Scars of Childhood

THE WOUND AND THE Bow--Edmund Wilson--Houghton Miff I in ($3).

Edmund Wilson's ranking among topflight U.S. literary critics will not be bolstered by his new book. But he still writes, as few Americans can, with the dry-wine deftness of a cultivated Frenchman. And his findings are still of value to all serious students of literature.

The Wound and the Bow takes its title from the legend of Philoctetes, who was first abandoned by the Greeks during the Trojan war because of a noisome, incurable wound, then sought out by them because of his magically invincible bow--symbol of the man of genius as pariah-savior and of the Gordian interdependence of power and neurosis. The two most important pieces in The Wound and the Bow are studies of that symbol in terms of1) Dickens, 2) Kipling.

Twenty years of stale marriage did harm enough to the mature Dickens; but the wound from which he never recovered was the six months he spent as a child in a ratty London warehouse, pasting labels on bottles. "Dickens' whole career was an attempt to digest these early shocks and hardships, to explain them to himself, to justify himself in relation to them, to give an intelligible and tolerable picture of a world in which such things could occur." Wilson demonstrates that the novels are powerful and bitter social criticism; that the Dickens character gallery contains ever more pitiless portraits of Victorian archetypes: the mealymouthed, blood-squeezing merchant, the vapid doll, the turncoat self-made man, and the soul-destroying shrew; that Dickens progressed from social to psychological, almost metaphysical analysis, and at his death was writing into the schizoid murderer Mr. Jasper (in Edwin Drood} not only the last and most symbolically charged of his Victorian hypocrites, but a sinister self-portrait as well.

This essay, abashing to Christmas-Carol Dickensians, arresting to highbrows who have never read Dickens in long pants, is an incisive collaboration by Wilson the Marxist and Wilson the amateur psychiatrist. But Wilson the literary critic is too much on the sidelines. Result: suggestive rather than definitive criticism.

Rudyard Kipling, as a child, under a tyrant aunt, suffered six years of a similar hell; but his wound distorted rather than strengthened his bow. As he grew older, he transposed the objects of his hatred and his fear; developed a weakling's abject worship of authority, and became the celebrant of class against mass, of system against the individual, of the animal, even of the machine, against the human. Wilson brilliantly points out the shifts and tightenings of these allegiances as they develop in Kipling's stories. He also points out that though Kipling is now neglected as a serious literary figure, he was the greatest prose craftsman of his time, with one of his time's greatest talents.

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