John Henry Raleigh
AMERICA REVISITED
Patriotic
Gore*-the phrase is from "Maryland! My Mary–
land!" and the subject is the civil war-is Edmund Wilson's final
large-scale assessment of history
in
general and American history in
particular and the literature, defined in the widest sense, that came
out of that conflict. As it is the product of a distinguished mind and
years of labor,
it
is worth the serious attention of every student of these
subjects. It makes no pretense of being "neutral" or "objective" al–
though it strives mightily to get at the real meaning of the Civil War;
it is rather the impassioned comment of a single individual, historian,
literary critic, moralist, rhetorician, on the great American tragedy,
the existence of slavery, the fratricidal conflict and its continuing
aftermath. The finest compliment that one can pay it is to say that
only Edmund Wilson could have written it.
It
is not without its
slower moments, still less of its irritating ones; and at times you think
that only Edmund Wilson
would
have written it. But it is so good,
and, despite its complexities and contradictions, so much all of a piece,
the product of a single, complicated, learned, tenacious, and sensitive
mind, that even its crotchets, which come out of an old American
cracker barrel, are part of the total value. It is a curious book too in
that, in some way that is difficult to explain, it is "unfinished," by
which I mean that the author does not fit all the parts together, as,
for example, he did at the end of
To the Finland Stati()1lj,
where the
historical key fits the historical lock and a book,
Das
Kapital,
becomes
history. In this book the original conflict is still going on, and separate
parts of the argument, at least to me, seem to run into one another.
(For example, Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Con–
federacy, is apotheosized as the upholder of human freedom, and the
foe of Absolutism; in other parts of the book the degradation of
slavery, for both Negro and white,
is
concretely and unforgettably
• PATRIOTIC GORE,
By
Edmund Wilson, Oxford University Press, $8.50.
