Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972

By Edmund Wilson

Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972 contains a selection of the literary critic and author Edmund Wilson's personal correspondence.

As editor Leon Edel states in his introduction to these papers: "More than a sampling, the present volume provides sufficient material to show the energy and vitality of Wilson's professional relations with friends and acquaintances; it shows even more the continuity of his imaginative life from his youth to the end."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781466899582

Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was a novelist, memoirist, playwright, journalist, poet, and editor but it is as a literary critic that he is most highly regarded. His more than twenty books include Axel’s Castle, Patriotic Gore, To the Finland Station, and Memoirs of Hecate County.

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THE EARLY YEARS

I was born May 8, 1895, in Red Bank, New Jersey, and educated at the Hill School (class of 1912) and at Princeton (class of 1916). All four of my grandparents were born in New York State. Their families were all originally English, except my paternal grandfather’s, which was originally Scotch-Irish. They had been living in New York and New England since the end of the sixteenth century, or thereabouts. My maternal grandfather belonged to a branch of the Mather family.

—To H. L. Mencken, 1923

1912

AND

PRINCETON

In the summers, I would visit the Bellingers in their house called Hilltop at Washington, Connecticut … Alfred and I, who had private jokes and exchanged epistles and verses, had an agreement that every year at Christmas each would send the other a book which the other would not otherwise be likely to read. Alfred later taught classics at Yale, and then became an authority on classical numismatics. He used to write excellent prose and verse. (A Prelude)

Dear Alfred: You made the stipulation that we should give entirely candid opinions of the interchanged books. If you want my candid opinion of The Naulahka,* I must state that I think the best things about it are the chapter headings. Imagine my chagrin and disgust to discover that the hero was a brave, unfearing, honest, virile American youth who calls the heroine little girl. This last item alone is enough to discourage me with almost any story. The heroine I found to be not †—a type one meets in nearly every modern romance and which I have grown accustomed to, as one may grow accustomed to eating sugar, when there is nothing else in the house. No, this Kate Sheriff woman did not even have the privilege of good looks, for do not the authors refer repeatedly to her plain, homely, features? But, I forgot: you, of course, did not notice whether she was a pretty girl or not.

I was conscious of having met these two—also the female villain—in a good many other stories before. With such a pair for protagonists, no wonder the character interest of the tale became nil.

Mr. Wolcott Balestier—I take it that he wrote the Western parts, and the delicate love passages—writes with even less charm and grace than Mr. George Randolph Chester, whom I had supposed hitherto was the master of the business-letter school of fiction. Even Mr. Kipling seems to lose most of his charm, when writing in collaboration with his imaginative brother-in-law. In short, with the exception of two chapters which pleased me very much, The Naulahka seems to me to be only a tolerably interesting and fairly readable potboiler. Your enthusiasm about it surprises me.

I hope that you enjoy Lavengro* as much as I did. I dare say you won’t, out of spite. Everything is as merry as a marriage bell here. I have plunged into the sparkling waters of Shaw after my hard struggle to swim in the stagnant waters of Kipling and Balestier. Have also been reading James McNeill Whistler’s Gentle Art of Making Enemies, by which I have learned how to be artistically snotty. Yours as ever, Bunny

I am awaiting your critique of Borrow. Hurry up and finish the book.

Dear Alfred: Excuse my not writing etc. etc. etc. I think you failed to appreciate Lavengro properly. Borrow’s conceit and pedantry never irritate me, because he is so naïve about it. I think it is impossible for you to enjoy anything except works as noncommittal as Jane Austen and Gibbon. However, you said that you did enjoy Lavengro to a considerable extent, which I think it impossible for anyone not to do. Have you read Romany Rye yet?

Your charges against me in regard to The Naulahka are quite wrong. I don’t think any of my statements are wholly indefensible. As far as I can remember, the worst thing I said about it was that it had no character interest—a statement which needs no defense. I know at least two Shawfed enthusiasts who like the book. In fact, most people like it, it seems. Don’t misunderstand me, I like a good story of adventure as well as anyone. I am as sensible to the thrills of Treasure Island, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and King Solomon’s Mines as anybody, but what I claim is that The Naulahka is not a good story of adventure. The only good thing in it isn’t part of the adventure at all. The chapter in which the old Sultana—or whatever she is—persuades Kate to give up the hospital job and get married is a gem, and one of the most human things Kipling ever wrote, and well worth reading the book for—also the delightful chapter headings, which, between you and me, I don’t believe to be real quotations at all, but I suspect that Rudyard wrote every one of them himself.

I have been reading various things this summer—Maeterlinck and Meredith chiefly. Your friend is quite right about the former, he is too darn consummate, but Uncle George Meredith is a wonder. When I send you the second of our biannual books it will be The Egoist.

I have been doing lots of things this summer, and as I have taken up so much time with the Delights of Literature, and as I have written a letter just before this one giving a full account of myself, I shall spare a detailed description of what I have been doing. Suffice it, therefore, to say that I have been up in New York [Talcottville] for a long time (came back a week ago), where I enjoyed myself amain what with picnics and swimming and friends and relations and the charmingest girl that ever I laid eyes on, albeit ’twas she who jilted me on the Sixth-Form Dance last spring. Yet have I appointed to meet her at the Harvard-Princeton game this fall, when that I go down to Cambridge and stay overnight with Hugh Cole or Gussie Leroy, if they can give me shelter. I have to go down to Princeton the 18th, I believe.

… All your friends will soon be collegians, Alfred—and Gawsh! what tough rah-rah boys me and Larry’ll be! I haven’t written a word of prose or verse all summer, but I intend to try for The Tiger at Princeton. After I’ve made that, I’ll have a shot at the Lit. and in time work around to The News. I do hope you’ll make the Hill Record next year, Alfred! You’ve been trying so long and hard, it’s high time they took you on. Remember me to your folks. Yours respectfully, Bunny

Dear Alfred: Thank you exceedingly for the bound Record, with my name on the outside. I have been reading it over with considerable interest. Much of my last year’s work seems already crude and silly, and I long to write better verse, and better prose, which I can do, for I have many ideas, if I would only cease idling my time doing trigonometry and going to the movies, and writing endless epistles to you …

The other day I was talking with Stan Dell about The Record, and its glorious past and uncertain future, and all the bright stars which once had shone in its pages. He told me many things that I didn’t know before, and I gave him a résumé of last year’s work. And I fell to meditating on the subject, and the gist of my meditation is embodied in the following advice (which is entirely needless). Although you may find that this year is a poor one for The Record, and travel sketches are ground out in abundance, and no one with any sort of talent appears, nevertheless, in the face of barrenness and jeers and complaints from the school, bring out the old magazine each month, and pull all the pep you’ve got into it to make it go, because someday in the future, when others are discovering the school, there will be geniuses as real as Walker [Ellis] and Stan [Dell] and the fellows who love The Record as much as yourself, who will enjoy the genial lively meetings and the lively quarrels and the dignity of seeing themselves in print, as much as we have done. It is your job to see that those who come after us get The Record, and I conjure you, by the memory of all those whom you have seen try for The Record, and make it and enjoy it and leave it, and all the jokes we have made, and the angry words we have exchanged, and the memories of yours that I know nothing about, and the memories of mine which you know nothing about, to stick to that job, for the sake of those who will be The Record, and have hilarious meetings—your institution—and have trouble with a too clever editor, and strive to make the board with breathless interest thinking it a supreme goal.

Amen, Amen, Yours ante-prandially, Bunny

Post-prandial P.S. I nearly missed supper writing this interminable thing.

Did you ever try deliberately writing an imitation of somebody? It makes you study the machinery of style and may be rather illuminating. (To Maxwell Geismar, 1942)

Dear Alfred: On the Saturday of the present week, a small but intrepid band of pilgrims will be seen breasting the Hill; their voices will be joined in a resonant paean of victory; their appearance—dusty and maculate from the journey though it be—will betoken joyful spirits. They will be heard from afar off by Pottstown singing We march, we march—followed by the Hill School Hymns.

All this is by way of asking you to be sure and obtain our five suitcases from the Express office ere it closes. We must have decent garb, so we are sending our suitcases ahead. They will be addressed to you. Thursday afternoon we start forth. We shall wander through the beautiful countryside alive with the vernal breath and athrob with the myriad twittering of birds. We shall look upon the flowers of the meadows in their many-tinted glory. At every crossroads we shall stop and fish out the map and bicker about which is the shortest way to go. The first night we shall lie at Lambertville—that haven of semi-rustic location and thriving manufacturing on the banks of the noble Delaware. Then at some delightful old-fashioned hostelry we shall eat of the homely but satisfactory fare of the country and search out the local moving-picture show.

On the second day, when the rosy-fingered Aurora throws her pink cloak athwart the Heavens, we shall set out again; and, for a midday meal partaking of the homely but satisfying fare of the country, shall make progress as far as the town called Montgomery.

On the third day we shall proceed farther and, towns failing, sup mayhap with the hospitable farmer folk of the country, of whose homely but satisfying fare we shall partake. On this day Mr. Hinchman will have to be carried and Mr. Osborn restrained from endeavoring to reach the destination before noon. And finally we shall arrive at Pottstown in the manner described at the beginning of this letter. Hallelujah!

Yours till Saturday, Edmund Wilson, Jr.

… I think I shall be able to get you a ticket, but the trouble is that you would have to sit in the Princeton cheering section, which I don’t think is legal …

Dear Alfred: I have just finished a long letter in ink, and have decided to rest by writing one to you in pencil, meaning no offense. There’s this about it, that I write fairly legibly in pencil …

I am just home from Cambridge where I had a very gay time what with one thing and what with another. Harvard is a helova place, and I wouldn’t go to college there for money. There is no class spirit, no roughhouse—nothing but luxury. They have telephones in each room, and bathrooms adjoining, also private swimming pools, restaurants, etc. Hugh Cole and Ed Leroy are getting somewhat Harvardized already, but they treated us very well.

… Larry Noyes writes that all the Yale bunch are coming down here for The game. Thursday night I stayed in New York (before going down to Cambridge) and saw Shaw’s new masterpiece, Fanny’s First Play, which delighted me vastly, albeit not so much as Milestones,* and set me to think on many things, and to wonder how many of the audience understood that they were those very people which the author satirized in the play, and I marveled much at Mr. Shaw’s so great wit and wisdom, for I know that he speaks the truth, and esteem him highly. Also meditating how that my friend Mr. Bellinger, the scrivener, would not like the play, and might even rage full force, as is his wont when he is angered, should he go to see Fanny’s First Play. Yet would I rejoice to have him behold it, if only that I might wrangle with him about it. So home and to bed, and my cousin so deep in thought that he says scarce a word, and I also. (I don’t know why I always adopt this Pepys’ Diary style, when I begin to tell about a play. Pepys’ Diary is a tome you should read.)

Cooper and Shea tell me that they have been up at school and that on account of the unsportsmanlike conduct of the Yale freshman team, many Hill students are changing to Princeton, which meseems a foolish reason to do a sensible thing, and I hope that you too may be induced to change your university … Yours as ever, Bunny

… I commence my Lit. duties upon the appearance of the next number. I don’t know what these duties may be, but suspect them to be made up to a large extent of loafing around the Lit. office …

The

Nassau Literary

Magazine

Volume LXXI

APRIL 1915       MARCH 1916

EDITORIAL BOARD

EDMUND WILSON, JR., Managing Editor

HAMILTON FISH ARMSTRONG

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

B. B ATTERBURY

ALEXANDER L. MCKAIG

W. S. DELL

J. S. NICHOLAS

BUSINESS DEPARTMENT

DOUGLAS H. KENYON, Business Manager

KIRK MOORE, Circulation Manager

JAMES M. GARVEY           EDWARD F. MCNICHOL

FOUNDED BY THE CLASS OF 1842

Published by the Undergraduates of Princeton University

1916

… Your mother, as you may know, sent me a volume of Lady Gregory’s plays, which I read with great delight. I am at present working away at George Meredith’s letters, which are very interesting. One incident told therein surpasses any of the time-worn stories about Sordello, I think. It seems that a lunacy specialist wrote to Meredith and told him that the first chapter of One of Our Conquerors bore all the symptoms of incipient insanity. I shall write a review of The Letters for the Lit. Of course, I’ll send you the number with my stuff in it, as soon as it comes out. The end of this week sometime. By the way, for heaven’s sake, read Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper by Robert Browning! Read it without delay …

… Monday—Up betimes and to Commons’ where I do have a passing bad breakfast as ever and thence to McCosh Hall where I take an examination in the Science of Trigonometry, wherein, God help me!, I fear I did fail pitifully. To my rooms where I do find much mail, and one letter from Sir Laurence Noyes, the architect, which proves to be an unregulated composition running on for pages and pages with much nonsense and some news which I am glad to hear. Thence to Commons’ again where all did talk of the examination, but My Lord Stanley Dell, who saith, Why do we prate of this that is passed; it giveth me a megrim to think of it. Thence to my rooms where I do set out to write letters but Mr. William Osborn coming in doth exhort me to come walking with him and Sir Wilton Lloyd-Smith, which, although I had determined never to set foot out of door on such a drizzling, dark day, nevertheless I do, and we trudging through mud and rain, and I falling prone in a great stream whereat all do laugh, arrive at Rockyhill, a sorry hamlet, where, being hungry, we buy at the village store all manner of cake and biscuits which eating we become surfeited, and so walk home singing all the way, and passing merrily the time, what with rag, tag, and bobtail, till that I wonder how it is that on so cheerless a day, I may feel so carefree and joyous. When we reach the Colledge we buy some sandwiches, caring not to dine again at Commons’. So, donning dry clothese, to the rooms of Mr. Osborn and My Lord Lloyd-Smith, and, they building a roaring fire, we all do sit around it and eat, and I think that never was I so at peace with the world before. Mr. N. Robinson and Sir Stanley coming in, we do bid them not to break in upon the aesthetick spell, and they entreating us to go to the living-pictures but with no success, and so they leave us to muse by the hearth, and we do reminisce much and recall to each other times past when we were happy, and wondering how that the things which appeared to us of so great importance at school, have become little in our sight now, so that we do jest at them although we did view them so seriously. But we all unite in praising our school, but say that we saw it at its best. But the fire dying out, Sir Wilton and I to the post office where we do post letters and I a copy of my works to Mr. Bellinger … Thence to the rooms of Sir Stanley and Mr. Robinson and them we find reading—the former Peer Gynt and the latter Tristram Shandy, and both telling me what brave books they are, and I agreeing with both.

So home and to writing in my journal when there comes a knock at the door and I, thinking it to be the seller of food who comes the rounds nightly, do shout out, Enter! and then, Sandwiches, apples, and pretzels! very droll, but it proveth to be not the food-seller at all, but the coming editor of The Nassau Literary Magazine, Mr. Hunter, who, albeit astonished to be so accosted, maketh a call and praiseth my scrivening highly, and tells me of his publication’s future, which I am glad to hear of. So, writing in my journal again, and bidding good-night to Mr. S. Carter, who retireth early ever, and, after reading in a book, to bed very well content …

… In my recent search for American literary art, I have discovered two masterpieces—Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome—but I know that it is absolutely no use reporting discoveries in modern letters to you, be they ever so fine. Your oration on ancient and modern literature delighted me, but why, when you begin to feel a perfectly legitimate interest in recent literature, do you hasten to stultify yourself with some ancient rubbish? …

… Today I attended a meeting of the board of The Nassau Literary Magazine. The editor says to me, he says, You write a one-act play for the next number, and I’ll write another one, and we’ll have a dramatic number. All right, says I, so suppose I’ll have to …

… I have been spending almost every evening during the last week in canvassing for the Lit., which is one of the darnedest jobs I ever had—those blocks of freshman houses full of bleak, barren, dismal, dirty rooms where you find knots of freshmen gloomily discussing the probability of their being dismembered in the next mob, and convince them with great difficulty—since they have been fleeced for everything from shaving mugs to Tiger pictures—that it is an essential exhibition of college spirit to subscribe to the Lit. But there are campus amenities. Bates Hunter, the editor, and I are an uncommonly unhappy combination, because we haven’t, either of us, an idea of orderly and businesslike procedure, so that we invariably leave part of the paraphernalia several rooms behind and have to return for it, fifty times a night, and because we are sometimes so overcome by the humor of the situation and the stereotyped quality of our remarks that we burst into open laughter, thereby convincing the wary freshman that he is the victim of some elaborate horse …

Dear Alfred: To treat of the most vital matters first—it seems to me that your arguments to prove that Bennett’s characters have no depth is applicable to many other novelists. Thackeray, for instance, and Hardy. The creative artist makes his characters, and succeeds in proportion as he makes you think them alive. Some excellent novelists actually not only indicate human depth but also explore them and bring forth authentic jewels. (But this kind of author is usually a poet—Browning is one of the best examples.) Other excellent novelists reproduce men faithfully from the outside. Thackeray is an extreme example. I think that Bennett created living characters, whose depths he suggested and understood although his exposition of them may appear sketchy and unpoetic to you. I can only say that I believe in them, and do not take exception to any of the things which you cite as particularly awful (I consider the last fatuous half page a stroke of genius—one of the most extraordinary in the book), and that I do think in those complicated nothings. You say you don’t and I say I do, and there we are, and we can’t get any further. When did Bennett claim to lay bare with entire completeness, etc.? I don’t think we can expect any novelist to do anything of the kind.

In short, I accept these novels as valuable and beautiful impressions of life, although I don’t pretend to Bennett’s point of view any more than I do anybody else’s. I don’t attempt to defend his style, of course. I always objected to it violently, in fact. The things you say about it are true, and it is on account of these limitations of style that he is always obliged to stop outside the sanctum sanctorum and express himself rather inadequately, while Mr. Wells breaks the lock and enters. Meredith introduces himself politely and Hardy occasionally peeps through the keyhole.

However, since, although it is amusing to bicker about books, it doesn’t get us anything, let us exchange life for literature during the remaining part of this letter.

The graduate school was opened formally yesterday. It was an occasion of great historical interest, an imposing sight and an opportunity to hear the foremost educators of the world speak. I was in New York at the time. Stan, Noel, R. P. Hinchman, and I went to see Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra acted by Forbes-Robertson and his wife, which we enjoyed immensely. After some further dissipation I returned last night to this hard, hard life of monotonous routine.

I busy myself these days with reading for elaborate courses in English and French literature, writing Triangle Club songs with Sam Shoemaker—Gilbert and Sullivan have nothing on us—lucubrating for the Lit…. bicycling about the country …

Anon I shall have to attend Philosophy, so I shall stop after giving you an imitation of the Philosophy prof [Norman Kemp Smith], an individual with a curious accent, pointing to one of two things: (1) that he is a Scotchman who went to an English university; (2) that he is an Englishman who went to a Scotch university. But no! my time is short and phonetics, however elaborate, can hardly give you an idea of how he expounds his meandering little philosophical paradoxes. The other day in the midst of a beautiful disproof of the existence of sound, a lusty brass band came down the street and completely drowned out the lecture, to the infinite delight of the class. Yours in all but literature, Bunny

Dear Alfred: I am glad you liked Youth’s Encounter [Compton Mackenzie] so much.* Did you know that it is only the first volume of Michael’s complete biography, the rest of which is to be published next year? The whole thing is to be called Sinister Street. Why Sinister Street, I wondered. The motif of utter foulness is one of the most uncanny things in the book; you feel that you are not walking on solid ground, that it may give way any moment and let you into the sewer. But I don’t object to those parts where the author suddenly makes the infinitely beautiful disclose the infinitely vile, as in the convent episode and so forth, because I think it is more or less true in life, and has not been made to overbalance the pure human goodness of the greater portion of the book. Of course, with your ideas of fiction, this is no argument at all, so there we are!

Just at present I am very well occupied, but not getting as much done as I should like, for the days are drawing nigh when I shall say, I have no pleasure in them, i.e., Exams. Last night I was laboring fiercely to finish a story, thinking to compete for the same prize I won last year. Teek Whipple came in and burst into roars of laughter at the sentence I had written, which was ‘My God, girl!’ said the doctor. ‘We don’t wear wigs in America,’ and really one can hardly blame him, because it is certainly a little startling, out of its context. He also told me that the members of the board cannot compete, so I gave up the story in disgust and we adjourned to Joe’s to eat and discuss the Great Question, which is the complete renovation, rehabilitation, and resuscitation of the Lit. office, whose bare discolored walls and—and—well, really that’s about all there has been to the Lit. office for years—have been an eyesore for all those who are anxious to have the place an Abode of Culture. So we decided to fix it up, and have been doing it for a week. It is the most humorous and amusing business I have had a hand in for some time. We began by buying a second-hand settle, which was placed in front of the ceiling-to-floor front windows so that the undergraduates could not see the editors taking tea; this shut out all the light, so Teek conceived the original idea of having windows cut in the back of the settle, which we have had done. Yesterday all the woodwork was repainted in dull black. The painter in his ardor painted a large portion of the floor and all the brickwork of the fireplace just to show there was no hard feeling, and now we all feel sensibly depressed when we go in, because it has all the atmosphere, as T. says, of a family vault. Now we are making haste to get gaily-colored hangings and rugs. All this in the face of the most complicated financial difficulties. This afternoon I am going to see the Curator about certain repairs which require his sanction. I’ll have to negotiate this carefully, because you see we have been occupying the office from time immemorial rent-free, because we don’t make a cent out of the magazine, whereas nowadays the senior editors get a liberal rake-off of some hundreds every year. Also the light and heat bills have not been paid for forty years and have consequently mounted up a lot. Now if the Curator gets wind of the fact that we are affluent, there is no knowing what may happen. Here is a task indeed for a man of infinite tact! …

Yours always, Bunny

… Really we saw very little of you over your last flying visit. Also, you saw very little of us. But, nonetheless, though you see us but a few days, and though we drop all tasks and set ourselves to merrymaking for your pleasure, yet do you conclude, on this so slight evidence, that we are a new community of dilettanti and fritteurs away of time, squandering our golden youth on long rich meals, incursions into the country, amusing books, and frivolous conversation.

This is what you conclude, and I am anxious to be perfectly frank with you—we don’t like it. Shall we, because we entertain you to our utmost, be contemned and condemned as idlers? A thousand times no! Neither shall I judge your Alma Mater by her appearance of inebriation on the eve of one of those great events—a football game. (Business of heaping coals on fire.)

… I am now going to don my cloak (once the property of an uncle who got it in its native land of Scotland), which makes me look a little like Tennyson, and sally forth into the lusty snowstorm now raging, to post this letter …                Farewell, E.W., Jr.

… There has been lots going on down here. Clubs have been and gone—for all except a trifling 100 sophomores, who are not considered as possible candidates for the private upper-class dining rooms. Stan, Noel, Arthur, and I went Charter—an excellent club. We had sworn to stick together, and did so although Stan and Arthur might have gone Cap and Gown, where More Gates and W. Lloyd-Smith are. I might have had a chance; the two last-mentioned gentlemen had put me through the sophomore section, but the upperclassmen objected. You see, Cap and Gown insists on having people distinguished by some special ability, and if you haven’t noticeable brains—a strong religious faith professed publicly in the sacred precincts of Murray Dodge will do as well. There is another way of getting in, too; that is, having a father or brother or whatnot who belonged to the club. So, you see, it is really made up of the most distinguished and admirable men in college, excepting, of course, those who were elected to Ivy, that glorious old organization, whose members we all respect; whose traditions we all revere. The traditions are father-or-brother-pull explained above, or what the newspapers call great wealth. The members are two-thirds handsome blockheads. When the upperclassmen of this celebrated institution have elected to their midst the very pick of the sophomore class, they give a series of little parties to the new arrivals, in New York and Princeton, where a large part of the club makes itself as drunk as possible and entertains itself in other ways consistent with the fifty finest men in the university. While I am telling at such great length about these two old and honored clubs, I may as well mention the Cottage Club, hardly less so. This contains all the choice spirits who do not make Ivy and Cap and Gown, but this year something happened: some sad birds were elected and no other decent sophomores could be got to join. (Arthur turned down an invitation with no little nonchalance.) Altogether, you must understand, the election to one of the above clubs is a matter of great significance—or—to drop the ironical style—it is surprisingly evident that nothing of the club dope has any significance whatever. But what is still more surprising is the fact that everybody gets intensely worked up about it, everybody without exception. You would too. The upperclassmen were vexed and amazed this year on account of the unprecedented way in which friends stuck together. Your sophomore would say, I’ll come, if you’ll take so and so, too, instead of jumping at the honor of an invitation. This was partly due to the new system, tried for the first time this year, which postpones any club agitation until February, but it was largely due, I think, to the firmness and honesty of the class in general—although the juniors and seniors all cuss us out heartily as a class. Well, it was exciting and extremely interesting while it lasted …

In the summer of 1914, at the end of my sophomore year at college, I spent a summer in England, with four of my friends, Stanley Dell and Noel Robinson from Princeton and Larry Noyes and David Hamilton from Yale.(A Prelude)

Go to, I said. I will go up to London and see the play myself before it is taken off! So I left the less Shavian members of the party and went up to London.

At Paddington I leapt into a cab, bade the cabman make haste, and promised him a shilling for his pains. Riding through London in a cab is the most perfect thing life has to offer. (And I say it who has tried all the pleasures of any number of continents; has rioted among the absinthe vapors of Montmartre, tried the terrors of Tibet, and fallen asleep over the gaming tables of Monte Carlo.) I am doubtful whether my ride could have been improved even by Dr. Johnson’s second requisite for his ideal post chaise, which was, in my case, of course, lacking. Imagine my joy upon seeing Baker Street, the abode of Sherlock Holmes; Oxford Street, where De Quincey wandered in his squalid youth; and all the other places where all the other things happened!

Having deposited my luggage (a suitcase hopelessly disabled in early Pottstown days, and now further wrecked by continual overcramming, so that it incontinently burst asunder at unexpected times and I am obliged to glean a shirt from a station platform or gather a toothbrush from a city street) at the hotel, I rode to His Majesty’s Theatre atop a varicolored bus, and purchased a ticket. Bookshops and Westminster Abbey next claimed my attention and the afternoon was passed with joy unbroken except by a Cockney who accosted me at Trafalgar Square and whined that he ’adn’t the money to get back to Cardiff and was lyme, ’e couldn’t work. I saw through the fellow instantly as an impostor and bade him begone. My cap (somewhat shrunken from the rains of the Lake Country), the shirt which I had borrowed from Davy Hamilton, and which had proved disparate to my figure, the necktie which I had borrowed from Larry Noyes, and which proved to strike a jarring note with my complexion, and the other clothes which I had been wearing since I left America had evidently betrayed me as a provincial, so I hastened to a haberdasher’s and persuaded an aged duke to sell me some modest articles of attire.

At supper I was initiated into the mysteries of English lemonade, which is known as lemon squash. They bring you the ingredients and you mix them right before the audience. I sat alone in a very prominent place in the palatial dining room. I showed the ladies and gentlemen that I had nothing but a bottle of soda, a bowl of sugar, and a very little lemon juice at the bottom of a large glass. I poured the soda into the glass and then poised a tablespoonful of sugar. (The waiters hung breathless.) I introduced it into the mixture, and immediately there was a loud explosion, the lemonade ascended like a waterspout, and the table was flooded. The headwaiter himself rushed to my rescue. I haven’t had so much fun since Chemistry 103.

After dinner I went to Shaw’s Pygmalion, one of the best things he ever wrote, and the only one I have ever seen acted where the interest of the play centers more on the development of the characters than on the irony of the author.

The next day I decided to stay over the afternoon so that I could see the first public performance in England of Ibsen’s Ghosts. It is a horrible thing and much more so for being wonderfully acted. The only time the audience laughed was when the curtain arose on the second act with the stage still gloomier than before and a character said, Ah, today is comparatively bright.

I found there was no train to Devonshire (where I was to meet my companions) until midnight, so, feeling reckless, I went to two art exhibitions, bought a huge tome on Henry James, had a fearful debauch on the national beverage, and went to a music ’all.

But, alas! the English train system is even worse than the Hartford—New Haven. I suffered until five in the morning in a third-class carriage; I found the inns at Exeter closed against me till I had wandered hahlf ovah the town and got two hours’ sleep in a hotel whose night porter happened to be awake; I rushed off breakfastless to arrive in Ilfracombe at noon only to find that the rest of the party had gone on, and left a note for me to follow: I started hot in pursuit by means of a hired automobile, which broke down, so that I had to spend a large part of the journey leaning out to see if the wheel cap was safe, because, as the driver so justly said, The wheel might fly off any moment; and I finally found my friends eating a veal and ham pie at a place of refreshment. Our meeting was too touching to be adequately conveyed by words (as they say in The Vicar of Wakefield); I had had the time of my life, in short.

Pds 7 10s 6d. Ah, Paris! I shall have to walk the streets a very pauper.—

… As to Compton Mackenzie—I saw a letter from him sometime ago, and he certainly talked as if he was going to finish Sinister Street. Besides, I have since seen it announced for this fall in a publisher’s catalogue. The English edition is published as Sinister Street, Vol. I, and contains a preface which throws some light on the title. It has no reference, the author says, to an heraldic euphemism, but is purely symbolic. Carnival, as you discovered, isn’t nearly so good. The Passionate Elopement, I have never read: it is said to be very evidently modeled upon Meredith …

… I dare say that you have read the second volume of Sinister Street by this time. I have devoured most of it, and find it as wonderfully executed as the first part. As Michael grows older, however, it seems to me that the author allows the abundance of his material to swamp the thread of his theme; it can’t cover some awful weaknesses. It appears that the point of the work is to lie in the hero’s going into the Church. Where I am reading now, he is being conducted to it along very dubious paths. But I won’t declare on its merits until I finish it. If this book is really the end: the reviews are full of rumors of more. By the way, if you want to read an excellent criticism of Mackenzie, and indeed all the modern people, get Henry James’s last book, Notes on the Novelists and Some Other Notes, and look at the essay on The New Novel. Aside from Sinister Street, I’ve been reading almost nothing but required Italian, Greek, and French, in the last of which, since I can read almost anything I like in the Honors’ Course in Novels, not so ridiculously simple as it sounds, believe me! I’m going through Stendhal, and Gosh! as you would say, it makes Arnold Bennett look like The Arabian Nights …

… Arthur has just dropped in, while I was writing, to return Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata. I know a super-impressionistic fellow who was thrown off for five days, he said, by reading it: I am relieved to see Arthur as strong as ever.

… write and tell me your opinion of Marius. Don’t you think that the end, so strong in itself, is somehow weakened by Pater’s telling of it? There is an effeminacy about his style that gets on my nerves, at times. Also, I think that the man’s imagination, probably as a result of his experience doing the same thing, failed him very notably in this particular book, and we are not in the least thrilled by a change—the change from paganism to Christianity—which must have been remarkably thrilling even within the strictly intellectual limits of Pater. Also, he often fussed with his words until they seemed to lose their meaning, and become simply printed things. I discover that I’ve written a rather Paterian sentence myself in this paragraph …

… I read in The Prince, this morning, that I am now the editor-in-chief of the Lit., and I wish it were all over, because I can foresee that I shall have to summon whatever executive ability may lurk unsuspected within me …

… I am sending you as much of my works as I can stand to have you read: namely, the three numbers of the Lit. issued since I have been editor, and The Conning Tower containing my incomparable Latin verses. Remember, even in reading such recent productions as these, that stuff published in a college magazine comes very quickly to look feeble and outmoded to its author …

… I’ll take this opportunity to pronounce a pithy dictum upon The Brothers Karamazov, which I read last vacation …

In comment upon what I remember you to have said about this book, I think that it is indeed a satire, but a chiefly conscious one, upon the Russian people. As a picture of manners—one of the most valuable functions of the novel is recording manners—it is important and interesting. You said also, I think, that as a novel it is a mess. Did you know that it was only the beginning of a longer work, designed, I imagine, to be something like Zola’s Rougon Macquart series? Dostoevsky died before he finished it, and this, of course, must account for its strange inconclusiveness. An episode is closed, but the matter of first interest, the entanglement of ideas, never gets anywhere. You said, too, that it wasn’t possible to consider any of the characters as sane. Well, many of them go through abnormal mental states, but it seems to me that they also remain intelligible and very recognizably human, and certainly show the hand of a great creative genius.

On the whole, in fact, I enjoyed it as much as any novel I’ve read this year. It kept me up late at night, in spite of its irrelevant longueurs—many of which, however, might have proved relevant, if Dostoevsky had ever carried out his plan. The episode about the precocious Russian boy, for example, was too elaborate and too amusing to have been merely a blind digression. The author combines the most naïve technique on record, I should say, with a treatment of his material which is anything but naïve. Even the speeches of the lawyers, for all their disproportionate and unconscionable length, have an ironic value somewhat similar to that of the ones in The Ring and the Book. In fact, the way he never ceases to discover interesting psychology in what might easily have been a common detective story is admirable. I applaud particularly the description of Dmitri’s sensations upon being examined by the police at the tavern. However, I suspect that I enjoyed it all more than you did and I’m indebted to you for introducing me to Dostoevsky, whom I intend to investigate further …

Stanley Dell was one of Bunny’s closest personal friends and they had been at the Hill School together. He had been handicapped by lack of vigorous health and had spent much time in Europe, where he had acquired a mastery of French and German such as few college graduates possess. Though he was the class poet, his interests were philosophical rather than literary, but he shared Bunny’s wide background and wrote with a sense for literary nuances and a clarity that makes rereading his contribution to the Lit. after thirty years a pleasure.

(Christian Gauss, Edmund Wilson, the Campus and the Nassau ‘Lit.,’ in The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 1944)

Dear Stan: We have had a long but interesting trip West by way of Canada. The West is a surprise and a shock: except for San Francisco and this part of California, all that we have seen is the most godforsaken even America can show. A Western city makes Trenton look like Athens, at first, until you discover that, whatever the harshness and crudity and desolation of country and city, the people are all much healthier and stronger than the people in the East. Nearly everybody, even in the worst towns, out here is in the bloom of health, whereas very few people you see on the street in New York, for instance, are.

And San Francisco is undoubtedly one of the most beautiful and attractive things in the country. I suppose it might be cloying if taken in too large quantities, but I think so probably because I am used to a state of bad weather and dull atmosphere. At any rate, they have woman suffrage. We took dinner a couple of nights ago with some Western relations. The women were all up on politics and busy about local affairs; they said that all the women in California were just as active, and while this is almost certainly an exaggeration, my observation of the way it works out here certainly confirms my conclusion …

I probably shall not be able to convince you of how good the Exposition is.* It was planned and executed under the direction of Jules Guerin, you know, and is architecturally so successful that it at once raises the question why, if American architects can build temporary buildings as good as this, can’t they build permanent ones of the same kind. I went this afternoon to a concert at the Exposition, where Paderewski was playing, with a Western cousin who seems to understand all branches of art and she told me that the architects who did the buildings had been chiefly confined to erecting pretty bungalows and new banks and, when they had the opportunity of planning real temples and towns and fountains and gardens, even if only in pasteboard, as it were, let themselves go with a verve and taste which has produced such magnificent results that the city is seriously contemplating the preservation of some of the buildings for public purposes. There are panels by Frank Brangwyn, statues by everyone in the country who can sculpture, a huge gallery of chiefly American paintings, lots of trash, but some good stuff by Sargent, Pennell, and Whistler, and the whole, even to the rubbish cans, benches, and officials’ costumes, planned and harmonized by Guerin. A great lesson should be learned from this Exposition! I look forward to the regeneration of America by means of architecture—or rather, I should, if I hadn’t seen Winnipeg and Seattle first. Nothing can be done for places like that …

I have read most of the stuff I took with me; and have bought a lot more. The Vie de Jésus is a masterpiece, although I hardly think that Renan’s "charmant docteur" displays much of the fierce enthusiasm with which I have always credited Christ. Mill’s Autobiography is a strangely fascinating book; do read it