September 14, 2005
Appreciating Edmund Wilson Posted by Allen Barra at 12:55 PM EST To call Edmund Wilson (who lived from 1895 to 1972) the greatest American critic or our most dynamic man of letters doesn’t begin to hint at the scope of his achievement. Wilson’s passions ranged from modernist literature (his favorites were the writers he came of age with—Yeats, Proust, Joyce, Hemingway, though not, oddly, Kafka), to politics (particularly the ways in which Marxism had permanently shaken the world), the American Civil War, the ancient Middle East, northeastern American Indians, and just about anything else that piqued his intellect. He wrote good fiction (a novel, I Thought Of Daisy, and a collection of stories, Memoirs of Hecate County), boring plays, scintillating memoirs, and journals that now function as time capsules for the decades in which they were written; he translated classic Russian poetry; and he filled several thick, rich volumes with reviews and essays on everything from his Princeton classmate F. Scott Fitzgerald to why he hated detective stories (the best known are probably The American Earthquake, The Shores of Light, and Classics and Commercials). No other American writer has produced so many essential volumes; no American who aspires to be an intellectual can afford not to be familiar with Axel’s Castle, To The Finland Station, The Wound and The Bow, Patriotic Gore, A Window on Russia, and perhaps a dozen other Wilson titles. Hemingway said that Wilson’s opinion was the only one “in the States I have any respect for.” W. H. Auden candidly admitted that he wrote for Wilson alone. Since Wilson’s death 33 years ago there have been numerous portraits and a couple of readable biographies, but Lewis M. Dabney’s new Edmund Wilson—A Life in Literature (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $30) is by far the most comprehensive deep-dish study of both his life and work, and at a whopping 600-plus pages, a grand feast for the intellectually horny. Born and raised in Red Bank, New Jersey, a handsome sleepy town with a Southern flavor, young Edmund was given an education grounded in both the Scriptures (his mother was proud to be a descendant of Cotton Mather) and the classics. His father, a one-time attorney general of New Jersey, was an upper-class WASP with surprisingly cosmopolitan tastes. (One of his friends was a Jew, Sigmund Eisner, grandfather of the Michael Eisner who would one day head Disney Productions). Given his background, it was inevitable that Wilson would attend Princeton, where he received, as Dabney puts it, “a purely humanistic education in the tradition going back to Erasmus, though absorbed within a country club environment.” There he met and befriended F. Scott Fitzgerald, a relationship that would loom large in American literature, not only because of his influence on Fitzgerald but because of his role in reviving Fitzgerald’s reputation years after his death. Wilson’s complacent world was shaken by the piles of corpses he saw during the First World War. Sobered, and with his horizons expanded, he returned home and became a top-flight journalist and critic for Vanity Fair, and then, as The New Republic’s literary editor, helped turn that magazine into “the primary organ in the United States for people who love books. ” He finally found a home at The New Yorker, where, in the words of one of his contemporaries, one picked up the magazine “to see what in God’s name he would be doing next.” As early as the mid-1930s, he had surpassed his early idol H. L. Mencken in both scope and influence as the most acclaimed critic in the country. There were four tumultuous marriages, including one to the brilliant and acerbic novelist and critic Mary McCarthy. (“American letters,” write Wilson’s biographer, “has not seen another alliance so flawed and distinguished.” There were dozens of celebrated affairs and friendships—whether in pursuit of one or the other, in Dabney’s sly phrasing, “he was always in search of a promising student.” His feuds, most notably his famous falling out with the Russian imigri novelist Vladimir Nabokov, dominated the pages of the leading literary periodicals. Given Wilson’s decades-long on and off romance with Marxism, it’s amazing in retrospect that he and the fanatical anti-Communist Nabokov were ever friends at all. Always, always, there was alcohol, astonishing quantities of it. Edmund Wilson, concludes Dabney, “was the only well known literary alcoholic of his generation who was not compromised by his drinking,” but, as Dabney makes clear, “alcohol undermined his marriages.” A Life in Literature humanizes our greatest man of letters without ever trivializing him. The most American of the twentieth century’s great scholars, Wilson spoke “with a pronounced British accent” while bristling at British class snobbishness. The great interpreter of Joyce and Eliot liked to relax with Bing Crosby records; by age 60 he enjoyed sitting down with Frank Sinatra’s album In the Wee Small Hours. He was a model of urbanity and intellectual control to some, but Anais Nin found him “irrational, lustful, violent.” A Seneca Indian woman he befriended while writing Apologies to The Iroquois was so impressed by his sincerity that she offered to make him a member of the tribe and named her son for him. Indeed at times in Dabney’s enormously satisfying account there seem to be several Edmund Wilsons, all of them products of a time, as the author puts it, “culturally narrower than ours,” but “in some respects more literate.” Till the end of his life Edmund Wilson reflected the confidence, vitality and sometimes arrogance of an America that had, with startling swiftness in the history of the western world, become not only important but dominant, a society whose “Mass culture was not yet its primary export.” A Life in Literature makes one nostalgic for such a time and such a man.
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