Edmund Wilson died 30 years ago this summer, but his shade lingers over those who write. Some weeks ago, after reviewing a book on Rudyard Kipling's political attitudes for these pages, I picked up Wilson's The Wound and the Bow to read his essay on Kipling. In "The Kipling That Nobody Read," written more than 60 years ago, Wilson hit the big points: the miserable childhood, the ear for vernacular, the technical mastery, the hatred, the subordination of literary gifts to hidebound political views.
The Wound and the Bow takes its title from the story of Philoctetes in Greek legend, the warrior possessed of a "bow that never missed its mark" and cursed by an incurable wound. The title essay expands this myth into a psychological account of the artist, who draws power as a writer from lingering psychological wounds. The essays on Kipling and Dickens in that collection memorably illustrate the concept.
A writer approaching a subject on which Wilson wrote must wonder whether there is anything useful to be said beyond what the American polymath already uttered. Wilson was a determined amateur, one of the last before the nation succumbed to the mania for credentials. Seeing himself as primarily a journalist he tackled subjects with avid curiosity and prodigious energy, writing about them in lucid English.
Axel's Castle, his book of 1931 on symbolism and literary modernism, may not compete with the vast literature on Yeats, Eliot and Joyce published in the 70 years since, but his essay on Joyce shows a strong mind grappling with the first half of Finnegans Wake, which had then been published serially.
One of his most substantial works, Patriotic Gore, is a panoramic examination of the literature of the American Civil War. (Its title is taken from Maryland's state song: "Avenge the patriotic gore / That flecked the streets of Baltimore.") What fascinates about that work is not only his efforts to disinter half-remembered authors -- Sidney Lanier, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page -- but also his efforts to understand in both literary and historical perspective such figures as Abraham Lincoln and the younger Oliver Wendell Holmes.
His essay on Lincoln shuns the national mythologizing ( "... one is tempted to feel that the cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg"). Instead, he focuses on the young Lincoln's freethinking and its metamorphosis into a deeper if somewhat inchoate spirituality during the presidential years, the legal precision of the prose, and the relentless underlying ambition.
His Justice Holmes is not the genial figure of Catherine Drinker Bowen's Yankee from Olympus, but a man whose legal philosophy, rising from his experience in the brutality of the Civil War, is basically that law reflects the interplay of forces in society, with the stronger forces prevailing. The South may have had a cause, but it lost; law, over time, reflects the winner's views.
When he took on a subject, he tackled it fearlessly. After teaching himself Russian, one of his several languages, he had the audacity to enter into a highly public dispute over Russian prosody with Vladimir Nabokov.
With Vladimir Nabokov!
In the 1950s he wrote about the Dead Sea Scrolls in The New Yorker, subsequently publishing the material in a book. A subsequent book, The Dead Sea Scrolls, 1947-1969, expanded on the earlier volume, including an account of its reception, with mordant satisfaction at the distortions and intellectual dishonesty displayed by academic scholars and religious figures.
Perhaps the best example of his amateur's scorn for the excess of the professoriate is to be found in the essay "The Fruits of the MLA," reprinted in the posthumous collection The Devils and Canon Barham. "The Fruits of the MLA" is a broadside against the Modern Language Association, a professional organization of academic scholars of literature, for its needlessly cumbersome procedures in editing the classic American authors: "It seems that eighteen of these Mark Twain workers are reading Tom Sawyer, word by word, backward, in order to ascertain, by this drudgery by attention to the story or the style, how many times 'Aunt Polly' is printed as 'aunt Polly,' and how many times ssst! is printed as sssst!'"
What Wilson was campaigning for was an American version of the French Pleaide series -- reliable texts in readable type, published without burdensome scholarly apparatus. Such editions now exist, in the Library of America series, and it is a great pity that Wilson did not live to see them. It is also a pity that we cannot see what Wilson would have made of the even greater obscurantism that now dominates what used to be called English departments in the universities.
It is not that Wilson despised scholarship; his book on the Dead Sea Scrolls contains numerous respectful references to archaeologists and specialists in the Semitic languages. But he detested cant and sham and pretense, and he wrote in a querulous tone whenever he thought that someone was wasting his time with substandard work (as in the famous essay dismissing murder mysteries, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?").
Neither is it that the ideas he expresses are necessarily original with him. Given that so many of his essays began as book reviews, with the book as a mere starting point rather than the focus, it is not easy to tell how much he may have drawn from the books under inspection.
He saw himself as a journalist in the broadest sense, a popularizer and explainer of ideas and authors. Like most journalists, he was an eclectic thinker, attaching himself to no particular school. In the short essay "The Historical Interpretation of Literature," delivered as a lecture at Princeton in 1940 and reprinted in The Triple Thinkers, he does distinguish himself from critics such as T.S. Eliot, who approach literature in a non-historical manner, seeing the whole of it "spread out before him under the aspect of eternity." But as a historical interpreter himself, Wilson refused to hold to a single method, deriving insights from history, sociology, psychology and economics as they seemed most useful for a particular subject.
Though far from infallible in matters of faith, morals or politics, he was an inspired amateur, one of the last of the breed called the man of letters, whose trajectory John Gross traced in a 1969 book, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. The 19th century was the high-water mark of the species, when a Scottish schoolmaster, James Murray, could become the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. (His heroic labors are recounted in a memorable biography, Caught in the Web of Words, written by his granddaughter, K.M. Elisabeth Murray.) In recent years, we have had John Updike, who reads everything and reviews everything; Stephen Jay Gould, who, despite his scientific speciality, ranged broadly over fields and cultures in his essays; and Gore Vidal, who can be urbane and witty about everyone from Suetonius to Richard Nixon. But thoughtful, literate and readable as they all are, none has quite the range of Wilson, or quite his depth of authority.
Perhaps, as they say, we shall not see his like again.
John E. McIntyre, who abandoned an uncompleted Ph.D. dissertation at Syracuse University to drift into journalism, was briefly a member of the MLA in graduate school. He is now president of the American Copy Editors Society and The Sun's assistant managing editor for the copy desk.