Caviar for the General

CLASSICS AND COMMERCIALS (534 pp.) --Edmund Wilson--Farrar, Straus ($5).

In the whole arid field of current U.S. literary criticism, few critics have successfully brought their acres to cultivation; most of the yield consists either of dried academic pods or fluttery reviewing that could thrive nearly as well on book jackets. Critic Edmund Wilson's small crop of evaluations (Axel's Castle, The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow) is the hardiest, the most varied and the one with the best chance of preservation. His new book, Classics and Commercials, is made up entirely of pieces written over the past ten years. No U.S. critic now writing could gather so rich a harvest.

Author Wilson is a tubby, New Jersey-born Cape Codder who looks like a cross between a cantankerous professor and an absent-minded Roman emperor. At 55, with more than a quarter-century of serious writing behind him, he is best known to U.S. readers for Memoirs of Hecate County, a book of turgid intellectual short stories laced with enough sex to get them widely banned. Somerset Maugham, a more successful storywriter, whom Wilson calls a "half-trashy novelist . . . patronized by half-serious readers," considers Hecate County "so execrably bad you wonder whether it's worth reading what he has to say about other people's novels."

Tedium & Hilarity. A less bitter critic than Maugham will not wonder long, after dipping into Classics and Commercials. It has all of Wilson's occasional faults: casual superciliousness, high-brow reserve, lack of warmth. But it also illustrates most of his more important virtues: a literary curiosity that ranges from horror stories and a life of John Barrymore to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and the precious hot-house blooms of Ronald Fir-bank (TIME, Nov. 21, 1949), an oldfashioned, discursive style, an artful way of saying exactly what a writer is up to while explaining at the same time how he got that way. Sometimes, as in writing about fifth-rate Poet Angelica Balabanoff, Wilson's ivory-tower reflections lead him straight into nonsense: "We have lost medieval Latin and 18th Century French, and have not yet arrived at Basic English; and in the meantime we have to do the best we can talking all the languages at once, like Marx and Engels in their correspondence, like Joyce in Finnegans Wake, like Eugene Jolas in his polyglot poetry, and like Angelica Balabanoff in these poems." But such tedious stuff is flanked by a charming essay on Alexander Woollcott (who was brought into the world by Wilson's grandfather, a doctor), and a hilarious dissection of the atrocious style of Joseph E. Davies' Mission to Moscow.

Algae & Doves. Critic Wilson, trying a humorous parody of surrealist rhetoric, can be as painful as anything in print: ". . . Mr. Dali allows the milliped and

Boschesque crustaceans of his hermetic imagination to caress the tentacular algae of his subaqueous and electrified impudicity or the nacreous and colubrine doves of a psychosomatic idealism to circle in simmering syndromes the facades of a palladian narcissism." Yet he can go from there to a superb review of William Faulkner's latest novel and the fairest, most graceful estimate yet of Fellow Critic Van Wyck Brooks's work. Sometimes his literary snobbishness leads Wilson into his most readable and most amusing writing. "Ambushing a Best-Seller" will make readers of the trashier kinds of historical novels blush for themselves and the authors who provide their fare; "What Became of Louis Bromfield" is fair criticism of a popular writer, but cruel enough to double as a pitiless obituary.

Critic Wilson's erudition is considerable and he sometimes uses it irritatingly, but it also gives him a literary focus that few of his U.S. colleagues could control. Classics and Commercials is not for those who like to get comfortable with a detective story or a runaway bestseller, but if it were read seriously by those who flipped the pages for smut in Hecate County, U.S. literary taste might be raised a notch.

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