The Last Empire Read Free Page B

critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism. Some of his reports—or even asides—make sense where most readers make none or nonsense. A friend
    had just read Tolstoy’s
Death of Ivan Ilyich
, which had made a great impression on him. I do not care for this story as much as many people do. I don’t believe that a man like Ivan Ilyich could ever look back on his life and find it empty and futile; I don’t believe that Tolstoy, in the period when he was writing his great novels, would ever have invented such a character.
    This is simply put; it is also, simply, true. Ivan Ilyich would not have regarded his past life as empty and futile any more than Edmund Wilson, despite his aches and pains, could ever have found his life anything but fascinating and full, as through him marched the Iroquois, the protagonists of the Civil War, the Dead Sea Scrolls, recollections of Daisy and Hecate County,
Axel’s Castle
and
To the Finland Station
, as well as these journals—first begun at Box Hill in Surrey, close to the small chalet where the great lost poet-novelist George Meredith wrote “half a dozen great novels.”
    The editor, Mr. Dabney, notes, I think correctly, that Wilson in his journals “was creating an art of portraiture in the tradition of Dr. Johnson, Taine and Sainte-Beuve.” He is certainly at his best when he turns the lights on a literary figure whom he knows and then walks, as it were, all around him. He mentions occasionally that he is reading Jules Renard’s journals; it is a pity that Wilson has none of that journalist’s aphoristic wit. But he might have said, with Renard, “Be interesting! Be interesting! Art is no excuse for boring people,” not to mention “I was born for successes in journalism, for the daily renown, the literature of abundance; reading great writers changed all that. That was the misfortune of my life.” But their misfortune is our good fortune. They existed to give the dull a glimpse of unsuspected worlds hidden in the one that we daily look at. One admires in Wilson what he admired in Parkman, “the avoidance of generalization, the description
of the events always in concrete detail. The larger tendencies are shown by a chronicle of individualized persons and actions. It is what I try to do myself.” Successfully, one might add. In the four-volume
Literary Criticism: A Short History
(1957), by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, the
Almanach da Gotha
of critics, Wilson is cited in
three
footnotes. Three! Fame!
    The New York Review of Books
    4 November 1993
    * 
D AWN P OWELL:
Q UEEN OF THE G OLDEN A GE
    In November 1987, after a year of reading the published works of Dawn Powell (1897–1965), I published my findings in
The New York Review of Books
. * There is now a somewhat blurred perception that she was always very much on the minds of such exciting critics and taste-makers as James Wolcott and John Updike, and that I had simply leapt onto a merrily moving bandwagon. Actually, all her books were out of print and her name was known only to those of us whose careers had overlapped hers. In the twenty-two years that had passed since her death, she had been thoroughly erased, as original writers so often are, in the United States of Amnesia. But then she had never had much success in her lifetime either. She was a wit, a satirist, and a woman, a combination that did not enchant the bookchatterers of that era. Worst of all,
she did not affirm warm mature family values.
She herself was the principal third of an interesting
ménage à trois
in Greenwich Village; the other two thirds were her lifelong
(
his
life long) husband, Joseph Gousha, and Coburn Gilman, a man about town and sometime magazine editor. All three were serious drinkers but then so was everyone else in those days when she could (with no irony) write a book about Manhattan and call it
The Happy Island
.
    Since my