SUMMER BOOKS
A Literary Humanist
BY PETER QUENNELL SINCE Baudelaire first announced, in his essay on the genius of Wagner, that every real poet must inevitably become a critic, and that a poet's critical activities were inseparable from his creative efforts, remarkably few modern writers have attempted to follow the lead he gave. Critic and creator have continued to stand apart; and, when a 'creative writer' has ventured into the field of criticism, he has usually done so with the air of shouldering an unfamiliar task, from which he is glad to escape as soon as he has said his say. Mr. Edmund Wilson, on the other hand, is .a critic of the Baudelairean type; for, although his original works—his poems, plays and short stories—are evidently much less interesting than such books as Axel's Castle and The Wound and the Bow and that ambitious study in revolutionary history, To the Finland Station, he has always exercised his critical functions with an enthusiasm that suggests the artist.
Now and then, of course, it may occur to his readers— more especially, to his English readers—that he is astonish- ingly wrong-headed. Edmund Wilson has an 'irascible talent; and nothing is so likely to exasperate him as a visit to the British Isles. His anglophobia is acute and persistent; and any provocation, no matter how slight, will bring it bubbling up again. Perhaps he hates because he has loved too well: there were hints of personal disappointment in the embittered volume he entitled Europe Without Baedeker. Or perhaps it is because he has enjoyed English literature so deeply, and studied our literary background so thoroughly, that the modern inheritors of this splendid tradition seem a drab and disappointing crew. Whatever the origins of the distaste he feels, its present manifestations are very often highly irrational. At the bottom of almost every wood-pile is a vulgar, self-seeking and class-conscious Englishman, rather like the imaginary English Duke whom some American politicians still believe to be running the British Empire for his own advantage. Yet, if we discount his personal prejudices, there is no critic today writing on either side of the Atlantic Ocean who has covered a larger variety of sub- jects—from Marxism to the achievement of the Symbolist poets—in a more enlightening and comprehensive style.
His latest production is a delightful travel book.* Red, Black, Blond and Olive consists of four lengthy . travel sketches executed between 1935 and 1954.- The earliest, which describes a Russian journey, was written at a period when the red star over the Kremlin, as seen by an American intellectual, still burned very bright indeed. Soon afterwards it began to develop a much more lurid and forbidding glow; but Edmund Wilson has not hesitated to keep on record his optimistic first impressions, merely adding a postscript, in which he admits his disillusionment, and interpolating a number of paragraphs (separated from rho body of the text by square brackets) in which he relates episodes and sets down comments that it appeared inadvisable to publish at the time. For, at the time, he was determined to accept and believe—`an atavistic Protestantism,' he assumes, may have predisposed him towards the ,rigours of the Marxist doctrine —and, coming straight from the detested shores of England, he was doubly susceptible to the exhilarating atmosphere of what he imagined to be the new society. Russia, he felt, was the 'moral top of, the world'; and, whereas 'the English with their antiquated social system cannot forgive a branch of their own race who have scrapped that system and prospered . . . the Soviet Union is certainly the European country which has most in common with ours.'
Meanwhile a succession of passages in square brackets represent his considered judgement. 1935 impressed him as the 'most liberal period ever known in Soviet Russia.' which promised new freedom for the individual citizen. But the shadow of the Great Purges was already advancing; and one of Edmund Wilson's most poignant entries depicts a •high- minded relic of pre-Revolutionary Russia, the distinguished man of letters Prince Mirsky'(xhon, during the next eighteen months, a purge was to engulf and sweep away), wearily eking out a twilit existence in the society he had hoped to serve, which, having extracted his full propaganda value, had no further use for him. His portrait of the unhappy Mirsky- a well-known figure in English literary circles before he decided to return to Russia—shows Edmund Wilson's . descriptive talents at their best; but almost equally good is the concluding section, which tells how, when he was at Odessa, awaiting the boat that was to take him on to Constantinople, he fell ill and was relegated to a public hospital where he confronted the face of the Old Russia, slovenly and apathetic, but smilingly good-humoured, beneath the official starched cap. It is a vivid picture, sympathetically drawn; but it did not appeal to the censors of the new society, who banned his book, put the author on a blacklist of persons who were never again to be granted a visa for the Soviet Union, and visited its displeasure on two American friends who had incautiously assisted him. Edmund Wilson might be a professed admirer; but he dis- played just that flash of genuine literary insight which singled him out as a potential enemy.
Such sparks of wit and intelligence, whatever the opinions he expresses, and despite the fact that some of his sentences are rather clumsily and loosely framed, enliven the chapters that he devotes to twentieth-century Israel, the Negro Republic of Haiti and the dances of the Zufii Indians. One does not associate Edmund Wilson's style with the vagrant inspiration of D. H. Lawrence; yet Wilson visiting New Mexico proves as eloquent and imaginative a guide as Law- rence upon similar ground, and a great deal less pretentious in his attitude towards the Dark Gods. His account of the dances themselves is extraordinarily vivid; and he succeeds in evoking the magical impression produced by the enormous bird-masks as, 'not rigidly erect but bent forward with the dignity of their kingly crests,' beaks snapping and plumes majestically nodding, they filed through the frosty moonlight and approached the lighted houses of the village. I was no less surprised to discover that he has a gift for rendering natural beauty. His descriptions of Haiti are particularly good—not only of the Haitians themselves and their enter- taining native literature (as an example of which I recom- mend the love-poem, 'Declaration Paysanne,' printed on page 114). but of the luminous ocean that surrounds the island, `varying as if with the shades of a sheet of taffetas changeant, pulled taut to the south in greenish shallows, to the north in a surface of a blue so tender that, though floating a white sail or two, it seems nothing so dense as salt-water. . . Even if one resented his touches of anglophobia and con- demned his ideological misadventures far more heartily than I feel prepared to do, one could not deny the literary merits of this disarming and engaging book. Edmund Wilson is a literary humanist, the possessor of a sensitive imagination, who combines a delight in the spectacle of human life with a deep devotion to the world of ideas.
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