Last Turns

THE DEVILS AND CANON BARHAM

by EDMUND WILSON

219 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $7.95.

The wretched old physique decays.

One smoulders in a slump for days;

Goes blank on names; gaga, forgets

What one was saying; loses bets.

And yet the effort must he made.

The bell to take the stage obeyed .

Edmund Wilson, who wrote those lines almost two decades before his death last year at 77, obeyed the bell to the end. The ten essays and reviews collected in The Devils and Canon Barham are the last turns in what he once called the All-Star Literary Vaudeville.

Written in the final four years of his life, the pieces do show some stiffness and shortness of breath. Devils does not have the force of posthumous revelation that can be expected from his diaries and journals, which will start pouring forth early next year. Yet the book is a reminder that Wilson, even falling off, wrote at a level that few critics ever reach.

He was not one critic but a dazzling one-man symposium. Devils represents Wilson the percipient tourist (in an essay on Italy's 16th century garden of sculptured monsters at Bomarzo), Wilson the memoirist and literary gamesman (in a record of his friendship with Novelist Edwin O'Connor), and Wilson the reviewer-who-was-there.

Also making a major appearance, as he did in a famous feud with Vladimir Nabokov, is Wilson the noble crank. Here he makes a dyspeptic but delightful attack on the cumbersome, pedantic paraphernalia assembled by the Modern Language Association (the college literature teachers' "union") to edit and publish classic American authors. The blame, says Wilson, goes back to "our oppressive Ph.D. system of which we would have been well rid if, at the time of the First World War, when we were renaming our hamburgers Salisbury Steak and our sauerkraut Liberty Cabbage, we had decided to scrap it as a German atrocity."

Throughout, Wilson holds to the aim he set for himself as a young critic: "Try to contribute something new or call attention to some neglected aspect . . ." An example of the latter is Wilson's emphasis on Mencken's habitual confusion in thinking and his dogmatic German brutality . . . We never expected coherence of Mencken. He was a poet in prose and a humorist."

As for championing unfamiliar writers perhaps the best thing in Devils is Wilson's double essay on Two Neglected American Novelists-- the fastidious Henry B. Fuller, who chronicled the collision of Europeanized culture with a bustling new America in turn-of-the-century Chicago, and the flamboyant Harold Frederic, a foreign correspondent whose fiction looked back on the callow, small-town life of upstate New York during and after the Civil War. In making a case for both novelists Wilson uses his well-known technique of writing criticism that draws on the resources of fiction and history.

For all the weighty compactness of detail and insight in Wilson's prose, it gives the impression of a broad sweep of scenes and events. The irony is that although Wilson ends by calling for full-scale books on both Fuller and Fred eric the reader of this essay may not feel in need of another word on either subject.

* Christopher Porterfield

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