Books in Brief: The Portable Edmund Wilson

The Portable Edmund Wilson, edited by Lewis M. Dabney (Penguin, 647 pp., $6.95)

The idea of a Viking Portable devoted to the work of Edmund Wilson was first mooted some three decades ago; Malcolm Cowley was to have been the editor, and Wilson himself drew up a proposed table of contents. Lewis M. Dabney, a professor at the University of Illinois, has finally been entrusted with the job, and his cross-section of “the essential Wilson” takes in most of the high points: the young Wilson on Eliot and Joyce, the great “psychobiographical” essays on Dickens and Hemingway, a substantial chunk of Patriotic Gore, an attractive sampling of the straight journalism and the endlessly fascinating correspondence. One does miss such choice specimens of Wilson in a curmudgeonly (and wrong-headed) mood as, say, “Splendors and Miseries of Evelyn Waugh” or “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” Still, Mr. Dabney has managed to give us a decently representative anthology of this quintessentially American man of letters; one suspects that Wilson, himself a pretty fair anthologist, would have been satisfied with the results.

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Saul Goodwin

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The Portable Edmund Wilson, edited by Lewis M. Dabney (Penguin, 647 pp., $6.95)

The idea of a Viking Portable devoted to the work of Edmund Wilson was first mooted some three decades ago; Malcolm Cowley was to have been the editor, and Wilson himself drew up a proposed table of contents. Lewis M. Dabney, a professor at the University of Illinois, has finally been entrusted with the job, and his cross-section of “the essential Wilson” takes in most of the high points: the young Wilson on Eliot and Joyce, the great “psychobiographical” essays on Dickens and Hemingway, a substantial chunk of Patriotic Gore, an attractive sampling of the straight journalism and the endlessly fascinating correspondence. One does miss such choice specimens of Wilson in a curmudgeonly (and wrong-headed) mood as, say, “Splendors and Miseries of Evelyn Waugh” or “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” Still, Mr. Dabney has managed to give us a decently representative anthology of this quintessentially American man of letters; one suspects that Wilson, himself a pretty fair anthologist, would have been satisfied with the results.