| [from the desk of Stickboy]
August 29, 2005 The Wall Street Journal Via fax Dear Editor: Regarding Hilton Kramer’s 26 August review of Lewis M. Dabney’s Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (“Critical Lapses”), I want to inform you that Memoirs of Hecate County is not a novel but a collection of short stories and a novel, The Princess with the Golden Hair, the centerpiece of the collection and one of the finest works of 20th century American fiction. Memoirs of Hecate County is important not only as the setting for Princess, but for the magic realism of “Ellen Terhune”, the first story in the collection, and for the New Historicist ideas Wilson presents in Princess, wherein the narrator and protagonist is, at first, writing a dissertation on the social, political and economic conditions surrounding the provenance of a number of European paintings. These literary approaches were far ahead of their time, predating much magic realist fiction and the new schools of literary criticism that have been prevalent in American universities since the Sixties. Yes, reading through Wilson’s political writing, one may find enough hagiography and foolhardy conviction to perhaps stuff an elephant, but Wilson was more willing than any writer of his generation to approach the elephant in the grand American drawing room: class and its inequities. The slanted economic playing field of our nation is at an even greater angle now than it was in the fabled days of the robber barons and the Jazz Age, especially as our middle class finds itself compressed and desiccated, and our current administration spends billions on illegal wars, sending our poor to kill theirs, and torturing those we capture. Was Wilson misguided about Lenin? Absolutely, but I believe his naïveté and ignorance bespoke a lifetime of straining for something better for our country. His blind cheering for Soviet communism seems as misguided today as your publication’s slaverous worship of capitalism will one day when, in the not-too-distant future, that system has reduced our world to rubble. Sincerely yours, |