Thirties Period Piece

Ralph de Toledano once called Edmund Wilson a literary string-saver. But the “string” in Mr. Wilson’s The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and the New Deal (Doubleday, $6.00) is stout stuff, and as Mr. Wilson shifts it from cupboard to cupboard, taking it from his older books and from the crumbling files of the New Republic, Scribner’s, the old Common Sense of Alfred Bingham, and V. F. Calverton’s Modern Monthly, it seems distinctly worth the saving. Sometimes Mr. Wilson succeeds in untying the knots and snarls created by the passage of time; sometimes he doesn’t. But the string doesn’t fray and ravel, and practically all of it bears using a second time over.

It is not that Mr. Wilson is to be trusted as a thinker about fundamentals, even when he appends footnotes to his admittedly fallacious older ideas about Marx. He seems incapable of wrestling with the basic problems of political, economic and social power, and if he has ever read any political philosophers or economists other than the Marxists and the “progressives” of his own Charles Beard-J. Allen Smith-Herbert Croly era, he does not show it in his writing. He is interested in philosophical systems, and he can build thrilling narratives around their genesis and amplification in successive generations of men. But his interest in philosophy is a novelist’s interest; what entrances him about ideas is their ability to provoke and condition dramatic human behavior. The question of the validity of a philosophical principle is something which Wilson gladly leaves to others.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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Ralph de Toledano once called Edmund Wilson a literary string-saver. But the “string” in Mr. Wilson’s The American Earthquake: A Documentary of the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and the New Deal (Doubleday, $6.00) is stout stuff, and as Mr. Wilson shifts it from cupboard to cupboard, taking it from his older books and from the crumbling files of the New Republic, Scribner’s, the old Common Sense of Alfred Bingham, and V. F. Calverton’s Modern Monthly, it seems distinctly worth the saving. Sometimes Mr. Wilson succeeds in untying the knots and snarls created by the passage of time; sometimes he doesn’t. But the string doesn’t fray and ravel, and practically all of it bears using a second time over.

It is not that Mr. Wilson is to be trusted as a thinker about fundamentals, even when he appends footnotes to his admittedly fallacious older ideas about Marx. He seems incapable of wrestling with the basic problems of political, economic and social power, and if he has ever read any political philosophers or economists other than the Marxists and the “progressives” of his own Charles Beard-J. Allen Smith-Herbert Croly era, he does not show it in his writing. He is interested in philosophical systems, and he can build thrilling narratives around their genesis and amplification in successive generations of men. But his interest in philosophy is a novelist’s interest; what entrances him about ideas is their ability to provoke and condition dramatic human behavior. The question of the validity of a philosophical principle is something which Wilson gladly leaves to others.