Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections.

Patriotic Gore (1962), Edmund Wilson's fat, endlessly fascinating book about the literature of the American Civil War, was the first thing I read of his. That was the summer I graduated from college. I had been hired by a professor to work on the restoration of his 144-year-old house overlooking the Connecticut River, and discovered Patriotic Gore at the small village library. I read it in the attic room where I stayed. Seeing me with a copy of the book, my host recalled how Wilson, as a scholar-in-residence at the college, had visited the house. Wilson, a heavy-set man and animated talker and drinker, had his chair collapse beneath him in the midst of some literary disputation. The great man of letters was uninjured and undeflected in argument by the fragility of the furniture.

Wilson's ability to combine a passion for literature with a sharp sense of history and personality proved intoxicating after the courses in literary criticism I had taken in college. In Patriotic Gore he famously championed Ulysses S. Grant, a failure at nearly everything except saving the Union, and then a failed president who on his deathbed wrote his Memoirs to provide for his family. Wilson made Grant, as well as William Sherman and John Mosby and Robert E. Lee, seem like characters out of Homer. The fierce, unblinking patrician Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the weary eloquence of Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy, were other revelations. Despite the often obscure nature of his subjects, Wilson's nimble literary analysis and authoritative judgments convinced you that it was as important to know what Mary Chestnut thought as what Abraham Lincoln thought.

Some books are forever associated with the places where you read them. There was something of that in my discovering Wilson's remarkable cast of nineteenth-century Americans in a house the author had visited, and especially in a house whose former inhabitants, one imagined, must have waited anxiously for news of the Grand Army of the Republic. In any event, without fuss Wilson conveyed a depth and thickness of history as well as a profound sense of how the past touches on the present. His personal, often idiosyncratic, connection to the American past made a large impression on me.

Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections reminds us that Wilson's intellectual and literary journalism made a large impression on a great many people. Alfred Kazin, C. Vann Woodward, Michael Walzer, Elizabeth Hardwick and two dozen more scholars, journalists, and writers make contributions to this volume, the result of symposia held at Princeton University and New York City's Mercantile Library in 1995. Patriotic Gore is the subject of several essays and two panel discussions, one on the book's controversial preface (in which Wilson dubiously equated Lincoln's aims and ambitions with Bismarck's and Lenin's and all three to the instinctive predations of sea slugs), the other on his neglect of black writers. There is also a discussion of To the Finland Station, Wilson's influential history of the idea of Marxism, and another where contributors offer more personal reminiscences. Various essays assess elements of Wilson's achievement and intellectual style, including his romanticism, debt to Enlightenment rationalism, and literary criticism. Sharp words are exchanged about Wilson's failure to grasp the malign nature of Lenin and communism and about his ignorance of nineteenth-century black writing. His crankish political views - as Jason Epstein notes, Wilson was a man of the nineteenth, if not the eighteenth century - and sometimes oddly impersonal understanding of sexuality are also noted.

These "reflections" give much instruction and pleasure. In one of the better essays, Andrew Delbanco, the literary critic, offers a shrewd assessment of Wilson's enduring appeal. "In Wilson's own writing there is a peculiar combination of belligerence and enthusiasm, a voice that is somehow sophisticated and callow at the same time." That captures an undeniable quality of Wilson's style, the vigorous way in which he communicated both his unflagging curiosity and his urge to connect what he was learning - and simultaneously sharing with readers - to the immense amount he already knew. Wilson wrote an almost transparent prose - W.H. Auden called it "clear-window" - and was a genius at laying out what an author was up to and to what extent, in Wilson's judgment, he or she succeeded. His interests were encyclopedic, ranging from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Pushkin to New York State's Iroquois Indians. He also wrote fiction (Memoirs of Hecate County), plays, and a torrent of book reviews. His posthumous diaries only added to his reputation as a social observer and quintessential American sensibility. Indeed, Neale Reinitz makes an interesting case for considering the diaries as the "big" novel Wilson always intended but never managed to write.

Surprisingly, there is also much to be said about Wilson's attitude toward religion. Long a cantankerous atheist ("We must learn to live without religion," Wilson told Kazin), he nevertheless had a keen interest in religion, especially as it touched on his sense of American identity. Mark Krupnick's essay, "Edmund Wilson and Gentile Philo-Semitism," links Wilson's admiration for Judaism to his sense of himself as a descendant of Presbyterian Calvinists (and of Cotton Mather on his mother's side), those American Puritans who thought of themselves as establishing a New Israel in the American wilderness.

In a similar vein, Delbanco calls attention to Wilson as a "not quite repressible believer," detecting in his admiration for the dignity and spiritual strength of those caught up in the tragedy of the Civil War the paradox of Wilson's own yearnings and indomitable will: "Wilson thinks, [they are] all in the grip of a delusion - but it is a delusion the critic is desperate not to give up." That "delusion," the moral instinct that had brought on war, Delbanco explains, was inherited from biblical religion's effort to "place beyond human reach the caretaker of [our] own standards." Wilson resisted that absolutizing religious impulse, thinking it too often ended in fanaticism and bloodshed. But "such a vision, or the hope of retrieving it," Delbanco writes, "seems to me to have animated Wilson throughout his lifetime."

Paul Baumann is executive editor of Commonweal.