Roger Ebert on being well-read

I’ve known for many years, from watching him on TV, that Roger Ebert is a smart guy. I’ve known at least since I read his review of Days of Heaven that he is an exceptional writer. But it is only now that I’ve discovered he is not only literate but literary.

In an article called Does anyone want to be “well-read?”, Ebert reacts to an article in which Cynthia Ozick poses this question:

Consider: who at this hour (apart from some professorial specialist currying his “field") is reading Mary McCarthy, James T. Farrell, John Berryman, Allan Bloom, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Edmund Wilson, Anne Sexton, Alice Adams, Robert Lowell, Grace Paley, Owen Barfield, Stanley Elkin, Robert Penn Warren, Norman Mailer, Leslie Fiedler, R.P. Blackmur, Paul Goodman, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, John Crowe Ransom, Stephen Spender, Daniel Fuchs, Hugh Kenner, Seymour Krim, J.F. Powers, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Rahv, Jack Richardson, John Auerbach, Harvey Swados--or Trilling himself?

“I read through this list with dismay,” writes Ebert. “I have read all but two of those writers, love some, and met five.” Yet noting that Ozick’s list was prompted by her review of Saul Bellow’s letters, he confesses that although he still reads Bellow, “I confess I have no plans to return to any of the other authors on her list in whatever time I have remaining.”

As for me, I’ve read at least 20 of the 32 writers on Ozick’s list. I have heard Mailer, Hellman, and Ginsberg read their work, and met Mailer at a reception afterwards. Robert Lowell is probably my favorite American poet, and I have great affection and admiration for Edmund Wilson, who rivals John Updike for the title of greatest overall 20th century American man (or woman) of letters. Wilson was so prolific, and wrote such clear springwater prose, that it is discouraging how few people seem to read him anymore. Frederick Exley found that in the throes of alcoholism and depression, Wilson was the only person he could read.

Ebert calls Wilson “a role model,” and writes that “I have every one of Edmund Wilson’s books, in the sublimely uniform Farrar Straus & Giroux editions.”

All of them? Really? Even The Undertaker’s Garland? If so, I am very impressed. I have 33 myself, and have read them all, and the only other person I know with a similar collection is the old friend who turned me onto Wilson in the first place. (He now works for the Library of America, the nonprofit publishing project that Edmund Wilson championed.)