MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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admiring "the dynamic force and definiteness of his personality." This is
Wilson as a rock-ribbed American character, no longer the Keatsian seis–
mograph of the cultural and political scene but withdrawn, like his father
before him, into "a pocket of the past." Wilson could be immensely elo–
quent about this old fogeyism, as he liked to describe it. At one point he
called himself a man more or less of the eighteenth century, at other times
a man of the 1920s. But for all of the diversity of his interests in his last
years-exploring Russian literature, learning Hebrew and writing about
the Dead Sea Scrolls, going to Haiti, studying Hungarian-in the end he
became something of a nativist whose fundamental values were invested in
a Roman and republican ideal he linked to people like Grant and Holmes.
In the peroration to
Patriotic Gore,
after some eight hundred pages, he
describes the aged Holmes as "perhaps the last Roman," and as "a just
man, a man of the old America, who having proved himself early in the
Civil War, had persisted and continued to function through everything that
had happened since, and had triumphed in remaining faithful to some kind
of tradi tional ideal."
What an odd yet moving place for Edmund Wilson's last phase: the
free-living modernist of the 1920s transformed into the quintessential
American of an earlier era; the critic of Keatsian receptivity becoming the
eccentric, quirky Johnsonian figure we knew from Wilson's later years. So
we conclude where we began, with Wilson's personality as a barrier
between us and his work.
It
may well be that the more we learn about
Wilson the less we like
him.
This certainly happened to me when I first
reviewed his journals of the 1930s, with their detached clinical record of
his sex life. But he lived his writing life on a heroic scale.
As
a reader he remained omnivorous to the end. In his last years he
was rediscovering minor American realists like Harold Frederic and Henry
Blake Fuller. His passion to record his life and thinking never abated; he
can be compared to the great Victorians in his plenitude and persistence,
in the strength of his work ethic and the moral calling he brought to the
practice of criticism. His curiosity, his gift for languages, kept him from
turning provincial. At a time when other critics grew enamored of tech–
nique, he used everything from social history and biography to
psychoanalysis to hold fast to the elusive human dimension of literature.
He saw reading and writing as encounters colored by sensibility, style, per–
sonal history, and social practice. He never lost confidence in his own
power to make sense of his impressions, to translate other people's language
into limpid, terse and resonant language of his own. As his personal pres–
ence fades, the real Edmund Wilson, the one who matters most, survives
in
his books.
