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PARTISAN REVIEW
Mr. Anderson himself has proposed
in
discussing the novelist's father.
Not moral system but moral "style" seems to have been the elder James's
passion; and Mr. Anderson, in his passion for abstract system, has
betrayed the son by transforming his work into a Swedenborgian
"church" in which the father's insights lie entombed.
Yet the book itself provides us with an "emblematic theme." We
have been taught in recent years--and we have profited greatly from
the lesson-that in the apparent madness of much modern criticism
there can lie hidden a brilliant and enlightening method. May it not be
time to stand that lesson on its head?
Irving Howe
THE DOUBLE THINKER
A PIECE OF MY MIND. By Edmund Wilson. Forror, Strous
&
Cudohy.
$3.75.
Despite its somewhat menacing title, Mr. Wilson's new book
is a harmless enough piece of work. It consists of what appear to
be
scattered chips from the busy Wilson workshop; and it deals, for the
most part, with subjects that Mr. Wilson has explored in far greater
detail elsewhere (Russia, religion, the Bible, impressions of Europe, as–
pects of American cultural history).
A Piece of My Mind
will contain
little thematic novelty for those familiar with Mr. Wilson's more recent
writings; nor does it, at first sight, appear to have more than a casual
unity. This first impression, however, is rather deceptive. For while the
individual articles do not
in
truth have much relation to each other,
they all nonetheless express, as one reads them together, the unity of
an attitude and a point of view.
Edmund Wilson, as he reminds us in the subtitle ("Reflections at
Sixty"), has reached the age of wisdom; and though he writes about
subjects which he has approached before as a reporter, a cultural his–
torian or a literary critic, the attitude he now adopts toward them is
that of a sage. The present volume, indeed, is pervaded by a reflective
and elegiac mood that bathes all the articles, whatever their diversity of
subject, in a pensive twilight glow. From his new vantage-point, Mr.
Wilson contemplates the past with tenderness, the present with serenity,
and the future-how could it
be
otherwise?-with anxiety and disquiet.
But while this intimately personal note gives
A Piece of My Mind
a spe–
cial place among Edmund Wilson's writings, it also brings into relief
