Critical Spirit

THE TRIPLE THINKERS--Edmund Wilson--Harcourt, Brace ($2.75).

Among contemporary American literary men, Edmund Wilson is a natural critic in the way that some writers are natural poets. He turns experience into critical formulations as poets turn them into verse. Even his novel, I Thought of Daisy, drifts into well-phrased critical discussions of the ideas held by its characters--although Daisy herself, a matter-of-fact, cheerful chorus girl, entertains ideas and men that no other important U. S. critic would try to analyze.

Last week Edmund Wilson again demonstrated how consistently he thinks in critical terms. The demonstration: a collection of ten essays that range from an account of a Princeton week end to an introduction to Pushkin's poetry. Not a unified book like his Axel's Castle, The Triple Thinkers includes a slightly heavy discourse on verse technique, but to compensate for that it has more of the U. S. literary scene than Wilson's previous writing, and it contains two brilliant essays, one on the ambiguity of Henry James which is the most searching study of James that has appeared; one on the critic and reformer, John Jay Chapman, which powerfully evokes the confusion of pre-War U. S. intellectual life, reveals what it has cost its men of genius.

The life of the romantic Bostonian, John Jay Chapman, with its independence, unfulfilled promise and notes of morbidity, demonstrates Wilson's thesis: "The Americans who graduated from college in the eighties found themselves up against a world which broke most of them. . . . They could no longer play the role in the professions of a trained and public-spirited caste: the new society did not recognize them." As is usual in Wilson's writing, his most penetrating insights are incorporated into the body of his writing, so unaccented and interwoven with descriptions of scene that casual readers may not recognize the observation that has gone into them. But even casual readers must be impressed at the way Wilson combines artful characterizations of scholars, homely, humorous details of their households, with lucid statements of the problems with which they grapple; be even more impressed at the meaning he wrings from a brief encounter with learned academics on a Princeton Sunday, or from the life and letters of a neglected Bostonian.

The Author. Only son of a prominent New Jersey lawyer and politician, Edmund Wilson has had a more varied career than most critics. He served in the Intelligence Service during the War, was a reporter on the New York Sun, managing editor of Vanity Fair, an editor of the New Republic for eight years, where he alternated his scholarly essays with firsthand accounts of strikes and political conventions. Absentminded, round-faced, stuttering slightly when animated, Wilson is a conscientious, molelike conversationalist. He sometimes surprises people by popping up from a topic they thought had been abandoned, picking up the conversation precisely where it had left off. Scholarly by temperament, a sagacious commentator on Latin poets, Greek dramatists, French fiction, he combines these academic pursuits with a love of the theatre, writes comedies (The Crime in the Whistler Room, This Room, This Gin and These Sandwiches] in which characters akin to those of F. Scott Fitzgerald are shown wound up with less outspoken intellectuals. In his desire to see the U. S. at firsthand Critic Wilson once bought a motorcycle, gave it up after he had run into a ditch and been arrested because he had neglected to buy a license. Now living in Stamford, Conn., where he is writing a long history of socialism, Edmund Wilson last month married pretty, Seattle-born Mary McCarthy. Two years ago in the Nation Mary McCarthy summed up much younger-generation opinion when she described Edmund Wilson as the best of American critics.

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