The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects

by Edmund Wilson

Book Overview

The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects contains some of Edmund Wilson's most significant and brilliant writings on topics and authors ranging from Pushkin, A. E. Housman, Flaubert, Henry James, Marxism, poetry and more.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374513228
• ISBN13: 9780374513221
• Release Date: September 1986
• Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
• Length: 270 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.7" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

How the trouble started...

Wilson helped Nabokov to get started in the US. Not only getting a paid job and a place to stay, but also friends to start with... Wilson knew Russian, he was a fellow traveller, but not stuck in it too strongly, otherwise Nab would have rejected him. Wilson was a Pushkin expert as far as that is possible for an American intellectual with recently aquired language skills. This essay collection from the late 30s, ie before Nab showed up in the US, has a clear center piece for me: the essay on Eugene Onegin at the occasion of Pushkin's 100th death anniversary. Wilson gives us a condensed summary plus an evaluation of the Russian masterpiece, a novel in verse. He rejects the comparisons to Byron and prefers Julien Sorel as a parallell: Stendhal's hero in Black and Red(which unfortunately and erroneously Nab didn't like very much). Pushkin, to Wilson, is more a rational word mason, like Flaubert, than a fountain of folksiness like the Romantics. He goes to great lengths to explain how any literal translation of the poem would kill it: the language is too compact, it is very hard to maintain meaning and standard in English. And then, barely 20 years later, Nab goes and does exactly that: a literal translation, not even trying to aim for poetry, only for meaning. A disaster! (not my opinion, but Wilson's) (while Nab started doubting W's knowledge of the language...) And one more on Pushkin: a prose translation of the Bronze Horseman, the poem which made Pushkin suspicious to the secret police. Frankly speaking, I think Wilson was nuts. What he produces here is quite exactly what Nab wasn't allowed to do later! But let's not ignore that there is more than Pushkin in this collection of essays. I also recommend the one on Flaubert, from which the title is taken: Flaubert wrote in a letter to Louise that writers are triple thinkers, without religion, fatherland, nor social conviction. That is of course a challenging program which will not gladly be accepted by everyone. Naturally, the villain is the bourgeois. Next to the Pushkin essays, my main interest in this collection is a memoir about his school and a teacher, a teacher of Greek. The memoir gives opportunity to talk about education and vent some steam against what was called 'progressive education'. Mr.Rolfe was not one of those, he was a proper conventional disciplinarian, from New England with Thoreau and Emerson ingrained. The school tried to indoctrinate their students evangelically, but failed with Wilson. His description of the types of preaching, that was let loose on the students, is hilarious.

An attempt to give meaning to experience

Edmund Wilson admits he may have been guilty about giving too favorable an impression of imperfect works. In this book of essays he wrote of Paul Elmer More of Princeton. More had come out of the old mid-western world. He was provincial. More was part of the great controversy over humanism. He was more sensible and less pretentious than Babbitt Wilson contended. More had been on the NATION with Oswald Garrison Villard. More had done a series of books on Greek philsophy and Christianity. More believed that Santayana was a half-way Platonist. The moralist in More had always been at war with the poet. More read detective stories and graded them from A to D. Wilson wrote of poetry. He said that in the 19th century a new conception of poetry appeared. The romantics redefined poetry. Also, no long poems would be really popular again, it was predicted, correctly. Verse as a technique was passing out of fashion. Poetry became specialized machines. Poetry came to mean primarily lyric verse. Wilson spoke of Falubert, a writer of prose, of being in Dante's class. Flaubert had a desire to give verse-rhythm to prose. No verse technique is more obsolete today than blank verse. Wilson was famous for his knowledge of Russian authors. He wrote on Pushkin. Pushkin came into world literature by way of the Russian novel. Pushkin learned the tone of easy negligence from Byron. Pushkin can make us see and l-earn things as Keats does. Pushkin, who has written a novel in verse, is more vigorous than Jane Austen. The hero of EVGENY ONEGIN had a fatal weakness. Pushkin married the same year ONEGIN was finished. Pushkin, writing THE BRONZE HORSEMAN, knew well what it was to have one's life under ruthless authority. The poet was descended from boyars. A.E. Housman believed that the arts and science could be defended on the ground that the desire for knowledge is one of the human appetites. Houseman regrded knowledge as a superior sort of pastime. As a scholar Housman was a giver of life. Housman's real favorite was the poet Propertius, but his area of study was Manilius. There was an element of perversity, of self-mortification in Housman's career. Wilson wrote that Housman's anger is tragic, like Swift's. Housman was compelled to suprress himself even more completely. Housman, as was the case of T.E. Lawrence, had an almost insane wish to conceal his talents and accomplishments. He was one of a group of men who received semi-monastic training at an English university. Flaubert's nihilism and ascetism were notable. Flaubert, 1820-1881, was close to the historians of his era. Flaubert termed the artist a triple thinker. He was primarily a social critic. Other essays in the collection deal with Henry James, John Jay Chapman, George Bernard Shaw, Ben Jonson, and Alfred Rolfe, Wilson's Greek teacher at his prep school. Every morsel of information in the collection is worth having.