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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE SHORES OF LIGHT.
By
Edmund Wilson. Forrar. Straus ond Young.
$6.50.
Mr. Wilson's new book is an extensive compilation of pieces
he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, but including also two recently written
essays-a revealing tribute to his old Princeton professor, Christian
Gauss, with which the book begins, and a long elegiac piece, at the
end of the book, on Edna St. Vincent Millay. In between there is a
great variety of essays and reviews, along with a number of fantasies,
satires, editorial comments, and letters, some merely topical or humor–
ous, some definitive in their critical pronouncements (many younger
critics have been discovering truths enunciated by Mr. Wilson twenty–
five years ago), and all falling into place in this vigorous chronicle of
two decades. There was no other critic on the scene, nor is there now,
who could write so well about so many different things. A list of the
names of writers with whom Mr. Wilson deals would look like the
index to a literary history of the time, and there are essays and remarks
by the way on Byron, Pope, Tennyson, Dostoevsky, Sophocles, Nietzsche,
Samuel Butler, Swift and others.
One of the pleasures of reading
The Shores of Light
is to follow
the author's curious search for unusual or exemplary facets of exper–
ience-a week end with the Fitzgeralds, a visit to the Minsky burlesque,
the discovery of an old edition of Persius, an imaginary view (some–
what in the nature of Buckingham's
Rehearsal)
of the staging of an
expressionistic play in the Hole and Corner Theater in Greenwich
Village. True, this search for curious experiences can go a little too far:
one need not feel guilty of overspecialization if one is unable to share
Mr. Wilson's enthusiasm upon discovering that Genevieve Taggard has
written "the only respectable poem on child-bearing that I remember
to have seen." But this bit of pedantry is unusual. Another pleasure in
reading
The Shores of Light
is to discover of how long standing is Mr.
Wilson's concern that language should be clear and disciplined; we hear,
for example, that in
This Side of Paradise
Fitzgerald "plays the lan–
guage entirely by ear" and that the 1920s is, unfortunately, "an age of
easy writing." Some of Wilson's own most brilliant writing is in this
book; there is a feeling of verve and contentiousness which one some–
times misses in his later style. Nowhere in Wilson's writing do we find
very much of that tasteless semantic fodder which many modern critics
use instead of English. He writes a beautifully modulating style of
~
mingled voices in which one may alternately detect a strongly imper-
ative protestant note, a note of bourgeois matter-of-factness, a note of
Proustian or Jamesian plenitude, a note of licentious, demiurgic gaiety.
There is much in
The Shores of Light
to be accounted equal with
