The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [68]
Edmund Wilson had other ideas, not about the national scope of such a series but about what form it should take. “I myself,” he wrote, “had had a project for publishing these classics in an easily accessible form such as that of the French Pléiade series.” His target, he said, was “the ordinary reader.” He included in his article the full text of a letter he had sent to Jason Epstein, then an editor at Random House (and one of the founders of The New York Review of Books), in which he described the Éditions de la Pléiade at greater length as a series that had “included many of the French classics, ancient and modern, in beautifully produced and admirably printed thin-paper volumes, ranging from 800 to 1500 pages.” Copies of the letter to Epstein, Wilson noted, had been sent to a group of other people whom he thought might be supportive: “W. H. Auden, Marius Bewley, R. P. Blackmur, Van Wyck Brooks, Alfred Kazin, President Kennedy, Robert Lowell, Perry Miller, Norman Holmes Pearson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, Mark Van Doren, and Robert Penn Warren.”
Poets, literati, public intellectuals, and men of letters: these recipients could also presumably be counted on to know what Cape Cod weather was like in the spring. Of these, Wilson reports, only Perry Miller, “a Professor of American literature at Harvard,” raised any question about the problem of preparing authoritative texts, and even Miller, he said, admitted that “the project on Hawthorne, to cite only this one, being undertaken by the University of Ohio is perhaps more ‘academic’ than the average reader needs.”21
The ordinary reader and the average reader were to be the ideal clientele for Wilson’s American Pléiade edition, which he and Epstein cofounded in 1982 as the Library of America. Back in 1968, when he wrote Fruits of the MLA, Wilson was convinced that money intended to come from the National Humanities Endowment to support his project had been “whisked away, and my project ‘tabled’—that is, set aside, dismissed. The Modern Language Association had, it seemed, had a project of its own for reprinting the American classics and had apparently had ours suppressed.”22 “Whisked,” “dismissed,” “suppressed”: this is hard language; bitter, even (one would be tempted to say, were the source not so eminent) paranoid language; and Wilson goes on, in his inimitable fashion, to explain to the “ordinary reader” of The New York Review of Books what the MLA is, or was, and what, by inference, it was not. The Modern Language Association, we learn, “publishes a periodical … which contains for the most part unreadable articles on literary problems and discoveries of very minute or no interest.” To underscore this point Wilson had recourse to a practice that, though it still can be found in journalistic accounts of academic conferences, was as unprofessional then as it is now: the citation of the titles of various academic papers as apparently self-evident indications of their worthlessness, indeed their risibility, without the writer taking the trouble to hear or read them. In this case, Wilson was quite sure he would be better off skipping papers on topics like “Flowers, Women, and Song in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams” and “The Unity of George Peele’s The Old Wives’ Tale.”
Edmund Wilson’s critical essays and other writings were formative for my own thinking about European and American literature. I am not sure, though, that it wouldn’t be possible to joke about the titles of essays called “Uncomfortable Casanova” or “Justice to Edith Wharton” or “The Kipling That Nobody Read,” all to be found in his collection The Wound and the Bow. The tactic of mocking what one has not read is overused and seldom precise. The problem is not that it is unfair but that it is lazy and contemptuous.
However, as we’ve noted, Wilson felt aggrieved. His proposal had been whisked and dismissed. Persons of no fame, many of whom lived far away, some of whom—especially since they were “teachers of American literature