Comments on: Edmund Wilson, Incompetent Genre Snob

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:41:53 +0000

Wilson is a bit of a complicated person. If he was a snob at times, it harkened back to his days as a privileged youth, going to a fine prep school and then to study under Gauss at Princeton. He read voraciously, traveled all over Europe, Russia, Canada in addition to the US. But, he had a love for the common man, despite appearing snobbish at times. Consider his in depth study of the Iroquois Indians and his genuine empathy for them. I truly believe he was also a believer in integration and that all human races are equals. I would not consider him “boorish.”

Wilson tended to get carried away by charming and good looking younger women. Perhaps Anais Nin owed him her professional career for his overly enthusiastic reviews of her early works. Also, Wilson drank too much. If you read “The Fifties” and “The Sixties” you will see his thinking is often clouded by alcohol. But, I enjoyed reading these plus “Upstate”, the “Old Stone House” and a few of his other writings. I do not think you can truly call Wilson a snob after you see how he truly enjoyed mixing with the country people who lived around his beloved Talcottville Old Stone House.

By: angus lamont

angus lamont — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 20:19:38 +0000

heres to bunny wilson
who set the table at a roar
was best at criticism
and always managed to score
and now its po mo polemic
and writers who can’t parse
farewell to edmund and his age
alas: we’ve now just farce

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:59:48 +0000

To paraphrase someone’s comment, Edmund Wilson’s mission was to prove that he was the only adult in the room.

By: warren leming

warren leming — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:25:25 +0000

Wilson is easily the finest American critic of the 20th century. Mr. Champion helps us chart the decline of the American intellect….and his own.
Here again we see the “narcissism of small differences…” at which Mr. Champion is champ.

By: Lol

Lol — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:16:24 +0000

Edmund Wilson incompetent? ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. Then again this is the INTERNET-dummyville.

By: Interim : Edward Champion’s Filthy Habits

Interim : Edward Champion’s Filthy Habits — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:04:13 +0000

[...] a douchebag.” To be clear on this, I wrote “the man was a bit of a douchebag” and offered an argument supporting why I felt this to be the case. Nevertheless, I will inform the editors who hire me on a professional basis that Lee Siegel has [...]

By: fairest

fairest — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 22:22:38 +0000

Ooh, can we have an essay on Stanley Edgar Hyman next?

By: Demian Farnworth

Demian Farnworth — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:08:35 +0000

You know, Wilson does have value: critics like Wilson help fellow snobs avoid the hack books, whether they are juvenile and clumsy, but bestsellers. It’s a brotherhood that I like. Where Wilson failed is in his judgement that a mystery has no value. He just didn’t see it as value and didn’t allow anyone else to believe they had value. He was a hammer and everything else a nail.

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 06:08:36 +0000

I’m afraid it may have been Bunny Wilson’s snobbery, rather than his great essays on such topics as Dickens, Wharton, Hemingway’s misogyny, Casanova’s old age, and Joyce, that allowed him to remain a revered figure in the Fifties and Sixties. Only one side of the Left’s populist/High Culture battles of the Thirties stayed respectable after the war, at least in literature; and it wasn’t the side that welcomed Hammett and Pohl but the side that was more easily co-opted by the CIA.

You know what else? “The Wound and the Bow” is an utterly pedestrian essay, mostly comprising plot summary, that’s had a pernicious effect on the use of Disease as Metaphor.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 21:27:36 +0000

No, Seriously, some of us kinda like Tolkien and don’t find his insights juvenile.

Hope the failed novel about nothing in particular is coming along swimmingly.

By: Pumpy

Pumpy — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:53:36 +0000

About mysteries, they ARE essentially whodunits! Or are you going against your advise that a book “should be read on its own terms”?

By: Carolyn

Carolyn — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 13:16:21 +0000

I have tried, I really tried to appreciate Wilson and I have never found him anything but a tremendous bore.

By: Seriously?

Seriously? — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 18:41:26 +0000

Wait, not everyone thinks that Tolkien is clumsy and juvenile? That is more surprising than Wilson’s correct opinion of it.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 13:55:08 +0000

Come on not everyone needs to love everything Ed. Besides if literary fiction sold even close to the way mysteries and other “genres” do they wouldn’t need champions. (hah, haha) I think the snobbery of literary writers and critics (much like the snobbery of poets towards prose writing) has to do with the sense of embattlement one gets from being not widely read, not necessarily understood, generally ignored.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 03:12:58 +0000

It's probably in there at some point, but Wilson also famously hated Tolkien, calling The Fellowship of the Ring "juvenile trash."

By: tbeshear

tbeshear — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 03:06:12 +0000

Huh — I listened to an unabridged audio version of The Nine Tailors years ago on a cross-country trip, and it was clear that Sayers was writing a novel of village life that happened to be disguised as a mystery. The solution to the mystery, while ingenious (and probably groundbreaking at the time), was a secondary pleasure.

Wilson didn’t “get” Lovecraft either.