THE FIFTIES
Edmund Wilson
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986
663 p.p., $25.00
In Important Nonsense, a collection of my critical essays (to appear early in 1987), readers will find a piece expressly devoted to outlining and defending what I take to have been Wilson's critical venture which had been sharply attacked during the sixties. It was in response to such attacks that I wrote my piece. My hope was to pay our eminent critic the respect those of us still occupied with literary values owe his work.
But what I have said, and might still have to say in his favor, can hardly be helped by his just published diaries, The Fifties, injudiciously introduced, albeit in felicitous prose, by Leon Edel. The latter implied that the very few pages - quite empty of intellectual content - which Wilson devoted to his 1954 stay in Israel ought interest us as having some bearing on his writing about the Dead Sea Scrolls, whose importance, by the way, has been greatly exaggerated. But all the The Fifties demonstrated about Wilson in Israel is that he had little of interest to say to anyone there, and that nothing of any real interest was said to him. To be sure, this is hardly his fault, nor was he wrong to keep a diary. The only thing wrong was his not having kept it from us.
One bit of gossip he heard in Israel that might interest Jewish readers if headlined by Wilson: Grodzensky's Story About Will Herberg. It seems Grodzensky told Wilson that Herberg, disillusioned with Lovestone's Marxism, was on the point of conversion to Christianity. To prevent which, Grodzensky gave him Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption; after reading which, Herberg began to demand "normative Judaism" of other Jews. Such bits of information may prove disheartening to the general reader.
Reading Exodus in Israel, Wilson writes:
I can only wonder at the ignorance and credulity of "civilized" human beings in carrying along and continuing to swallow all this old nonsense. Voltaire, however obtuse to the spiritual values of Scriptures, however unimaginative in his failure to put himself back into the origins of human culture...did perform a useful service in pointing out the absurdities of the Bible stories. Let us slough off his ancient rubbish in proportion as we feel self-confident in our new moral positions, based on further experiences of ourselves, of the world, of the universe.
Evidently Wilson thought there was something new under the sun, while Ecclesiastes tells us the contrary. And what in point of fact are the "new moral positions" which are going to increase our self-confidence? Increase of our knowledge has brought increasing skepticism, in particular about the foundations of any moral position. It seems that the more we know the less likely we are to feel that we are right about anything. And the Bible is still the best of all primers on how to felt to be right on matters of importance. We feel less right as we distance ourselves from the most High.
Then there is the fact that the Bible, along with the plays of Shakespeare, has been the most important influence on American rhetoric from the Founding
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