Classics and Commercials - A literary chronicle of the forties

542 Pages·1950·27.985 MB·English

by  Edmund Wilson

C L A S S I C S A N D
C O M M E R C I A L S
A 1. /TERARY CHRO .VICL.t.'
OF THE l ;ORTIES
BOOKS BY EDMUND WILSON
I THOUGHT OF DAISY
POETS, FAREWELL!
AXEL'S CASTLE
THE AMERICAN JITTERS: A YBAR OF THE SLUMP
TRAVELS IN TWO DEMOCRACIES
THIS ROOM AND THIS GIN AND THESE SANDWICHES
THE TRIPLE THINKERS
TO THE FINLAND STATION
THB WOUND AND THE BOW
NOTE-BOOKS OF NIGHT
THE SHOCK OF RECOGNITION
MEMOIRS OF HECATE COUNTY
EUROPE WITHOUT BAEDEKER
THE LITTLE BLUE LIGHT
Classics and Commercials
A LITERARY CHRONICLE OF THE FORTIES
EDMUND WILSON
BY
FARRAR, STRAUS AND COMPANY • NEW YORK
Copyright 1950 by Edmund Wil
son. All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book,
or portions thereof, in any form.
Manufactured in the United States
of America by H. Wolff, New York.
Designed by Stefan Salter
First Printing, November, 1950
Second Printing, February, 1951
CONTENTS
Archibald MacLeish and the Word 3
VanWyck Brooks's Second Phase JO
The Boys in the Back Room
1. JAMES M. CAIN
2. JOHN o'HARA
3· WILLIAM SAROYAN
4· HANS OTTO STORM
5.
JOHN STEINBECK
6. FACING THE PACIFIC
POSTSCRIPT
Max Eastman in I94I 57
T. K. Whipple 70
The Antrobuses and the Earwickers 8 I
Alexander W oollcott of the Phalanx 87
The Poetry of Angelica Balabanoff 94
Mr. Joseph E. Davies as a Stylist 98
Thoughts on Being Bibliographed I05
Through the Embassy Window: Harold Nicolson I2I
Kay Boyle and the Saturday Evening Post I28
The Life and Times of John Barrymore I33
"Never Apologize, Never Explain": The Art
of Evelyn Waugh I40
John Mulholland and the Art of Illusion I47
What Became of Louis Bromfield 53
I
J. Dover Wilson on Falstaff 61
I
v
VI CONTENTS
A Toast and a Tear for Dorothy Parker I68
A Treatise on Tales of Horror I72
A Guide to Finnegans Wake I82
A Novel by Salvador Dalj I90
A Long Talk about Jane Austen I96
"You Can't Do This to Me!" Shrilled Celia 204
Aldous Huxley in the World Beyond Time 209
Vladimir Nabokov on Gogol 2I5
Katherine Anne Porter 2I9
A Picture to Hang in the Library:
Brooks's Age of Irving 224
Why Do People Read Detective Stories? 23I
Bernard Shaw on the Training of a Statesman 238
Reexamining Dr. Johnson 244
Leonid Leonov: The Sophistication of a Formula 250
Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? 257
"Mr. Holmes, They Were The Footprints
of a Gigantic Hound!" 266
Glenway Wescott's War Work 275
A Cry from the Unquiet Grave 28o
Tales of the Marvellous and the Ridiculous 286
Thackeray's Letters: A Victorian Document 291
Splendors and Miseries of Evelyn Waugh 298
George Saintsbury's Centenary 306
Ambushing a Best-Seller 3
1 I
The Apotheosis of Somerset Maugham 3 9
I
William Saroyan and His Darling Old Providence 327
Oscar Wilde: "One Must Always Seek
What Is Most Tragic" 33
I
George Grosz in the United ·states 343
An Old Friend of the Family: Thackeray 348
Gilbert Without Sullivan 359
George Saintsbury: Gourmet and Glutton 366
Books of Etiquette and Emily Post 372
CONTENTS Vll
A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka 383
Jean-Paul Sartre: The Novelist
and the Existentialist 393
The Musical Glasses of Peacock 404
Edith Wharton: A Memoir by an English Friend 412
The Sanctity of Baudelaire 419
Van Wyck Brooks on the Civil War Period 423
An Analysis of Max Beerbohm 431
The Original of Tolstoy's Natasha 442
11The Most Unhappy Man on Earth" 453
William Faulkner's Reply to the
Civil-Rights Program 460
In Memory of Octave Mirbeau 471
A Revival of Ronald Firbank 486
Paul Rosenfeld: Three Phases 503
Index ;~t
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Tuzs BOOK contains a selection of my literary articles
written during the nineteen-forties. All of them have been
revised and some of them considerably rewritten. A few
have been brought up to date with postscripts. With the
exception of the memoir of Rosenfeld and some of the
notes on Connolly and Waugh, they are presented in
chronological order. The dates in most cases are those of
their first appearance in print; but to T. K. Whipple,
Thoughts on Being Bibliographed and Paul Rosenfeld:
Three Phases I have assigned the dates when they were
written.
From the article on Harold Nicolson through the
article on Ronald Firbank, all the pieces originally ap
peared in the New Yorker. Archibald MacLeish and the
Word, VanWyck Brooks's Second Phase and Max East
man in 1941 were first printed in the New. Republic; The
Antrobuses and the Earwickers, AlexanJer W oollcott of
the Phalanx and The Poetry of Angelica Balabanoff in
the Nation; and Mr. Joseph E. Davies as a Stylist in
Partisan Review. Thoughts on Being Bibliographed was
written for the Princeton University Library Chronicle
and appeared in the issue of February, 1944. T. K.
Whipple was written as an introduction to a volume of
Whipple's posthumous papers called Study Out the Land,
published by the University of California Press in 1943;
and Paul Rosenfeld: Three Phases was contributed to a
IX
X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
memorial volume called Paul Rosenfeld: Voyager in the
Arts, published by the Creative Age Press in I947· The
Boys in the Back Room originally came out as a series in
the issues of the New Republic of November I I, No
vember I8, December 9 and December I6, I94o, and was
republished, with its added Postscript, in book-form the
following year by the Colt Press of San Francisco.
ARCHIBALD MACLEISH AND THE WORD
Mn. ARCHIBALD MAcLEISH, in his new role of Librarian
of Congress, has suddenly taken a turn which must be as
tonishing even to those who have followed his previous
career.
In a speech before the American Association for Adult
Education, which has been prominently reported in the
newspapers and printed by the New Republic in its issue
of June 10, he has declared that the war novels of such
writers as John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway (to
name only the Americans mentioned), in their railing
against 11the statements of conviction, of purpose and of
belief on which the war of 1914-18 was fought," have
left the younger generation 11defenseless against an enemy
whose cynicism, whose brutality and whose stated inten
tion to enslave present the issue of the future in moral
terms-in terms of conviction and belief." Without, says
Mr. MacLeish, attempting to 11judge these writers," and
confessing that he himself at one time indulged a similar
impulse, he sternly insists that Dos Passos, Hemingway
and Company 11must face the fact that the books they
wrote in the years just after the War have done more to
disarm democracy in the face of fascism than any other
single influence."
Now, in the first place, it is obviously absurd for Mr.
MacLeish to cite, as he does, two passages describing the
feelings of characters in novels by Dos Passos and Heming
way as evidence of the authors' own lack of convictions or
3