Mendelson, Edward 1946- (Edward James Mendelson)

PERSONAL:

Born March 15, 1946, in New York, NY; son of Ralph (a lawyer and teacher) and Grace (a teacher) Mendelson; married Cheryl Neel Noble, 1990; children: James. Education: University of Rochester, B.A., 1966; Johns Hopkins University, Ph.D., 1969.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Office—Department of English, Columbia University, 602 Philosophy Hall, New York, NY 10027. E-mail—em36@columbia.edu.

CAREER:

Writer, editor, literary executor, and educator. Yale University, New Haven, CT, instructor in English, 1969-70, assistant professor, 1970-76, associate professor, 1976-79; Columbia University, New York, NY, visiting associate professor, 1979-80, associate professor, 1980-83, professor of English and comparative literature, 1983—, Lionell Trilling professor of the humanities, 2006—. Visiting associate professor at Harvard University, 1977-78. Literary executor for the estate of poet W.H. Auden.

MEMBER:

Academy of Literature Studies, Societe Europeene de Culture.

AWARDS, HONORS:

American Council of Learned Societies fellow, 1974-75; National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1980-81; National Book Critics Circle award nomination in criticism, 1981, for Early Auden; Guggenheim fellow, 1986-87.

WRITINGS:

(With B.C. Bloomfield) W.H. Auden: A Bibliography, 1924-1969, University Press of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA), 1972.

W.H. Auden, 1907-1973: An Exhibition of Manuscripts, Books, and Photographs Selected from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, Readex Books (New York, NY), 1976.

Early Auden, Viking (New York, NY), 1981.

(Selector) W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1989.

(Selector) W.H. Auden, As I Walked Out One Evening: Songs, Ballads, Lullabies, Limericks, and Other Light Verse, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Later Auden, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1999.

The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say about the Stages of Life, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2006.

EDITOR

W.H. Auden, Collected Poems, Random House (New York, NY), 1976, 4th edition, 1991.

(With Michael Seidel) Homer to Brecht: The European Epic and Dramatic Traditions, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1977.

The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939, Random House (New York, NY), 1977.

Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1978.

W.H. Auden, Selected Poems, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1979, new edition, Vintage International (New York, NY), 2007.

W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, 1928-1938, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1988.

W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman: Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings by W.H. Auden, 1939-1973, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1993.

W.H. Auden, The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, 1926-1938, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1996.

George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Penguin (New York, NY), 1999.

Poetry for Young People: Lewis Carroll, Sterling Publishing Co. (New York, NY), 2000.

Poetry for Young People: Edward Lear, Sterling Publishing Co. (New York, NY), 2001.

Contributor to books, including American Poetry Since 1960, edited by Robert Shaw, Carcanet (London, England), 1973; Individual and Community, edited by Kenneth Baldwin and David Kirby, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1975; W.H. Auden: A Tribute, edited by Stephen Spender, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1975; and Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, edited by George Levine and David Leverenz, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976. Also contributor to The Absolute Sound.

Contributor to periodicals and journals, including New Statesman, Yale Review, Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, Harvard English Studies, and New Republic.

SIDELIGHTS:

"The current literary business has few practitioners more assiduous than … Edward Mendelson, W.H. Auden's extremely intelligent executor, bibliographer, editor, and critic," wrote Paul Fussell in the New Republic. Of the several books Mendelson has written about the renowned poet, essayist, and playwright, perhaps the most widely reviewed to date is his critical biography Early Auden. According to Fussell, the book, "virtually an intellectual history of the 1930s with Auden at its center, is rich and suggestive in its generalizations, resourceful in its scholarship, and precise in its readings of Auden's work. And it is discriminating: Mendelson recognizes immediately when Auden writes badly and speculates on the reasons, usually Auden's taking a position not fully understood or believed, or allowing himself to camp up serious things."

In analyzing the life and career of Auden up until about 1942, Mendelson "nails his colors to the mast," noted Newsweek reviewer Walter Clemons. "In [the author's] view, Auden's brilliant, curtly obscure, incohesive early work was that of the first poet to absorb the fragmented modernism of Eliot and Pound and then to move beyond it to the humbler ideal of the civil poet, user of traditional forms … and plain truth-teller to fellow citizens." In a Nation review of Early Auden, Robert B. Shaw noted Mendelson's reaction to "Auden's indebtedness to the authors he drew upon in forming his voice and point of view—Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Marx, Freud … and so on." Shaw stated that Mendelson "has managed to give a reasonably full account of these eclectic borrowings without getting snarled in a web of cross-reference. He does this, no doubt, by focusing not so much on the ideas themselves as on their concrete presentation in Auden's poems. He gives the reader a map of Auden's imaginative landscape, plotting the positions and relationships of its key images."

"Some of the most exciting passages in Early Auden," declared Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing in the New York Times, "attempt to define the links between literary Modernism and the tradition of Romanticism—a thesis that the author develops not just to keep his critical muscles in tone, but rather to explain, among other things, the inner contradictions of Auden's early historical poems."

In a New York Times Book Review article, Denis Donoghue called Early Auden "an odd book. Professor Mendelson claims that Auden ‘became the most inclusive poet of the twentieth century, its most technically skilled, and its most truthful.’ The claim is loosely worded: Before it could make sense, virtually every adjective would have to be expounded, the necessary qualifications taken into account, judicious comparisons made. But in any case the claim is effectively refuted by the book itself. The dominant impression enforced by … Mendelson is that Auden's moral and intellectual vanity kept him at every moment of his early life excited and bewildered, able to talk loud but not to think straight." He continued: "Going through the early poems and plays, [the author] finds, mostly, incoherence, contradiction, extravagance. Indeed, while he mocks those critics who thought of Auden as a permanent undergraduate, a glittering adolescent, he goes far toward proving them right."

Stuart Newton Hampshire, writing in the New York Review of Books, felt that Mendelson "dwells rather heavily on the undeniable inadequacies and inconsistencies of Auden's thought as that of a poet of the left and an occasional advocate of social revolution," during his early years. Hampshire stated that Mendelson "will not let him off the charge of having at this stage no firm and thought-out position, no solid basis for the continuing moralizing in his verse." Yet, the critic noted, "Auden loved aphorisms and epigrams, his own and those of others, which he very successfully anthologized; and his aphorisms and epigrams naturally tend to carry a moral punch as general reflections on life, as he wove them into his verse."

America critic James Finn Cotter found Mendelson "no blind worshipper" of Auden; "he points out contradictions when they occur, even within the same works, and he calls doggerel just that. He supposes some factual familiarity with Auden's life, but he does illuminate critical moments in his spiritual development with some felicitous quotations." While the author's book, according to Jeffery Meyers in Commonweal, "is not as original as those of his predecessors Monroe Spears (1963) and John Fuller (1970)—he is sound rather than brilliant—and his rather relentless exposition of scores of complex poems makes difficult reading …, his interpretations are backed with the authority of personal conversations, manuscripts and unpublished letters that cast new light on Auden's intellect, ideas, and intentions." So "detailed is Professor Mendelson's text," observed Lehmann-Haupt, "so precise is his reading of Auden's work and so complex are the ties he establishes between the work and the poet's psychology, politics and esthetics, that I wish I'd had time to go through Early Auden with all the time in the world. Its highest rewards appear to depend on a first-hand familiarity with Auden's poems, plays, and essays. Because the author could only afford to quote fragments of these, the ideal way to read him would be with Auden's complete works at hand." In conclusion, Fussell saw Edward Mendelson as a "civic critic, whose means and whose voice—learned, rational, measured, calm, sympathetic—are beautifully appropriate to the task at hand."

In addition to editing the "Complete Works of W.H. Auden" series for Princeton University Press, Mendelson published the companion volume to Early Auden in 1999. Later Auden is a "mammoth, accessible study [that] ties the life of major English poet W.H. Auden to his ideas, and both to his poetry," according to a Publishers Weekly critic.

Focusing on Auden's career after he arrived in America in 1939, Later Auden received largely positive reviews. "Auden sometimes behaved oddly in his last years," argued New Republic critic Frank Kermode, "but one unsilly act of the poet was to make Edward Mendelson his literary executor. Mendelson has done the job justly." Kermode praised the volume, finding that Mendelson's "notes are a triumph of pure scholarship." Robert L. Kelly, in Library Journal, found the work "illuminating, scholarly, and very readable."

Mendelson turned his attention to two other British writers in Poetry for Young People: Lewis Carroll and Poetry for Young People: Edward Lear. Carroll is famous for the work Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and for the nonsense poem "Jabberwocky." Mendelson offers a "brief but illuminating biography" of Carroll, noted Chris Riedel in School Library Journal. He presents a number of Carroll's works in context and provides copious introductions to the poems, vocabulary explanations, and notes on the place and purpose of the works. Mendelson succeeds in gathering and exploring "much of the sly, entertaining, and sometimes just plain odd poetry" that can be found in Carroll's books, observed GraceAnne A. DeCandido in Booklist. In the volume dedicated to the works of Edward Lear, Mendelson undertakes a similarly thorough survey of Lear's many nonsensical, verbally rich poems. Booklist reviewer John Peters commented that the book "makes a thought-and laugh-provoking bridge between" picturebook editions of Lear's work, which usually contain only a single poem, and larger volumes of collected pieces.

In The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say about the Stages of Life, Mendelson analyzes in depth the meaning, context, and subtext of seven major novels, all by female writers. His exploration includes important nineteenth-and twentieth-century novels: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts, all by Virginia Woolf. Mendelson expresses the "belief that what is most valuable in literature is not the single individual, but the interweaving of emotions and relationships among a group of people," noted Richard Eder in the New York Times Book Review. "Because society in the 19th century and much of the 20th tended to treat women impersonally and as a category, it was female writers who were most strongly motivated to explore and develop the personal," Eder continued. Mendelson interprets these novels in terms of the many events and crises that define the course of life and as works that stand to illuminate and celebrate those things that are most important within human existence. He looks at subjects such as parenting, a child's search for independence, the realities of marriage, family dynamics, and more. The novels under study provide life lessons that that argue for the lasting importance of literature, itself a thoroughly human undertaking. Booklist reviewer Bryce Christensen commented that "devotees of all of the authors examined will applaud Mendelson for reconnecting literary art and real life." Mendelson "provides many fresh insights into how these novels help us reflect on the values and meanings of our own lives," remarked Anthony Pucci, writing in Library Journal. A Publishers Weekly critic concluded: "As literary guides to these seven books, Mendelson's essays offer significant intellectual pleasure."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

America, October 17, 1981, James Finn Cotter, review of Early Auden, p. 226.

Booklist, March 1, 2001, GraceAnne A. DeCandido, review of Poetry for Young People: Lewis Carroll, p. 1274; March 1, 2002, John Peters, review of Poetry for Young People: Edward Lear, p. 1135; August 1, 2006, Bryce Christensen, review of The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say about the Stages of Life, p. 28.

Books & Culture, March 1, 2007, Alan Jacobs, "How to Read," review of The Things That Matter, p. 12.

Commonweal, November 6, 1981, Jeffrey Meyers, review of Early Auden, p. 633.

Library Journal, June 15, 1997, Michael Rogers, review of The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose and Travel Books in Prose and Verse, 1926-1938, p. 102; March 15, 1999, Robert L. Kelly, review of Later Auden, p. 80; August 1, 2006, Anthony Pucci, review of The Things That Matter, p. 87.

Nation, August 8, 1981, Robert B. Shaw, review of Early Auden, p. 119.

New Republic, August 1, 1981, Paul Fussell, review of Early Auden, p. 43; February 26, 1990, Sara Mosle, review of The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, 1928-1938, p. 38; November 29, 1993, J.D. McClatchy, review of W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman: Libretti and Other Dramatic Writings, 1939-1973, p. 40; April 26, 1999, Frank Kermode, "The Power to Enchant," p. 108.

New Statesman & Society, August 25, 1989, Sean French, review of The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, 1928-1938, p. 25.

Newsweek, September 28, 1981, Walter Clemons, review of Early Auden, p. 92.

New York Review of Books, August 13, 1981, Stuart Newton Hampshire, review of Early Auden, p. 3.

New York Times, August 4, 1981, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Early Auden, p. 19.

New York Times Book Review, August 9, 1981, Dennis Donoghue, review of Early Auden, p. 8; August 24, 2006, Richard Eder, "Lessons of Life Interpreted through Novels," review of The Things That Matter.

Publishers Weekly, February 22, 1999, review of Later Auden, p. 90; December 18, 2000, review of Poetryfor Young People: Lewis Carroll, p. 80; June 12, 2006, review of The Things That Matter, p. 44.

School Library Journal, March, 2001, Chris Riedel, review of Poetry for Young People: Lewis Carroll, p. 272.

Times Educational Supplement, October 27, 1989, Ashok Bery, review of The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Plays and Other Dramatic Writings, 1928-1938, p. 24.

ONLINE

Random House Web site,http://www.randomhouse.com/ (September 9, 2007), biography of Edward Mendelson.