Galahad and I Thought of Daisy by Edmund Wilson

Author:Edmund Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Larry Mickler, with his revolver and his passion for Dostoevsky, had made upon me an unpleasant impression. I had come to connect him obscurely with my impulse to smash the peach-brandy bottle, when I had felt myself so helpless with Rita, and I found that I disliked Dostoevsky, because Larry Mickler admired him. I remembered—as I went back in the taxi to my own apartment in Bank Street—Dostoevsky’s sadistic manias, his complaisance in self-degradation combined with extravagant vanity; I now felt, after meeting Mickler, that the masterpieces of such a man of genius were a doubtful compensation on paper for the moral bankruptcy of a life. Were not the purity of Dostoevsky’s tenderness, the flights of his Christian idealism, counterbalanced by his cruel perversity, his almost sub-human depths of indifference? Were not the Svidrigaïlovs and Stavrogins in Dostoevsky’s novels—those malignant growths which sprouted and seemed, almost without the author’s intention, to swell to such monstrous proportions—were they not the price which one had to pay for the Myshkins and the Alyoshas?

True, it was quite unfair to Dostoevsky to identify him with Larry Mickler; it was the triumph, at least, of the great writer that, by dint of terrific effort, he had, if only in the world of his novels, succeeded in restoring a moral balance of that universe which he had once felt reeling with the world of his own soul; whereas, in the case of Larry Mickler, who had merely to read Dostoevsky’s books, all that desperate idealism, that victory of moral passion, would, it seemed to me at that moment, go principally to give him a good conscience in licking his chops over the cruelties and perversities, and to leave him with the gratified conviction that there was no kind of discreditable behavior which imagination might not redeem.

And Pete Bird, with his charming wistful verses and his swindle of the liverwurst sandwiches! And Rita—without that mêlée in which her varying passions had involved her, that possession by all the devils of all the sensual desires at once, all that panic and anarchy and anguish and deceit of her daily life, would she ever without all this have been compelled to the noble severity, the firm and harmonious form, the bravery of candor, of her verse?

And those poets of whom Rita and I had talked the first night I had known her in Bank Street! Tonight, the curses and groans of Catullus only filled me with the same disgust for his abasement at the feet of Lesbia as did my own preoccupation with Rita. And Verlaine, in his prison cell, with his imbecile alternations between piety and pornography—if he had published his religious poems, as he had originally intended to do, sandwiched in between his poems of lechery, he would have furnished a perfect example, an example forever ludicrous, of the disorder of the poet’s mind.

Even Dante, of whom I had once thought, of whom I thought still, as the supreme poet of Europe, who had possessed

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