Strange Bedfellows

Wilson's Library of America Volume

The first thing you need to know is that  The Library of America is not a place, like the Mall of America,  it’s a publishing company, a non-profit publishing company that began in 1979 with grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.  

The LOA is a library of America’s great works of literature that have been republished to preserve their beauty and integrity..

The next thing you should know is that although I really tried to admire Edmund Wilson, one of the literati that dreamed of creating the LOA, it was impossible.  

When I start reading about someone new (which is almost everyday) my opinion is flexible, like jello before it sets.  As I sift through stories, pictures and facts my brain jello firms up and by the end of the evening I have a pretty good mold, nothing fancy, but definitely solid.  It’s just like going on a first date, by the time you get home, you just know if there’s going to be a second date.

I really admired Wilson’s idea of gathering up American classic literature and publishing it in a beautiful library to be cherished and read for generations (he was actually inspired by the French Bibliotheque Pleiade, but that’s a story for later in the week), so I was all set to add him to my list of book heroes.  

My first red flag popped up when I read that he referred to The Lord of the Rings as “juvenile trash”.  Then I learned that he wrote that Orwell was “inconsistent and provincial”.  In fact, he regularly offered harsh words about books that are now accepted classics, required-reading-list books in school across the country.  I reminded myself that Wilson was a book critic and he was writing about these authors in the 1930s and 40s, the authors were contemporaries, not legends.  At the time the books were brand new, certainly not the classics that I spent many hours learning to revere and respect.  I tried not to be a Monday morning quarterback.   

Wilson, on the other hand, was not doing much to earn my respect.  The events of his life were flowing together like an oil spill in a nature reserve...destructive and dirty.  Curmudgeon was a popular word to describe his personality, but he was also an alcoholic, a snob, a tax evader, a womanizer (his first fling was with Edna St. Vincent Millay) and was know for his rudeness.  Four marriages did not prevent him from constantly cheating and at 70 he was still chasing skirts (ewww).  

So why exactly is Wilson still remembered and appreciated?  He was a brilliant literary critic, an author, a journalist and provided a powerful social commentary of his times.  Wilson was born in 1895 and lived a charmed life including; prep school, Princeton (as a classmate of  F. Scott Fitzgerald), summer estates and European adventures.  He served in the Army during WWI before becoming the editor of Vanity Fair, assistant editor of The New Republic and book reviewer for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Although he was a writer, his greatest influence was as a literary critic.  Wilson’s intellect and writing skill led to his reputation as one of the great American critics.  He wrote some of the first reviews of Ulysses, The Waste Land and Yeats, promoting him as a important poet.  He also supported Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s writing and was on target with his perceptions of E.E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens.   He wrote prolifically and his opinions were scattered across decades of great American writing.

Wilson is the kind of guy modern women would back away from quickly.  If fact, I can’t imagine many men or women who would enjoy his volatile company at all.  Maybe this is why he spent so much time reading and writing about books, alone with a bottle in his summer estate, perhaps he was more of a tragic figure than a villain?   Whatever his motivations, his passion for books led to the creation of the Library of America, a beautiful collection of books, that continues to grow and preserve our country’s great thoughts, ideas and stories.  For that he has my grudging respect and admiration.