Edward Wagenknecht - Criticism

Criticism

Wagenknecht practiced a form of criticism pioneered by French critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve and taken up by Gamaliel Bradford. He would explore the full range of a writer's works, then form an overall picture of the writer's point of view and technique. He was particularly interested in characterization, style, and moral issues. He favored the Jamesian well-made novel but made an effort to be open to other types of writing, such as stream-of-consciousness works. This effort was not always successful. For example, his comments on Ulysses in the James Joyce chapter of Cavalcade of the English Novel are probably the least perceptive in that admirable book. He is also cited in Jack Green's book Fire the Bastards! as one of the many book reviewers who ought to lose his job for not perceiving the merits and importance of William Gaddis' first novel, The Recognitions.

Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Herbert F. Smith commented: “The critical and biographical writing of Edward Wagenknecht represents the epitome of a style of subjective criticism which began with the nineteenth-century critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve.” Wagenknecht himself pointed out his debt to Bradford and Sainte-Beuve:

My specialty as a writer was the psychograph or character portrait, which I learned from Gamaliel Bradford, who, in turn, had been inspired by Sainte-Beuve. Bradford furnished an introduction to my first book of consequence, The Man Charles Dickens: A Victorian Portrait, and in fact placed it with Houghton Mifflin Co. I use the psychographic method in all my books which deal with individuals.”

He also produced an enormous amount of film criticism, much of it before the movies became a fashionable subject of academic attention. He enjoyed writing about women artists in both literature and film, although it would be hard to call his viewpoint a feminist one. He was more courtly in his approach to the women he wrote about.

Above all, Wagenknecht was a completely professional writer who always had an eye on publication. In his memoir As Far as Yesterday (1968) he wrote:

Though I have always written to please myself first of all, I have never been bashful about wooing the printing press, and I began sending my things out very early. For a long time, of course, they all came back, but in the long run nothing that was publishable failed of publication, though, except for book reviews, I have always been more successful with book publishers than with magazine editors. Here, again, I am sure my irrefragable independence has been the root cause. Magazine editors have 'policies' and 'interests.' So have I, and I have never considered dropping mine to take up those of somebody else.