Rejoycings

NOTEBOOKS OF NIGHT--Edmund Wilson--Colt Press ($2.50).

Edmund Wilson's latest book is chiefly interesting because it shows an outstanding U.S. literary critic as a satirist in verse and prose. Two of the best pieces are wicked parodies, one in prose, one in verse. Verse parody is the salty Omelet of A. MacLeish, in which Critic Wilson paraphrases the Librarian of Congress' smooth pentameters, feminine endings, assonance and love of colons:

I was wired for sound as I started again

down the river: And my colons went out on the air to

the clang of a gong:

O when shall I ring with the perilous

pain and the fever? A clean and clever lad who is doing his best

to get on. . . .

The prose parody, The Three Limperary Cripples, written in the manner of James Joyce, is less malicious, more successful. Wrote Justice Holmes (see .p. 84) to Sir Frederick Pollock: "[It] made me laugh consumedly. . . . The writer['s] ... indecency . . . must have escaped the editors." Critic Wilson's subject: book reviewers ("What a wonderful is liquorary quiddicism! What fastiddily! . . . What unreproachable stammards and crytea-ria!"). Parodist Wilson's chief victims are "Liberary clinics Carl von Doorman, Herbert S. Goren, Gorman B. Munson"):

"Carl . . . was The-Book-of-the-Munch-Club . . . the giver-away of a mahogany Britannica with every subscription." He gave Munch-Club readers: "Elizabeth and Sex by Lytton Scratchy, John Brown's Benny by Steve Brody, The Bridge of San Louis Bromfield by Ray Long, A Farewell to Farms by Mark van Doorman, How to be Happy: A Preface to Morons by Walter B. Pipkin, Pfui D., Tristram Coffin, a finespun obituary by Edwinson Arlington Cemetry, Black Majesty by Dark van Moron, The Life of Joseph Wood Peacock by his uncle Doc van Doren, and Training the Giant Pander by quaint old Trader van Horen." Concludes Satirist Wilson: "And there was also Granville van Arven and his League of American Vipers, but that is another snory."

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