The Use and Abuse of Literature (20 page)

Remember that this is an essay from 1935. Its own juvenescence, if we may put it that way, seems considerable: “the ulterior purposes of literature,” “the separable content of literature,” and “leav[ing] … literature behind” are very contemporary concerns, as timely now as they were then.

Several years ago I wrote an essay about “The Amateur Professional and the Professional Amateur.”
¹⁴
What I meant by “amateur professional” was someone who did not have specific training in a field but nonetheless had become a respected practitioner in it, like C. P. Snow, a scientist who wrote novels and cultural criticism, or Carl Djerassi, a chemist who writes plays, or Judge Richard Posner, who has written on law and literature. What I meant by “professional amateur” was someone who disavowed the status of professional in favor of the preferred role of amateur, gaining points by
not
being a professional: the book reviewer, the belletrist, the polymath, and the public intellectual. Two examples I cited from this category were Kenneth Burke and Edmund Wilson, both of whom wielded enormous critical clout and had a great influence on the literary field in the twentieth century.
¹⁵
Wilson went to Princeton, became a highly regarded critic, and wrote books that influenced literary taste and judgment (several of which became classics on academic course curricula). Burke dropped out of Columbia to be a writer, became the editor of a little magazine,
The Dial
, and wrote highly influential works of literary criticism and philosophy. Neither was a traditional college professor.

Over time Edmund Wilson developed contempt for what he regarded as “academic pedantry,” and for the “PhD system” that produced and depended upon it—a system he thought ought to have been scrapped
after World War I as a “German atrocity.”
¹⁶
His gleeful animadversions against academia and the Modern Language Association, occasioned by a book series whose editorial practices he disapproved, were published in an article in
The New York Review of Books
(later republished as a separate booklet) and elicited a strong response from scholars, of which the following, from Gordon N. Ray, the president of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, is worth quoting in full:

Ray’s own scholarship was focused on the life and work of William Makepeace Thackeray, whose letters and private papers he edited (in four volumes) and about whom he wrote a two-volume biography. His reply to Wilson, which stands as the epigraph to an MLA pamphlet called
Professional Standards and American Editions
, is clearly both personal and professional, since his was apparently the kind of scholarship Wilson thought the world would be better off without. But Ray’s riposte, and the prominent place given it in the pamphlet, is symptomatic of a particular time in intellectual and professional history. The quarrel of the amateurs and the professionals seems at that moment to have erupted in a way both vivid and virulent. What was at stake? Ray mentions “the alarm of amateurs” at the arrival of “rigorous professional standards,” and the newly achieved maturity of the “American learned world.” After World War II, with the expansion of the state universities and the G.I. Bill, a wave of comparative democratization hit the U.S. academy, together—not altogether paradoxically—with a growth in graduate programs, a sophistication of editorial practices, and (as Wilson notes dismissively)
the need for more, and more varied, projects for dissertation students to undertake. What he calls the “boondoggling of the MLA editions”
¹⁸
and what Gordon Ray calls “professional standards” are two sides of the same coin.

The tension felt, the challenge detected and resisted, was not only between amateurs and professionals, between self-made critics and PhD-bearing scholars, but also between the New York world of books, magazines, and intellectual life and the rest of the country. The corridor traversed by the old Pennsylvania Railroad, with all paths leading to or from New York, had long tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, been the province of arbiters of taste and intellectual leadership. In
The Fruits of the MLA
, Wilson had begun by mildly mocking a letter from an unnamed correspondent, the editor of one of the MLA volumes, which presumes to say something about the climate of the East Coast, where Wilson spent his summer vacations: “he professes to envy me my enjoyment of spring on Cape Cod—which is actually rather bleak—since the part of the Middle West to which he is at present condemned cannot be said to have a spring.”
¹⁹
Gordon Ray, though by then the head of a New York–based foundation, was a graduate of the University of Indiana and had been an administrator at the University of Illinois. The other contributors to
Professional Standards and American Editions
(which bore the subtitle
A Response to Edmund Wilson
) included two scholars based in Iowa and one from Berkeley, California.

The original idea for what became the MLA editions had been generated by the American Literature Group of the MLA, headed by a Princeton professor, Willard Thorp, in 1947–48. But by the time of these editions, produced by a team of five Emerson scholars, appeared from Harvard University Press (to be immediately lambasted by the critic and journal editor Lewis Mumford in an article called “Emerson Behind Barbed Wire”)
²⁰
, the series had garnered financial support from the National Endowment on the Arts and Humanities and smaller grants from the U.S. Office of Education. It had become a national project.

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”—might never even have
heard
of the Pléiade series, had prevailed over the publishers, writers, and others to whom Wilson had copied his letter. “I knew,” he says, “that the MLA had a strong and determined lobby to further its own designs and that representatives of the MLA had attempted to discourage our project and had, it seems, very soon succeeded.”
²³
The three damning initials appear over and over, as if they were CIA or FBI or KGB. “Representatives” of this “determined group” were busy furthering “the designs” of the organization: what could a lover of literature do?

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 be satisfied with “it has been said … I believe … by someone”?)