Axel's Castle / The Wound and the Bow
Wilson was the last great general man of letters in American criticism. He could write about anything with authority and pleasure. His essay criticism invented the template for the thinking person's book review.
Both Wilson books demand homework you may not have done. Without prior footing in Yeats, Eliot, Proust and Joyce, the Symbolism argument in Axel’s Castle sails past; one reader admits it felt “way too smart for a country boy like myself.” Stein gets generous treatment and stays impenetrable anyway, and the collection reads as visibly dated now, “dated in some respects, and it gives Stein relatively short space,” runs one verdict. In The Wound and the Bow, the Freudian premise, that injury explains a writer’s gift, stretches across seven subjects past what it can bear, and the Dickens and Kipling essays crowd out shorter pieces on Wharton and Casanova. Wilson’s own Finnegans Wake chapter reads to one reader less like invitation than warning: “life is too short to try and tackle Finnigan’s Wake again.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
