In the years since [the publication of A Piece of My Mind], while his productivity has remained amazingly high and at least one book—Patriotic Gore—is a testament to sustained powers of scholarship and intellectual conviction, Wilson has become increasingly detached from the central life of culture in this country, a life he once helped shape and color. And yet it does not seem to me to be the comfortable detachment of old fogyism—nothing so placid, unremarkable and unembattled as that….

A number of writers have remarked on how Wilson is not temperamentally a man of our time, and he has confirmed it; and it has been said that after a crisis in his personal life and his beliefs he retreated into a private world, into literature cut off from political actuality and observation cut off from the crucial scene to be observed. The notion that he is a great literary critic (as well as a social critic) who has substituted literature for life is widespread, and is, I believe, thoroughly mistaken; he is, on the contrary, a critic who for a very long time has not really criticized, a man who has substituted the superficies of literature for its real life and held that at bay.

These things are what The Bit Between My Teeth reestablishes throughout its nearly seven hundred pages. Similar in size and format to his collections of writings of the twenties, thirties and forties, Classics and Commercials and The Shores of Light, it is subtitled, like them, "A Literary Chronicle," in this case of 1950–1965. Yet nothing could be more misleading; sometimes charming (although also frequently petulant), often instructive, maintaining the clarity of discourse and quiet elegance of style to which we have long been accustomed, it is nevertheless scarcely about literature at all, except in that "bookman's" sense, that sense of peripheral issues and secondary inquiries of quirkish causes, of ax-grinding and wine-tasting, which rises whenever the "human" situation of literature, its circumstances and accidents, become surrogates for its essence. (p. 23)

It is in the ostensible critical pieces that one sees. Wilson's decline from originality and forcefulness in its most exposed condition. His enthusiasm for Doctor Zhivago, about which he writes at great length, outstrips that of any other critic who has written on the book, yet he is unable, for all the apparatus of scholarship he brings to bear, to persuade us that Pasternak's novel is "one of the great events in man's literary and moral history." And this is partly because the scholarship itself—the protracted etymological inquiries, the hot quest for symbols, the quibbles over details—has the effect of returning us to an atmosphere of outdated modes of criticism. "Does Larisa personify the Revolution?" he asks. "This can hardly be possible, for in that case she would have…." It is the kind of thing one got from one's college instructor about Moby Dick.

Beyond that, one feels that Wilson's inordinate admiration for the novel is much more moral than literary, that it derives more from Wilson's feelings about what literature should be or do than from any acute sensibility addressing itself to what is. He fails to see that, for all its nobility of spirit, Doctor Zhivago suffers from a radical awkwardness, an amateurishness stemming no doubt from the absence of recent precedents due to the long interment of consciousness about fiction in Soviet Russia, so that Pasternak had to return shakily to 19th-Century models. That Wilson should not for the past twenty and more years have written about any of the period's significant writers except Pasternak … expresses the fact, I think, that Doctor Zhivago alone rewoke in him his early lofty hope of literature as humanizing force, as agency of social resurrection. (pp. 23-4)

Because [The Bit Between My Teeth] contains so little literary criticism, and because, as I have said, an air of musty irrelevance and antiquarian obsession rises so strongly from its pages, it seemed to me important to try to determine whether or not Wilson should still be called a critic; how long ago, if he could not, he had ceased being one; and what kind he had been when there could not have been a question about it. So I set out to read, or for the most part reread nearly everything he has written—an act performed, I should like to say, under his influence: his practice of phenomenally thorough grounding in the work of even the minor writers he was called upon to judge was one of the keystones of the arch he built between criticism and reviewing.

So I tracked him through the years—the literary essays and the literary journalism, the poetry and plays and fiction, the reporting, the autobiographical writings, the forays into history or archeology or anthropology, the apostrophes to peoples and cultures outside the main swing of our concern. And what I became aware of was something different from an aging captain's graceful retirement from the bridge, the mind following the body into retreat, the ceding of immediacy. That, after all, has happened to even the most forceful and revolutionary of men, and may be the exit of a happy warrior, who will move on now to consolidation and the organization of memory.

What I saw was a steady decline from centrality, a long arc of descent into something—when it comes to literature—narrow and isolated on one side and crabbed and almost spiteful on the other. It seemed to me that as a literary critic involved with the truest tides and artifacts, the sturm und drang of creation, or with the literary past in its permanent achievements, he has undergone not an inevitable process of enervation, but the cumulative destructive action of certain tendencies that were present in his mind and imagination from the beginning, present as the underside of his civilized and humane approach to literature.

The literary situation he entered when he "set himself up in business as a critic" after World War I, was fully open to the kind of observer—eager, erudite, with piety for the cultural past but also with an appetite for the new—that he felt himself to be. The major period of American criticism was not to begin for another ten years or so, though Kenneth Burke, Allan Tate and Yvor Winters had begun, like Wilson, to write in the twenties. When it came, it would reveal Wilson as less a highly original and powerful critic than a brilliantly eclectic literary aficionado, a grammarian, a humanist in the untechnical sense and a champion of classical and somewhat inelastic values. Burke's Counter-Statement was to be published in 1931, the same year as Axel's Castle, Wilson's closest approach to the much more rigorous and original books of theory and perception which Burke, Tate, Winters, John Crowe Ransom and R. P. Blackmur were to issue in the years that followed.

But meanwhile, Wilson, with more liveliness and wit and much more continuity than anybody else, was commenting on the new writers of the twenties: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Lewis, Anderson, Dos Passos, Wilder. In most cases they were contemporaries with whom he felt allied in an undertaking of light-bringing, but to whom (one gets the impression) he also felt slightly superior, his taste having suffered no corruption by being embodied in vulnerable objects—stories, novels, poems. He was to write these later of course, an instance not of a critic exemplifying his theories but of something more interesting: he wished, it seems to me, to do imaginative work so as to fulfill his vision of the life of letters. (pp. 24-5)

Above all, [Wilson] was spectacularly a timer of all the races, a referee of all the controversies. Through the twenties and into the thirties, when his interests (and morale) began to change, he let almost nothing near at hand get by and reached out for whatever in literature seemed to him striking, new and valuable….

He had written that "the task of the intellectual is not merely to study the common life but to make his thoughts and symbols seem relevant to it," by which he meant nothing invidious, no advice on how to create the appearance of seriousness, but on how to communicate seriousness to one's readers. It was an implicit condemnation of the highbrow, and he would continue to make it long past the point where his own work had slipped mostly out of true seriousness and into a special kind of genteel, easy-going academicism, the academicism of the sage in his booklined country den. But he built his reputation on the work he did to bring literature into relation with contemporary life, to give it the kind of resonant appeal, anti-romantic but possessing its own species of drama, which its connections with psychology, history and social reality would, he felt, naturally provide….

The influence of Taine, the example of a large civilized handling of literature as one element in a larger social drama, was to assert itself mainly in two currents of Wilson's criticism: the undoctrinaire, tentative and in some cases self-reproving Marxist inquiries of the thirties, and the equally undoctrinaire but more forceful and original speculations of a psychoanalytic, more properly Adlerian, kind, which were to find their most prominent expressions in his theory of artistic creation as psychic compensation, the theory of The Wound and The Bow.

But just before Wilson entered these phases, he composed the one book in his entire output which, in my judgment, comes near to being an original contribution to aesthetic understanding, which consistently advances a point of view, which at least partially submits history, psychology and economics to something approaching a metaphysics—without which it seems to me no criticism has any permanence. Here he makes the fullest effort to submit taste—the bulwark of minor criticism as it is the chief enemy of anything larger—to a deeper sense of what is possible to the imagination and what is needed.

Axel's Castle is a book which splendidly exhibits Wilson's great virtues as a collator, an expositor, a channel for literary intelligence and, in the best sense, a popularizer. Yet none of these qualities would have mattered much then, as they do not much matter now in his work, if he had not set himself a subject of high, complex importance. The book is a thorough, lucid, strongly documented account of the movement in European literature which Wilson called "symbolism," a term to catch and fix what had been happening to traditional notions of fiction and poetry, an event which had occurred outside the awareness of a great many literate Americans. "A revolution in the imagery of poetry is in reality a revolution in metaphysics," Wilson cogently argued, and he proceeded to try to trace the main results of that revolution in the work of Yeats, Eliot, Valéry, Proust, Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Moving between close readings of texts and broader inquiries into social back-grounds, between assessments of the works and of their authors' natures, he made what was until then by far the strongest public case for the great contemporaries and what remains today as ample and useful an introduction as can be found. (p. 26)

Axel's Castle, in its wide sympathies, its accurate intuitions and generous willingness to see the changes, was a leap beyond the kind of criticism which resists the new because it lacks the sanctifications, the received values by which it may be judged.

And yet it was a leap with a long backward and nostalgic glance accompanying it. For all Wilson's enormously intelligent insight into the writers he was discussing and for all his conscious intention to put his critical and expository powers in the service of a validation of their seizure and transformation of the contemporary imagination—"Joyce," he writes, "is indeed really the great poet of a new phase of human consciousness"—one feels in Axel's Castle a peculiar reluctance to see all the way, to accept, for example, that the novel is never again to be Balzacian or poetry Keatsian. One also feels a nagging suspicion that this new literature may not be all for mankind's good. It is not the skepticism of the rigorous critic, prepared to challenge the new if it is simply that, but rather, it seems to me, the doubtfulness and defensiveness of a man committed by temperament and background to what is fundamentally a different view of literature's purposes and possibilities than is represented by the writers his intelligence tells him to admire. (p. 27)

Wilson's bias towards a humane, socially apprehensible and positive art, towards an art that can be brought into energizing coherence with manners and mores and above all with political reality, and his corresponding bias against an art of interiority and transcendence, shows itself again and again in Axel's Castle but nowhere more explicitly than in his contrast of Anatole France and Valéry: "It may be said that the strength of Anatole France's generation was the strength to be derived from a wide knowledge of human affairs, a sympathetic interest in human beings, direct contact with public opinion and participation in public life through literature. The strength of solitary labor and earnest introspection is the strength of Valéry's." Coolly balanced as the sentences may seem, there is no doubt where Wilson's preference lies. And it is all his robust intelligence and sensitivity can do to get him past the pull towards the kind of literature Anatole France represents and back to the business of explicating the far greater accomplishments of Valéry, Joyce and the others.

Now there is nothing opprobrious in preferring the values of Anatole France's generation, its vision of the writer, to that of Valéry's, just as there is nothing reprehensible in preferring socially oriented literature, or, more subtly in Wilson's case, a literature that flows into social existence and becomes a source of humanist hope and morale, to literature that is fundamentally at cross-purposes with humanist expectations. There have been strong cases made against the great contemporaries, and they may indeed be considered to have performed, by the dazzling prestidigitation of their art, something that looks very like the undermining of men's confidences in their possibilities. And finally there isn't the slightest thing wrong in a critic's choosing as his task the elucidation of works outside the shrines of the day, choosing to run counter to what he considers dangerous fashion (Winters and Leavis are two examples) or choosing to ignore contemporary writing altogether for the sake of some more detached structure of thought about literature as a perennial enterprise.

My point is that, for Wilson, none of these choices was ever made; what happened was that slowly and perhaps unconsciously, under the pressure of the desperate political and social reality of the time but also under pressure from his own predilections and internal necessities, he abandoned a full inhabitation of literature and moved to its outskirts, circling around it, so to speak, in order to retain connection but unable to address himself to its central issues and manifestations. It was as though the course of contemporary writing was inimical, at some deep level of his consciousness, to what he desired from existence and to the way he wished to employ his skills and powers. The most obvious demonstration of this was his plunge, in the thirties, into intellectual history, most particularly the history of radical thought, whose action, unlike literature's, might and had renewed that "creative imagination for the possibilities of human life" which he had found so wanting in Proust.

In "A Modest Self-Tribute" in his new book, he writes that "I have tried to contribute a little to the general cross-fertilization, to make it possible for our literate public to appreciate and understand both our own Anglo-American culture and those of the European countries in relation to one another." This is exactly what he did do up to Axel's Castle and in its pages.

But though after that he addressed himself from time to time to contemporary American, British and European writers, it was only thinly and with more social and biographical emphasis than literary, and they were almost never the important ones. He was never again to take as his task the explication and illumination of the truly central works of our era's imagination, or of its risks and vicissitudes. He was never again to be abreast of literature. On the other hand, in order not to be cut off from literature, he was to immerse himself more and more in its marginal people and extrinsic aspects, skillfully and knowledgeably to recount what he had found.

To read Wilson's literary chronicles seriatim is to receive the strong impression that for more than twenty-five years he has had very little to say about the aesthetics of literature, and that on the scattered occasions when he is writing true criticism and not biography or intellectual "drama" he is operating on received notions, "classic" concepts of literary form—"balance," "harmony," "orchestration," "focusing"—which suggest the academic art critic perpetually looking for Greek values while all around him abstract or kinetic sculpture, action painting, op and pop whirl their new and self-generated forms.

The chronicles reveal that he is still interested in writing; but it is writing as history, as sociology, as biography or as usage and grammar. And more and more he is interested in "books," as artifacts of a cultured way of life, as curiosities and conundrums, as occasions for genteel discourse and as counter-pressures to the tides of barbarism and chaos he so evidently feels in contemporary life. (pp. 27-8)

Richard Gilman, "Edmund Wilson, Then and Now," in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New Republic; © 1966 The New Republic, Inc.), Vol. 155, No. 1, July 2, 1966, pp. 23-8.