Wellek Wilson PDF

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)
Author(s): René Wellek

Source: Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 15, No. 1, Special Issue in Honor of Calvin S.
Brown (Mar., 1978), pp. 97-123
Published by: Penn State University Press
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Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)
RENÉ WELLEK
Edmund Wilson is the one American critic most widely known

and read in Europe. In the United States he is (or rather was) a
dominant figure: the man of letters, a general critic of society.
Many of his writings, such as The American Jitters (1932), To the
Finland Station (1940), The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955),
Apologies to the Iroquois (1959), and O Canada (1965) range far
beyond the province of literature. Wilson also wrote fiction, plays,
and verse, recorded impressions of his travels to Soviet Russia, Is-
rael, Haiti, and the main countries of Europe, and in several auto-
biographical writings left a full record of his development and
views on all possible subjects. The diaries and notebooks which
Leon Edel is editing and the collection of letters promised will
constitute an account of a man's most intimate feelings and a
chronicle of his involvement in his time from his first trip to Eu-
rope in 1908 to his last illness.
Thus some injustice is done if I limit myself strictly to the liter-
ary criticism. Focussing on it we are immediately confronted with
two difficulties. Wilson himself disclaimed being a literary critic.
"I think of myself simply as a writer and a journalist. I am as much
interested in history as I am in literature," he said in 1959. l Then,
as a good empiricist, Wilson refuses to be pinned down to a theory.
In introducing his anthology, The Shock of Recognition (1943),
Wilson states expressly that "the best way to understand the gen-
eral is, in any case, to study the concrete."2 There are only two
essays in the enormous corpus of Wilson's writings which can be
considered deliberate pronouncements on the theory of criticism
and literature: "Marxism and Literature" (1937) and "The His-
torical Interpretation of Literature" (1941 ).3 One must look to
casual remarks and the implications of opinions and observations
in order to discover the theories and standards that underlie his
critical activity. One must be aware of the changes or at least the
shifts of emphasis in his critical preoccupations, which run parallel
to his political commitments, changing in turn with the social
history of the United States.
It might be best first to define Wilson's position in a history of
97
98 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
American criticism. Clearly he precedes the Ne

though his career overlaps its heyday. Wilson n
New Critic in detail. We find only perfunctory
Allen Tate's "finding fault with Keats for givin
patory views of his time,"4 or to Ransom's q
speare's reference to "dusty death,"5 where eve
som is omitted, or Empson's "interesting study
Only in 1962 did Wilson comment on Leavis.
have read his books, "and when I have read him
railing against somebody. He is the kind of dog
inevitably antagonizes me." "Why try to cast a
body who doesn't like George Eliot? I deteste
Adam Bede when I had to read them for school
around to Middlemarch. And why regard Max B
Still, Wilson recognizes that Leavis' "interest in
sionate and moral."7
In the interview in which he speaks of the Le
versy about the two cultures without committ
issue, Wilson tells of a plan to write "a sort of
academic life." "The villain is a New Critic, w
Yeats 's poems apart and discovers homosexualit
Swans at Coole' - note the 'Wilde' swans, and
are really young men."8 Without mentioning n
elsewhere his disapproval of "finding religious
gories in even such extremely nonreligious wri
and Stephen Crane," and he must be alluding
Love and Death in the American Novel (1960
about the assumption that "the sexual situati
American fiction could only have taken place
similar passage refers to the "vast academic des
of The Sound and the Fury, the variants in the
Letter and the religious significance of The G
compares the present fashion of interpretation
of Jewish pilpul, that purely intellectual exerc
explaining some passage from Scripture in a fa
way."11 But these remarks seem off target. Ne
analytical nor religious allegorizing is character
Critics, and they, of course, had no sympathy
ries of textual criticism which Wilson attacked
Fruits of the MLA (1968). There seems a deliber
ing in Wilson's complete silence about I.A. Ri
Yvor Winters, R.P. Blackmur, Cleanth Brooks,
mention only the most obvious names. He re
Trilling's first book on Matthew Arnold, praisi
discussion of literary criticism.12
RENÉ WELLEK 99
There is one exception, and that is

a New Critic. Wilson early recogn
become perhaps the most important
speaking world"13 and showed some
influence. "It is as much as one's lif
young people, to say an approving w
one about Donne." Wilson speaks, I
"scientific study of aesthetic values
criticism is "completely nonhistoric
writing of the age abstracted from
fore him in one great exhibition, of
poise, he conducted a comparative
Wilson wrote a whole page parodyin
culing his name-dropping and what
linkages and comparisons.16 Wilson
action induced by Eliot is "leading f
a futile aestheticism."17
Much later (in 1958) in a review of
Eliot by "Myra Buttle," the pseudon
bridge classical don, Wilson defende
raged by his criticism of Shakespear
agrees with Eliot that Dante's Divi
Shakespeare's plays," that Milton's im
than visual, and that Shelley writes
impersonations of the "formidable p
Johnson who tries to instruct us "w
what extent, it is permitted [us] to
by Eliot's talk about the "Main Str
exclude Auden and even Yeats.19 Th
literary dictator is of course part an
of Eliot's politics and religion.
Wilson's distaste for the American
and Paul Elmer More, is even strong
public attention around 1929 but th
much earlier, even in the 1890's and
Wilson, in "Notes on Babbitt and
"Sophocles, Babbitt and Freud" (19
agreeing with Babbitt's interpretati
adopted a view of Greek tragedy wh
Sophocles' serenity, emphasizing rat
his plots, and objects particularly to
Goethe, to play down Antigone's abn
er.20 Wilson in his polemics against
"art for art's sake" as justified in it
of experimentation with such new t
consciousness" in Joyce against More's uninform

he concludes, is "really an old-fashioned Puritan
Puritan theology without having lost the Purita
and Babbitt is called "an old-fashioned snob an
fanatical literary moralist" who propounds an "a
pid philosophy."22 Wilson had called on More in
December 1929 before his public attack and ha
what satirical account of his visit which he publ
More's death in 1937, in a toned-down version.23
Thus Wilson is clearly set off from the two ma
can criticism in the first half of this century. H
with the group of critics who, around 1920, rev
"genteel tradition": with H.L. Mencken and Va
Wilson tells us how in 1912, at the age of 17, he
Smart Set, and was "astonished to find audacio
amusing critical articles by men named Mencken
whom I had never heard."24 Mencken is later pr
gant terms: "he is the civilized consciousness of
learning, its intelligence and its taste, realizing t
manners and mind and crying out in horror and
him "the whole perspective of literature in the
changed."26 Wilson, however, came to recogni
pleasant features: his contempt for the common
American boob," his pseudo -Niet zschean worsh
and later his "tenderness to Nazis." Wilson admits that he can be
"brutal, obtuse," that as a thinker he is "brash, inconsistent and
crude" but he continued to admire him as "our greatest practicing
journalist" since Poe, defending his "using a bludgeon on a society
that understands nothing but bludgeons." Wilson particularly val-
ued The American Language and praised his prose-style for its
"personal rhythm and color." He was "a poet in prose and a hu-
morist."27
In an invented dialogue between Scott Fitzgerald and Van Wyck
Brooks, Wilson has Fitzgerald address Brooks: "You were almost
alone, when you first began to write, in taking American literature
seriously . . . you were among the first to stand for the romantic
doctrine of experience for its own sake and to insist on the im-
portance of literature as a political and social influence." Brooks
understood that the failing of our literature was "the timidity of
the 'genteel tradition.' "28 "America's new orientation in respect
to her artistic life was inaugurated in 1915 by Brooks 's A merica
Coming of Age and two years later more violently promoted by
Mencken's^ Book of Prefaces "29 When Brooks turned later into
a sentimental, indiscriminate chronicler of American literary his-
tory with the series of books beginning with The Flowering of New
RENÉ WELLEK 101
England (1936), Wilson continued with

of Brooks though he himself had a far
of American literature. As late as 1963 Wilson called Brooks "one of
the top American writers of our time," "the first modern literary his-
torian to read through the whole of American belles lettres," com-
paring him, extravagantly to my mind, to the greatest literary histori-
ans, Francesco De Sanctis and Hippolyte Taine.30 Wilson reviewed
every one of Brooks 's books favorably, though he came to see that
Brooks is not "really a literary critic because he is not interested in
literature as an art and lies under serious suspicion of not being able
to tell chalk from cheese. . . Van Wyck Brooks concerns himself
with literature mainly from the point of view of its immediate so-
cial significance." Still, he has "the historical imagination." He can
"show us movements and books as they loomed upon the people to
whom they were new."31 Even the Opinions of Oliver Allston
(1941), a deplorable book which divides writers into "primary,"
optimistic writers and the lesser breed of pessimists, is handled very
gently by Wilson. It "revealed that [Brooks's] own standards of ex-
cellence are still more or less those of an enthusiastic young man in
his twenties in the heyday of H.G. Wells, a young man for whom
Tolstoy and Ibsen, on the one hand, and Victor Hugo and Brown-
ing, on the other, all inhabit the same empyrean of greatness."32
Wilson sees the change in Brooks from the "somber and despairing"
early writings to the "chortling and crooning" Flowering of New
England33 and its successors, but he cannot bring himself to ac-
knowledge Brooks's sell-out to a bumptious nationalism, to the
"nativism" which has since inflated the study of American litera-
ture.
Wilson sided with these critics of American business civilization
in the twenties, but he differed from them as a critic in two crucial
respects: he had a sure, well-defined taste, and he acquired tools for
the analysis of literature from nineteenth-century historicism, par-
ticularly Marxism, and from Freud. He learned (if such a thing can
be learned) his sense of quality in his school, Hill School in Potts-
town, Pennsylvania, very early. He speaks gratefully of his classical
training, particularly of one teacher, Alfred Rolfe,34 and of his
early acquaintance with the writings of James Huneker, whose Ego-
ists (1909) gave "a stimulating account of the excitement to be de-
rived from the writings of Stendhal, Flaubert, Huysmans and
Baudelaire."35 As an undergraduate at Princeton, class of 1916,
Wilson studied French literature under Christian Gauss (1878-
1951), with whom he established a lifelong, almost filial relation-
ship. Gauss was, in Wilson's estimation (which lacks, I think, public
documentation), "a brilliant critic - by far the best, as far as I
know, in our academic world of that period."36 In the dedication
to Wilson's first critical book, Axel's Castle (1931),

"it was principally from you that I acquired then
literary criticism ought to be - a history of man's
ings in the setting of the conditions which have s
published correspondence shows how Wilson def
advice37 and how his taste was formed by an early
French literature. Wilson spent almost two years
November 1917 to July 1919), first as a wound-dr
in intelligence. The War shook his aestheticism an
called his upperclass consciousness. (His father was
had been Attorney General of New Jersey for a b
realized that "I could never go back to the falsenes
of my prewar life again. I swore to myself that w
over I should stand outside society altogether."38 A
tice he sent to friends a manifesto "indicting the
the Western world and suggesting a way out in th
socialism."39 When he returned he plunged into th
wich Village and into journalism, first as managin
Fair and later as drama critic and associate editor of The New Re-
public. He became a declared dissenter, a "radical," a Bohemian,
violently opposed to the reigning business temper of the time. He
welcomed thus the stockmarket crash of 1929 with some dee as
an exposure of the "stupid gigantic fraud" of capitalism. In the
worst winter of the Depression (1930-31) Wilson went on extensive
trips through the country investigating poverty, strikes, and racism
such as the Scottsboro case vividly described in The American Jit-
ters (1932). Early in 1931 he studied Marx seriously for the first
time, and he moved more and more toward communism, signing,
for instance, a manifesto calling for the election of William Z.
Foster for President in 1932. In 1935 Wilson made a trip to Rus-
sia for several months and wrote an account which, while showing
some signs of disillusion, still asserted that "you feel in the Soviet
Union that you are living at the moral top of the world."41 But
Wilson very soon got into conflict with the orthodox communists,
for he could not help being shocked by the great purges. Still, in
1940, he published To the Finland Station, a glowing account of
the rise of socialism and communism, of the lives and teachings of
Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and Lenin. Lenin is particularly admired as
the propounder of "one of the great imaginative influences of our
age - a world-view which gives life a meaning and in which every
man is assigned a place." But Stalin is now called "a bandit-poli-
tician."42 That year Wilson broke with The New Republic: he op-
posed the pro-Allied policy of its owners. He retired from public
life almost completely, considering the War simply a struggle be-
tween two greedy imperialisms. In the summer of 1945 he made a
RENÉ WELLEK 103
trip to Europe as a reporter which he

out Baedecker: Sketches among the R
land (1947). The book is a strange dis
tionalism and feeling of superiority o
(England and France included). Despite
can policies Wilson had remained a str
1928 Wilson said that it <4is our high
true prophetic words to declining Eu
could assert that "for myself, as an A
doubt that I have derived a good deal m
as well as the inspirational kind from
room than I have from the cathedrals
same book of reflections, A Piece of M
clare: "When, for example, I look thro
I do not belong to the country depicte
live in that country."44 Wilson did no
1946 to 1955 and defended this lapse
Cold War and the Income Tax (1963) w
American bureaucracy and policies. H
of the opposition: Roosevelt lured the
the Cold War was started by the Ame
tween two greedy seaslugs or gorillas.
most strongly opposed to American po
ped commenting on contemporary Am
widely honored. In 1963 he received
Freedom, and later the National Med
the rewards of the Establishment with
against it. In academic circles his repu
Stanley E. Hy man's unfair chapter i
but it rose again in the last years of h
Charles P. Frank, and Leonard Kriege
monographs and Frank Kermode, John
man Podhoretz, and others wrote laud
It seemed necessary to trace Wilson
his criticism reflects these changes ve
dedication to Gauss, Wilson must have
setting and even conditioning of liter
age of fifteen he had read Hippolyte T
Literature in translation and that his
literature was affected by Taine's met
interpretation." Later he read him in
larly the comparison between Tennyso
admiration for this passage, (which co
Tennyson - the family circle, the wor
seurs of antiquity, the sportsmen, the
the wealthy Victorian businessmen and their lad

Musset - the intellectuals, the Bohemian artists,
ists, the hectic women of leisure), survived the
feel in the chapter on Taine in To the Finland St
Wilson disagrees with Taine 's hostile view of th
Wilson deplores here the "monotonous force" of
"cocksure and priggish tone." Taine "manages t
of the factory with the upholstery and the orna
nineteenth-century sa Ion," but Wilson still adm
program, which he sees modified by "strong mo
From Taine and, I assume, many other historian
eral concepts of determinism, or at least genetic
quently refers to the racial ancestry of authors.
Oscar Wilde we must take into account his Italian blood "in con-
sidering his theatrical instincts and his appetite for the ornate."48
Wilson makes much of the moral genius of the Jews. "It was prob-
ably the Jew in the half -Jewish Proust that saved him from being
the Anatole France of an even more deliquescent phase of the
French belletristic tradition."49 He even appeals to the elusive in-
heritance of the character of a grandfather when he explains Ron-
ald Firbank's passion for perfection by the slogan of his grandfather,
a big railroad contractor: "I value as nowt what I gets for nowts."50
As in Taine great importance is sometimes assigned to climate and
weather: we are told that Geneviève Taggard was born in the state
of Washington and taken as a baby to Honolulu and are asked
"whether the moods and the emotions of lyric poetry are not, to
a considerable degree, the products of varying weather. In coun-
tries where the seasons change, our feelings also run to extremes."
In California even poetry becomes equable and bright as the cli-
mate.51 Wilson seems to believe in a linguistic determinism when
he says that "our failure in the United States to produce much
first-rate lyric poetry is partly due to our flattening and drawling
of the vowels and our slovenly slurring of the consonants"52 and
makes much of the Russian aspects of verbs to conclude that Rus-
sians lack a sense of time and hence to explain the lengths of their
novels and plays.53 He can even establish a link between the prog-
ress of technology and a literary genre. The ghost story was killed
by electric light. "It was only during the ages of candlelight that
the ghost story really flourished."5 Once he makes the odd state-
ment that value is determined by demand: "If Manet- cannot pos-
sibly be considered so great a painter as Titian, it is partly because,
in his lifetime, there was so much less demand for his work."55
More convincingly, throughout his career Wilson would point to
the social origins of a writer such as Ben Jonson or Max Beerbohm.56
He would try to reconstruct the background, for example, in the
RENÉ WELLEK 105
politics of Upstate New York during th

plain the stories of Harold Frederic o
Beecher Sto we as "a great repository w
of history,"58 drawing from literature
More boldly he would generalize on the
Thus Dorothy Parker's poetry belongs
psychological and literary atmosphere
ties, "when people were much freer" th
"they began to have to watch their poc
looks back at the Twenties, when "the
had not yet begun working on people t
experience."59 Wilson's first book of
implies such generalizations about succe
himself acknowledges that the scheme
Science and the Modern World (1926)
own book.60 Just as Romanticism as in
book reacted against the Newtonian sci
century, so Symbolism reacted against
and Positivism of the nineteenth centu
conceived the idea of an international s
I believe, was new at that time.61 The
Eliot, Proust, Joyce, and Gertrude Stei
been developed only much later. It w
baud proclaimed Proust a symbolist.62
and continuity of the international mo
the great names was Wilson's. We may,
the inclusion of Gertrude Stein and no
ignoring of the Germans - George, Ril
may doubt Wilson's success in attempt
of space-time and relativity implied in
the equivalent of the metaphysics of W
verse of Whitehead, the 'events,' which
infinitely small or infinitely compreh
structure, in which all are interdepend
other and the whole; so Proust's book i
complicated revelations." Joyce is assim
terms: "like Proust's or Whitehead's
world is always changing as it is percei
and by them at different times."63 Bu
bolists (in Wilson's sense) reflect or inc
insights of modern physical science an
union of art and science can hardly be
instead of endorsing Valéry's similar h
Valéry as a philosopher. "Most of Valér
fundity comes, I believe, from the fac
first literary men to acquire a smattering of th

and physical theory." "He never seems to have g
excitement at reading Po in care."64
This whole concept is in conflict with the side
Wilson cannot help stressing: "a sullenness, a let
energies ingrown and sometimes festering." Wil
du temps perdu "one of the gloomiest books eve
the aridity and dreariness of Eliot's The Waste L
of Yeats that his poetry is "dully weighted, for
candor, by a leaden acquiescence in defeat." Jo
empted. "It is curious to reflect that a number o
have found Joyce misanthropic."65
Axel's Castle is, however, dominated by other m
view that verse is a dying technique, that poetry
past, and that symbolism will be or should be re
naturalism. There seems to be a shift in Wilson's
writing of the book. The first chapter on "Sym
published as "A Preface to Modern Literature"
gives a sympathetic account of the French symb
whereas the last chapter, "Axel and Rimbaud,"
lished in February and March 1930, after the sto
has a tone of disapproval.66 We are told that "th
of the Symbolists consisted in reminding people
and function of words,"67 i.e., their power of su
then treated to a contrast between the fictional
de risle-Adam's tragedy) who says "Live? our ser
for us" and the life-story of Rimbaud, told with
ments then current, concluding that "Rimbaud's
satisfactory than the works of his Symbolist co
He hopes now that we shall live to see Valéry,
displaced and points suddenly to Russia as "a c
central socio-political idealism has been able to u
spire the artist as well as the engineer."69 Wilso
verted to Marxism.
But has he become a Marxist literary critic? The question can-
not be answered by a simple "yes" or "no." Wilson certainly be-
comes conscious of the class concept and the economic conditions
of literature. When Michael Gold, a Marxist critic, attacked Thorn-
ton Wilder as a typical bourgeois, Wilson, though a friend of Wilder,
defended Gold for raising the class issue.70 Occasionally, even in
later years, Wilson engaged in Marxist allegorizing. Thus, referring
to the fact that we are told at the end of the novel that Madame
Bovary's daughter is sent to a cotton mill after her mother's sui-
cide, Wilson remarks: "The socialist of Flaubert's time might per-
fectly have approved of this: while the romantic individualist de-
RENÉ WELLEK 107
ludes himself with unrealizable fantasi

bourgeois society, and only succeeds in
humanity fall a victim to the industria
which, unimpeded by his dreaming, go
But even here Wilson does not quite en
into the mouth of a socialist of Flaubert's time: Wilson must have
been aware that the fate of poor Berthe is quite incidental to the
meaning of the book. At most, it adds one more cruel touch. In
the same paper, "The Politics of Flaubert" (1937), the liaison be-
tween Rosanette, the daughter of poor silk-mill workers, with the
hero of L'Éducation sentimentale, Frederic Moreau, is considered
"a symbol of the disastrously unenduring union between the pro-
letariat and the bourgeoisie, of which Karl Marx had written in
The Eighteenth Brumaire "12 But this paper is an exception.
In 1938 Wilson discussed "Marxism and Literature," expressly
quoting some of the standard texts: Engels' letter to Starkenburg,
in 1890, admitting a reciprocal interaction between the economic
base and the superstructure, the letter of Engels to Minna Kautsky
disapproving of overtly tendentious novels, the Sickingen debate
with Lassalle which Wilson reduces to Marx chiding Lassalle for
mistaking the role of his hero, and the passage that praises Greek
art and grants that "certain periods of highest development of art
stand in no direct connection with the general development of so-
ciety, nor with the material basis and the skeleton structure of its
organization."73 Wilson sees this passage only as an inconsistency
without discussing the issue itself and continues briefly to expound
Lenin's essays on Tolstoy, accepting their thesis that Tolstoy repre-
sents the psychology of patriarchal peasantry. Wilson is most im-
pressed by Trotsky's Literature and Revolution (1924), agreeing
with him that there cannot be a proletarian literature and that a
work of art must first be judged as a work of art. Wilson sees that
the identification of literature with politics is liable to terrible
abuses and he deplores developments under Stalin such as the
damning of the music of Shostakovich. He concludes that "Marx-
ism by itself can tell us nothing whatever about the 'goodness or
badness of a work of art": a conclusion that rejects, in principle,
all the efforts of Marxists such as Lukács to develop a specific
Marxist aesthetics. "What Marxism can do, however, is throw a
great deal of light on the origins and social significance of works
of art."74 Wilson seems to allude to a view like that of Lukács
(though I know of no evidence that he had read or could have
read him at that time) when he denies that "the character of a
work of art" must be "shown engaged in a conflict which illus-
trates the larger conflicts of society." What matters is the moral
insight. Wilson gives the death of Bergotte in Proust's novel and,
rather incongruously, Thornton Wilder's Heaven

and Hemingway's story, "The Undefeated," as
ly trivial subjects widening into universal signif
scriptive requirements such as Granville Hicks 's
point of view must be "that of the vanguard of
rejected, as is the doctrine of "socialist realism"
"to legislate masterpieces into existence."75 Wils
between "short-range and long-range" literature
"books for the moment" versus "books for the
ing that art can be and has been a political weapo
mains of Dante is not his commitment to the Em
of Shakespeare to "Elizabethan imperialism." In
argues, revolutionary periods were not periods o
surge in literature. Wilson can think only of Ch
they hardly prove the opposite: Chénier was gui
died in despair with the revolution in Russia. Bu
article Wilson embraces the most Utopian side of
"It is society itself, says Trotsky, which under c
comes the work of art." Wilson knows that "thi
terms of centuries, of ages; but, in practicing an
we must not be unaware of the first efforts of t
transcend literature itself."76 The odd ideal of a
can and should dispense with art - apparently be
realized in Soviet Russia - is evoked somewhat
lieve that this passage, though anticipated in the
lished notebooks,77 is unique in Wilson's public w
The Princeton lecture on "The Historical Inte
Literature" (1940), which followed the paper o
years later, rehearses the same topics under a di
in a markedly subdued tone. Wilson glances at th
historical approach in Vico (a figure briefly disc
nection with his discoverer, Michelet, in To the
Herder, Hegel, and Taine. Taine and Michelet, W
paid attention to the influence of social classes b
Marx and Engels as literary critics were "tentati
modest." Again the passage on Greek art is singl
Marx "a good deal of trouble." Bernard Shaw a
are mentioned as "the great critics who were tra
and Trotsky's Literature and Revolution is call
valuable."7 But now a new motif is introduced
or simply "the interpretation of works of literat
personalities behind them." Wilson thinks of Fr
analysis merely as an extension of the biographi
as practiced by Dr. Johnson and Sainte-Beuve.
Wyck Brooks 's The Ordeal of Mark Twain (19
RENÉ WELLEK 109
"The attitudes, the compulsions, the em

in the work of a writer are of great int
Freudian, individual psychology is assim
od which in turn has absorbed the Mar
cates such a combination but sees that the historical or better sim-
ply the genetic approach does not solve the problem of criticism as
value judgment. He repeats the argument stated in the Marxism
paper. "No matter how thoroughly and searchingly we may have
scrutinized works of literature from the historical and biographi-
cal point of view, we must be ready to attempt to estimate . . .
the relative degrees of success attained by the products of the vari-
ous periods and the various personalities. We must be able to tell
good from bad, the first-rate from the second-rate. We shall not
otherwise write literary criticism at all, but merely social or poli-
tical history as reflected in literary texts, or psychological case
histories from past eras."79
Wilson solves the question of value judgment to his satisfaction
by an appeal to an emotional reaction which he considers the Kant-
ian solution as he learned it from his Princeton teacher, Norman
Kemp Smith. Attempts to define standards such as "unity, symme-
try, originality, vision, inspiration, strangeness, suggestiveness, im-
proving morality, socialist realism," do not impress him: "you sim-
ply shift the emotional reaction to the recognition of the element
or elements" and still might not have a good play, a good novel, a
good poem. This reliance on taste leads Wilson to accept a self-
appointed and self -perpetuating elite of "genuine connoisseurs
who establish standards of taste" and "will compel you to accept
their authority." Wilson trusts, far too easily, that "imposters may
try to put themselves over, but these quacks will not last."80 He
believes in the verdict of the ages.
The appeal to taste is nothing new. For instance, in 1927 he is
content to say: "I do not pretend that my own primary judgments
as to what is good poetry or what is not are anything other, in the
last analysis, than mysterious emotional responses," and he can
even endorse the silly criterion for poetry proposed by A.E. Hous-
man, tongue-in-cheek, that "the most intense, the most profound,
the most beautifully composed and the most comprehensive works
of literary art ... are also the most thrilling and give us most prick-
ly sensations while shaving."82 Wilson preserved an admiration for
the "gusto" of Saintsbury, the intensity of the poetic effect pro-
pounded by Poe. Saintsbury is called the "sole full-length profes-
sional critic, who is of really first-rate stature," "a gourmet and
something of a glutton" for whom "the enjoyment of literature
[is] somehow a moral matter."83 Wilson here seems to define
his own attitude and prevalent practice: conveying the joy of
1 1 0 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES
literature by describing, evoking, or often simply

the books he has read. As he said himself: "There a
enjoy so much as talking to people about books
and they haven't, and making them wish they had
book that is hard to get or in a language that they
Many times Wilson deplores the decline of "apprec
of purely technical or philosophical or sociological
literature.85 The bulk of his criticism is undeniab
"introductory critic," a middleman, an expositor a
of literary events, a role which we should not und
effects on several generations of readers nor unde
sheer abilities it requires in the skill, say, of retell
series of novels or the numerous memoirs of the Civil War in Pa-
triotic Gore. But Wilson's ideal of the critic goes of course be-
yond this function. A reviewer-critic should know "the past work
of every important writer he deals with and be able to write about
an author's new book in the light of his general development and
intention. He should also be able to see the author in relation to
the national literature and the national literature in relation to other
literatures."86 In "A Modest Self -tribute" (1952) Wilson quite right-
ly claims to have "tried to contribute a little to the general cross-
fertilization, to make it possible for our literate public to appreciate
and to understand both our Anglo-American culture and those of
the European countries in relation to one another."87
Though Wilson detested the American Humanists he arrives at a
humanism of his own: "the belief in the nobility and beauty of
what man as man has accomplished, and the reverence for litera-
ture as a record of this." Since his school years "humanism had
continued to serve me when the religion had come to seem false.
The thing that glowed for me through Xenophon and Homer in
those classrooms of thirty years ago has glowed for me ever since."88
Marxism remains firmly relegated to being a variety of the his-
torical approach. As the discussion of Marx in To the Finland Sta-
tion shows, Wilson, though deeply impressed by Marx's personality,
devotion, and moral fervor in criticizing the industrial society of
his time, came away from a study of his writings totally uncon-
vinced by two crucial Marxist doctrines: surplus value and the
dialectic. The Labor theory of Marx is rejected as "the creation of
the metaphysician," fallacious because of its narrow concept of
human motivation, and the dialectic is dismissed as a "religious
myth disencumbered of a divine personality and tied up with
the history of mankind." Dialectic is simply the "old Trinity":
"the mythical and magical triangle . . .which probably derived its
significance from its correspondence to the male sexual organs,"
a hoary joke of anti-Trinitarian polemics.89 History in Marxism is
RENÉ WELLEK 111
"a substitute for old-fashioned Provid

criticized overt propaganda art. "There
cussing "Communist Criticism" (1937
reer under the impression that one is
Marxist criticism does not recognize t
cut through the social classes, and the
dent existence. The writers make a gr
ers make a group of their own; the sc
each of these groups has its own tradi
of doctrine which has been brought d
titioners that have come from a varie
of societies. ... A Communist critic wh
nores the author's status as a craftsma
propaganda, denying the dignity of h
ferent context Wilson illustrates this
not possible without Augustus: but a
us, his Alexandrian predecessor, the p
Wilson had learned from Marxism that "economic and social forces
do play a much larger part in molding people's ideals, and conse-
quently in coloring their literature, than most people are willing to
admit,"94 but he did not adopt either the concept of history or the
commitment to the cause of a literature furthering the aims of
Marxism. Proletarian literature does not and cannot exist, just as
"there could not be proletarian chemistry or proletarian engineer-
ing." "When the proletariat learn to appreciate the arts . . . they
will appreciate and understand them in the same way as anyone
else." "There are already great proletarian names among the arts
and sciences, but they are the great names of artists and scientists,
not of proletarians." The involvement of art in ideology and
class is denied: a universal art and even universal human nature is
assumed here. Marxism is rejected.
Actually, Wilson's interest in psychoanalysis grew, and the book
The Wound and the Bow (1941) is expressly devoted to the prob-
lem. Not that Wilson had not known of psychoanalysis before. One
of his earliest papers, "The Progress of Psychoanalysis," dates back
to 1920. 96 Wilson's interest in an author's psychology was not mere-
ly biographical. He assumes, in the discussion of Proust, that "the
real elements, ot course, of any work of fiction, are the elements
of the author's personality: his imagination embodies in the images
of characters, situations and scenes the fundamental conflicts of
his nature or the cycles of phases through which it habitually pas-
ses. His personages are personifications of the author's various im-
pulses and emotions." But only in The Wound and the Bow is
the connection between psychic disease and artistic accomplish-
ment stated as a thesis. The title essay, the last in the book, uses
the Philoctetes story from Sophocles' play. "The vict

odorous disease ... is also the master of a superhum
one could object that the Philoctetes story does not
model for the "conception of superior strength as i
disability" or the idea "that genius and disease, like
mutilation, may be inextricably bound together,"99
seems to claim. Philoctetes had the miraculous bow before he was
bitten by the snake. The story does not imply that the bow may
not be owned or drawn without the wound. But we must not press
the parallel; we should be content with the Philoctetes story sim-
ply as an allegory of the situations described in several essays of
the book. "Dickens: The Two Scrooges" emphasizes the shock of
the six months the boy of twelve spent laboring in a blacking ware-
house; "The Kipling Nobody Read" exploits the degrading experi-
ences of Kipling as a little boy with foster-parents in England,
slightly fictionalized in the story "Baa Baa Black Sheep," and his
further brutalizing at the United Services College, oddly glorified
in Stalky and Co. The other essays in the volume hardly fit the
formula of the title. But even the pieces on Dickens and Kipling
cannot be reduced to mere exemplifications of the theory. They
are also essays using the traditional methods of criticism. In the
Dickens essay Wilson is looking for the darker side of Dickens at
the expense of his humor. Dickens' interest in criminals and rebels,
thieves and murderers, in scenes of violence such as hangings or the
burning of Newgate prison in Barnaby Rudge, his general revolt
against the institutions and the temper of the age and its repre-
sentative, the Queen, whom he studiously avoided meeting, is
skillfully expounded. In his last unfinished novel, The Mystery of
Edwin Droody "Dickens has turned," Wilson claims, "the protest
against the age into a protest against self." Wilson sees Dickens
accepting the verdict that "he is a creature irretrievably taint-
ed," a conclusion which seems warranted only if we assume
that the murderer Jasper somehow embodies the submerged mind
of Dickens himself.10* But the essay was deservedly influential in
changing the accepted image of the jolly Christmas Dickens, though
Wilson's own picture seems overdrawn in the other direction.
Similarly, the essay on Kipling, though it makes much of the
boy's tribulations as explaining how "the work of [his] life is to
be shot through with hatred," soon becomes straight literary criti-
cism. Stalky and Co. is the worst of Kipling's books, "crude in
writing, trashy in feeling," whereas Kim is almost a first-rate
book. 02 But psychological criteria are used on occasion. The con-
cept of overcompensation seems to be invoked when we are told
that it is "proof of Kipling's timidity and weakness that he should
loudly overdo this glorification" of his motherland. It seems hard,
RENÉ WELLEK 113
however, to understand why "the fer

racy which finally overtakes him mu
that household in Southsea which trie
birth."103 It assumes that the boy Ki
democracy in the ferocious tyranny
knew of his genius at that time. Even
argues, shows that "the theme of ang
being deserved [i.e., the going blind o
of having been derived from a morbi
inflicted by his experience at South
rive every theme from these childho
forced: thus, "Mary Postgate," the st
airplane, is considered to illustrate th
parent" (actually a plain and dull co
ternal role to the soldier) as "reflecti
abandoned child."104 As often in ps
tails, you lose."
We must look beyond The Wound an
of psychoanalytical insights. "The Am
The Triple Thinkers is the best-know
The Turn of the Screw as "a neurot
ghosts are not real ghosts but halluci
Wilson's view is easily refuted not on
declaration in the Notebooks (publis
by the obvious fact (which Wilson tr
"Mrs. Gross, the housekeeper, recogn
ly specific description of the sinister
who had never before heard of Pet
seems mistaken in the attempt to psy
it does perceptively discuss James's p
ception of a man shut out from love,
people's activities," "dramatizing the
In a postscript to the essay (1948) W
lytical interpretation by Dr. Saul Ros
during a fire at Newport, Rhode Isl
but backs away from its full implicat
of "reducing the dignity of these sto
embarrassments of the author."108 M
literary criticism. Thus Wilson single
Tragic Muse as "solid and alive," as
demns The Awkward Age "for combi
logic with the equivocal subjectivity o
won a prize as a Princeton undergrad
James and preserved for him a life
critical admiration. Unlike Van Wy
1 14 COMPARATIVE LITE RATURE STUDIES
Wilson cherishes the last novels of Henry James.

Mr. Leavis asserts, fundamentally unreal and weak
they are perhaps the most vigorous, the most her
of his fictions."111
Wilson became technically psychoanalytical on
Freud's article "Charakter und Analerotik" (1908
derivatives to characterize Ben Jonson. He finds in
three traits, pedantry, avarice, and obstinacy, ascr
childhood attitudes toward excretatory processe
in literature as a hoarding of words. Wilson, howe
treats from his commitment to the Freudian appr
qualified to 'analyze' Jonson in the light of this F
tion, and I have no interest in trying to fit him in
tion of it. I am not even sure that the relation between the work-
ings of the alimentary tract and the other phenomena of person-
ality is, as Freud assumes, a relation of cause and effect; but I am
sure that Freud has here really seized upon a nexus of human
traits that are involved with one another and has isolated a recog-
nizable type."112 Thus "anal eroticism" in Wilson has come to
mean nothing more than a psychological type, a pattern of char-
acter traits exhibited in the life and writings of Ben Jonson and
apparently also in Gogol and Joyce.113 But I cannot see that the
recurrent themes of Ben Jonson 's plays, "miserliness, unsociabili-
ty, a self-sufficient and systematic spite," prove anything about
Ben Jonson as a person or why a character like Morose (the man
pathologically and comically afraid of noise in The Silent Woman)
shows Ben Jonson "tormenting himself for what is negative and
recessive in his nature."114 Ben Jonson, to my mind, has fun at
the expense of a miser and wants his audience to laugh at his
plight and gloat over his falling into a trap. Wilson underestimates
the role of genre, of stage stereotypes and theatrical conventions.
Wilson defends the interest in individual psychology as com-
patible with the historical method and with Marxism. "The atti-
tudes, the compulsions, the emotional 'patterns' that recur in the
work of a writer are of great interest to the historical critic. These
attitudes and patterns are embodied in the community and the
historical moment, and they may indicate its ideals and its dis-
eases as the cell shows the condition of the tissue. The recent sci-
entific experimentation [I am not sure what Wilson can be re-
ferring to] in the combining of Freudian with Marxist method,
and of psychoanalysis with anthropology, has had its parallel
development in criticism." While welcoming this combination
Wilson always sees the limits of any genetic approach. "Freud
himself emphatically states in his study of Leonardo that his
method can make no attempt to account for Leonardo's genius.
RENÉ WELLEK 115
The problems of comparative artistic

given attention to the Freudian psych
after we have given attention to the
the racial and geographical factors."11
Only rarely can we discover Wilson's
is clear that poetry is judged by Wilso
ted, possibly from Saintsbury, a disti
form which made form largely mean
euphonious sound-effects. Poetry is
"dying technique" at that.116 He rejec
cept of poetry to lyrical verse, protes
is "absolutely different in kind from
while prose is all sense."117 He argues
for all kinds of purposes. In antiquity
for philosophical argument or instruc
like the Brownings wrote novels in ve
poetry is confined to the description
But Wilson draws from this specializa
which parallels the "purification" of t
conclusion that poetry is destined to
theory that verse, being "a more prim
is losing its early association with m
One can understand that Wilson disliked the blank verse of Max-
well Anderson119 and had his doubts about the success of modern
verse drama as advocated by T.S. Eliot, but surely his forecast of
the disappearance of verse is not likely to be fulfilled, considering
the enormous output even in industrialized societies, not to speak
of other countries and languages where verse has kept its domi-
nance. Wilson reviewed many poets and wrote poetry himself, much
of it humorous and parodie, but his relation to it remains unsure,
awkward, even hostile, and his vocabulary in dealing with it is often
vague and imprecise. He quickly slides into a discussion of theme
and ideology and makes many egregious blunders in his estimates.
Emily Dickinson seems to him "a little overrated,"120 Robert
Frost is "excessively dull and he certainly writes very poor verse."121
E.E. Cummings is an "eternal adolescent," "as half-baked as a school-
boy," expressing "familiar and simple emotions," but at least he is
not like Wallace Stevens "insulated or chilled; he is not indifferent
to life." Stevens suffers "from a sort of aridity" but remains "a
charming decorative artist."122 Auden has "arrested at the mentali-
ty of an adolescent schoolboy," though later Wilson recognized him
as "an incredible virtuoso."123 Pound's poems are "a pile of frag-
ments." "In spite of the parade of culture and the pontifical pre-
tenses, Ezra Pound is really at heart a very boyish fellow and an
incurable provincial."124 No doubt, some of these jibes have their
measure of truth, but even in the sympathetic discussions W

limitations as a critic of poetry are glaring. The chapter on
Axel's Castle manages to ignore such poems as "The Secon
(1921) or "Sailing to Byzantium" (1928). Wilson criticizes
what in recent jargon has been called "elitism," his "dignity
tinction" "becoming more and more impossible in our mo
cratic society," for his aloofness from the "democratic, the
the modern world," "from the general enlightened thought
time," and Wilson is comprehensibly impatient with A Visio
he contrasts with the so much more sensible Intelligent Wom
Guide to Socialism and Capitalism by Bernard Shaw.125 Th
on T.S. Eliot in the same book excels in suggesting the perso
sources of Eliot's views. The Waste Land illustrates "the p
conflicts of the Puritan turned artist, the horror of vulgarit
the shy sympathy with the common life, the ascetic shrink
sexual experience and the distress at the drying up of the sp
sexual emotion, with the straining after a religious emotion
may be made to take its place."12* A diary entry is even mo
ceptive in saying that The Waste Land is "nothing more nor
than a most distressingly moving account of Eliot's own ago
state of mind during the years which preceded his nervous
down." "It is certainly a cry de pro fundis if there ever was
almost the cry of a man on the verge of insanity."127 Wilso
ever, never tried to say anything about the Four Quartets. I
taste Wilson remains an incurable imagist who admires the m
of smooth verse and the vividness of visual metaphors in Ed
Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, or Geneviève Taggard, poets h
ly overrated, and not only for personal reasons. Music and im
somehow combined or fused are his ideal of poetry.
He is much more satisfactory and much more concrete wh
speaks of the novel. A great novelist "must show us large soc
forces, or uncontrollable lines of destiny, or antagonistic im
of the human spirit, struggling with one another."128 The i
enough, of the need of contraries in art is developed also as
ment against propaganda art. "One of the primary errors of
radical criticism has been the assumption that great novels a
must necessarily be written by people who have everything
their minds. People who have everything clear in their mind
are not capable of identifying themselves imaginatively with
do not actually embody in themselves, contrary emotions an
points of view, do not write novels or plays at all - do not, a
rate, write good ones. And - given genius - the more violent
contraries, the greater the works of art."129 Somewhat surp
this criterion of violent contraries, apparently not necessari
ciled, is used to put down War and Peace as not "quite one
RENÉ WELLEK 117
very summits of literature" because of

"a certain element of the idealization in
to indulge in imagining the lives of ou
gue that War and Peace shows violent c
and youth, good and evil, and so forth
Wilson has a point in feeling the nosta
scenes. In all of these passages nothing
clash of contraries. But when Wilson r
which he admires almost beyond any o
feels as if he were watching the proces
ments of [Pushkin's] character, the sev
ence, have taken symmetry about the
Pushkin's "serenity, his perfect balance
beings with unrelenting respect for re
mind than Stendhal's."131
Balance, equipoise is not quite resolu
a few passages Wilson thinks of art in
paradox of literature: provoked by the
discord, its chaos, its pain, it attempte
ics, to impose on that chaos some order
that discord, to render the pain accept
conceives this ordering and consoling f
utilitarian terms: "All our intellectual a
takes place, is an attempt to give mean
is, to make life more practicable; for b
make it easier to survive and get aroun
afterwards the function of literature i
"We have been cured of some ache of d
oppressive burden of uncomprehended
most like Wordsworth speaking of the
the mystery." In the upshot, Wilson se
optimism from a writer. Thus he pref
ley because of Steinbeck's "irreducible
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
more likely to find out something of v
noblement of life by studying human
through the code of self -contemplatio
lessly and palely in the decay of scient
latest of the Huxleys represents."134 S
about the stories in Angus Wilson's The
by being repelled and by feeling that i
joy so much ugliness and humiliation
noble value somewhere."135 On occasi
to consider this idealizing function of
He can say that "art has its origin in t
human life is something other than it is, and, in a

tending this, it succeeds to some extent in transfo
But in a discussion of Dostoevsky we are told that
art has only the dignity of any other self -protect
Dostoevsky "has falsified life, because he has prete
monize something." "The work of art is therefore
But this imposture, this beautiful lie is ultimately
necessity. Wilson wrote a crude and obtuse essay
Opinion on Kafka" (1947), which argues that it
take him seriously as a major writer," but the obj
presumed pessimism and religious mysticism come
core of Wilson's nature. When he quotes in conc
aphorism "one must not cheat anybody, not even
its triumph," Wilson protests. "But what are we w
if it is not to cheat the world of its triumph?"138
was so impressed by André Malraux 's Voices of Si
the really great books of our time": Malraux believ
ern Western art "has a tremendous philosophical a
portance, because it represents, for the first time
declaration by man of his will to master the worl
in conformity with his own ideals."139 Wilson fel
is consolation, an expression of faith in life. Parad
sounds like Arnold or Keble, who speak of poetry
the healing power in a time of unbelief.
I have tried to show that Wilson cannot be simp

lacking a coherent point of view. He early adopted
Taine's determinism and when he was converted to Marxism assimi-
lated the Marxist approach, deprived of its dialectic, to a general
historical view of literature and literary study. Marxism became a
variety of genetic explanation alongside psychoanalysis. Judicial
criticism, the decision of what is good and what is bad in art, re-
mained reserved to a judgment of taste independent of history.
I am aware that Wilson cannot be judged merely a theorist. On
many questions he has nothing to say, for he has not thought them
worthy of his attention. He is, and never claimed otherwise, a prac-
tical critic who has fulfilled his aims in reporting and judging books
and authors from many countries on an enormous variety of sub-
jects. He has opened windows, and not only to Russia. His human
sympathy is almost unlimited. It extends, as he justly remarked,
"even to those [manifestations of the American literary movement]
of which, artistically, he disapproves,"140 because he wanted to as-
sert the dignity of the literary vocation in America. This sympathy
seems, on occasion, too indiscriminate when we think of his weak-
ness for such trivial authors as Ronald Firbank or shallow raconteurs
RENÉ WELLEK 119
such as Casanova, whom Wilson prefers

trics such as J J. Chapman. Still, we mi
teachers such as Mr. Rolfe or Dean Gau
make no complaints about his contemp
historical romances.
Still, there are definite limits to the reach of his mind. I am not
thinking only of his obvious lack of technical skill in analyzing nar-
rative modes or poetic structures. More disturbing is the coarseness
and even sentimental vulgarity of his dominant interest in sex, dis-
played in some of the fiction and, obsessively, in the early note-
books. He shows hardly any interest in the fine arts or music. He
lacks understanding not only for religion, which he treats as a "de-
lusion," but also for philosophy. The early enthusiasm for White-
head, his "crystalline abstract thought,"1 seems to be based on a
misunderstanding. It supported Wilson in his limited sympathies
for symbolism and made him discount the "two divisions of mind
and matter, body and soul,"143 also in his polemics against the Neo-
humanists. But he could not share Whitehead's neoplatonic idealism
or his concept of God and soon abandoned him for Marxism. But as
Wilson's Marxism discarded the dialectics, it meant rather a return
to a basic positivism and pragmatism, a commonsense attitude to
reality. One sees this also in the comment on existentialism, which
Wilson ridiculed for its assumption that "the predicament of the
patriotic Frenchmen oppressed by the German occupation repre-
sents the condition of all mankind."144 Wilson seems not to know
that L'Être et le néant was published in 1936 and that existential-
ism goes back to Heidegger and ultimately to Kierkegaard. Wilson
thus could not escape from the limitations of a world view funda-
mentally akin to his early masters, Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells,
however much he transcended their provincialism. In spite of his
cosmopolitism, the wide range of his interests, there is a closeness
and even crudity about his self-assurance and air of authority. But
as public critic he dominates the early twentieth century with a
resonance ^unmatched by any of the New Critics.
RENÉ WELLEK • Yale University
Bibliography
The main critical writings are quoted thus:
Axel's Castle (1931, reprint 1945), as AC.

The Triple Thinkers (1938, revised and enlarged edition, 1948) as TT.
To the Finland Station (1940; Anchor Book edition, Garden City, N.Y., 1953) as FS.
The Wound and the Bow (Cambridge, Mass., 1941) as WB.
Classics and Commercials (1950) as CC.
The Shores of Light (1952) as SL.
Red, Black, Blond and Olive (1956 as RBBO.
Patriotic Gore (1962) as PG.
The Bit Between My Teeth (1965) as BBMT.

A Window on Russia (1972).
The Devils and Canon Barham. Forword by Leon Edel (1973).
The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period. Ed. Leon Edel (1975).
There are three books and a pamphlet on Wilson:
Sherman Paul, Edmund Wilson: A Study of Literary Vocation in Our Time (Urbana,
Illinois, 1965).
Werner Berthoff, Edmund Wilson, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American
Writers (Minneapolis, 1968) Critical.
Charles P. Frank, Edmund Wilson (1970). Has a good chapter on literary criticism.
Leonard Kriegel, Edmund Wilson (Carbondale, Illinois, 1971).
Edmund Wilson: A Bibliography, compiled by Richard David Ramsey (1971) is indis-

pensable for a list of scattered essays and reviews and a list of articles and reviews about
Wilson.
The following items may be singled out from the mass of commentary on Wilson:
In books:
Alfred Kazin in On Native Grounds (1942), pp. 446-52.

The Inmost Leaf 1955), pp. 93-97.
Contemporaries (1962), pp. 405-11.
Stanley Edgar Hyman, in The Armed Vision (1948), pp. 19-48. Highly unfavorable.
Frank Kermode, in Puzzlesand Epiphanies (1962), pp. 55-63.
John Wain, in Essays on Literature and Ideas (London, 1963), pp. 141-45.
Norman Podhoretz, in Doings and Undoings (1964), pp. 30-50.
Delmore Schwartz, in Selected Essays (Chicago, 1970), pp. 360-74.
Leon Edel, "A Portrait of Edmund Wilson," in The Twenties (1975), pp. xvii-xlvi.
Among the mass of articles in periodicals:
Robert B. Heilman, "The Freudian Reading of The Turn of the Screw," Modern Language
Notes, 62 (November 1947), 433-45.
lohn Farrellv. in Scrutiny. 18 (1951-52). 229-33.
Frank Kermode. in Encounter, 26 (May 1966), 61-66, 68, 70.
Richard Gilman, "E. Wilson: Then and Now" in New Republic, 155 (2 July 1966), 23-28.
NOTES
1. Henry Brandon, "We don't know where we are." A conversation with Edmund
Wilson in New Republic, March 30, 1959, pp. 13-14.
2.The Shock of Recognition (1943), Foreword.
3.BothinTT, 197-212, 257-70.
4.77ie Twenties, 426.
5.CC.518.
6.SL.546.
7.BBT, 535-36.
8.BBT, 546.
9.BBT, 553.
10.BBT, 576.
ll.BBT, 553. Almost the same in BBT, 381.
12.New Republic, 98 (22 March 1939), 199-200.
13.SL, 436.
14. AC, 115, 116-17.
15.SL, 713-14.
RENÉ WELLE K 121
16. AC, 124.

17.AC, 122.
1 8. BBT, 372-73.
19.BBT, 384-86. .. .„,«„»,,
20. SL, 451-67, 468-75. See Johann
1827. Ed. H.H. Houben (Leipzig, 1
21. SL, 460, 463, 466.
22. BBT, 384, 535, 397.
23. TT, 3-14.
24.77ie Devils and Canon Barham (iy73 , p. M.
25. 1921, quoted by Leonhard Kriegel, E Wilson, p. 9.
26. BBT, 30.
27. SL, 296; BBT, 33, 32, 31 ; SL, 159; The Devils, 104.
28. SL, 143.
29. SL, 164.
30. BTT, 554-55.
31. CC, 13, 15.
32.CC, 227.
33.CC, 10-11.
34. See the essay "Mr. Rolfe" in TT, 233-5b.
$5.A Prelude 1967 , p. 62.
36. SL, 36. The Papers of Christian Gauss, ed. Katherine Gauss Jackson and íiiram
Haydn (1957) and his other published writings do not bear out his eminence as a critic
and literary historian.
37. In The Papers of Christian Gauss.
SS.The American Jitters (1932, rpt. iyb«), p. 3U/. inis cnapter was aroppea irom
the reprint in The American Earthquake (1958). A similar passage in ,4 Prelude, 227.
39.^ Prelude, 268.
40.SL, 229.
41.RBBO, 375.
42.FS.452.
43. The Twenties, 245. A letter to Allen Tate (1928).
44.i4 Piece of My Mind (1956), Anchor ed. 1958, pp. 59, Z3Z.
45. Cf. Bibliography.
46. BBT, 2.
47. FS, 44-45, 49; cf. TT, 260-61.
48.CC, 333.
49. FS, 306-7.
50.CC, 492, 487.
51. SL, 346-47.
52.SL, 749.
53. RBBO, 413-18.
54.CC, 172.
55.BBT, 146.
56.CC, 439. Bee
Jonson's backgr
57. The Devils and Canon Barnam, oyrr.
5 8. Wilson quotes Arthur Schlesinger. In rG, àò.
59.CC, 169-70.
60.AC, 3, 5. . . _
61 In "Moder
48 (2 November 1926), 296-97. _ __
62.1n Preface to Emeric Fiser3 s L 'Esthétique de Marcel rroust ^raris, ivoû).
63.AC, 158, 221-22.
64.AC, 79.
65.AC, 283, 164, 218-19. . _^ . ._ _ ...
66.New Republic, 58 (20 Ma

1930), 34-40, concluded ibid
67.AC, 245.
68.AC, 263, 283.
69.AC, 293.
70."The Literary Class War," May 4, 1932, SL, 535.
1 22 COMPARATIVE LITE RATURE STUDIES
71. TT, 77.

72.TT, 80.
73.TT, 199. Note that this passage comes from the "Einführung zur Kritik der
politischen Ökonomie" (1857), a manuscript that was abandoned and was published
in an obscure journal in 1903; Die Neue Zeit, 21 (1903), 710-18, 741-45, 772-81.
74. TT, 204.
75.TT, 205-7.
76.TT, 208, 209, 212.
77. The Twenties, 421, 129.
78.TT, 262, 263, 265.
79.TT, 266-67.
80.TT, 267-70.
81. SL, 210.
82.TT, 28-29.
83.CC, 306, 368-69.
84.SL, 376.
85.3BT, 47.
86.SL, 603.
87.BBT, 5.
88.TT, 254-55.
89.FS, 298, 194, 190.
90. FS, 436.
91. SL, 650.
92.SL, 501.
93. FS, 187.
94.SL, 501.
95. "Are Artists People?" New Masses, 3 (January 1927), 5-9.
96. "The Progress of Psychoanalysis: The Importance of the Discovery, by Dr. Sig-
mund Freud, of the Subconscious Self" in Vanity Fair, 14 (August 1920), 41, 86, 88.
97.AC, 176.
98. WB, 294.
99. WB, 287, 289.
100. WB, 102-03.
101. A.E. Dyson, The Inimitable Dickens (1970) rejects Wilson's view, but Angus
Wilson accepts it, with some hesitation. See Introduction to Penguin Edition of The
Mystery of Edwin Drood f 19741 , p. 23.
102. WB, 111, 114, 123.
103. WB, 138, 143.
104. WB, 166.
105.TT, 88.
106.77k? Notebooks, ed. F.O. Matthiessen and K. Murdock (1947), pp. 1 78-79. I
quote the refutation by F.R. Leavis in Scrutiny, 18 (1950), 117. There is an incredibly
inflated literature on this story.
107.TT, 100-01.
108.TT, 129, 130n.
109.TT, 106, 111.
HQ.Nassau Literary Magazine, 70 (November 1914), 286-95.
lll.SL, 220.
112.TT,219.
113.CC, 216-17.
114.TT, 221.
115.TT, 266-67.
1 1 6. "Is Verse a Dying Technique?" in TT, 1 5-30. Originally as "The Canons of
Poetry" in The Atlantic Monthly, 153 (April 1934), 455-62.
11 7. AC, 82.
118.AC, 118-20; TT, 16-18.
119.TT, 26-28.
120.PG.489.
121. SL, 240.
122.SL, 50, 53, 49, 241.
123.SL, 669; BBT, 362.
124.SL, 45.
RENÉWELLEK 123
125.AC, 39, 40, 47, 59.

126.AC, 105.
127. The Twenties, 247-48.
128. WB, 126-27.
129.TT, 180.
130. CC, 448.
131.TT, 46.
132.SL, 271.
133.TT, 269-70.
134.GC, 44.
135.BBT, 272.
136.SL, 62.
13 7. "Meditations on Dostoevsky, New Republic, ob (October 24, 11*28), 274-76.
Note that The Twenties, 312 has entry: "All of literature gives a false view of life." In
the novel / Thought of Daisy (1929), pp. 174-76, the sentiments of the Dostoevsky
article are repeated, sometimes verbatim.
138.CC, 392.
139.BBT, 137, 139.
140.SL, 229.
141.WB, 192. But Wilson wrote an introduction to the Borzoi edition of Rousseau s
Confessions (1923) which sees its importance as "the first real romantic autobiography."
142.The Twenties, 290.
143. Professor Grosbeake in / Thought of Daisy expounds Whitehead in these terms
(p. 226). Wilson defended Whitehead against P.E. More (SL, 465).
144.CC, 399.

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Edmund Wilson (1895-1972)

Author(s): René Wellek

Edmund Wilson is the one American critic most widely known

American criticism. Clearly he precedes the Ne

There is one exception, and that is

consciousness" in Joyce against More's uninform

England (1936), Wilson continued with

to Wilson's first critical book, Axel's Castle (1931),

trip to Europe as a reporter which he

the wealthy Victorian businessmen and their lad

politics of Upstate New York during th

first literary men to acquire a smattering of th

ludes himself with unrealizable fantasi

rather incongruously, Thornton Wilder's Heaven

"The attitudes, the compulsions, the em

literature by describing, evoking, or often simply

"a substitute for old-fashioned Provid

the Philoctetes story from Sophocles' play. "The vict

however, to understand why "the fer

Wilson cherishes the last novels of Henry James.

The problems of comparative artistic

measure of truth, but even in the sympathetic discussions W

very summits of literature" because of

human life is something other than it is, and, in a

I have tried to show that Wilson cannot be simp

such as Casanova, whom Wilson prefers

The main critical writings are quoted thus:

Axel's Castle (1931, reprint 1945), as AC.

The Bit Between My Teeth (1965) as BBMT.

There are three books and a pamphlet on Wilson:

Edmund Wilson: A Bibliography, compiled by Richard David Ramsey (1971) is indis-

Alfred Kazin in On Native Grounds (1942), pp. 446-52.

Among the mass of articles in periodicals:

16. AC, 124.

66.New Republic, 58 (20 Ma

71. TT, 77.

125.AC, 39, 40, 47, 59.

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