I got for Christmas the first of two volumes in the Library of America series given over to Edmund Wilson. It includes The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, Classics and Commercials, and a few uncollected essays. Rather than rooting around in the 900 pages, I'm reading it straight through, and the other day, in a coffee shop, I came to the essay in The Triple Thinkers on John Jay Chapman and elicited a couple sidelong glances from fellow caffeineators when I suddenly burst out laughing. Chapman was an admirer of Emerson, whom I consider a colossal bore, but his tart observations were not restricted to subjects he held in low regard. Of Emerson he once wrote (I'm quoting Wilson quoting Chapman):
If an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an Italian opera than he would by reading Emerson's volumes. He would learn from the Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin.
Though few would think to describe Wilson as a humorist, I can think of other times, especially in his journals, that he has made me laugh aloud. I think it was in the last journal, reviewed here by Frank Kermode, covering the last dozen years of his life, that Wilson told the story of an academic--a Harvard professor, I think (I don't own the volume and so cannot right now track down the details)--who practiced yoga and protested the Vietnam war. Let us say his name was Arthur Darby Vance. His dissenting activities had attracted the attention of the authorities, and one day a couple of beefy cops came to pay him a visit. The nude Vance, however, was burning incense and meditating when the lawmen arrived, and so did not respond to their progressively louder requests that he admit them. Eventually they burst through the door without invitation and found him, sitting naked and cross-legged on the floor, humming amid the burning incense. "Jesus Christ!" exclaimed one of the cops. The subject then spoke for the first time. "No," he said, "Arthur Darby Vance."
I promise to go to the library and supply the details in a later post.
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