate New Yorker from the city New Yorker, but precisely those that make of the Albany New Yorker yet another category. Poe, and after him Crane, both of whom were tied to New York periodical publishing, served as great exemplars of craftsmanship but in their bizarre daily doings they were to be admired rather than imitated. Psychologically they may have been the doppelgangers of the Wilson whose private life is now emerging in the posthumous journals, but the public critic had a powerful sense of his membership in a more cautious American tradition and a powerful desire to recover that part of the American past down to its nicest particular that would meet his sense of his tradition. (pp. 57-8)
Leon Edel reminds us of Wilson's impatience, tempered with sadness, at being praised as an expositor at the expense of his novels. The elegiac note in his writings on Americans whose names have faded may have been struck from him by this: that he as well as Fitzgerald was a novelist of the twenties; that he as well as Lawrence pushed back the fences that cramped the representation of sexual love in literature. His undoubted sovereignty as a critic and historian may not have sufficed to balance the neglect of his fictions, and in his criticism, therefore, he developed a corresponding sensitivity to the neglected.
Perhaps Wilson in his image of himself as the man by the fire was unfair to the animals that crouched outside the circle of light and so unfair to himself. He may have underestimated their desire to perpetuate him. We thank him for the minor men he has restored to us but we lack reason to number him among them. (pp. 58-9)
Larzer Ziff, "The Man by the Fire: Edmund Wilson" (reprinted by permission of New York University Press; copyright © 1978 by Phaidon Press Limited), in Edmund Wilson: The Man and His Work, edited by John Wain, New York University Press, 1978, pp. 43-59.
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