Near the Magician, by Rosalind Baker Wilson
The title of Rosalind Baker Wilson’s memoir refers not to her father’s intellectual powers but to the fact that he loved to perform magic tricks. Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) is generally regarded as one of America’s most no-nonsense men of letters; Miss Wilson, who is the critic’s eldest daughter, here contrasts his “love of illusion and magic” to “his career, which depended on analyzing and taking apart literary works and removing the magic.” Yet Wilson’s criticism actually worked to preserve, not to remove, the magic in difficult literary works by making them accessible to a large audience. In Axel’s Castle (1931) he made it possible for Americans to understand modernist literature, from the Symbolist poets to Joyce, and elsewhere he famously led expeditions into a wide range of literary and extra-literary subjects including the Russian Revolution, the American Civil War, the Iroquois, Canada, Haiti, and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Was Wilson truly a “man of letters”? If this means that he was outstanding in imaginative as well as in critical writing, the answer would have to be no. His novels and plays are mere literary memorabilia; they have an increasingly antique charm, but no life. (Vladimir Nabokov called Wilson’s 1946 novel, Memoirs of Hecate County, “as pure as a block of ice in a surgical laboratory.”) Wilson’s most valuable contribution was his criticism, which was usually interesting even when—as was often the case-it was not correct. Unlike most intellectuals today, his was always an independent and unaffiliated point of view. As he saw it, the position of “people who know about literature” (clearly meaning himself) “is simply that they know what they know, and that they are determined to impose their opinions by main force of eloquence or assertion on the people who do not know.”
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