EDMUND Wilson, one of our country’s supreme men of letters, is sometimes remembered as being autocratic and intimidating. My own memory, not the most intimate, is of a cheerful, corpulent, chuckling gentleman, well-dressed in brown suits and double martinis. As a literary and cultural critic, Wilson produced many volumes on an astonishing range of subjects. And beyond that, every scrap of his diaries, his letters, and his autobiographical writings appears to have been collected and published. He liked to write about himself, his friends, his wives, his love affairs, his days and nights, sometimes formally composed in an essay, sometimes transformed, more or less, into fiction or preserved in his voluminous daily jottings. With the author having left so few gaps, it is not surprising that the present biography by Jeffrey Meyers can be said to be the first devoted to Wilson.
A “first” is something of a rarity for the very productive Meyers, who has practiced his craft in the prevailing scene of biography, in which the lives of writers and the remains of certain flamboyant artists and musicians are examined in one large volume after another. A new letter here or there, an untapped acquaintance, a passing stranger remembering a misdemeanor, might offer what is called in court “a window of opportunity.” In any case, Jeffrey Meyers has produced biographies of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Robert Lowell, Joseph Conrad, and others. In this field study, each new digger will need to explore the previously looted pharaonic tombs in search of an overlooked jewel in the stone eyes prepared for eternity.
If Jeffrey Meyers has broken the tape in the matter of Wilson’s biography, he might not hold the title for long. The scholar Lewis Dabney has been “working on Wilson” for some years, and his labor is known as “authorized.” What that distinction means is not always clear. Is it to be thought of as similar to the Queen of England’s stamp on Pear’s Soap? For a biographer, authorization seems to indicate the choice and support of family or heirs by providing access to papers, letters, drafts, mementos, photographs not available to all and sundry. In fact, almost everything or its equivalent—another photograph, for instance—is available to all and sundry, leaving the family members or others interested in restriction with not much beyond the power of refusing a personal interview.
Papers are sold, deposited, given as gifts or charitable deductions to libraries and other institutions suitable for preservation, cataloging, and reproduction, and they are for the most part open to academics and others with useful credentials. Collections are not meant usually as an honor to the collector but as a source of cultural history. If a biographer sets about his task, writes letters and receives replies about the subject, goes here and there for interviews, visits birth and burial sites perhaps, reads the work and the critical response to it, offers or stresses a few preferences, then with reasonable experience in doctoral programs or independent critical work, a biography can be produced. They are far from being, in most cases, a rich source of income; a lot of time is consumed, and if one is led to wonder just to whom the works are addressed, there is always one answer—the subsequent biographer.
Auden, George Orwell, and T. S. Eliot come to mind as distinguished writers who pleaded that there be no biography. They were like old wanderers on the road in Russian fiction, crying, “Have mercy on me, good folk!” The prayer seemed to have been heard as an impertinence and certainly an alert. Each got his biography and not one but several, the “interpretation” of Eliot’s life flowing down to Tom and Viv on the stage. Scandal, or merely selfish and imprudent behavior, can be found in most lives as surely as the dates and ancestral records. It happened, didn’t it? The unguarded moment or lifelong indiscretions, yes, or most likely, and so the biographer proceeds, as if under oath “to the best of my knowledge.”
In the Victorian period, great figures often shared some of the majesty of the monarch, but even there the authorized memorialist could turn out to be somewhat less awed by the connection than the great one had imagined. Carlyle asked his friend and more or less disciple, the historian James A. Froude, to edit his memorial to Jane and to tell the tale, as it were. Froude wrote: “Carlyle never should have married.” A curious emendation or explosion about the celebrated couple who lived together for forty years and famously reigned at 5 Cheyne Row. This assertion later led the unreliable Frank Harris to report that a doctor had examined Jane in her forties and found her to be “virgo intacta.”
The poet Philip Larkin may have believed he was out of the literary scene by spending a good part of his life acting as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull. But he spoke and complained and wrote letters that achieved his own damnation by way of deeply unpleasant opinions promiscuously expressed. These utterances of ideas and prejudices appear in the recent biography by his sincere admirer, Andrew Motion. Larkin’s contemptuous disapproval of blacks, wogs, foreigners, and so on bleakly enshroud the dour melancholy of his witty, beautiful poems—for the moment.
There have been outstanding biographies in our time, works of unremitting scholarly labor that add to our knowledge, elucidate the texts, and are composed with a refinement of style and judgment that honor the subject and give pleasure to the reader. Although these large undertakings are admirable in documentation and many other qualities, English literature is also enriched by odd, personal, less than definitive, glories—De Quincey’s exhilarating memories of the Lake Poets, Henry James on Hawthorne, and a forgotten book, a quirky biography of Stephen Crane by the poet John Berryman.
“But they are wrong!” biographers in the stacks complain about so many irreplaceable documents of the past. Even Wilson is condescending to the miracle of Boswell’s life of Johnson. Wilson promotes, with reservations, a newer work by Joseph Wood Krutch, itself, of course, superseded. To speak of Dr. Johnson: the heart-rending, brilliant Life of Mr. Richard Savage is etched in falsehoods offered by Savage himself. Johnson’s “life” is a sort of unwitting forgery written with genius, alive after the original, the true Richard Savage, has fallen into dust.
Edmund Wilson, were he living now, would be over one hundred years old. Jeffrey Meyers begins his biography with the chapter heading: “Red Bank, 1895–1907.” Red Bank, New Jersey, was the scene of Wilson’s birth, and for those of a literary inclination he may be said to have put the town on the map. His great-great-grandfather Kimball, on the mother’s side, had married a Mather of New England. Meyers’s first paragraph opens with this fact or stress:
Edmund Wilson’s ancestors served the altars of learning and committed murders in the name of God. He was descended from Cotton Mather, seventeenth-century puritan divine and zealous witch hunter during the Salem trials, and shared many characteristics—intellect, bookishness, linguistic ability, temperament, energy, productivity and multiple marriages—with his eminent forefather. The prodigiously learned Mather, more widely read than any other American of his time, had entered Harvard at the age of twelve and spoke seven languages. Known for his arrogant manner and aggressiveness in controversy, he overtaxed his nerves by indefatigable industry, poured out more than 450 works on an enormous range of subjects and still managed to acquire three wives.
Except for the demonism that captured the extraordinary mind of Cotton Mather with abominable results, Wilson does share the learning and immense productivity of his ancestor and managed to exceed him in the matter of wives by having four. Perhaps the opening of Meyers’s book is not so much to indicate the intellectual brilliance of the two as to alert the reader to a consanguineous “arrogant manner and aggressiveness in controversy.”
During his formative years Wilson grew up with a secure place in upper-middle-class society (a position he was unable to maintain for most of his writing career) and became attached to his ancestral home. He was shy and sensitive, interested in flowers and in drama, fantasy and magic, and always absorbed in books. He felt alienated from his parents, developed a difficult, demanding character, and inherited from his father an irritable disposition and a peremptory mode of discourse.
Wilson was not a New Englander of the seventeenth century in temperament or attraction to religion. When the poet Allen Tate became a Roman Catholic, or a sort of Catholic since he subsequently took advantage of the civil law and obtained two divorces, Wilson wrote him in a letter: “I hope that becoming a Catholic will give you peace of mind; though swallowing the New Testament as factual and moral truth seems to me an awful price to pay for it. You are wrong, and have always been wrong, in thinking I am in any sense a Christian. Christianity seems to me the worst imposture of any of the religions I know of. Even aside from the question of faith, the morality of the Gospel seems to me absurd.”
Jeffrey Meyers’s Edmund Wilson is organized in the conventional chronological manner, which serves well here and follows more or less the organization Wilson employs in his autobiographical volume, A Prelude, which takes him up to 1919, the date of his release from service in World War I. Wilson was not much like other young men. He was clumsy and bulky, short, five feet six inches, immune to the attraction of competitive sports. And yet, at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, he made interesting friendships, learned to admire certain of his teachers, studied among other subjects Latin, Greek, and French without, as Meyers tells us, making especially good grades but nevertheless building the foundation of his interest in languages. He went on to Princeton, an important part of his life, and there wrote and studied, made friends, notably Scott Fitzgerald and the scholar Christian Gauss.
Princeton social life lay in the eating clubs: “These clubs are remarkably uninteresting,” he wrote, and added: “Since I did not play billiards or bridge, there was nothing to occupy me except to sit, as I sometimes did in winter, in front of our big open fireplace and read the papers and magazines.” Odd as Wilson might have been, it does not appear that he felt himself so or in any way suffered from shame or anxiety about his nature or how he might appear to others.
Wilson grew up an only child, but he had a very well-populated family of connections. On his first trip to Europe when he was thirteen years old, the party was large: his parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, each of whose character and fate he describes. The diary of this thirteen-year-old is printed in A Prelude. “I do not recommend for its interest the 1908 diary of my first trip to Europe, but I am printing it for the sake of completeness, and because it provides me with a pretext for explaining certain family matters.”
The existence of the diary is the interesting consideration here. The keeping of diaries and, in Wilson’s case a lifelong journal, are marks of confidence and self-esteem, an early sense of vocation. What one experiences is important to record, even when events are trivial, because the diarist is present. Still, the confidence, the being comfortable with his body and mind, are perhaps clues to the daunting and, in a way, unexpected inclusion in later years of precise, he believed, details of sexual adventures. Wilson’s diaries were not published until after his death, and then they were edited and arranged by decades such as The Twenties, The Thirties, and so on up to The Sixties. They are a remarkable exercise of creative, intellectual, and physical energy produced as if under some self-appointed duty by one who was forever publishing reviews, extended essays, complex books, and undertaking exhausting journeys all over the world. The diaries are casual, perhaps, but they show a workman’s sense of care, craft, and also thrift. Some of the recordings therein, such as those on Scott Fitzgerald and Edna Millay appear intact or, expanded, in book collections.
Throughout his life, here and abroad, Wilson was acquainted with a great number of distinguished and interesting people, and many became attached to him for his charm, his knowledge, his vivid conversation—indeed, the specially high quality of his work and of himself. But there is a latitudinarianism in Wilson, an open spirit, not disclaimed by a certain gruffness at times. As he writes about his daily life, he will give many pages to, for instance, an old farming family, the Munns, to their daily affairs, the various members of the family. The diaries, as we have them, are not different in style from his professional work. The collections of literary articles, written for The New Yorker and other magazines, found in Classics and Commercials and in The Shores of Light and The Bit Between My Teeth, are not diminished by thinking of them as the diaries of a professional man at his desk, with the texts to be examined, the author’s life to be wondered about, in much the same way as he approaches the vast army of real persons who have passed his way.
In Meyers’s biography of Wilson, wives and other ladies, “mistresses” and fumbles, have their place and their more than considerable number of pages. The publications of books are mingled with the calendar of life events and critical judgment is supplied by the reviews lying about in the attic of magazines and newspapers. The “fight” with the IRS over unpaid taxes owes its details to Wilson’s book on the subject. More interesting for literary history and personal display is the “quarrel” with Vladimir Nabokov. The combats with the IRS and Nabokov were comedies, however painful each might have been for the participants.
About the IRS: There was Wilson, a gentleman always broke and with expenses not unwarranted, if often uncovered. He worked more diligently and with more conspicuous concentration than a president in the Oval Office. Wilson must have felt that as an independent, self-employed producer of strange small-business goods he was somehow not a wage earner required to give his deputed allotment with a burdensome regularity. The use of the nation’s taxes for the Cold War and other misappropriations, as he viewed them, probably entered his mind later, although his distaste for militarism, weapons, and so on was sincere and marked by vehemence. The fact probably was that he simply didn’t want to pay his taxes and this led to a pleasing amnesia as the time rolled around and led in the end to grimly calculated penalties and much harassment. Still, the affair was a comedy in the operatic sense, with the distracted, tousled hero and the rogues looking for gold under the bed.
Nabokov’s translation with commentaries of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin was a folly of such earnest magnitude that it might have been conceived in Bouvard and Pécuchet. It was attacked by Slavicists for its wild, peculiar vocabulary in English and for its “original” dissertations on matters of prosody. Wilson was critically dismayed and moved without hesitation to say as much. He felt himself competent in the Russian language and certainly knowledgeable about Pushkin, to whom he had devoted an essay in The Triple Thinkers. Indeed, in that volume he translated “The Bronze Horseman” into “prose with an iambic base.” The translation is a gift to those who wish to receive it. It is instructive and agreeable to read, much in the helpful spirit of the prose translations at the bottom of the page in the Penguin series of poetry in German, Spanish, and other languages. Wilson had embarked on a formidable accomplishment in his study of Russian, which he followed with his astounding assault on Hebrew. In his mid-sixties, we find him in a state of excitation about Hungarian. About this late effort, he was heard to say that he felt like “an old character in Balzac, huffing and puffing to his last liaison.”
Wilson did not show any special modesty or hesitation in his contentious review of Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin; however, the scholar Clarence Brown found Wilson guilty of the “unbelievable hubris of reading Nabokov’s petulant little lessons about Russian grammar and vocabulary, himself blundering all the while.” The pages of literary magazines were stuffed to grogginess with Wilson and Nabokov eloquently engaged about the properties of Russian and English pronunciation, metrical traditions in both languages, personal and literary qualities. John Updike’s review of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters takes its title, “The Cuckoo and the Rooster,” from an Ivan Krylov fable. In the midst of the battle, Nabokov wrote with his characteristic left-handedness, “I have always been grateful to him [Wilson] for the tact he has showed in not reviewing any of my novels while constantly saying flattering things about me in the so-called literary circles where I seldom revolve.”
Wilson reviewed Nabokov’s book on Gogol with a generous degree of plus and a scattering of minus. His reservations are the clue to an irreconcilable difference in the practice of the two writers: the style of composition. Nabokov’s Gogol book is one of the most exhilarating, engaging, and original works ever written by one writer about another. Wilson acknowledges its uniqueness, but he finds himself annoyed by Nabokov’s “poses, perversities and vanities.” These “perversities” are the glory of Nabokov’s writing, and they are the grandiloquent, imaginative cascade of images and diversions Wilson could not normally accept. He dismissed Lolita: “I like it less than anything of yours I have read.” After The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov’s first novel in English, Wilson was more or less “disappointed.”
In Patriotic Gore, a dazzling monument in the national literature, Wilson has a chapter on “American Prose.” It is his idea that American writing abandoned the cultivated standards of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century fell into deplorable exaggeration, rhetorical display, fanciful diversions more or less arising out of the models of the sermon and public addresses. Therein, he writes a shocking appraisal that suggests the impossibility of his finding pleasure and beauty in Nabokov:
There is nothing in the fiction of Hawthorne to carry the reader along: in the narrative proper of The Scarlet Letter, the paragraphs and the sentences, so deliberately and fastidiously written, are as sluggish as the introduction with its description of the old custom house. The voyage of the Pequod in Moby-Dick, for all its variety of incident and its progression to a dramatic end, is a construction of close-knit blocks which have to be surmounted one by one; the huge units of Billy Budd, even more clottedly dense, make it one of the most inappropriate works for reading in bed at night, since it is easy to lose consciousness in the middle of one.
The chapter on Charles Dickens in The Wound and the Bow is one of Wilson’s glowing achievements. It is rich in complexity, original in ideas, moves around the challenge of the novels and of the life of Dickens with a speculative and interrogating ease that is altogether remarkable. The essay is also a perfect example of Wilson’s method as a critic. The title of the collection is suggested by Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, and the theme is that the sufferings and traumas in the lives of artists have a deep connection with the release of creativity.
In the case of Dickens, the “wound” is well known: The family fell on hard times, and the boy was taken out of school and sent to work in a blacking factory, a cruel, degrading, and forever damaging fate. At the end of the day, the boy would visit his family, now residing in Marshalsea Prison due to the father’s debts. Even when the elder Dickens received a legacy, the family did not immediately take the boy out of the factory and return him to school, a lapse he could never forgive. This wound in his youth has naturally been seen as the base for Dickens’s hatred of cruelty to children, his exposure of hypocrisy throughout society, his contempt for knavery, social and intellectual pretense, money grubbing, lying—all embodied in a host of characters, an army invading London. These smarmy characters have their opposites in good, long-suffering, generous little people and sometimes good big people.
It is Wilson’s idea that the bad people/good people duality arose from Dickens’s inability to create characters of mixed motives and believably warring inclinations. He feels the author was approaching this in the unfinished novel, Edwin Drood, which is examined in great detail. Scholarship, recounted by Wilson, has shown that there were other humiliations in Dickens’s past: His grandparents had worked as domestic servants in the household of Lord Crewe; the father of Dickens’s mother was found guilty of embezzlement and fled. The facts about Dickens’s past were hidden by Dickens himself. One of the most interesting stories is told by his son; not long before the author’s death, the family was playing a word game and Dickens came up with: Warren’s Blacking, 30 Strand. No one present understood what he was talking about. So there is a feeling, as the essay maintains, in Dickens himself of a kind of inauthenticity. By an argument too dense and detailed to examine here, the number of murders in the novels, the obsession with the murders indicate in the end that Dickens had murdered himself, a psychological element in Wilson’s study.
So there is the “wound,” but what about the “bow”—Dickens’s style? The breathless flow of adjectives, metaphors, and similes, the description of clothes, houses, streets, alleys, and occupations, the skewered visual genius of one who describes the knobs on an impostor’s head as “looking like the crust of a plum pie.” The perpetual motion of Dickens’s outrageous imagination seems wearisome for Wilson.
Nabokov’s lectures at Cornell on Bleak House seize the novel when it is flying off the page, seize it with delight. The listeners are invited to note the lamplighter as he goes about his rounds, “like an executioner to a despotic king, strikes off the little heads of fire” or the Jellyby children “tumbled about, and notched memoranda of their accidents on their legs, which were perfect little calendars of distress.” On and on the lecturer goes, remarking on names, alliteration, and assonance.
In his essay on American prose, Wilson explains his own preference in literary style. He sees the tragedy of the Civil War as breaking the fabric of romantic exaggeration, embroidery, false eloquence. His models are the stories of Ambrose Bierce and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, among other examples. Sobriety, terseness, lucidity, and precision—and, indeed, his own compositions are wonderful in clarity, balance, movement, language, always at hand to express the large capacity of his mind and experience, whether current fiction, the Russian Revolution, or the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And yet Wilson, for all the practicality of his method, could be unpredictable and never more so than in his embrace of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, another language to learn, as it were. “In conception as well as in execution, one of the boldest books ever written,” he remarks in the essay devoted to the novel in The Wound and the Bow. The essay is somewhat parental in approach as he guides the reader through whatever factual information might be useful, such as the age, occupation, marriage, and children of Earwicker. There are some rebukes, typical of Wilson’s household rules: “And the more daring Joyce’s subjects become, the more he tends to swathe them about with the fancywork of his literary virtuosity.” Still, he brings to Finnegans Wake a beaming affection and solicitude.
Sex, Mary McCarthy, Memoirs of Hecate County, and so on. Mary McCarthy has written in her memoirs of her detestation of Wilson’s body and soul, information provided by her decision to become his wife. She has disguised him in satirical portraits in her fiction, a disguise on the order of sunglasses. They were divorced after a span of seven years during which she bore a son by Wilson and after which she lived, wrote, and added two more husbands. A marriage, however successfully escaped, rankles more in the memory than an old, ferocious bout of the flu, but no matter, her preoccupation is extreme. She had much in common with Wilson, especially in the need to instruct. Some persons are not content to have a deep aversion to another but feel the command to have others share the documented distaste. This is different from jealousy of, for instance, Wilson’s subsequent marriage to the attractive, cosmopolitan, domestically gifted, and loyal Elena Mumm Thornton. It would appear that McCarthy wanted to instruct Elena in the true nature of her husband, instruct Elena and everyone else. Otherwise consider the oddity of the amount of repetitive energy put into denunciation of the past by one so pleasantly situated in life, so rich in experience, friendships, new loves, handsome surroundings—all of that.
What was Wilson thinking of in descriptions in his diaries of his swaying home after an “encounter,” only to awaken the next day and put it all down? He was, of course, thinking of himself, the principal actor in the drama, the “I.” The “I” in a partnership on the bed or couch, or whatever, will, if he is in a mood to leave a record, need to move into the sensations of the “she.” About Marie, a pickup, “Her cunt, however, seemed small. She would not, the first time, respond very heartily, but, the second, would wet herself and bite my tongue, and when I had finished, I could feel her vagina throbbing powerfully.”
Memoirs of Hecate County, a fiction, more or less, with the real-life persons serving in the short and the longer story run down by the biographer, like a policeman tracking suspects. The book was banned, but it has survived and is probably still read because of its interesting reputation for salaciousness and the genuine interest of the book. It was a bizarre composition to add to the stately list of literary and cultural studies already long and commanding when it was published in 1946. “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” the principal, most arresting tale, became the occasion for a good number of amusing, unfavorable reviews. The “princess,” a remote and withholding beauty of the pre-Raphaelite sort for whom the narrator longs, did not arouse a like yearning in many readers. Interest, if not quite yearning, arrives when the princess-frustrated, first-person narrator, an art critic, takes a diversionary spin down to Fourteenth Street and a dance hall called the Tango Casino. There he meets Anna, a “hostess.” She is poor, has spent time in an orphanage, has a brutal husband and a little girl and much misery and deprivation in her life. This background is finely done by Wilson as it flows in and out of the “couplings.” Anna is a “relief”—not much more, if a lot of relief. Her lower-class “hard protruding little thigh bones” seem inadequate when at last the “luxurious” princess is brought to bed. “Her little bud was so deeply imbedded that it was hardly involved in the play, and she made me arrest my movement while she did something special and gentle that did not, however, press on this point, rubbing herself somehow against me—and then came, with a self-excited tremor.”
“Clinical” was applied to the sex writing in the diaries and in the fiction. Cyril Connolly thought the fornications had “a kind of monotony,” and John Updike found the writing “leaden and saturnine”; Raymond Chandler said Wilson managed to make “fornication as dull as a railroad timetable.”
Jeffrey Meyers has produced a long book, 483 pages. There is a lot of Wilson to be sifted, and so there is a lot of Meyers. We might think the biographer has brought together the immense flow of Wilson’s life and work, both of which are scattered in the many publications and collections. Meyers has certainly not made of the object of his labors the worst one could imagine—drinking, vanity, and so on—nor has he been able to create the brilliant, irreplaceable mind and spirit. Too many facts, of whatever laudatory or dismissive nature, destroy the shape of all lives as they are experienced by even the most unreflective in a flashing, quick, and unstable form. But that cannot be the way of biographers. And so we bid farewell to the unlikely presence in our literature of a great thinker, writer, and unusual being. Farewell, until the next time, the Wilson biography Professor Dabney has been working on for lo, these many years.
1997