Books
The Shock of Unrecognition
THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION. Edited by Edmund Wilson. Double–
day, Doran. $5.00.
Edmund Wilson's anthology is one of the best in recent years.
It
contains Henry James' little masterpiece on Hawthorne and Law–
ence's
Studies in Classical American Literature
and this alone is enough
to make it the best
kind
of introduction to American writing available.
It
gains a good deal from Wilson's acute sense of the time and the place
in
which the literary work is engendered, and Wilson's brief intro–
ductory notes are significant additions to his work as a whole. Con–
sidered merely as a publisher's enterprise, the volume marks a really
intelligent practice, that of giving editing to first-rate authors. The
contrast between Quiller-Couch's anthology of English poetry and
Yeats' is obvious enough as an example, and as an extreme, one ought
to consider-it is better than a comic strip !-the growing irnipression
that the author of
War and Peace
is Clifton Fadiman.
There
is,
however, nothing excellent about the title of this new
anthology, nor the misleading picture of authorship and literary his–
tory which it enforces and which is inade emphatic
by
many of the
selections, although there are other important choices which bear
very different witness. The title is drawn from. a sentence of Mel–
ville's.
"For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one
shock of recognition runs the whole circle round".
Surely a more inexact sentence about the fate of modern literary
genius cannot be found.
One might ask, to begin with: What would Melville himself have
said of this declaration in 1.865, 1875, and in 1.885, after the reception
of
Moby
Dick
and
Pierre
had reduced him, or helped t.o reduce him
to an almost unbroken silence? Perhaps he was then too unhappy,
perplexed, indifferent or benumbed to say anything.
The examples, however, are countless, and
if
I cite many of them,
it is to make clear how overwhelming is the blindness of author for
author. The classic examples of Voltaire's contempt for Dante and
Tolstoy's dislike of Shakespeare (or even, with, intermissions, of Dos–
toevsky) are perhaps too distant in time and place. But then there is
Emerson's regret that Hawthorne was not a good author, since he was
such a fine fellow, and the disregard Hawthorne suffered from his peers
of which
1
ames speaks
in
the very pages which Wilson reprints; there
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