Salvage Heart

From Louis Menand's August 8, 2005, "Critic at Large" column in The New Yorker on critic Edmund Wilson, "Missionary: Edmund Wilson and American culture":

....Why shouldn't there be errors and omissions? Wilson was opinionated and arbitrary about the subjects he covered because he was a writer, not an expert. He was not obliged, as professors are, to pick out a single furrow and plow it for life. His whole career was devoted to the opposite principle: that an educated, intelligent person can take on any subject that seems interesting and important, and, by doing the homework and taking care with the exposition, make it interesting and important to other people. There is no point in comparing Wilson--either unfavorably, as Hyman did, or favorably, as people contemptuous of English professors sometimes do today--with academic critics. He operated in an entirely different environment. "To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity," he once explained. "You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject." He wrote in a world where print was still king, and literature was at the center of a nation's culture--circumstances that gave glamour to literary journalism. He sensed that that world was coming to an end before most people did, and he declined to compromise with the future. In the last week of his life, he was taken to see two movies, "The Godfather" and "The French Connection." As always, he recorded his observations in his journal. "Bang bang" was all he wrote.

Here is a wikipedia entry (the new Warhol 15 minutes: We shall all have a wikipedia entry).