The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [69]
Although I don’t like Wilson’s dismissive tone, I understand his publishing dreams. Still, I have some difference of opinion about the results. I own several Library of America editions; they may be classics, and printed on acid-free paper to ensure their longevity, but they are also bulky, cumbersome, and lacking in the kind of preface and contextual information that I, even as a non–“teacher of American literature,” would have found helpful. (The LOA’s single slender green-ribbon book mark, a presumptive sign of elegance and leisurely perusal by the ordinary reader, is always supplemented in my copies by a myriad of decidedly inelegant Post-its, each indicating a passage to which I want to return.) Wilson posited a schism between the concerns of the scholar-pedants he caricatured and the ordinary reader. “What on earth is the interest of all of this?” he asks, when discussing some of William Dean Howells’s early travel articles and a diary of his travels with his wife, both of which Howells used as source material for his book The Wedding Journey. “Every writer knows how diaries and articles are utilized as material for books, and no ordinary reader knows or cares. What is important is the finished work by which the author wishes to stand.”24 Echoing Mumford, he calls source materials “literary garbage,”25 and he does not hide his contempt for the clueless academics who undertake their scholarship without lucrative contracts with publishers that would provide for advances and royalties. “A professional writer is astounded by the terms accepted by academic persons for work that may take many years. It seems incredible that, in the case of university presses, they sometimes have no contracts at all. They think in terms of academic prestige, and it is time that some solid achievement in this line should be given some more solid compensation. To examine an MLA contract gives a professional writer the shudders.”26 Notice the repetition of the phrase “a professional writer” at the beginning and the end of this supposedly altruistic piece of advice. Where the pamphlet is never shy about mobilizing the first-person-singular pronoun, now we have twice, instead of the word I, “a professional writer”—like Edmund Wilson.
Gordon Ray’s tart reply, in a publication conspicuously called Professional Standards, lumps Wilson with the amateurs who see that their time is passing. But Wilson himself proudly claimed to be a professional writer in comparison with the academic pedants, penniless but sifting the garbage of major authors, who exemplified to him the “ineptitude of [the MLA’s] pretensions to reprint the American classics.”27
We might ask why, in a diatribe so deeply concerned with discrediting professional scholars as drudges who distance themselves from ordinary reading, Wilson should take this determined swerve at just about the last moment (the final page of his piece as it appeared in The New York Review) away from being the champion of the ordinary reader and toward the mantle of professionalism. He damns the eminent bibliographer Fredson Bowers with faint praise: “I am on friendly terms with Mr. Bowers, and I know that he is an impassioned bibliographer as well as an expert on Elizabethan texts … [b]ut I have found no reason to believe that he is … much interested in literature. It has been said, in fact, I believe, by someone in the academic world that, in editing Leaves of Grass, he has done everything for it but read it.”28 (Would a professional journalist