Liquored-Up

Stefan Collini

• Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature by Lewis Dabney
  Farrar, Straus, 642 pp, £35.00, August 2005, ISBN 0 374 11312 2

Edmund Wilson has become an object of fantasy. A lot of desire is currently invested in him as the representative of a cherished role: the critic-as-generalist, the man of letters as cultural critic, or what in the last decade or more it has become common in the United States to call the ‘public intellectual’. Fantasies are, by definition, about the not-present, and all of these notions are deployed to express a sense of absence or loss, a form of keening for a vanished world. Now, it is said, we only have specialists, experts who address other experts, uninterested in and unintelligible to those outside the walls; but then, wide-ranging, readable critics addressed their fellow common readers on equal terms (quite when ‘then’ was turns out to be tricky to pin down). Cultural controversies fuelled by this fantasy promote the need for icons, and this is what has led so many parts to be scripted for Wilson – the modern Dr Johnson, the American Sainte-Beuve, the last of the men of letters, the man who read everything.