In the years since [the publication of A Piece of My Mind], while his productivity has remained amazingly high and at least one book—Patriotic Gore—is a testament to sustained powers of scholarship and intellectual conviction, Wilson has become increasingly detached from the central life of culture in this country, a life he once helped shape and color. And yet it does not seem to me to be the comfortable detachment of old fogyism—nothing so placid, unremarkable and unembattled as that….
A number of writers have remarked on how Wilson is not temperamentally a man of our time, and he has confirmed it; and it has been said that after a crisis in his personal life and his beliefs he retreated into a private world, into literature cut off from political actuality and observation cut off from the crucial scene to be observed. The notion that he is a great literary critic (as well as a social critic) who has substituted literature for life is widespread, and is, I believe, thoroughly mistaken; he is, on the contrary, a critic who for a very long time has not really criticized, a man who has substituted the superficies of literature for its real life and held that at bay.
