Back to the Classics #3

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020.

Abandoned Classic. Some years ago I bailed out this 1962 survey when I realized that Wilson was not going to cover Frederick Douglass despite the power of Douglass' post-war speeches and  My Bondage and My Freedom. Older now, I think ideally a writer can write about what they wish without having always to be inclusive. I’m down with it if James Baldwin wants to write about white guys named David and Giovanni or William Styron wants to write about a slave named Nat. Sorry my examples date me; I do hear that Twittter regularly explodes with outraged people telling writers what subjects they can and cannot write about.,

Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War – Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson was a critic for various high-prestige periodicals from the Thirties to the Seventies. This book is a collection of long pieces he wrote for The New Yorker. He comments upon a broad array of writings by such figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, Frederick Law Olmsted, Colonel Wentworth Higginson, Mary Chestnut, Robert E. Lee, and Hinton Helper. He also examines Southern apologists such as George Fitzhugh and Alexander Stephens. Perhaps as an indicator of how forgotten figures such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and William Wells Brown were at the time, absent are pieces by the slave, the escaped slave, and the free Negro.

Another thing I rather despised about the book is Wilson’s sympathy for the Old South. Honor, good manners, style. Yadda Yadda Yadda. Ole Massa and Missy and dere minority culture victimized by dat tyrant Linkum and hiz guldang fedral gubmint. It was those triggered Abolitionists, those  ur-SJW’s, that carried the ideological water for the North’s greedy drive for expansion.

Wilson has the problem of many journalists and critics: he bases sweeping generalizations on what the reader suspects is not much evidence. One is often nagged by wondering what other critics have opined on the subject and whether Wilson is not citing sources that he ought to be. I work at a university so maybe I'm sensitive to niceties like giving credit.

On the other hand, I don’t where else I would have read about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s husband Calvin who wrote her mean letters that have to be read to be believed. In the context of another marriage, Wilson tells the story of the conflict Sherman had with his wife Ellen when their son became a Jesuit priest. He blamed the son’s decision on Ellen, who said, “You knew when you married me that I was a Catholic”, to which Sherman replied, “Of course I did, but I didn’t know you would get worse every year.”

To wrap up, I would recommend this collection of essays to people interested in American Literature, intellectual history, and of course the American Civil War. Wilson short biographies and overviews of the writers’ work are concise and interesting.

Note: David Blight's brilliant review of this is here.