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PARTISAN REVIEW
comparing and refining tastes; and a quite unique appreciation of the
extent to which criticism may be taken as a form of cultivated play.
His work suggests no image of blackboard and chalk; nor can it be
mistaken for the criticism of three dozen other people, as so many
recent essays can be; it is his and his alone, the strength inseparable
from the weakness.
Much of that strength derives from the fact that in some general
sense Wilson is still a radical. Though his obsession with an ogre he
whimsically calls "dialectical materialism" reminds one of John O'Hara's
obsession with an ogre
he
calls "Edmund Wilson," the underlying
attitude of
Classics and Commercials
is still the traditional radical wari–
ness before official institutions and the bureaucratized minds they pro–
duce. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Wilson has retained the
classical picture of The Enemy: Hollywood, Broadway, mass journalism,
middlebrow professors. When writing about trash he knows that the
most important critical job is to insist that it is trash, and he does not
acquiesce to that surrender of standards which, in the name of a socio–
logical analysis of mass culture, permits a cheap detective-story writer
to be treated with the elaborateness usually reserved for a serious artist.
It is the same adherence to standards, the same old-fashioned insistence
that at the very least a book must be
written,
which leads Wilson to
his superb annihilation of the mystery novel fad, that vast bore culti–
vated by people who do not find good writing sufficiently "relaxing."
If
one sometimes feels that he spends too much time in stalking such easy
game as Kay Boyle and Louis Bromfield, one must remember that
hygiene is an inescapable function of reviewing and, more important,
that Wilson is dealing with writers who in his younger days were taken
with a certain amount of seriousness.
Of course, there is nothing in
Classics and Commercials
nearly so
good as the essays in Wilson's more ambitious collections, and I suppose
it is not irrelevant to deplore whatever it was that compelled him to
devote his time to snippets rather than major work. Though he writes
well about third-rate books precisely because he has behind him a body
of serious criticism, Wilson does not quite escape the trap of literary
journalism, which is that it forces you to write about books you would
not ordinarily care to read. Still, there are pieces in
Classics and Com–
mercials
(those, for example, on Wilde, Peacock, Faulkner, Maugham
and Steinbeck) that are very fine miniatures of criticism. The one
serious gap, particularly if you bear in mind the book's subtitle, "A
Literary Chronicle of the Forties," is the absence of any discussion of
new writers, a few of whom would surely have provided a greater chal-
