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Michael Reilly

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Classics and Commercials

by Edmund Wilson

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Michael Reilly said: " This is the collected literary criticism of Edmund Wilson in the 1940s. It is roughly chronologically arranged. He starts with a July 1940 piece criticizing Archibald MacLeish, the new Librarian of Congress, because he had suggested that authors shou This is the collected literary criticism of Edmund Wilson in the 1940s. It is roughly chronologically arranged. He starts with a July 1940 piece criticizing Archibald MacLeish, the new Librarian of Congress, because he had suggested that authors should censor themselves as part of the upcoming war for Western Civilization. He ends with a December 1949 appreciation of the English novelist, Ronald Firbank. Most of the pieces were originally published in The New Yorker, some in The New Republic.

Wilson has spectacular breadth as a critic. This collection includes detailed and well thought out considerations of Jane Austen, detective stories, Joyce's "Finnegans Wake", Oscar Wilde, William Faulkner, Thackery and much more. Some of the pieces discuss authors who are fairly obscure these days. Who still reads Octave Mirbeau, George Grosz or Angelica Balanoff? However, Wilson is the John McPhee of literary critics. He can make almost any book interesting.

He has a section called "The Boys in the Back Room" which is brilliant. His theory is that many of the serious American novelists of the 30s and 40s were strongly influenced by Ernest Hemingway. He discusses James M. Cain, John O'Hara, William Saroyan, and John Steinbeck and explains how each of them started from the Hemingway style and made their own changes.

Wilson has a clear and classical style which he can play with. He can drop a nice turn of phrase. Hemingway "is pugnacious almost to the point of madness." or, on Agatha Christie's novels, "You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out...".

Wilson has no use for most popular literature. He trashes horror stories and detective stories, including the critic's darlings, Chandler and Hammett. He reviews the best seller of the decade, "The Robe" by Lloyd C. Davis. He opines that it is difficult "to imagine any literate person with even the faintest trace of literary taste could ever get through more than two pages of it for pleasure."

He is judiciously enthusiastic about Evelyn Waugh, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was his friend, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Edith Wharton and the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Wilson read an astounding amount. It was not unusual for him to read nine or ten novels for an eight-page review of an author. At times he succumbs to the reviewer trap of long plot summaries. He also has a tendency at times to lapse into "fine writing" for its own sake.

It would not be possible these days to support yourself writing literary criticism as Wilson did. These days literary critics are either academics or journalist who dabble in it. Wilson was fascinated by things, books, people, ideas and he had the very rare skill of saying intelligent things about all of it and getting paid for it. ...more "

Jul 23, 2023 04:37PM · see review