Edmund Wilson and a "Truly Human Culture"

Abstract

Edmund Wilson, Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1971; Toronto: Doubleday, 1971. Pp. 386. $8.95. Edmund Wilson, A Window on Russia: for the Use of Foreign Readers. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1972; Toronto: Doubleday, 1972. Pp. 280. $9.25. Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: a Study in the Writing and Acting of History. With a New Introduction. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1972; Toronto, Doubleday, 1972. Pp. xvii + 590. $17.25. Leonard Kriegel, Edmund Wilson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971; Don Mills: Burns and MacEachern, 1971. Pp. 145. $7.25. Edmund Wilson, who died last June at the age of seventy-seven at his ancestral home in Talcottville in upstate New York, was by almost uni- versal consent the leading twentieth-century American man of letters. His energies were protean, and the range of subjects upon which he wrote - always interestingly, often authoritatively, and sometimes, especially in his later years, crankily - is astonishing. His subjects include the Dead Sea scrolls, the Iroquois, income tax, the literatures and cultures of - inter alia - Canada, Haiti, Israel, Hungary, and Russia. There are a virtually countless number of essays, articles and reviews on literary subjects, some of them of classic stature, first-rate political and social reportage on the United States during the depression years, and other fine first-hand reporting - particularly his account of the plight of Europe at the end of World War II in Europe Without Baedeker: Sketches among the Ruins of Italy, Greece and England. There are also poems and stories, a novel, and a number of plays, which, if they will never occupy in Wilson's canon as major a place as he thought they deserved, are by no means uninteresting. And each of his three most major works - Axel's Castle: a Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930 (1931), To the Finland Station: a Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940), and Patriotic Core: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962) - is both mas- terly in itself and quite different in subject matter from the others.