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The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and Thirties

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A person reading an Edmund Wilson book receives an education of sorts. The arrangement of the essays is not chronological, it is thematic. There are 97 pieces. The destination of most of the essays was the NEW REPUBLIC.

Christian Gauss of Princeton was an influential teacher, although he founded no school. His pace was unhurried. He possessed scrupulous precision. He carried on a discreet feud with the canons of the English department. For him the great poet was Dante.

Ezra Pound is called a bold personality, but one of the symptoms of his incompleteness is his recourse to translation. Wallace Stevens has a style. He has a curious ironic imagination. Sherwood Anderson's art was closer to that of a poet than to a writer in prose. In his work there is a queer and disquieting imprecision. Ring Lardner shows a firmer grasp of Western vernacular than Sherwood Anderson does. Stephen Crane was a vortex of intensity.

By 1923 Wilson knew that the prose of Ernest Hemingway was of the first distinction. He suggests that Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein form a sort of school. There is a naivete of language passing into colloquialism. John Crowe Ransome is akin to Edith Sitwell and Wallace Stevens. Interestingly it is noted that Laura Riding and Donald Davidson, in addition to John Crowe Ransome, published poems in a Nashville magazine, THE FUGITIVE. They managed to throw off the influence of T.S. Eliot Wilson believes. As a talent spotter he is peerless. In the same essay he recognizes the excellence of the work of Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate.

The Imagist influence, it is alleged, has deprived American poetry of sound. Too, the influence of Whitman has rendered it more prosaic. In Wilson's estimation Henry James reached his peak around the time he wrote WHAT MAISIE KNEW and THE ASPERN PAPERS. He points out that James resembles Racine and Moliere, not contemporary novelists. Racine and Moliere present conflicts of moral character. Mencken's NOTES ON DEMOCRACY are the obverse of Whitman's LEAVES OF GRASS. Mencken's emotions are rarely positive.

To understand Woodrow Wilson we need to consider the virtues and the deficiencies of Presbyterian society. His power derived from passionate persistence. Woodrow Wilson's idealism eventually seemed to be hypocracy. He seems to have pretended even to himself that here was an absence in him of base motives. Puritan culture has a limited scope and is isolated from the world. It is a great handicap. The essay on Woodrow Wilson at Princeton is as detailed, mannered, and ironic as a story by Henry James!

Wilson gives an hilarious account of his visit to Scott Fitzgerald at his rented mansion in Delaware. Fitzgerald had a novel in progress, TENDER IS THE NIGHT. Wilson writes of John Dos Passos and his cult of the class-conscious proletariat and T.S. Eliot's classicism, royalism, and Anglo-Catholicism as possessing equally implausible stances. Wilson has a good time deploring the lessons espoused by Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, a pair of old-fashioned literary commentators.

Herbert Croly had been editor-in-chief of the NEW REPUBLIC. Political journaLism never became mere routine for Croly. He was shy, excessively sensitive, and yet, he could be formidable and final. Wilson does an analysis of sophistication. Songs of Cole Porter, the NEW YORKER magazine, and the plays of Philip Barry flicker and float, but in America there is no fixed code of manners. Arthur Schnitzler drew upon a different tradition.

As he moves to writing in the thirties, Wilson is driven to describe an America with nine million men out of work and an agricultural life bankrupted. With the economic breakdown there is psychological change. The best is saved for last in a very extended treatment of biographical information pertaining to Edna St.Vincent Millay. In all respects Wilson's writing is impeccable and vigorous.

Edmund Wilson surveys here the highlights of mostly American, but also British and European Literature in the twenties and the thirties. He also examines political realities. Reading this work over seventy years after most of it was written I was impressed again by Wilson's great strength in assertion, his firmness of judgment, his mastery. He may often be wrong but when he is wrong he is wrong with a good strong argument, and interesting perception.
The book opens with an essay on Wilson's teacher and mentor from Princeton Christian Gauss, It closes with a long essay on a close friend of Wilson, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. In between there are tens of essays on writers as varied as Poe and Hemingway, Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, Auden and Malraux, Samuel Butler, Dostoevsky, Thorton Wilder, Pope and Tennyson, Upton Sinclair, Henry James,Dos Passos, Virginia Woolf,Eugene O'Neill, Ring Lardner, Byron, and of course Wilson's friend F.Scott Fitzgerald. Wilson 's passion for Literature is felt throughout and one essay ' The Pleasures of Literature' is devoted to it.
Wilson was an early champion of great writers, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Malraux.
My own feeling is that he was a bit tin- eared. For how can anyone come away from reading Wallace Stevens without understanding that in the musicality and memorability of his lines there are few poets who can match him?
But he also remarkable in defining the essence of a writer. His essays on the poems of Swift, and on Samuel Butler provided me a fresh understanding of these writers.
I believe anyone who is truly interested in American Literature will find these essays a 'must read'.