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Messiah at the Seder," in which Mr. Wilson endows the iguana with the
voice of God Himself. For when a "run-of-the-mill child prodigy" from
Brooklyn leaves atomic bomb research to proclaim himself the Messiah,
the Lord chides him for having expected to have any quick success.
And when, swallowing his resentment, the would-be Messiah asks the
Lord for advice--now that Judgment Day seems a very remote possi–
bility-the Lord answers: "'Go back to your old work,' said the
Voice. 'Go on raising money for Israel. Maybe some good will come
of it.''' These tones of chastened wisdom are the very accents of the
iguana; and it is significant that, when Mr. Wilson touches on
art
in
this conversation, he takes some ironic thrusts at the attempt of small–
scale Messiahs to liquidate its problems by fiat.
"Why, there's even a music expert-a disciple of Rabbi Schoenberg
-who wants to exclude from Redemption all the modern composers
who don't practice the pure twelve-tone system. . . . There's even a
literary critic-a rabbi himself, with his own disciples-who says that
he can't run the danger of finding himself assigned to a category which
might include certain critics who don't subscribe to his doctrine. The
core of that doctrine is that--evaluating in moral terms-there are
only five novelists in English whose work can be taken seriously." Here,
one might say, Mr. Wilson's own ox is being gored by his prize bull–
but now working for Rabbi Leavis. And, as we see, Mr. Wilson does
not buy the gimmick when it manhandles matters in which he is vitally
and personally concerned.
Indeed, the most enlightening pages of the present volume are those
in which we feel Mr. Wilson himself most intimately engaged; na–
turally enough, these pages deal with American cultural matters in
general and Mr. Wilson's personal history in particular.
It
is never
superfluous to remind Americans, as Mr. Wilson takes occasion to do,
that "the United States has not been exempt from the appetites that
led to the conquests of Nebuchadnezzar's Nineveh, Caesar's Rome or
Bonaparte's France." To control these appetites, there is only that tra–
dition on which Mr. Wilson puts his finger when he refers to those who
feel that "beyond their opportunities for money-making, they have a
stake in the success of our system, that they share the responsibility
to
carry on its institutions, to find expression for its new point of view, to
give it dignity, to make it work." This whole analysis of "republican
patriotism" is an excellent example of Mr. Wilson's "feel" for historical
nuance and national diversity (though when he remarks that Europeans
have trouble understanding such patriotism, his Anglophobia gets the
better of his historical sense).
