From the Uncollected Edmond Wilson

Literary Review, Spring, 1996 by Burton Raffel

A THOUSAND YEARS AGO, when the mind and heart of the West chirruped and twittered in Christianty's golden cage, saints regularly mediated between our lowly lives and those on high. The Venerable Bede, to whom we owe most of what we know about the early history of Anglo-Saxon England, wrote a life of Saint Cuthbert in which, among other things, he described the saint's habit of rising in "the dead of night, while everyone else was sleeping, to go out and pray." Here is Bede's soberly written account:

One night one of the monks watched him creep out, then followed him

stealthily to see where he was going and what he was about. Down he

[Cuthbert] went towards the beach beneath the monastery and out into

the sea until he was up to his arms and neck in deep water. The splash

of the waves accompanied his vigil throughout the dark hours of the

night. At daybreak he came out, knelt down on the sand, and prayed.

Then two otters knelt down on the sand, and prayed. Then two otters

bounded out of the water, stretched themselves out before him, warmed

his feet with their breath, and tried to dry him on their fur. They

finished, received his blessing, and slipped back to their watery home.

He was soon home and was in choir at the proper time with the rest of

the monks.

All creation, in the sea as on the land, recognized and worshipped in the saints what they hailed as God's perfection in man -- not quite so perfect, of course, as that perfection which was God in man, nor anything like so fundamental to the well-being of the world, but quite important enough. "Cuthbert's miracles of healing:' Bede carefully assures us, "did not cease with his death and burial."

A roughly contemporary hagiographic account, the life of Saint Wilfred, supposed to be by one Eddius Stephanus, is even closer to the conventional formulae of saintly existence.

A sign from God proved that he [Wilfred] was sanctified while still in

the womb of his most pious mother.... His mother was in confinement,

worn out with the pains of labor, her women round her, when a group of

men standing outside saw the house

Groth, Janet and David Castronovo, eds. From the Uncollected Edmond Wilson. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995.

suddenly take fire and flames shoot sky high. Everyone started

dashing panic-stricken in all directions, trying to douse the flames

with water and rescue the inhabitants. But the women of the

house came to the door and told them to keep calm: "Control

yourselves; a child has been born into the world." At first they

were amazed; then saw in what had taken place a great work of

God, just as when Moses saw the burning bush with the flames

crackling yet consuming nothing.

"From his boyhood he was obedient to his parents, beloved of all," the account continues, "handsome, well-proportioned, gentle, modest, and controlled, with none of the silly fads common to boys . . ."

No one can doubt the high-order utility of such men. Not only do they say and do useful things that could not be said and done by lesser folk, but by their very nature they cannot help but say and do such things, just as by their very nature they cannot help at least partaking of, if not quite matching, heavenly perfection. The saints' essential nature, that is, is a guarantee that what they say and do is reliably pre-approved, even divinely sanctified.

Literary criticism, too, has sometimes longed for the presence of such mediators. The artist as infallibly good man was a staple of much nineteenth-century discussion. Works of art were pure and noble because so too was the artist who, with divine guidance, produced them-and when the artist was blatantly impure, the art was highly suspect. How indeed could good come from bad-or from anything less than very, very good? "Talent alone can not make a writer," as Emerson insisted. "There must be a man behind the book . . ." And in the essay on Goethe, where he makes these assertions, Emerson goes on to confess: "I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; . . . there are nobler strains in poetry than any he has sounded. There are writers poorer in talent, whose tone is purer, and more touches the heart." Accordingly, Emerson concludes, "Goethe can never be dear to men. His is not even the devotion to pure truth; but to truth for the sake of culture." More plainly, Goethe "is not an artist.... He is fragmentary; a writer of occasional poems and of an encyclopaedia of sentences." But Emerson is even-handed: he rejects Shakespeare on much the same grounds: "As long as the question is of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to show. But when the question is, to life and its materials and its auxiliaries, how does he profit me?" Unfortunately, Shakespeare "led an obscure and profane life, using his genius for the public amusement."

It has often appeared that the only way criticism could separate the artist from the work was by separating morality from art itself. Art for Art's Sake (for which doctrine I have little sympathy) surely saves us from having to make moral judgments about the artist. But the temptation to conflate art and artist remains powerful: riots are threatened, when the Israel Philharmonic plays the music of Wagner; James Russell Lowell, who burned his review copy of Leaves of Gross, would not admit Walt Whitman to his house, despite Emerson's sponsorship; and the Bollingen Prize awarded to Ezra Pound for his Pisan Cantos, almost fifty years ago, raised a howling storm of protest. Wagner was certainly no saint: I dare say the jokesters of the late 19th century, listening to friends complaining of their wives, would sometimes suggest that, as a way of making the problem disappear, the disappointed husbands should consider introducing the difficult ladies to Wagner (an expert and experienced wife-stealer). Walt Whitman may have been no threat to the virginal young ladies who were, Lowell said, his principal concern (Whitman would quite likely have been more interested in their brothers), but Whitman would certainly have been an odd fit in a polite Victorian-era drawing room. I have myself dedicated a small volume of poems to Ezra Pound, and written a book about him, but, speaking as a onetime lawyer, I have no doubt whatever that, whatever Pound himself thought of his Italian radio broadcasts during World War Two, he was guilty of treason. And as a Jew I can easily understand how his strong anti-Semitism, during the Hitler years especially, would be deeply disturbing. But I regularly listen to Wagner, and read Whitman, and read and have strong feelings of admiration and indebtedness to Pound. They are none of them saints, nor do I expect them to be.