Why Is This Man Scowling?

Letters on Literature and Politics: 1912-1972 By Edmund Wilson Farrar, 768 pp., $20 The sort of critics whose biothermostats comfortably adapt them to the warm, mild bath of our contemporary intellectual discourse have already pronounced themselves offended by the caustic tone of many of Edmund Wilson’s epistolary remarks to his correspondents, whether old friends or wary acquaintances. Most of this curmudgeonliness is merely what made Wilson the powerful literary figure he was: that is to say, it is sheer intellectual honesty, or what is nowadays known as Bad Taste. It is true, however, that there is a perceptible difference in tone between the letters of the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, and those written between the end of World War II and Wilson’s death in 1972. The Wilson of the Twenties is full of literary japes, clearly derivative of the hoaxes and horseries of H. L. Mencken; the Wilson of the early Thirties heaves with the warrior’s heavy breathing—his pen clicks with those of his correspondents like knitting needles around a guillotine as he debates the pros and cons (mainly pros) of Marxism. In the late Thirties, Wilson has losthis revolutionary fire, but he is full of the still-optimistic dignity of the man of letters who has forsworn factional politics in order to offer the responsible social and intellectual criticism that he considers it the intellectual’s chief function to provide; in the Forties, the optimism has dwindled to a kind of sour stoicism frequently shot through with humorous lightnings.

But in the Fifties, the Wilson of recent memory asserts himself: cranky, curmudgeonly, ungenerous, as aggressive as a pit viper. He quits reading the work of young writers; he refuses to pay his federal income taxes; he writes a recidivist introduction to Patriotic Gore in which, echoing his old enemies the Social Darwinists, he compares the rivalry between the U.S.A. and the USSR to the blindly predatory battlings of two gigantic sea slugs. Usually, this sort of slide into ill-tempered disillusionment can be attributed to the frustrations and infirmities of old age. But in Wilson’s case, it considerably illuminates a career that, from an early age, was clearly and wholly apprehended by its maker.

CW

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Letters on Literature and Politics: 1912-1972 By Edmund Wilson Farrar, 768 pp., $20 The sort of critics whose biothermostats comfortably adapt them to the warm, mild bath of our contemporary intellectual discourse have already pronounced themselves offended by the caustic tone of many of Edmund Wilson’s epistolary remarks to his correspondents, whether old friends or wary acquaintances. Most of this curmudgeonliness is merely what made Wilson the powerful literary figure he was: that is to say, it is sheer intellectual honesty, or what is nowadays known as Bad Taste. It is true, however, that there is a perceptible difference in tone between the letters of the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, and those written between the end of World War II and Wilson’s death in 1972. The Wilson of the Twenties is full of literary japes, clearly derivative of the hoaxes and horseries of H. L. Mencken; the Wilson of the early Thirties heaves with the warrior’s heavy breathing—his pen clicks with those of his correspondents like knitting needles around a guillotine as he debates the pros and cons (mainly pros) of Marxism. In the late Thirties, Wilson has losthis revolutionary fire, but he is full of the still-optimistic dignity of the man of letters who has forsworn factional politics in order to offer the responsible social and intellectual criticism that he considers it the intellectual’s chief function to provide; in the Forties, the optimism has dwindled to a kind of sour stoicism frequently shot through with humorous lightnings.

But in the Fifties, the Wilson of recent memory asserts himself: cranky, curmudgeonly, ungenerous, as aggressive as a pit viper. He quits reading the work of young writers; he refuses to pay his federal income taxes; he writes a recidivist introduction to Patriotic Gore in which, echoing his old enemies the Social Darwinists, he compares the rivalry between the U.S.A. and the USSR to the blindly predatory battlings of two gigantic sea slugs. Usually, this sort of slide into ill-tempered disillusionment can be attributed to the frustrations and infirmities of old age. But in Wilson’s case, it considerably illuminates a career that, from an early age, was clearly and wholly apprehended by its maker.