BOOKS
295
These pages take on their full significance, however, only when we
read them along with his moving tribute to his father. For the elder
Wilson, who came to manhood in the robber-baron period after the
Civil War, and who suffered from neurotic depressions because of "his
lack of objectives in life," nonetheless managed to uphold this American
tradition in his own way. He was "a crack trial lawyer" who sometimes
worked for large corporations, but who helped his neighbors for little
or nothing when they got a raw deal. He was a staunch Republican
who once served as
Attorney~General
of New Jersey; but his strongest
ally in attempting to improve local education was a Jew from Czecho–
slovakia who had originally come to New Jersey as a peddler. One
of
his
closest cronies was the editor of the local Socialist newspaper,
with whom he took long walks because his wife would not allow this
disreputable character in her house. When Edmund Wilson came home
from the First World War, he was surprised to find his father, staunch
Republican though he was, indignant over the persecution of the So–
cialists and Communists. "I had been so full of Wells and Shaw and
Barbusse and the Russian Revolution that I was only learning now from
my father what the principles of American justice were."
These same principles prevented Edmund Wilson in the '30s, for
all his sympathy with Marxism, from ever becoming the dupe of
the dialectic. It is these same principles that we feel him asserting
now when he protests against the stupidities of Congress in censoring
textbooks with pictures of the Dust Bowl; or when he inveighs against
the barbarities of our passport policy-matched, to our shame, by no
other even semi-civilized country except Soviet Russia. Once we locate
Edmund Wilson in this American context, we realize that even his
stubborn and cranky scientism has a long and honorable history in the
lonely fight against bigotry and prejudice that sought emotional relief
in dreams of a scientific millennium. And we also realize that, as an
important influence on the education of the American intelligentsia
over the past thirty years, Edmund Wilson takes a distinguished place
among those who have carried on the American heritage exemplified
by his father. For the ex-bohemian of the '20s, the semi-Marxist of
the '30s, the omniscient and cosmopolitan literary critic, war corres–
pondent and student of religions of the '40s and '50s now reveals him–
self, in his "Reflections at Sixty," for what he has been in reality all
along-{)ne of the staunchest pillars of the Republic. Long may he stand!
Joseph Frank
