A sorry fate is overtaking the reputation of Edmund Wilson. Since his death … there has been an increasing tendency to portray Wilson as the Grand Cham of American letters, a venerable sage whose most impromptu and trivial scribbles must be embalmed in print and enshrined for all eternity. Ironically, Wilson had himself initiated this reverential salvage operation with the publication of A Prelude, in 1967; it began with the precocious diary, "My Trip Abroad," written when he was thirteen years old, and moved through the "landscapes, characters and conversations from the earlier years of my life" recorded in his day-to-day journal through the end of his military service in the First World War. He was preparing The Twenties for publication at the time of his death.
As a young man of letters, Wilson had been scornful of such indiscriminate sanctimony toward the scratch-pad detritus of great writers, whose notes, he wrote in his journal, "may have been merely mechanical and meaningless jottings, the products of an instinct to write in its most rudimentary habitual twitchings, like the instinctive defensive or predatory gestures of the lowest forms of life." If the future volumes of Edmund Wilson's journal prove to be as dull as A Prelude and The Twenties …, it will become more and more difficult to retain a just and accurate sense of Wilson's singular importance as a literary journalist and critical historian in twentieth-century America. And because his unique achievement seems in danger of suffocating under an avalanche of posthumous piety concerned more with the life of Edmund Wilson than with the intellectual value of his work, it is now urgent to take a conscientious backward glance at his important book, Axel's Castle…. (p. 115)
