And this bwings us to liquorary quiddicism. What a wonderful is liquorary quiddicism! What fastiddily! what intellectual breath! what unreproachable stammards and crytearia! what inside and painentralia!
The Three Limperary Cripples (1930)
And it raises the question why Edmund Wilson should be thought to be, as in my view he is, so pre-eminently the greatest periodical critic of his time, at any rate in English. The younger Americans have of late been showing some disappointment with him, finding him cranky and unwilling to deal with their new things as he had dealt with his own. We have no special reason to like him, as the English are a source of annoyance and disappointment to him and he has often said so. He once began a review thus: ‘Mr E. H. Carr is an odd phenomenon—perhaps a symptom of the decay of Great Britain.’ Nor does this remark, which—leaving aside the justice of the diagnosis—could only have been made by a very difficult and occasionally somewhat ludicrous critic, stand alone. Needing to make it clear that despite his admiration for Marx and Engels he loathes the Dialectic, he tosses off the proposal that the Hegelian triad, like the triangle of Pythagoras, the Christian Trinity and the Wotan–Brunnhilde–Siegfried set, were symbols of the male sexual organs (To the Finland Station, II, 11). This is an emotional way of saying that he finds the Dialectic and the Trinity extremely unreasonable, and lest argument should fail to establish this he throws in a tremendous symbol of irrationality. Much too often, I think, he uses Freudian explanations in a similar way: The Wound and the Bow is on re-reading his least interesting book (though it is still a good one) partly because the theory ends the argument prematurely, and the essay on Ben Jonson in The Triple Thinkers, for all its richness of reference and structural power, is so busy with the thesis of Jonson’s anal eroticism that it neglects to examine his works. Texture is important in Jonson, and its examination is not one of Wilson’s strong points. I am not saying the thesis is wrong, or even that it is irrelevant, but only that it obtrudes itself, as E. M. Forster once said mysticism might, ‘at the wrong stage of the affair.’
This only begins the tale of Edmund Wilson’s deficiencies, and we might as well mention one more which has a bearing on his view of the English: this is simply that he is so echt American that it shows in some ways which may strike us as inappropriate. Red Bank, Princeton, houses, friends, heroes such as H. L. Mencken and John Jay Chapman, they all become part of a patrician mythology rather like Yeats’s, and sometimes Wilson seems to feel a need to Americanise before he can offer sympathetic understanding. An essay on Dostoevsky makes the point that when the Russian is writing on Russian exiles ‘a good deal of what he says applies equally to expatriate Americans in Europe.’ Fair enough; but two pages later we read this: ‘Dostoevsky’s instinct was sound: the fact that the American problem seems a particularly formidable one is no cause for fleeing or evading it.’ In the same way we feel an unexpected sympathy with Lenin’s red hair and Marx’s boils and certain Russian country houses. The Jews are translated into New Englanders. Going to America made Auden a good poet; leaving it made Eliot a sort of cultured Uriah Heep. Finally, Patriotic Gore, for all its virtues, obviously indulges a nostalgic, bitter Americanism; so does The Cold War and the Income Tax.
Good reviewing in the weeklies and monthlies is, as Wilson himself very well knows, an essential element in the hygiene of a literary culture; yet he has done it more or less under protest over a long period of his life; and this from vanity rather than laziness, for he is apparently a tireless reader and writes (judging from the bulk of his work, and the ease with which it is articulated) with as much facility as any one, though this is a quality that casual readers are very apt to exaggerate. It is not surprising, therefore, that his critics notice a decline in the interest and penetration of his journalism between the work of the twenties and ’Thirties collected in The Shores of Light and that of the ‘Forties collected in Classics and Commercials.1 No doubt a further decline may be found in the new collection from later years, which is called—as if to emphasise a certain inconsiderate isolation, a galloping off in directions that interest only him— The Bit Between my Teeth.2 If the best journalism belongs to the ‘Twenties and the best criticism of the more formal kind is in Axel’s Castle (1931), there is some justification for the view of various commentators that this formidable figure has—for reasons only to be guessed at, though often related to the politics of the ’Thirties—grown less and less useful over the last thirty-five years. And we can at least be sure that Wilson himself unreservedly accepts the criterion of utility in matters of criticism, as in literature itself. Broadly speaking, this is the way Norman Podhoretz talks about Wilson in what is probably the best essay about him. ‘From now on,’ Podhoretz says at the end of his piece, ‘we shall have to look elsewhere for the kind of guidance that it was his particular glory to give.’
It is not difficult to understand Podhoretz’s disappointment. A man who had clearly seen, and tirelessly propagated, the right programme for American letters—who had, with serious optimism, insisted upon their relevance to the health of American society—seems to have contracted out, calling himself an alien in his own country, constructing a misanthrope’s Vision. All that patrician generosity, all that subtle meditation on social justice, were converted into the gloomy execrations of un-American self-exile; like Shakespeare’s Poet visiting Timon in the woods, the dependent critic is rewarded with curses and gold thrown in his face. This is how it must seem to the leaderless.
This is of course primarily an American problem, and it is interesting to notice that a new book on Wilson tackles it quite differently. Mr Sherman Paul3 has, in fact, written a very elaborate study of the large and varied œuvre with the intention not of demonstrating Wilson’s cultural usefulness but of tracing in it the lines of an important writer’s personal development. This strategy has its drawbacks, the worst of which is that it gets Wilson’s public achievement out of focus; Paul attends just as closely to writings of small public importance as to the major works, and even the criticism is treated as if it were à clef. There are other disadvantages. Nobody can write about Wilson without inviting hostile comparisons between his prose and that of his subject. It would have been tactful of Mr Paul to avoid usages formally condemned by his hero, such as demean in the sense of ‘disparage’ or ‘abase,’ which occurs twice in the book.
All the same, this is a valuable study. From the opening chapter on the critic’s youth one gets a perfectly valid slogan: Wilson is finely Puritan, if the word can mean ‘concerned with moral precision.’ The dominant virtue of the intellectual is a demythologised charity, and if Wilson has often lapsed from this, both by mythologising and by uncharitable behaviour, who among critics working under such pressures has been more faithful? Certainly not Taine, his earliest model, who ‘shrank … into professorial superiority’ when progress came to be associated with vulgar revolution: ‘a remote disapproval chills his tone, all the bright colours of his fancy go dead.’ Again and again Wilson finds in the career of distinguished writers a similar shrinking: in Eliot, for example, and all the neo-Christians (as Mr Empson calls them), in Anatole France and Bernard Shaw. But even in the days when the rightness of the Marxist diagnosis seemed most dreadfully confirmed by the condition of America, Wilson wanted Marxism without the mythology, wanted people to prove their charitable faith by good works rather than by an abdication of the reason. Whatever the mistakes, he did seek to carry out the Jamesian programme of ‘striving to understand everything’ about human relations in a world not in itself organised for humanity, and discovering what might be for humanity ‘indubitable values.’ Even now it is not the values that have changed, but society that has turned out to be less corrigible than he hoped.
In the early days of his career, at Princeton and in Greenwich Village, the constant pursuit of abstract civil virtue and il ben del intelletto seem to have set him a little apart even from his brilliant contemporaries. Part of the difficulty was doubtless that for all his excitement at an American renaissance, his superior understanding of the modern, Wilson was always a man for continuity. He remained devoted to his Princeton teacher Christian Gauss, who believed that to adapt to his environment man must master it intellectually. Criticism would ideally be an aid to this; it should try to be ‘a history of man’s ideas and imaginings in the setting of conditions which have shaped them.’ Axel’s Castle, which acts upon this belief, is dedicated to Gauss; and it is not merely an exceptionally intelligent and original piece of literary history but an attempt to improve the possibility of literature becoming an agent of human mastery over the modern environment. For Wilson literature is always a way of knowing the world, and however much one may say of it as a giver of pleasure it is measured finally by its utility. It will not be useful unless it is fully informed, and neither the writing nor the exposition of imaginative works can, in his view, be worth much unless the author or the expositor has a deep familiarity with his subject and the knowledge to provide broad context. That is why his own programme has involved the mastery of many languages and literatures, and why he despises monolingual and one-subject professors. It is also the reason for his commitment to the past—not only the American past, but to the best in Greek, Latin, Italian, French and Russian literature as well as English and American, and for his guilt about Latin-American writing. His ‘adventure on reality,’ as Mr Paul calls it, required also an education in politics and economics. Later Hebrew demanded attention. The artist—and Wilson thought of all his work as an artist’s—is committed to the past, to the present, and to the community.
Wilson’s plays and his fiction, with the important exception of Memoirs of Hecate County, belong mostly to his earlier years. In respect of the need of discipline he did not discriminate between criticism and fiction, and there is a sense in which it is plausible to say, with Mr Paul, that Axel’s Castle and I Thought of Daisy belong together: they were worked on at the same time, and deal with the same problem, ‘the writer’s allegiance to society.’ But even Mr Paul, who devotes many pages to the novel, cannot deny that there is in it a programmatic stiffness, a lack of easy invention, which throws into high relief the ease and authority of the critical work; and Wilson’s later memoir of Edna St Vincent Millay tells us more and more movingly about the personal element than the story can, however teased out by interpreters. She fits, as Wilson’s heroes do, into a system not so much autobiographical as symbolising the structure of the world as he finds it: with Scott Fitzgerald and Paul Rosenfeld and Mr Justice Holmes and Whitehead and Gauss and Mario Praz.
This personal mythology is important and valuable to a writer, but Wilson speaks best when he speaks out. His prose style is designed for speaking out: his language is in his own terms, ‘the language of responsibility,’ as men engaged upon decisive action speak it; he is with Lincoln and Grant, not with the non-participants, Henry James and Henry Adams. If his prose has often an antique balance and his diction an etymological exactitude, this is proper enough, for his action is the action of structural thought; and if it sometimes seems pedantic in its cultivation this is because solecism and vulgarism enfeeble the activity of language. Wilson’s prose, whether one speaks of it in quite this way or not, is certainly a powerful instrument; despite his own fears it has remained supple and strong over a long and arduous career. One consequence is that, schooled to correctness, one is shocked in Wilson by what would pass almost unnoticed in another writer; when he uses attainted for tainted a bell rings violently in the mind (‘Mr Krutch … gives some evidence of being attainted with this tendency’). Anyway, there is small doubt that Wilson’s style is better adapted to the exposition of literature and ideas than to fiction.
‘Participation in public life through literature’ is the programme of Axel’s Castle; for Mr Paul it is related to the same needs expressed in the novel, which is the author’s need to extinguish in himself any symptoms of Axel-symbolist withdrawal and leaving living to the servants. Having written these books, he was ready for the labours of the ‘Thirties; Mr Paul quotes with approval a contemporary opinion that ‘one could plot a graph of Mr Wilson from Proust to Karl Marx,’ and this is what he does, having chosen to make the inward movement of Wilson’s mind the theme of his book. Consequently one needs, if one is to seize Wilson’s real importance, which is a matter of creative criticism rather than of literary personality, to get some view of the outward as well as of the inward aspects of this as of other periods of his work; and this one can do by reading such books as Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left, Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return, Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out in the Thirties, anything that, however obliquely, gives one the feeling of that decisive New York decade. Throughout this time Wilson, Trotskyist at least in this respect, maintained the values of bourgeois culture in the classless society, and saw in Marx and Engels poets of the political vision, as Michelet had been, and as he was now trying to be himself.
To the Finland Station was the result of the arduous reading of the ’Thirties. Alfred Kazin reminds us of Wilson’s invaluable self-discipline, a ‘habit of willed attention, of strained concentration,’ essential to work of this kind; and we can also remember his power to organise large bodies of material, to make self-consistent structures and establish large relevances. It is perhaps the noblest of Wilson’s books. It appeared, as Paul remarks, too late, when Stalin had put an end to the dream of the ‘first truly human culture’; but in so far as it is about intellectual heroism and the role of honest imaginative thinking in the creation of a good society it is a work of permanent value. It is true that the tone is of biography rather than ideology; but this, like the author’s tendency to identify his own mind and methods with those of the subjects, gives it an exceptional resonance, and makes it, like Axel’s Castle, a book of use even to those who can no longer be instructed by it. One notes that the praise of Marx’s expository method represents admiration for an ideal the author himself aims at (‘the exposition of the theory—the dance of commodities, the cross-stitch of logic—is always followed by a documented picture of the capitalist laws at work … we feel that we have been taken for the first time through the real structure of our civilisation, and that it is the ugliest that has ever existed.’). Here I have had to leave out the long and powerful sentence in which the working of the capitalist laws is described; long, but lucid and forceful, as Wilson thinks expository sentences should sometimes be. And I take it that even the expert will not deny the clarity and cogency of the exposition in this book. Engels as a man is treated with affectionate admiration, but with Lenin one senses the author’s detachment: just as Marx was ‘incapable of imagining a democracy,’ Lenin shunned ‘gratuitous intellectual activity.’ If Marx was psychologically crude, he was in other ways Wilsonian, ‘heavily loaded with the old paraphernalia of culture’ and making of Das Kapital, somewhat unexpectedly, a work which has affinities with the Anatomy of Melancholy. But Lenin was not a scholar, not a writer; his style (as Gorky observed) was ‘the cold glitter of steel shavings.’ He was the New Man, the modernist of Marxism, exponent of an un-Wilsonian break with the past. ‘We don’t need bourgeois democracy,’ he said in his speech at the Finland Station. In an epilogue looking back over the whole story in 1940, Wilson is finely himself; he cannot allow that the failure of Marxist dogma means the failure of all hope for a society without class exploitation. Doing without the Dialectic is only a small part of the challenge, which will ‘require of us,’ as he very characteristically concludes, ‘an unsleeping adaptive exercise of reason and instinct combined.’
From Mr Paul’s point of view, which is reasonable but as I say not the only one, there is a link between this book and Wilson’s slightly later volume of novelle, Memoirs of Hecate County, comparable with that between Axel’s Castle and I Thought of Daisy; on his view that ‘to some extent everything he does—and when he takes it up—is a personal index,’ the relation is inevitable. In the central story, ‘The Princess with the Golden Hair,’ Wilson certainly has rather private sources—he is thinking of Engels and Mary Burns, as well as of Casanova—and yet this is one of his most subtle and passionate comments on the evils of a society in which, as he remarked in To the Finland Station, ‘there is very little to choose between the physical degradation of the workers and the moral degradation of the masters.’ Wilson himself calls it his favourite among his works, and one can see why. Also it marked a turning point in his career; the last of the works in which commitment to public life is a central theme. The later books of travel, the bold attempt on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the works on the Iroquois, the Income Tax, the literature of the Civil War, and the culture of Canada, for all their urgent relation to his own unending self-examination and his concern with American culture, are works, by comparison, of exile. Hence the discontent of some compatriots.
But even from this very defective account of his career one can see that a stranger might very well use his privilege to call such criticism unjust. The example of Wilson—discipline, persistence, self-involvement, a willingness to acquire the means with which to practise an effective criticism—has been followed, but not adequately acknowledged, by younger Americans. To make possible an American criticism that would be strong enough for its job, to provide for it the strength, range and subtlety of the French, was the vast undertaking. Wilson himself saw that it meant good reviewing in the periodicals. The job begins there.
It is no doubt impossible [he wrote in 1928] for an English-speaking country to hope for a literary criticism comparable to that of the French…. But when one considers the number of reviews, the immense amount of literary journalism that is now being published in New York, one asks oneself how it is possible for our reviewing to remain so puerile…. Since the death of Stuart P. Sherman, who was second-rate at best, there has not been a single American critic who regularly occupied himself in any authoritative way with contemporary literature.
He went on to list some of the evils of the situation which strong reviewing might have averted; many of them he himself was to tackle. But he also added, thinking again of himself, that first-rate criticism must come from writers: ‘No such creature exists as a full-time literary critic—that is, a writer who is at once first-rate and nothing but a literary critic’ And so the task of providing America with a criticism was difficult even on the mundane level of simply finding time to do it. You had to review a lot but your reviewing would be useless unless you did other things on another level. Sometimes it wasn’t possible to do both; during the years when he was reading for To the Finland Station Wilson, as he says, lost touch with what was going on. But by working enormously and being provident in the choice of subjects he succeeded remarkably in his attempt to do everything at once. Because he did so there is in America literate unacademic criticism.
One should say, then, that the size of Wilson’s critical achievement, as the outsider sees it, cannot be measured by the more formal volumes, such as Axel’s Castle, The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, alone; one has to take account of the hundreds of shorter pieces, not merely because many of them were tributaries to these major streams, but also because they constitute in themselves that almost weekly intervention in the literary affairs of the time which probably, in the end, has the more decisive effect on taste, and on what happens next. Wilson has himself described how a career like this can be managed. In a very interesting piece called ‘Thoughts on Being Bibliographed’ (1943) he complains that his kind of person doesn’t seem to exist any more, a writer who is a critic and a journalist, free of the oppression and patronage of academics though having of course his own problems.
To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity. You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject… . My [strategy] has usually been, first to get books for review … on subjects in which I happened to be interested; then, later, to use the scattered articles for writing general studies of these subjects; then, finally, to bring out a book in which groups of these essays were revised and combined.
Using this somewhat clumsy but necessary system, he tackled the self-imposed task of carrying on the work of Mencken; one part of it, for example, was to bring home to the bourgeois intellectual world the importance of the literature of post-Symbolism and the implications of the Russian Revolution. Now, he says (in 1943), he is too old for all that; and nobody else is doing it, partly because anybody who might have qualified himself is working in a university or having his talent wrecked in a different way by Time, Life, and Fortune. Wilson had a perfect right to say this about people who feel he has betrayed them by refusing to bear the strain for ever. The routine outlined above takes strength, courage, discipline, none of them to be rewarded by the gift of tenure, or by long, gentle sabbaticals. One sees, sadly, why Wilson is so unkind to academics, refusing their honorary degrees, and, if he admires them, as he did Newton Arvin, Saintsbury, Gauss, Kemp Smith, Whitehead, Praz, assuming that their ability to write creatively simply takes them out of the academic category, and so does not disturb his theory.
It is the routine reviewing, somewhat disparaged by Wilson himself, that gives the best evidence of hard labour and also, often enough, of disciplined commitment. The three large volumes which collect reviews and other fugitive pieces are, what can rarely be said for such collections of periodical criticism, a great pleasure to read; the reviews frequently survive their subjects. As a great professional Wilson knows the ropes, and is willing to instruct. ‘The Literary Worker’s Polonais,’ written in 1935, sets out schematically the duties of editors and contributors, the former obliged in honour to make quick decisions and quick payments, the latter needing to give the editors reasonable time to decide and consult, and to abstain from writing seductive covering letters. A whole section is given to reviewers, classified under five heads: People Who Want Work, Literary Columnists (overworked, don’t expect accuracy), People Who Want to Write about Something Else (even if they let the author down, they are often interesting and should not be discouraged), Reviewer Experts (poets reviewing poets, etc., on the whole not a good thing), and Reviewer Critics. These last are extremely rare, and to earn the title an aspirant should ‘be more or less familiar, or be ready to familiarise himself, with the past work of every important writer he deals with…. He should also be able to see the author in relation to the national literature as a whole and the national literature in relation to other literatures.’ And so on. Only Sainte-Beuve, says Wilson, really fits into this category; but of course he does too. And when this paragon gets down to a book he must not shirk the most boring part of the job, the exposition of the contents, the summary: this is absolutely essential. Wilson does it, as a matter of fact, superbly. He really can ‘establish definite identities for the books that he discusses.’ It takes work, and more surprisingly brains, to do this. Yet it is only the start. In ‘A Modest Serf-Tribute’ (1952) Wilson is again insisting on the need for critics ‘to bring into one system the literatures of several cultures that have not been in close communication… . I may claim for myself, since nobody so far as I know, has ever yet claimed it for me, that I have tried to contribute a little to the general cross-fertilisation….
To do this you need more than a ‘volatile curiosity,’ but you need that too. Some of the long essays in the latest book, which may be used to show how Wilson has wandered off in pursuit of his own private interests, are also evidence of his determination to find out what is necessary. Certainly he goes on rather about the Marquis de Sade; but he also explores Doctor Zhivago at great length. It strikes me as both typical and impressive that, returning for another go at T. S. Eliot in a review of ‘Myra Buttle’s’ The Sweeniad, Wilson took himself off to a library to read the ‘hilariously awful’ epic, Cadmus: The Poet and the World, written earlier by Victor Purcell, the man behind the mask of ‘Myra Buttle.’ This later activity may not be as important as being the first to present André Malraux or Henry Miller to the American public, but it speaks of an inquisitive turn of mind and a willingness to walk to the library. Also it reminds one that one of the preservatives of Wilson’s periodical criticism is that he can be rather sombrely funny. He did not much like writing for the New Yorker, but some of the pieces there printed have lasted wonderfully: the analysis of Ambassador Davies’ prose, for instance, the attacks on detective stories (notably ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’), and the judicious distaste of the article on Lloyd C. Douglas’ best-seller, The Robe. In fact the pieces in Classics and Commercials are inferior to those in Shores of Light only if you miss, what had to go, the special excitements of the ’Twenties and ‘Thirties. They belong to what Wilson called ‘the bleak and shrivelled ’Forties,’ and they address themselves to what seemed in need of informed attention at the time: the intellectual position of Archibald MacLeish in relation to the war; the new novelists—Cain, Steinbeck, O’Hara, Saroyan; Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh (two excellent essays); Sartre, Firbank, and so on, with an extended memoir of Paul Rosenfeld at the end, corresponding to the memoir of Edna St Vincent Millay at the end of Shores of Light. The new book, as its title suggests, wanders further from the beaten track, and has a lot about Swinburne and James Branch Cabell, but there are some comedy turns too, including Wilson getting lengthily angry about the way people abuse English.
It is, then, true but unreasonable to complain that none of this has quite the bite of earlier work, done when Wilson was in the centre of things. The Shores of Light contains an imaginary dialogue between Paul Rosenfeld and Matthew Josephson (one of the original Discordant Encounters) which is so absolutely in the centre of the first controversies on modernism as to be even now immediately relevant. It was written in 1924; forty-two years on Mr Tom Wolfe is doing well out of an aperçu of Josephson’s in the Dialogue, which is that electric signs are nicer than art. Don’t talk to me about art, he says—
How can you set up these trivialities as rivals to the electric sign … a triumph of ingenuity, of colour, of imagination!—which slings its great gold–green–red symbol across the face of the heavens themselves …! I tell you that culture as you understand it is no longer of any value; the human race no longer believes in it. That is why I am giving my support to the campaign for Henry Ford as President… . Vote for Henry Ford! The Master Dadaist of the twentieth century!
In those days Wilson, not long down from Princeton, was living in the Village and learning his job. As a critic he did most things—vaudeville, the galleries, music, theatre—but he did them as a writer, and with a growing sense of the commitments to the modern and to politics, or rather to the task of making a literature and a criticism which would not simply exclude these. His interests narrowed, perhaps, but never before each had reached fruition in a book; perhaps he forsaw a time when literature and politics would be as inextricably blended in America as in The Triple Thinkers he saw them to be in Russia; or a time when a new biographical criticism would profit by the thesis of The Wound and the Bow. But of course he changed, moved on, a stranger in a changing world. It is sometimes said that behind every criticism there is a philosophy; Wilson’s is steadily pragmatic.
All our activity, in whatever field it takes place, is an attempt to give meaning to our experience—that is, to make life more practicable.
This is as true of the fictions of Sophocles as of Euclid.
Art has its origin in the need to pretend that human life is something other than it is, and, in a sense, by pretending this, it succeeds to some extent in transforming it.
This last remark belongs to 1922, and I suppose Wilson would have no reason to withdraw it now. The transformation of the world, as Wallace Stevens remarked, is the transformation of ourselves, and we do it with reason and imagination. What needs to be transformed, how transformations have historically occurred, and what is wrong with present attempts at transformation, are the legitimate and exhausting tasks of criticism. Wilson has worked at them as no other critic in his time. He dislikes my profession and my nationality, but if no American has yet claimed this for him I offer it as the most modest of tributes.
Edmund Wilson, one of the greatest of living men of letters and a leading character in a most interesting chapter of American literary history, advises the reader in the reissue of Memoirs of Hecate County that it is his favourite among his books. ‘I have never understood why the people who interest themselves in my work never pay any attention to it.’ The reason is, presumably, that Wilson’s powers are most impressively exhibited not in fiction but in books which more obviously embody his great intellectual energy, and that range of learning which, in its diversity and order, testifies to the integrity of the mind that assimilates it. But this is also a reason for taking the fiction seriously, for it will give one a chance to observe the activity of this mind when it is freely inventing as well as ordering its material. If only because this book provides an insight into the author’s situation at a critical moment in his career it will have its place in the story. But it is in fact rather more than a mere supporting document.
One of the constants in Wilson’s literary character—its native American quality—is well expressed in one of the lesser stories here reprinted. The narrator, himself newly returned from Europe, brings with him a conviction that American artists, however much Europe may rub off on them, depend for their continuing vitality on their ‘native American base.’ Wilson has always been a connoisseur of the vital American tradition, and a patrician connoisseur at that; it is the American 18th century that speaks in his expertises of furniture, women, language. Superimposed on that base is an easy understanding of all that has happened since to alter the cultivated mind—the Russian novel, the colours and shapes of modern painting, Marx and Freud, shifting social patterns and new judgments of manners. The mind is cosmopolitan, equipped for criticism, but deeply American still.
The narrator of the earlier novel, I Thought of Daisy, demonstrates its way of working when, back from France, he notices ‘with a new attention the way Americans talked,’ and read ‘with astonished gratification, the first books of those American writers who seemed to be making a new literature out of that sprawling square-syllabled speech … a language fit only, it had seemed, for the uses of trade or of a plebeian extravagance and irony.’ He takes a critical delight—‘an interest self-conscious and pedantic’—in the new slang, classifying it as ‘Village’ and ‘Broadway.’ And at the same time he sees sickness in American society—people like Hugo in Daisy who seem ‘a human penance for the shortcomings of a whole class and culture’; the new life is built on corruption, injustice, sterility. Like many others, though more thoroughly than most, Wilson studied the Marxist diagnosis and the Russian cure. But Hecate County is mostly about the sickness.
It is a collection of six stories and novelle (one long enough for a novel, but still, in method, a novella). They are written in that characteristically fastidious prose, at once masculine and sensitive, and all are satisfying, though not all are strong enough to justify Wilson’s preference for this book over the others. ‘The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles’ is a mildly Westian extravagance; ‘Ellen Terhune,’ an exercise in the manner of The Turn of the Screw. There are examples of satirical demonism, touches of Scott Fitzgerald. A certain slight poverty of means (endless drinks, parties, conversations) makes itself felt, without great harm to the intellectual elegance of the work; it wouldn’t be worth mentioning except that the author’s own standards are so high (‘If you begin recommending the second-rate … you’re not gradually educating people … you’re simply letting down the standards and leaving people completely at sea.’) These minor tales don’t matter much, considered in relation to the whole output of a major writer. But the centrepiece, ‘The Princess with the Golden Hair,’ does.
This is the story that caused all the fuss when it came out twenty-three years ago. The trouble was caused, I take it, by the descriptions of lovemaking. These passages, which are absolutely essential to the structure of the piece, are so refined and periphrastic that it is hard to imagine how anybody could be wickedly stimulated by them. The other shocking thing was that the narrator, a cultivated art expert, contracts gonorrhoea. But that too is sedately expressed, and, in the story, quite as functional as the parallel infection in Bubu of Montparnasse. It seems unlikely, given the changes in the climate of literary sexuality, that any of this can now get in the way of the reader, or even cause the book to be read for the wrong reasons.
In respect of its form, the story has the patrician elegance; its matter, however, is less mandarin, since it deals with the ‘mechanical tyranny’ of the ‘dying social system’ as observed in the Depression years. The narrator deals obliquely with this contrast in a passage about his rejection of the doctrine of ‘significant form’—stimulated by a new and fruitful contact with proletarian life, he sees the intense formalism of painting after Cézanne less as a triumph of art than as a symptom of ‘human decadence.’ But he cannot entirely give way to these feelings, and the distortions of life, reflected in some painting and brought about by capitalism, become the material of an elegant fictional argument.
The substance of the book lies in two contrasting love affairs. There is a bourgeois beloved, long untouchable and wearing a brace because she thinks she has tuberculosis of the spine. In fact the condition is hysterical. Her bogus pre-Raphaelite remoteness, and later her selfish sexual performance, are represented as deviant from a healthy American norm. Imogen is Beauty chained (by her self-induced disease) to a couch, a decadent, unhealthy teaser. Her beauty is real enough; she is perfect in form, and even the distortion of a breast by the unnecessary brace seems luxurious in its perversity. In her dealings with vulgar life she shows a streak of commonness. This is a very adequate image of the social disease of a bourgeoisie lacking the fineness that should accompany privilege.
The other girl is a second-generation Slavic-American, one of the good poor who have fallen into a feckless underworld life because of ‘the badness of the times,’ a victim of the system. She brings the narrator into contact with what is left of the good life of the poor, and he thinks of this as human reality in contrast with the spuriousness of Imogen. She also introduces him to the infections of that life; the gonorrhoea, unlike the tuberculosis, is real. It lingers in him, a reminder of the problems of class.
The proletarian-pastoral is notoriously a genre which promotes sentimentality and simpleness. Wilson’s critical faculty is on duty here to prevent disaster. The narrator’s love for the girl is critically presented. Was he perverse, seeking underworld excitements, deceiving himself? He decides not. She gave him ‘the life of the people,’ which transcended what infected and defiled it, and had more reality than the ‘infantile fairy tales’ of Imogen.
The delicacy and strength don’t come through in summary. The story has to be read. In its subtle joining of American patrician and American plebeian the book itself is a moment in the history of American culture.
(1965-6)
The one thing certain about modern criticism is that there is too much of it, and it is only rarely that one can say of a practitioner that he cannot safely be left unread. But one has to say it of Frye; ever since the publication, in 1957, of An Anatomy of Criticism, we have been trying to come to terms with him, and he has been writing a succession of shorter books to help us do so. Shakespeare’s final plays have always been important to his theory, and he has now devoted to them a series of lectures which should enable us to make up our minds.
One striking aspect of Frye’s system is its theological rigour. He insists that his theory, however primitive in its present form, is the only true one; that you must accept or reject it in toto. This new book, A Natural Perspective, is lucid and self-explanatory (Frye writes excellent prose); but it implies the dogmatics of the Anatomy, and readers who cannot find the time to absorb that vast and surprising book should at least read two of the essays reprinted in the collection of 1963 entitled Fables of Identity; these give the gist of the doctrine under the rubrics ‘The Archetypes of Literature’ and ‘Myth, Fiction and Displacement.’ They will then notice that this new book, freshly thought out as it undoubtedly is, is an application, to works Frye regards as crucial, of the general theory. I may as well say right off that I look for a way of saving some of the special insights without accepting the doctrine; exactly what Frye regards as an impossible compromise.
According to Frye, we must not confuse the experience of literature with criticism. In this book he ‘retreats from individual plays into a middle distance, considering the comedies as a single group unified by recurring images and structural devices.’ The reader ‘is led from the characteristics of the individual play … to consider what kind of a form comedy is, and what is its place in literature.’ This is what he calls ‘standing back,’ the way you stand back to look at a painting. One step back gives you the view of Wilson Knight or Bradley—occult thematic or psychological patterns—and the second enables you to see the object in its genre: Hamlet as a Revenge Play, for example. One more step and you have Frye’s view: Hamlet as myth, probably multiple: the Liebestod and the leap into and out of Ophelia’s grave. From this distance you see a work of literature as frozen in space, devoid like myth, of temporality, and fit for inclusion in an all-embracing mythical system. ‘It is part of the critic’s business to show how all literary genres are derived from the quest-myth … the quest-myth will constitute the first chapter of whatever future handbooks of criticism may be written that will be based on enough organised critical knowledge to … live up to their titles.’ Criticism is a progressive system of description. It cannot value literature, but by describing its mythical fundamentals it can enable us to deduce its political role, which is identical with that of myth: ‘the central myth of art must be the vision of an end of social effort, the innocent world of fulfilled desires, the free human society.’
This is not the whole of Frye, but it is, I think, the essence. And before disputing it one must insist that the mind which gives it embodiment, whether in the glittering structures of the Anatomy or the various and resourceful inventions of the present book, is well-stocked, cogent, and sane. Some of its principles deserve to be regarded as laws: ‘there is no passage in Shakespeare’s plays … which cannot be explained entirely in terms of its dramatic function and context … nothing which owes its existence to Shakespeare’s desire to “say” something.’ Or, to take another instance, Frye’s denial of allegorical readings applied to such works as The Winter’s Tale. The argument is dubious (there is no room for allegory because the drama does by ‘the identity of myth and metaphor’ what ritual did by ‘the identity of sympathetic magic’) but the conclusion is right: ‘the meaning of the play is the play,’ and abstractions from it are all false.
Nevertheless, all critics proceed by abstractions from that meaning. Some of them, however, seek to stay as close as may be to the ‘total experience of the play’—as W. K. Wimsatt once put it, they work out pi to as many decimal places as possible. Frye abstracts by standing back, and finds strength in his analogy with looking at a painting: but, as Philip Hallie has pointed out, the analogy is useless, merely a way of dignifying Frye’s generalities. What could be more abstract than the observation that the heroines of the romances are Andromeda-types; unless it is the observation that the hero of them all is Orpheus? The method can produce insights, as it does when Frye discusses the wedding ‘masque’ in The Tempest—a passage that has always seemed to fit rather loosely into an otherwise tight play. The accumulation of such insights is in fact an important part of the true history of criticism, though Frye does not think so; for him, of course, their value is determined solely by their adaptability to his total system. He is the polar opposite of Blackmur, who was essentially a very unsystematic critic and believed, dangerously but correctly, that criticism is mostly anarchic, though dependent on a difficult act of submission and then on the critic’s having a mind with useful and interesting contents. The insights are quite unsystematic; their history is certainly not that of a ‘progressive’ system. And of course the general history of criticism very powerfully suggests that it isn’t progressive; which is why Frye has had to strike such a revolutionary pose, representing himself as being to Aristotle the critic what Linnaeus was to Aristotle the biologist. The cost of the system is fairly faced in the opening pages of the Anatomy, which deny the critic the right to make judgments of value. What is more serious is the assumption that the farther he gets from the work the more accurate his descriptions will be.
These are the issues that arise once more in A Natural Perspective.1 Characteristically, they have to do with Frye’s system rather than with Shakespeare’s plays. How, to borrow Frye’s neat quote from The Comedy of Errors, should we ‘entertain the offered fallacy?’ Frye is saying that the romances, rather than the tragedies, are the culmination of the ‘logical evolution’ of Shakespeare (one of those disguised value-judgments one often finds in his work) because tragedy pays more respect to the reality principle, whereas romance deliberately moves back towards myth: ‘the story seeks its own end instead of holding up the mirror to nature.’ In other words, the more a work deviates from the reality principle the better he likes it, just as he believes only in criticism which has backed so far away from literature that all the little things that make one work different from another drop out of view. The closer it gets to myth, the more completely the story identifies itself with ritual magic, as Shakespeare must have known when he regressed at the end to the ‘childlike and concrete’ romance conventions, and so lent himself more easily to a criticism which ‘deals entirely with literature in this frozen or spatial way.’ At the stage in his evolution marked by Pericles Shakespeare is ready for the full Frye treatment.
‘Drama,’ says Frye, ‘is born in the renunciation of magic’; but instead of drawing the more obvious conclusions from this sound observation, he goes on to show not only that magic was never totally renounced, but that the best drama is always trying to get it back. When Shakespeare isn’t returning directly to ritual origins he is at least getting back as far as the New Comedy, stock characters of which recur in the Romances under very ingenious disguises: Leontes, for instance, is the jealous senex. It is true enough, though probably too general to be very useful, that Shakespeare’s comedies are like the Latin ones in that they show the reformation of an anticomic society and the festal inauguration of a comic one. But Frye’s real purpose in so arguing is simply that a general resemblance between Shakespeare’s plays and the Roman comedies is a large step back towards myth and ritual. In taking the step Frye argues well and makes many interesting points; but the essence of the situation is precisely that he is the critic of regress, writing regressive criticism about plays he finds to be regressive.
There is nothing new, of course, about treating the romances as a group; and to do so is at once to begin the regression, to lose sight of the differentiae. If one holds one’s ground for a moment it will be clear that few plays could be different from one another in more obvious ways than Pericles and Cymbeline, the first and second of the series. To forget that the mythic patterns of The Winter’s Tale are qualified by the actuality of Leontes’ putrid talk and the sexual realism of Perdita: or that the play of multiple recognitions, Cymbeline, is also one in which the talk of the characters achieves a new level of ratiocinative complexity; or that Prospero’s insistence on the need for magical chastity and the total obedience of his inferiors colour his language with prurience and fuss—to forget such obvious facts is to sacrifice the plays to a satisfying generalisation, and this seems no more acceptable in Frye than in Dowden or Strachey. And to prefer the romances to the tragedies, at any rate on these grounds, is to dismiss as irrelevant everything that constitutes the personal presence of a work of art, its existential complexities, all that makes it mean something now to a waking audience.
And here, I think, is the clue to what finally invalidates Frye. If literature does the work that ritual and myth once did, the arrangement is providential, for myth and ritual can obviously no longer do it. What makes literature different is, roughly, a different reality principle, appropriate, in an expression of Eliade’s which Frye himself quotes, to this time as myth was appropriate to that time. The difference between illud tempus and hoc tempus is simply willed away in Frye’s critical system, but it is essential to the very forms of modern literature, and to our experience of it. I do not mean simply that in the literature of our own time, which is itself considerably complicated by the prestige of myth, we are made aware of the conflicting claims of rigorous fact and comforting fiction; in my generalisation I include Shakespeare, and especially the Shakespeare of the tragedies. King Lear dies on a heap of disconfirmed myths, and modern literature follows Shakespeare into a world where the ritual paradigms will not serve, and magic does not work; where our imaginative satisfactions depend on a decent respect for the reality principle and our great novels are, in the words of Lukacs, ‘epics without god.’
And even Shakespeare’s romances belong in hoc tempore. We do not accept their conventions as we accept those of popular tales, simply as given for our ease and comfort. The tough verse forbids that, and so does the particularity of what happens on the stage. The statue that moves might enact the Pygmalion myth, were it not that Perdita in all her vitality stands motionless beside it; and that it is shown how no chisel could ever yet cut breath. It is the breath of Hermione, the presence of Perdita, that are lost to view as you stand back; you sacrifice them to a system and a myth. The conclusion seems obvious: when you hear talk of archetypes, reach for your reality principle.
(1965)
1 Both collections are now reissued by W. H. Allen.
2 W. H. Allen.
3 Edmund Wilson: A Study of Literary Vocation in Our Time. University of Illinois Press.
1 A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. Columbia.