Word: edel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Auden is a textbook case drawn largely from the poet's autobiography-of-sorts, A Certain World. The book is an alphabetical listing of subjects close to Auden's heart, and the psychological evidence is so blatant that one should expect an ambush. Edel plunges ahead. Under "Castration Complex," he finds a reference to "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb," whose mother warns him that he will lose his favorite fingers if he does not stop his infantile habit. He does not, and in comes "the great, long, red-legged scissors-man" to carry out the sentence...
Under D, Auden describes a dream in which his appendix is to be removed. Instead, the doctor cuts off "the arm of an old lady who was going to do me an injury." Mommy dearest? Of course, and Edel does not fail to evoke the emasculating female. How much weight Auden, a homosexual, gave to primal imagery is open to question. An artist must care more about what he makes than what he is. Auden put it right when he told a friend, "I am a poet first and a queen second...
Where no dreams appear to whet his analytical appetite, Edel proves to be a literary journalist of great skill. His chapter on Henry David Thoreau as Mamma's boy and great American freeloader is a model of concision and balance. So are his pieces on James Joyce as "injustice collector" and "unfinished genius," Tolstoy as a "prodigy of self-inhibitions" and "self-indulgence," Yeats as a hero of "creative aging," and T.S. Eliot as a successful battler against will-sapping depression...
...chapter on Edmund Wilson, "The Critic as Wound-Dresser," is overblown and a bit self-serving. Edel refers to the Greek myth of Philoctetes, a great archer who was banished because a septic injury offended the noses of his countrymen. Wilson himself read this as an allegory of the artist as outcast. As embellished by Edel, Wilson the critic is like Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, who endured the stench and nursed the archer. Wound-dresser is a limited and benign definition of a critic who laid open many a reputation with one stroke...
When authors gather to analyze critics, they frequently speak of pencil envy. The diagnosis hardly applies to Edel, a man with many distinguished books to his credit. If anything, he is a professional who knows how to cover his bets. He can argue the obvious: that literature is not a patient and he is no therapist. He can then go on to examine writers and their work along orthodox lines laid down by Viennese mind-science nearly a century ago. He is wary enough to disarm those who would argue that literary psychology diminishes its subject. The fact remains that...