Literature: Mr. Wilson’s War

American literature has long been the scene of wordy battles between scholars and critics. The scholars are basically interested in establishing accurate texts, the critics in plumbing nuances of characterization, plot and symbol. The critics sometimes decry the scholars as pedants with bibliomania, while the scholars dismiss the critics as dilettantes with an unprofessional lack of interest in discovering what an author really wrote. In a pair of scathing articles for the New York Review of Books, Critic Edmund Wilson recently added his eminent voice to the quarrel. He suggested that a number of leading literary experts are now engaged in a pointless exercise in scholarship that amounts to an outrageous boondoggle.

The object of Wilson’s wrath is the 28,000-member Modern Language Association, to which most college and university professors of literature belong. Wilson argues that one of the M.L.A.’s most ambitious enterprises, definitive editions of major 19th century American writers, is so riddled with pedantry that the 258-volume series will be virtually useless. Reviewing one of the volumes already published, William Dean Howells’ Their Wedding Journey (Indiana University; $10), Wilson dismisses the project as “a waste of time and money.” He claims that its high price tag and its elaborate textual commentary will mean that only Ph.D. candidates are likely to buy it, while such works should be designed for general readers as well.

Bananas or Banannas. From the viewpoint of the ordinary reader, Wilson certainly has a point. The M.L.A. editions are crammed with niggling notes on whether Herman Melville used the spelling “bananas” or “banannas” and whether Howells wrote “wrapt” or “wrapped.” In an earlier review of the M.L.A. edition of The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Harvard University), Cultural Critic Lewis Mumford found the text so cut up by the “barbed wire” of notations and arcane diacritical symbols that it was virtually unreadable.

Scholars have reacted to Wilson’s charges with something less than cool objectivity. “Edmund Wilson, who is to be admired and cherished for the things he can do, has made a fool of himself this time. He is very, very wrong,” says Dr. Matthew Bruccoli, head of the English Department at Ohio State University, which is producing the M.L.A.’s Hawthorne edition. Twain Scholar Hen ry Nash Smith of the University of California at Berkeley complains that “Wilson paws and snorts like a bull moose. He seems to be saying that we should correct serious distortions, but doesn’t realize that you can’t tell if it’s distorted unless you do the research.”

Many M.L.A. editors insist their plodding, comma-splicing spadework is absolutely necessary because the texts of any American classics have been hopelessly corrupted. Typesetters were often careless; authors read proofs badly; later editors bowdlerized on grounds of prudence. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s widow, for example, was an eccentric who diligently excised all words that offended her from his manuscript notebooks before she let them be published.

Errors in Transmission. The scholars discovered that Mark Twain started three versions of The Mysterious Stranger, finished only the third. Twain’s literary executor and his editor liked the first version best, took the ending from the third and tacked it on the first.

Since the versions were different, they had to write a bridge paragraph and even introduce a new character to make the ending fit. In the new M.L.A. edition, all three manuscripts will be published. Even modern novels are susceptible to damaging errors in transmission. Between 1925 and 1953, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby accumulated 125 variances in the text, 75 involving substantive changes in wording.

The scholars also point out that their corrected texts will not be for libraries alone. Two years after the university presses turn out the M.L.A. volumes, the same accurate editions, stripped of scholarly notations, will be made available to commercial publishers. Some scholars argue that Wilson knows this and is suffering from a severe case of sour grapes because a project of his own —to produce definitive editions of American authors in pocket-sized volumes—did not receive the federal support eventually awarded the M.L.A. “He’s mad because he didn’t get the money,” says William M. Gibson, director of the M.L.A. project. “He’s just too impatient. He wants the books on the market but doesn’t want to do the necessary research.”