556
PARTISAN REVIEW
died, and only H.L. Mencken has been as posthumously prolific. Looking
back on his huge body of writing, I'm struck by its extraordinary variety,
from the drama and fiction and poetry at which he was not very successful to
the travel writing that supports much of his later work. His early criticism
itself is just as varied. Besides introducing an often puzzled audience to the
new American writers of his generation and to the difficult modernists-he
wrote some of the first articles about them to appear in the American press–
he also wrote about Chaplin movies, popular culture, vaudeville, and the
Ziegfeld Follies. In its freshness and abundance,
The Shores
if
Light
is surely
the best collection of his journalism: ninety-seven articles, full of the excite–
ment of discovery, yet only a selection of what he published during the
twenties and thirties.
It
would be hard to imagine a more spirited literary
chronicle of the era.
Nothing illuminates the conditions under which Wilson worked better
than these weekly pieces, written under deadline yet always alert to new sub–
jects. Today we no longer have a steady critic writing regular critical essays
for a magazine like
The New Republic,
Wilson's
main
forum during the peri–
od. His old nemesis, Stanley Edgar Hyman, who had once dismissed
him
as
a mere journalist, was perhaps the last to try it, taking on every important new
novel for
The New Leader
in the 1960s. Perhaps the vigorous literary journal–
ism of John Updike and Gore Vidal comes closest to Wilson's in scope,
though without his daunting critical authority. His was a nineteenth-century
approach to criticism: the generalist as man of letters-judicial, didactic,
authoritative--within a much more book-oriented culture than we have
today.
The young Wilson tried his hand at everything. In one anonymously
published twenty-page piece called "The All-Star Literary Vaudeville," he
offered a sweeping yet entertaining account of virtually every writer on the
scene. Like an expert tour guide, he takes on these writers with a no-nonsense
directness that would become his hallmark and a remarkable self-assurance
about what he thinks of each one of them. These really are encounters, a
favorite word of his during the period. And even when he is wrong-headed
or rudimentary, he engages the writers, some of them new and difficult, with
the full weight of his own experience and sensibility. If a case can be made
against the Wilson of
The Shores
if
Light,
it is that his almost perfect pitch for
prose fiction deserts
him
when he turns to poetry. At one of the great
moments in American poetry, he favors friends like Elinor Wylie or Millay
while doing scant justice to major figures like Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens,
Hart Crane or William Carlos Williams. More a socially oriented cri tic
than
a technical one, he excels at connecting writers to their milieu, an approach
more suited to the social and biographical texture of fiction than the linguis–
tic density of poetry.
