Edmund Wilson: A Biography
By Jeffrey Meyers
Houghton Mifflin, 554 pages, $35
It may well be that few people born after 1950 have heard of Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), the literary critic whom Gore Vidal called “America’s best mind.” But Wilson’s curiosity, energy and intelligence were formidable, and he was as colorful as he was distinguished. Though physically unimpressive at 5-foot-6 and 200 pounds, he lost his virginity to the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and later married the beautiful and brilliant novelist Mary McCarthy. He knew D.H. Lawrence, Igor Stravinsky and Charlie for whom he wrote a ballet. Guests at his upstate New York home included Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Parker and W.H. Auden.
A vigorous stylist who wrote well on many subjects, Wilson understood Dickens, Henry James and Kipling better than any previous reader. With extraordinary skill, his “Axel’s Castle” (1931) evaluated writers like Proust, Yeats and Joyce . His “To the Finland Station” (1940)–which discussed the origins of Marxism and the relevance of Marx to contemporary social and economic woes–moved so sharply from the inner to the outer world that readers coming to the book from “Axel’s Castle” thought it written by a different hand.
Wilson’s youthful wish was “to know something about all the main departments of human thought.” A voracious student of languages, he learned Greek and Latin at prep school, French and Italian at college and German, Russian, Hebrew and Hungarian afterward. Though he could never speak these tongues gracefully, he read them all with skill. Nor was he an Ivory Tower escapist. As a nurse during World War I, he treated victims of mustard gas and shell shock, which led both to his pacifism and his lifelong sympathy for the oppressed. In different decades he championed unemployed factory hands and the Quebecois and the Iroquois Indians.
Wilson’s attainments seem all the more impressive when we understand the obstacles he had to hurdle. His father was a neurotic lawyer whose time with his only child was limited by bouts of severe depression. His strong-willed mother withheld love from him because his large head tore her vaginal walls during birth.
A heavy drinker and a patron of brothels, Wilson also suffered a nervous breakdown and was plagued by an ongoing fear of insanity. Yet these burdens, along with his recurring financial woes and his losing fight against the IRS (he filed no tax returns from 1946 to 1955), never slowed his production; this author of 50 books was a stranger to writer’s block.
But how much of his resolve, robustness and moral passion was either misdirected or misapplied? One needn’t read far into Jeffrey Meyers’ magisterial biography to see that Wilson was an arrogant, combative man whose need to be right strained every close personal tie he ever had. He never healed an early split, caused by political differences, with novelist John Dos Passos. In 1965, he sparked what Meyers calls “the most notorious literary quarrel of the century” by attacking Vladimir Nabokov’s translation of Alexander Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin.” The recurring problems that beset his three children stemmed largely from his insensitivity as a father.
Wilson failed most grievously as a husband. He cheated on every woman he was close to, including his four wives, and Meyers judges this romancer of women to have been “one of the great literary fornicators of all time.” He enacted his final adultery as a gouty elder of 75 with a woman 37 years his junior–who seduced him. Souring the comedy of this encounter was his lifelong practice of recounting in his diary the details of his sexual bouts.
Whenever he got bored, this jowly foot fetishist would return to the bed of Frances, a Brooklyn waitress and jailbird’s wife. Wilson rated his own needs first, and the lower-class Frances was unlikely to challenge him. Perhaps Mary McCarthy had it right when she called Wilson “selfish, brutal, and dishonest.”
On the credit side, Wilson put his brilliance to good use. He helped younger writers get published. Possessed of a gentle, wondering side, he loved magic tricks. And he could leaven his dogmatism with a joke. Voicing his dislike of Carl Sandburg’s biography of our 16th president, he called it “the cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth.”
Meyers does justice to his mercurial, complex subject. A diligent scholar, he inspected FBI files, read suppressed passages of book manuscripts and interviewed scores of people associated with Wilson. Though no idolater, he presents Wilson’s failings as a writer and a teacher, a friend and a family man, without disrespect or derision. Meyers’ sensibility, tact and skill in absorbing an abundance of material and then using it to find the shape and direction of Wilson’s life lends the biography distinction. Were he around to read it, the old curmudgeon himself might have chuckled in approval.
