From High Modernism to Middlebrow Culture

On August 18, 1962, Edmund Wilson wrote to a friend, the publisher and editor Jason Epstein, expressing satisfaction with the latter’s proposal to the Bollingen Foundation “of bringing out in a complete and compact form the principal American [literary] classics.” This was a project, Wilson said, that he had “been trying for years to interest some publisher in.” His model was the famous Éditions de la Pléiade, “beautifully produced and admirably printed thin-paper volumes, ranging from 800 to 1500 pages.”

It took nearly two decades for Wilson’s idea to be realized; in the interim he continued to campaign for it, most notably (notoriously?) in his scandalous (to academicians) attack on the cumbersome editions of Emerson, Hawthorne, and others sponsored by the Modern Language Association in a pamphlet entitled The Fruits of the MLA (1968). Continuing resistance to the project was based as much as anything on fears of its marketability. Was there still a well-informed reading public large enough to make it pay?

But, when the first “beautifully produced and admirably printed thin-paper volumes” of the Library of America appeared in the early 1980s, they were an immediate publishing success. Works by Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Mark Twain sold well as expected; but perhaps nothing better proved the existence of a ready and waiting readership than the brisk sales of two volumes of Francis Parkman’s history of France and England in North America (nos. 11 and 12 in the Library’s series). Some later volumes have languished, such as certain lesser novels of William Dean Howells, but in the main the Library of America has justified Wilson’s early championing. There is, then, a fine appropriateness, roughly a quarter of a century since the Library’s inception, in the publication in two volumes (nos. 176 and 177) of Edmund Wilson’s literary essays and reviews of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, containing in full the writings collected in Axel’s Castle (1932), The Triple Thinkers (1938), The Wound and the Bow (1941), Classics and Commercials (1950), and The Shores of Light (1952), with a handful of previously uncollected reviews.

At least two more collections of Wilson’s nonfictional writings are conceivable, if not at the moment certain, covering his voluminous work on subjects—beginning with The American Jitters (1932)—not specifically literary. He did, after 1950, continue to write on current work he particularly admired, like Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago (1958), or on figures, Edward Gorey for one, to whom he felt nobody else had paid proper attention. And there is, of course, his massive compilation, Patriotic Gore (1962), on the literature of the Civil War. We may be sure, if these collections do come, that they will have the same attractive physical shape and design that after 1950, publishing with Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Wilson insisted on for each new book.

Looked at in the round, we see a chief interest in these first two collections is the distinct shift in critical temper and tone from the 1920s into the 1940s—a shift that corresponds to and effectively traces an unmistakable change, a falling off and wearing away, from the confident creative achievements of “high modernism” celebrated in Axel’s Castle to a drabber, palpably dispirited time. In part this shift involved tribulations in Wilson’s personal affairs, perhaps even a midlife crisis of sorts, as well as a noticeable decline from the Joyce-Yeats-early-Hemingway era. An evident nostalgia for the time of his own coming-of-age comes into much of his 1940s reviewing, as when—commenting on the Viking Portable Dorothy Parker—he recalled a time when the behavior of literary people was in every way “freer”; they could love, travel, stay up late “as extravagantly as they pleased,” and risk any irresponsibility in order to write “whatever seemed to...