Edmund Wilson has been much in the press lately, because of a new “biography”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0374113122/qid=1125531467/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-5680853-4509440?v=glance&s=books by Lewis M. Dabney. As it happens, I’ve been having an Edmund Wilson sort of summer. At the end of the spring semester I finally read To the Finland Station which was recommended to me years ago by my mom. I am ashamed to say I didn’t get around to reading it until I finally realized it was definitely not To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, which did not sound at all like my cup of tea (nor my mom’s, which made the recommendation seem all the more dubious and improbable). Result? A boffo point in the mater column and a big zero in the alma mater column. Years of graduate training laden with discussion of Marx and Marxism and nary a mention of Wilson’s amazing book on the man and his milieu! It’s true that Wilson doesn’t quite get Marx the theorist. But so what? Discussions of Marx the theorist are easily come by. What Wilson offers instead (and hoorah for that) is a hugely learned account of the social history from which Marxism emerged (ie, not the intellectual history of Hegel begat…) and of life as Marx and Engels and their families, friends, and lovers lived it.

Anyway, since then (and further inspired by some of the reviews of the new biography) I’ve gone on to O Canada (has an earning-his-keep magazine work feel throughout, unfortunately — but still interesting if you are interested in Canada of the 50s and early 60s) and Axel’s Castle in which I found these lovely paired descriptions, which brings me round again to anthropology:

“Anatole France was a popular writer: he aimed to be persuasive and intelligible – he used frankly to remind his secretary … ‘Leave to your reader the easy victory of seeing further than you.’ His books were sold on all the bookstalls of France and known all over the civilized world. …Whereas Paul Valéry disregards altogether the taste and intelligence of the ordinary reader: instead of allowing his reader the easy victory, he takes pride in outstripping him completely. And he is read chiefly by other writers or people with a special interest in literature… Paul Valéry has set himself … the task of reproducing by his very language all the complexities and confusions of our interacting sensations and ideas… When France turns away from literature, he occupies himself naturally with politics – he goes on the stump for Dreyfus, allies himself with the Socialist party, writes editorials for its paper, addresses meetings of working men and finally declares himself a Communist. But Valéry concerns himself little with politics… (1931: 88-89).

If a list of anthropologists scrolls through your mind at this juncture, you’ll probably be able to sort many of them into the “France” or the “Valéry” column. But not all of them, right?

Wilson sets up a compelling contrast between the two writers. You can feel that his sympathies are with France (and Wilson, who wrote widely and beautifully, is manifestly a writer of the France variety). But while Wilson condemns aspects of Valéry’s writing (and character), he also admires his artistic mission. It is clear, in fact, that Wilson thinks Valéry is the more important artist, even given that France and Valéry are very different kinds of writers. This is a small example of what is nice about Wilson’s writing –again and again, he takes apart a particular example in such a way that one is prompted to think about more general patterns. Isn’t this contrast between France and Valéry evocative of discussions we’ve had here about the public intellectual, the accessible writer, the spokesperson for anthropology versus the pointy-headed snoot, the abstruse theorizer, the politically ineffectual academic?

Wilson doesn’t say that one cannot choose between them — he suggests and in a way exemplifies that conclusion (thus giving the reader the “easy victory” of making the connection). While he writes as a France, he also generously acknowledges the accomplishments of Valéry, and thus makes room for both of their virtues. It’s a stance and a way of presenting that stance that is difficult to emulate, but always inspiring — in anthropology and outside of it.