On Edmund Wilson's Style and Career Path

I’ve been reading Janet Groth’s excellent book Edmund Wilson: Critic for Our Time and have encountered her description of Wilson’s prose style that accounts for both why I enjoy reading Wilson and what I aspire to in my own writing (still a long way to go on that front). I’m going to piece together sentences from several of Groth’s pages in Chapter Two for the purpose of condensation. His prose style:

• exhibits a lesser degree of formality than academic writing. "I can't write the jargon of critical quarterlies," Wilson says;
• is "well written, intensely felt, pungent, terse";
• has "color and rhythm";
• should be "highly personal";
• should bear the eighteenth-century qualities of "lucidity, force, and ease";
• uses Voltaire as a model and is "intended to provide a nondidactice, neutral medium that will allow the free play of the intellect over the subject at hand".

In his essay "Thoughts on Being Bibliographed," Wilson described his general approach to his writing career. > "To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity....My own strategy ... has usually been, first to get books for review or reporting assignments to cover on subjects in which I happen to be interested; then, later, to use the scattered artices for writing general studies of these subjects; then, finally, to bring out a book in which groups of these essays are combined. There are usually to be distinguided ... at least two or three stages; and it is of course by the books that I want to stand, since the preliminary sketches quite often show my subjects in a different light and in some cases, perhaps, are contradicted by my final conclusions about them."

Brilliant. I wish I'd had that paragraph much earlier in my writing life--I would have save the drafts of some of the articles I published on websites that no longer exist. Still -- perhaps it's not too late to start.