Margot St. Clair

Edmund Wilson, mon amour

Reading this week’s New York Review, I fell in love yet again. This time the honor is bestowed upon Edmund Wilson, the literary critic and journalist who wrote for The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Vanity Fair (among other things) for over sixty years. Gazing at his picture, one is struck with his pudgy literary critic exterior; it his not his appearance that causes my heart to flutter. His writing speaks through ages: describing the literary scene of Paris, alongside Hemingway, dos Passos, and Fitzgerald in the twenties; bemoaning the unquestioned literary authority of Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats in the thirties; and forever contemplating the plight of the alienated American liberal.

John Updike, reviewing his journals, described his commentary on the American scene of the thirties as having renounced, “the hope of a civilized intelligence to identify itself with America.” Ahhhhh, such truthful words, but applied in our present context, so eerily prescient. It is this prescience which really characterizes much of his later writing. Of course, in time eternal quotes on the state of society continually recycle their applicability. But Wilson hits the nail so directly on the head so often; one cannot help but revel in his genius.

To investigate:
In his preface to Europe without Baedeker, written during the Vietnam War, Wilson claimed that, “our talk about bringing to backward peoples the processes of democratic government and of defending the ‘free world’ is as much an exploit of Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy as anything ever perpetrated by the English.”
In the sixties, Wilson wrote of his growing distrust of what he denounced as “the policies of the lying governments; the inevitable standardization of what we assume to be ‘exotic’ and ‘backward’ peoples; the stupidity of applied ideologies; the competition of ‘success’ with ‘status.’”
In the twenties, he claimed that “the landslide of American nationalism had already begun’, and he feared that, “the United States will develop into a great imperialistic power with all its artists, critics, and philosophers as ineffective and as easily extinguished as the German ones were in 1914.”
And finally (and isn’t this a feeling we’ve all had, at the very least on November 3, 2004) “I find – with a certain surprise – that I am rather out of tune with the US. It has suddenly come over me that, whatever you are doing, functioning in America is a terrible struggle – in the long run, it wears you out.”

There is more to love about Wilson than just his dissatisfaction with the state of America. Inside his dissatisfaction is embodied a kind of loss of innocence, which I think any critic/appreciator of society and literature happens to stumble upon at some point. But still, despite his bitter nostalgia, he held on to a focus that directed his reading and pursuits, (and one which I continually site as my own raison d’etre), as he had, “made it his business to extend himself into every kind of human consciousness with which he can establish contact.” He was forever seeking, “the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art.” These sentiments, however radically optimistic, are so necessary in our society, and so easy to bury beneath the clutter of Fox News and People Magazine. As I sit listening to the confirmation of hearings of Samuel Alito, Jr., I can’t help but think that this biography has come about at a most auspicious time.

(all quotes from “The Unquiet American.” Pankaj Mishra. The New York Review, January 12, 2006)

posted by Margot St. Clair @ 11:56 AM