Customer Reviews

Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s: The Shores of Light / Axel's Castle / Uncollected Reviews (Library of America #176)

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This first volume of an LoA edition of E.Wilson collects reviews and literary essays on and from the 20s and 30s.
I think they should be required reading for all Amazonian amateur reviewers. Not that I always agree with everything that he had to say. He was a snob, no doubt, and proud of it, it seems. (Look at the delightful text called Muses out of Work from the 20s, where he pontificates on poets and poetry; then he adds an afterthought when the collection of reviews was published in book form in the 50s: he includes Hart Crane's letter attacking him for being a sort of social parasite, and another letter that attacks his general poetic theory, but admits that his judgments are still good, because he manages to ignore his own theories. That's where my headline is taken from.) As time progresses, his essays become more mature and his subjects more relevant. Must be a function of age, I guess.
The collection is full of interesting thoughts on subjects like Poe, Henry James, Upton Sinclair, Dos Passos, Wilder, D.H.Lawrence, Americans and Russians in exile, American and English English, etc... The man was rather vain, as expected. He took pleasure in bashing the early Scott Fitzgerald, he was exceedingly proud in taking a small part in launching Hemingway...
Why do I read him? 2 main reasons: 1st because of LoA, 2nd because Wilson was a great help to Nabokov when he came to the US as a refugee during WW2. Good deeds must be rewarded. Never mind that they fell out later over Lolita and Nab's Pushkin translations.
Apart from his snobbery, the man had sound principles: one of the first rules for a civilization should be freedom of artist and scientist.
And he was a good polemicist: the influence of T.S.Eliot is making young men prematurely senile...
This volume 1 of the LoA edition contains mainly two essay collections: The Shores of Light, which takes about 3/4 of the space and doesn't seem to be available in print separately any more, and Axel's Castle, a collection of essays published in 1931, which I will review separately.

I am not sure why Edmund Wilson isn't discussed as much nowadays as he was previous during his lifetime. I find his writing about the artists and art of his day to be insightful, interesting, and always informative. His writing is interesting and alive. Of course, it is the rare critic who is read beyond his immediate generation, but I think Wilson deserves to be read and thought about. Of course, the modern (or post-modern) deconstructionist and sex fixated fashion is not a part of Wilson's world and that may well be why I like it much better than nearly all present-day critical writing. Certainly, it is wonderfully valuable in getting into the culture of the times when the artists he writes about were working and their now standard works were new and unknown. Reading about Joyce, Eliot, Hemingway, and many others when they were young and still creating new works was fascinating. Even now, we can see that Wilson had a keen eye and new what he was talking about (as long as he wasn't writing as a shill for socialism).

Another factor that has probably put him out in the cold is his now unfashionable politics. He was an apologist for the USSR and Stalin. Of course, Putin has recently made signals indicating a possible rehabilitation of Stalin and maybe Wilson's political writing might be useful to him and those who would support such a hideous effort. I have no use for Wilson's advocacy for socialism and find it to be much weaker than his stuff on literature, theater, and culture (which, in former times, was not always seen as politics).

This wonderful collection provides us with his essays and reviews that were collected in "The Shores of Light" and the book that put him in the big leagues of artistic criticism, "Axel's Castle". This volume also supplies some reviews that were not collected in book form. You not only get a look at the writers and artists of his time, but how Wilson sees them in the context of the artists of earlier times. For example, Axel's Castle examines literature from 1870-1930 through the works of six writers: W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, and Paul Valéry. He sees them as the culmination of a movement that began much earlier and discusses its origins and how these writers represent a fulfillment of the issues raise by Romanticism and so forth. This book is, I think, a very helpful introduction to not only those writers, but in providing a context for understanding them within their culture, their artistic goals, and how things were viewed at the time rather than being satisfied with our little paragraph passing judgment and dismissing those decades in retrospect.

This book also has a chronology of Wilson's rather troubled life, notes on the text, other notes that explain certain issues within the text that a modern reader might need help with, and an index.

A wonderful volume and very much worth exploring.

Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI

Re-reading these essays and reviews has simply increased my respect for Wilson. I can only say that reading Wilson has helped give me a framework for evrything I read.

It's great to see Wilson get this recognition for his brilliant insights and fine writing. For many of us the writers and characters of the Twenties and Thirties hold a special fascination. Wilson who knew most or all of this celebrated cast of characters during this period is a splendid witness to these decades. It's book for dipping and browsing.

I don't know about other LOA publications, but this is the most typo-riddled book I've read in a long, long time. This is supposed, if not academic, but THE definitive edition of great American literature. Well, the only definitive thing about this book is that it is sloppy.