I MET EDMUND WILSON, I think, sometime in the early spring of 1946, after I had come back from Moscow to finish the job I was doing at the British Embassy in Washington. I had been in Washington during the war years, and my friend the Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov, who, like his cousin Vladimir, was a friend of Wilson’s, thought that he might like to meet me (I had expressed my intense admiration for Axel’s Castle and The Triple Thinkers) and talk about Russian literature and other topics. Wilson refused. He was convinced that any British official could want to meet him only in order to rope him into the British propaganda machine. He was acutely isolationist: his Anglophobia, which in any case had been fairly acute, was increased by the reflection that England had once again managed to drag America into a dreadful and totally unnecessary war, and he had no wish to meet any representative of that country. However, once the war was over he evidently decided that he was no longer in any danger of being inveigled into pro-British activities, and asked me to lunch at the Princeton Club in New York.
I was, I own, rather taken aback by his appearance. I do not know what I had imagined a distinguished literary critic to look like, but there stood before me a thickset, red-faced, pot-bellied figure, not unlike President Hoover in appearance; but once he began to talk, almost before we had sat down, I forgot everything save his conversation. He spoke in a curiously strangled voice, with gaps between his sentences, as if ideas jostled and thrashed about inside him, getting in each other’s way as they struggled to emerge, which made for short bursts, emitted staccato, interspersed with gentle, low-voiced, legato passages. He spoke in a moving and imaginative fashion about the American writers of his generation, about Dante, and about what the Russian poet Pushkin had meant to him. He described his visit to the Soviet Union in 1935 and the appalling effect which this had had upon him, for, like many other members of the American intelligentsia, he had once tended to idealise the Communist regime.
The climax of his visit was a meeting with Prince D. S. Mirsky. Mirsky was a brilliant, highly original émigré writer in English on Russian literature who had become a convert to Marxism in England; he then returned to Russia and soon after this published a book denouncing British writers and intellectuals, some of whom had befriended him. Wilson found him in Moscow in a very low and wretched state (two years later he was arrested and sent to a camp, where he died). Mirsky’s downfall and pathetic condition had made an indelible impression on Wilson, and he spoke long and bitterly about the passing of his own political infatuation. He then talked about Russian literature in general, and particularly about Chekhov and Gogol, as well as I have ever heard anyone talk on any literary topic. I was completely fascinated; I felt honoured to have met this greatly gifted and morally impressive man. We became friends. I did not return to the United States until 1949, when I went to teach at Harvard, and stayed a night with Wilson at Wellfleet, where he was living with his wife Elena. I went to see them both on subsequent visits in the 1950s.
In 1954 he came to England and telephoned virtually from the airport to tell me that he wished to come to Oxford and stay with me for a day or two. I welcomed this. Since I was not married then, I was living in All Souls College. Wilson did stay two nights with me in a not very attractive college room (which he describes with characteristic acerbity in his diary).1 He was in a splendidly Anglophobic mood. On the first morning, before lunch, we went for a walk to look at the colleges. When we passed Christ Church, he looked at the decaying building of the Library (not then yet refaced, as it would be later, with the assistance of the Rockefeller Foundation) and said, ‘Oh, most of these buildings look in very poor shape – I think they’re actually falling down’, and looked delighted. ‘I think that’s the case with a lot of England,’ he went on, ‘I think your country deserves a bit of this.’
He then launched into a sweeping attack on academic life and academics in general as murderers of all that was living and real in literature and art – classical, medieval, modern. I asked him whether there were no academics he liked or admired. He said that there were indeed a few: one was Christian Gauss, his teacher at Princeton, whose lectures he had greatly admired and whom he had liked and deeply respected as a man; another was Norman Kemp Smith, who had been a professor of philosophy at Princeton in his day and was now living in retirement in Scotland. (Wilson had gone to see him during a visit to England in 1945, the visit on which the pages about England in Europe without Baedeker were founded.) Apart from these he could for the moment think of no one.
The diatribe continued (I had no idea of whether this was a passing mood, induced by Oxford, or a permanent attitude): he could wish for no worse fate for anyone than to hold a job at a university, particularly if it were connected with literary studies; he had heard that Archibald MacLeish contemplated becoming, or had become, a professor somewhere, was it Harvard? It was a fate that that ass deserved (I had read Wilson’s devastating parody, ‘The Omelet of A. MacLeish’,1 and had realised that this poet was not one of his favourites). Then there had been the ridiculous Ted Spencer at Harvard, who tried to seek him out but had died before any relationship could be attempted; and there was also Spencer’s protégé, Harry Levin – a clever man, and widely read, with interesting things to say, who had had it in him to become something if only he had not chosen to make a career at Harvard, which had turned him into a pedantic schoolmaster, buried in trivial detail, a Dryasdust, who turned everything into dust, a kind of coloured dust. ‘Oh, but I can’t explain it,’ he said, ‘I talked to him about Howells – he doesn’t think Howells is any good at all.’ He went on to say that Harry Levin was, in spite of all this, not a bad fellow; he could be highly perceptive and interesting, but he was ridiculous about Howells. I was under the impression that they were friends (as I feel sure in fact they were), and was taken aback by these remarks about Levin, whom I admired and whose essay on Stendhal I thought a remarkable piece of work. But he would not relent. His next target was Perry Miller; then C. S. Lewis; he went on and on in a ferocious fashion. Perhaps Tennyson talked about Churton Collins in this way when he called him a louse in the locks of literature. I saw no reason to doubt that he spoke of me in similar fashion; it was obviously part of him; I loved him as he was.
He asked me whether it was to be his fate to meet more academics at lunch or dinner. I relieved his fears about lunch by saying the guests would be Stephen Spender and another man of letters (I cannot remember who); in the evening, however, if he wished to dine in All Souls as he had suggested, he might well meet some academics. Would he prefer to dine in a restaurant? No, he said, he wished to plumb the depths of old, decayed, conservative English academic life in its death-throes. I remember his words: ‘It can’t be long now,’ he said ominously, ‘I think we’re in at the kill.’ I did not ask him to develop this theme, but tried to divert him on to other subjects. No good. He said that in England – London – writers and the like formed little cliques, jealous coteries engaged in keeping each other out; there was no real literary world; Evelyn Waugh could not be in a room with Peter Quennell, a perfectly decent man of letters; both had spoken ill of Cyril Connolly; Auden was ostracised; nobody had a kind word to say about MacNeice or Angus Wilson; and so on and so on. Most of this seemed absurdly misconceived to me. To get him off this topic I asked him – unwisely, as it turned out – what his last visit to England had been like. But by then it was time for lunch. He seemed to enjoy the company, denounced the writers of the Partisan Review, said that Philip Rahv was able enough but, like the rest of them, used literature to make political points, and praised V. S. Pritchett as one of the few critics whose thought was free and who had something to say.
After lunch he reminded me of my earlier question and told me what had occurred during his previous London visit. He had arrived as a kind of war correspondent, and the wartime British Ministry of Information had detached the well-known publisher Hamish Hamilton, who was then a member of that ministry and was half American, to look after him. Hamilton had organised a party of eminent members of the British literary establishment. According to Wilson, he saw at the party, among others, T. S. Eliot, one or two Sitwells, Cyril Connolly, Siegfried Sassoon, Harold Nicolson, Peter Quennell and, I think, Rosamond Lehmann. He wished to talk to none of these. ‘T. S. Eliot’, he said, ‘is a gifted poet, but somewhere inside him there is a scoundrel. When I see him, which is not often, I just cannot take him. I do not wish to meet him, although I think some of his poetry is wonderful – it repels me, but it is poetry.’ The Sitwells he dismissed as being of no interest. The only person there that he was able to speak to was Compton Mackenzie – they swapped stories about life before and during the First World War, and he found the appearance, manner and conversation of the old buccaneer quite entrancing.
I gradually realised that there is a sense in which Wilson belonged to an earlier generation than the literary intelligentsia of England at that time; that the kind of people he preferred were the Edwardians – full-blooded, masculine men of letters, with sometimes coarse (and even to some degree philistine) but vital personalities – and that this was the world to which Compton Mackenzie truly belonged. Desmond MacCarthy had once described to David Cecil and myself a typical dinner he had attended some years before the First World War in a London club – the Reform, or it may have been the Travellers’. Present were Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, Max Beerbohm, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Arnold Bennett and Bernard Shaw, as well as Henry James and the young Hugh Walpole. There was no talk about literature or the arts, or friendship or nature or morality or personal relations or the ends of life – the kinds of things that were discussed in Bloomsbury. There was not a touch of anything faintly aesthetic – the talk was hearty, concerned with royalties, publishers, love-affairs, absurd adventures, society scandals, and anecdotes about famous persons, accompanied by gusts of laughter, puns, limericks, a great deal of mutual banter, jokes about money, women and foreigners, and a great deal of drink. The atmosphere was that of a male dining-club of vigorous, amusing, sometimes rather vulgar friends. These were the best-known authors of the time, the ‘blind leaders of the blind’ so much disliked and disapproved of by Bloomsbury. It seemed to me that Edmund Wilson, for all his unerring sense of quality and his moral preoccupations, had an affinity with these masters. I do not think that he would have greatly enjoyed tea with Virginia Woolf or an evening with Lytton Strachey.
Hence the literary party in London did not suit him at all, and, after a few perfunctory words with E. M. Forster about Jane Austen, he told Hamish Hamilton that he wanted to get away from it as soon as possible. After the conversation with Compton Mackenzie he swiftly withdrew, to the disappointment, so Hamilton told me, of some of those invited. All he wished to do was to go to Scotland and see his mentor, Kemp Smith. Hamish Hamilton, who had probably never heard of this Kantian scholar, did his best to arrange for the journey to Scotland. Wilson did manage to see him – he told me that he had had a good time with him, that they had talked about the old times with great pleasure and had discussed the decline in the standards of European scholarship. Then he came back to London to be met at the station by the courteous and indefatigable Hamilton, who tried to persuade him to get into a taxi to go to his hotel. It was evening; Wilson had become convinced (so he told me) that what Hamilton was mainly anxious to do was to prevent him from seeing the prostitutes who then walked the streets of London in exceptional numbers (so he had been told). He did his best to evade Hamilton, for whom he had by then conceived one of his violent, irrational dislikes (by this time reciprocated by Hamilton, who told me on a later occasion that Wilson was one of the most unpleasant and difficult people he had ever encountered). Wilson did get into a taxi, but, by God, he got out of it after five minutes, and he did walk the streets, particularly Park Lane, and he did see prostitutes, and he felt that he had scored off the officials who had been sent to escort him, almost, he thought, in the manner of the Russian secret police.
I tried to persuade him that all that Hamish Hamilton had attempted to do was to extend the kind of courtesies which cultural institutions thought to be his due. Wilson would have none of that: he was certain that an attempt was being made to bear-lead him in London, to prevent him from meeting unsuitable people whom in fact he might have liked to meet. This conviction – that there was a general conspiracy in England, of a Soviet type, not to let him meet unsuitable people – obsessed him, and was to surface later in Oxford. I asked him if he had disliked every literary person he had met in London. He said, ‘No, I like Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly best.’ Why? ‘Because I thought they were so nasty.’ Perhaps this referred to later meetings, because I do not know if Evelyn Waugh was in London during the war, in which he served as a soldier. He had also taken to Angus Wilson because he reminded him of the heartfelt human feelings of the kind of Americans with whom he felt at home. It was the aestheticism, the prissiness, the superciliousness, the cliquishness, the thin, piping voices, the bloodlessness, the preoccupation with one’s own emotions both in life and in literature – all of which he (no less than D. H. Lawrence) attributed to Bloomsbury – that irritated him. He thought the whole of English literary life was infected by this. I don’t know what he would have said about J. B. Priestley – I think that he was, perhaps, below his angle of vision. He could not bear the thought of the Huxleys, Aldous or Julian.
Evening fell, and it was time for dinner in the common room of All Souls College. He had me on one side and the senior fellow dining, the historian A. L. Rowse, on the other. He hardly spoke to Rowse, although Rowse tried to speak to him. He turned to me brusquely and engaged in conversation about mutual friends in America – Justice Felix Frankfurter and his wife, Nicolas Nabokov and his wives, the playwright Sam Behrman, Mary McCarthy (to whom Wilson had been married), Conrad Aiken, Arthur Schlesinger, Judge Learned Hand and others. Reluctantly he turned to his other side and allowed himself to be addressed by Rowse. He answered in monosyllables. After coffee, when we came back to my rooms, he complained that a flood of British nationalist propaganda had been poured over him by Rowse at dinner, that he had not come to Oxford to be made a victim of cultural chauvinists. I think that on a later occasion, when Rowse went to see him in the United States, they may have got on a little better – but on this occasion he was in a grumpy mood and would not let up.
He said that he realised why the All Souls college servants removed the plates so rapidly, hardly letting him finish a single dish – he spoke of a Barmecide feast – it was because they were acutely class-conscious, hated their masters, wanted to serve them as gracelessly as possible and get away from their hated presence as quickly as they could. He had noticed, he said, that class-consciousness was clearly rampant in this ancient establishment. I did not argue with him – he was, I think, past convincing on this and most other points. What he said was characteristic wonderful nonsense, of course. The majority of scouts (servants) in Oxford were certainly then, and perhaps are still, among the most conservative of its inhabitants; they were conscious carriers of ancient college traditions, old retainers if ever there were such, who for the most part – certainly at that time – refused to be unionised, on the ground that this was an insult to what they conceived to be their status and very special function. The servants at All Souls exemplified this type almost to the point of caricature.
It was plain that Wilson on that day – as on many others – lived in a world of angry fantasy, particularly in the case of anything British, and although I was devoted to him, felt deep admiration and respect for him to his dying day, and remain intensely proud of the friendship that bound us, I knew that it was useless to argue with him once he got the bit between his teeth. This was certainly the case during his stay with me in Oxford. After dinner I had invited my colleague David Cecil, the novelist Iris Murdoch and her husband the critic John Bayley, and the philosopher Stuart Hampshire to meet him. It was not a happy evening. He took against everyone in the room. He mistook Bayley for the critic Humphry House (with whom he might well have got on) and virtually ignored him and everyone else. He became listless, answered in monosyllables, gurgled, drank a great deal of whisky, and looked with hateful eyes at everyone. Although Iris, who is the soul of courtesy and kindness, tried to make things go, and John Bayley, a beguiling talker, did his best, the old bear remained in his lair, glaring balefully from time to time and trying to drown his boredom in drink. The evening came to an early end. At the end of it he burst out about these feeble creatures – aristocrats who dabbled in literature were useless; the dons were all bloodless monks, cut off from all that mattered. Why could I not have invited one of the few academics with guts, like A. J. P. Taylor, whom he wanted to meet because he liked his radical polemics? I said that I knew and liked Taylor, despite a slight froideur caused by a somewhat disparaging review he had written of a small book I had just published, but that I would gladly arrange a meeting between them – and did so on the following day.
Taylor was most amiable to us both. Wilson said that he had quite enjoyed his visit to Taylor’s rooms in Magdalen College. But then Taylor had taken him to a lecture by Steven Runciman on a Byzantine subject, which bored him stiff; once again he heard the over-refined and, to him, deeply depressing accents of Bloomsbury, those high, thin voices which he could not bear. (I do not know how many of these voices he had ever actually heard.) I also arranged for him to see the Jewish historian Cecil Roth, because at this time he took an increasing interest in Jewish history and was learning Hebrew – it was not long before the publication of his book on the Dead Sea Scrolls. That visit also went well, particularly as I had warned him that Roth was something of a bore, though a worthy and learned antiquary; those mildly disparaging words were enough to make Wilson like him. He muttered something about being kept from people he admired by persons (myself) who for some reason decided to ‘blackball’ them – more fantasy, more mild paranoia.
Once he had formed a sociological and psychological hypothesis, he held on to it grimly with a kind of pleased deliberate perversity, against all evidence. He told me that the only persons he had truly enjoyed meeting in England, apart from his old friend Sylvester Gates, whom he had known at Harvard many years before, were Connolly (again because what he said was so malicious), Taylor, Roth and Angus Wilson. The rest seemed to him repellent. ‘And Compton Mackenzie? And Kemp Smith?’ Yes, indeed, these too, but that was all. The most hateful figure to him in England, he said, was Winston Churchill, who was nothing but a typical low-grade American journalist. If it were not for Sylvester Gates and myself he would not have come to England. Did Oxford still contain a ridiculous puffed-up fellow called Maurice Bowra, whom he had met with Gates and who, for all his knowledge of languages, had no understanding whatever of literature? He loved literature – that was evident – a pity that he had nothing of interest to say about it; he gathered that he was a friend of mine: how could this be? His conversation was banal and empty to a degree, just a lot of shouting. He could not understand how such writers as Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh could be said to owe so much to this inflated philistine – they were at least gifted, he was a caricature John Bull. The diatribes went on. By this time he had drunk a great deal and his eyes were almost closed. I managed to get him to his bedroom, not without some difficulty.
Next day he was serene and gentle. We talked about Russian writers, about his life in Talcottville, which he pressed me to visit with him, about Hebrew tenses and the structure of the Hungarian language (which he contemplated acquiring), about his intense admiration for the poetry of W. H. Auden, about the interesting position of the New Yorker in American cultural life, about the monstrously patronising attitude of Europeans, not only the despicable English but the French and even the Italians, towards American culture, towards such great poets as Walt Whitman and such prose writers as Herman Melville and Henry James – they were recognised, but the fact that they were Americans had always, it seemed to him, to be explained away or apologised for. But America would show them. There was a wonderful generation of young technologists and engineers coming up in America, confident, gifted, clear-headed, uncluttered men in thin drill suits (I remember this odd description), inventors of excellent new gadgets; these men were building a new, fresh, highly practical civilisation that would respond to new human needs and would open prospects of wonderful new comforts of life, and this would supersede the decay and self-conceit and squalor of a fast-declining, petty-minded European culture.
Nevertheless, these boutades of his were less violent than on the day before, and rarer. Wilson was in a calmer and happier mood, quite relaxed. He explained that his life was, and always had been, literature and writers, that music1 and even painting meant less, even though they did mean a great deal: Malraux was marvellous on sculpture. Nothing had contributed so much to his ideas about life and art – to what seemed to him to matter, politics and all – as the great Russian masters. Pushkin had begun to move him more than Shakespeare, but not more than Dante; what terrible nonsense Orwell had written about Tolstoy and Lear. He said that his distaste for the English had been increased by the knock-kneed creatures he met in London and Oxford. Did I know his friend Jason Epstein? He was, he thought, himself misanthropic enough, but Epstein outdid him – his dislike of mankind was phenomenal. He liked Epstein, and liked that in him.
After which he left. It could not be regarded as a successful visit. In spite of this, he did come back to Oxford with his wife Elena to stay for a couple of days with me and my wife – by that time we were living in a house of our own – and I took care not to invite Oxford academics to meet him, however great their eagerness and admiration. I preferred to meet him in Boston, London and New York.
He was, in my eyes, a great critic, and a noble and moving human being, whom I loved and respected and wanted to have a good opinion of me; I was deeply touched when, not long before he died, he made me inscribe a line from the Bible with a diamond upon the window-pane of his house in Wellfleet, a privilege reserved for friends. The line was a verse from Isaiah, with whom, he insisted, I had obviously identified myself – another ineradicable fantasy, like his obstinate insistence that I had written as I did about Tolstoy only because I, too, was a fox, longing to be, indeed believing myself to be, a hedgehog. Nothing said to deny this absurdity made the faintest impression on him. He knew that ‘like all Jews’ I sought unity and a metaphysically integrated organic world; in fact, I believe the exact opposite. The constructions of his inner world withstood all external evidence. He was prey to wild fantasies, to absurd conjectures, to irrational hatreds and loves. The fact that my prejudices largely coincided with his own was, of course, an immense source of sympathy and endearment. It was perhaps this more than anything else that brought us together.
His judgements were often erratic, and he was prey to delusions, but his humanity and integrity were total. When he went off on a tangent it might end anywhere. His review in the New Yorker of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was the best and most understanding, I think, in any language; but his speculation in a later article on the meaning of various names and symbols in the novel was crazy to a degree.1 He managed to combine profound insight and extraordinary vision into cultures not his own with turbulent prejudices, hatreds and a great deal of pure nonsense; he sometimes misfired totally and missed the target by miles; yet most of his denunciations were deserved. He was the last major critic in the tradition of Johnson, Sainte-Beuve, Belinsky and Matthew Arnold; his aim and practice were to consider works of literature within a larger social and cultural frame – one which included an absorbed, acutely penetrating, direct, wonderfully illuminating view of the author’s personality, goals and social and personal origins, the surrounding moral, intellectual and political worlds, and the nature of the author’s vision – and to present the writer, the work and its complex setting as interrelated, integrated wholes. He told me during his visit that the modern tendency towards purely literary scholarship, towards an often deliberate ignoring of the texture of the writer’s life and society, for him lacked all genuine content. I agreed with him, fervently. Art shone for him, but not by its own light alone. He is gone, and has not left his peer.
1 Edmund Wilson, The Fifties, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1986), 135 (entry for 20–21 January 1954).
1 New Yorker, 14 January 1939, 23–4.
1 I once asked him, I cannot think why, whether he liked Wagner. He said, I think, ‘Yes, yes, I did, yes, when I was much younger, but it is not the kind of stuff I can listen to now.’
1 The two articles are ‘Doctor Life and his Guardian Angel’, New Yorker, 15 November 1958, 201–26, and (with Barbara Deming and Evgenia Lehovich) ‘Legend and Symbol in “Doctor Zhivago” ’, Nation 188 no. 16 (18 April 1959), 363–73, and Encounter 12 no. 6 (June 1959), 5–16; both reprinted in Wilson’s The Bit between My Teeth: A Literary Chronicle of 1950–1965 (London, [1966]).