MORRIS DICKSTEIN
557
Despite this limitation, The
Shores
if
Light
brings back the glory days of
Wilson as a critic, wonderfully in tune with new literary movements,
responding to a great creative surge as yet unappreciated by the world at
large. Wilson once confessed that he loved talking about writers to people
who hadn't yet read them, exactly the opposite of the academic critic who
writes only for the initiated. And this love of introducing a writer to an
audience, in print or in conversation, enabled Wilson to give free play to
the narrative gifts never fully realized in his fiction. When he writes about
Proust and Joyce in
Axel~
Castle,
he actually sets about to recreate their
work-not simply to retell the story, but to convey it in terms so nuanced
with interpretation, irony, and judgment that it becomes something new,
a redaction that is itself novelistic.
What makes the pieces so impressive when you reread them is not only
his range and style but the supple agility of his dealings with different
kinds of writers. In the middle of the book he even slips in a manifesto
called "The Critic Who Does Not Exist" in which he maps out the war–
ring critical and literary schools of the time, each propagating its own
doctrine with little attention to other viewpoints, with no genuinely
disinterested critic ("that is, a writer who is at once first-rate and nothing
but a literary critic") prepared to challenge them. Wilson saw himself as
just that critic, someone moving easily among many kinds of writers, con–
strained by no dogma or party spirit, committed to literature itself in all its
protean variety.
Assembling his articles long after they first appeared-The
Shores of
Light
did not come out until 1952, a sequel to the collection of more
recent work called
Classics and Commercials-Wilson
dramatizes his crit–
ical position with a witty juxtaposition, setting a piece on H .L.
Mencken alongside one on Woodrow Wilson's tenure as president of
Princeton. We think of Mencken and Woodrow Wilson as polar oppo–
sites: Wilson so moralistic, impassioned, and rhetorical, Mencken ever
the iconoclast, eagerly deflating moralistic cant. But Edmund Wilson
presents them both as rigidly determined minds, repeti tious, predictable,
and inflexibly themselves. A part of Wilson is drawn to this: it helps
explain his lifelong interest in the effects of New England Puritanism
on later American culture. At the end of each piece he does a dialecti–
cal turn, showing how Mencken's dogmatic quality gives him power as
a satirist, and honoring Woodrow Wilson's unbending idealism, which
would cause him so much trouble in his conflict with the U.S. Senate.
Edmund Wilson had a streak of sympathy for both positions, espe–
cially the idealism that was in short supply during the Coolidge years
when he wrote his piece. But the critical temperament, as he under–
stood it, was just the opposite of what these men possessed, for they
