[TLS] A critic's journey from bohemian to moral barometer

[MGGPillai]

The Times Literary Supplement, London
01 March 2006

Edmund Wilson's human interest
Morris Dickstein


Lewis M. Dabney
EDMUND WILSON
A life in literature
639pp. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $35.
0 374 11312 2


Apart from his collection of long stories, Memoirs of Hecate County
(1946), which was banned for obscenity in the State of New York,
Edmund Wilson’s books were never widely read. But for upwards of half
a century they had an incalculable impact on readers. Several
generations of American intellectuals not only cared what he thought
about literature and politics but used his career as a model. They
admired his restless curiosity, omnivorous reading, sharp literary
judgement, and grasp of culture as a living entity. They envied the
unforced clarity of his style. Wilson was hardly more than a decade
older than the writers who founded Partisan Review in the mid-1930s,
and his deep-dyed American background was different from their
immigrant roots, yet, as Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin testified,
they looked to him as their difficult-to-please mentor. Other sources
of inspiration for the Partisan Review circle were distant figures,
but Wilson actually married into the family when he took Mary
McCarthy, their scarlet princess, as his third wife.

The same chemistry of warm admiration and crusty independence can be
observed in his relations with writers and editors in the 1950s,
especially Roger Straus and Jason Epstein, who encouraged Wilson to
collect his early journalism and reissued his books as upmarket
paperbacks. Not long afterwards, the more literate radicals of the
1960s rediscovered To the Finland Station (1940), his galvanizing
history of Revolutionary ideas and personalities, and were cheered by
his critique of the Cold War, which he saw as a by-product of
America’s imperial designs. In “The Metropolitan Critic”, published
anonymously in the TLS shortly before Wilson’s death in 1972, the
young Clive James took the measure of his whole career, singling out
literary chronicles such as The Shores of Light (1952) as keystones
of the critic’s trade, and paid tribute to the range of his insight
and his deceptively plain style. Finally, a generation of public
intellectuals who emerged in the 1980s, including the historian Sean
Wilentz, the cultural critics Andrew Delbanco and Louis Menand, the
political essayist Paul Berman and the art critic Jed Perl, were
drawn to Wilson’s example as a counter to specialized academic work,
with its restricted language and limited audience, particularly in
the social sciences and literary theory.

As early as 1943, in one of his first autobiographical essays,
“Thoughts on Being Bibliographed”, Wilson expressed his ambivalence
about those young writers who vied for his approval, wanting “to
thrust him into a throne and have him available as an object of
veneration”. Being canonized, he thought, would make him the object
of attack and lock him down to work he had already done. (The attack,
a sweeping and dismissive one, came a few years later, in Stanley
Edgar Hyman’s skewed book on modern criticism, The Armed Vision.)
Wilson’s generation, including friends such as F. Scott Fitzgerald
and Nathanael West, had begun dying off along with their elders in
the Modern movement. “Yeats, Freud, Trotsky, and Joyce have all gone
in so short a time, it is almost like the death of one’s father”,
Wilson wrote in 1941. His actual father, Edmund Wilson senior, was a
brilliant trial lawyer and prosecutor whom Woodrow Wilson considered
appointing to the United States Supreme Court, but he was also a
hypochondriac who spent his later years in a twilight of
psychosomatic fears. Wilson senior had a horror that his only son,
with his rich assortment of interests, would not make his mark, and
so urged him to “concentrate on something”. Wilson replied,
persuasively, that “what I want to do is to try to get to know
something about all the main departments of human thought”.

When his father died, in 1923, young Edmund had already set out to
accomplish this, not in the cloistered world of scholarship but in
the cultural marketplace. He grew famous as a journalist, covering
popular culture from the Ziegfeld Follies, vaudeville and burlesque
to silent movies, and as an up-to-the-minute literary critic,
introducing his readers to difficult Modern writers, such as Joyce,
Proust, Hemingway, T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. He also wrote
poetry, plays and fiction, including a novel set in Greenwich
Village, I Thought of Daisy (1929), in which he tried, like his
college friend Fitzgerald, to sum up the restless mood of the 1920s
and the experience of his generation. Like so many first-rate
critics, Wilson wanted to be a writer, not a conduit of other
people’s writing. But the terse, classical manner that served him so
well in his essays fell flat in his fiction, where it seemed like
evidence of emotional disengagement. He had sometimes patronized
Fitzgerald, who looked to him as his “intellectual conscience”. But
rereading The Great Gatsby as he revised the proofs of his own novel,
Wilson grew depressed to realize “how much better Scott Fitzgerald’s
prose and dramatic sense were than mine. If I’d only been able to
give my book the vividness and excitement, and the technical
accuracy, of his”.

Lewis M. Dabney’s definitive and unfailingly intelligent biography of
Wilson, more than twenty years in the making, is especially good on
the turning points in Wilson’s life – his experience as a soldier in
Europe, which separated him from his narrow, privileged background;
his eager embrace of sex and alcohol in the carnivalesque years of
the 1920s; his conversion to left-wing politics after the stock
market crash, which confirmed his patrician distaste for America’s
“business civilization”; his tempestuous marriage to McCarthy and
withdrawal to Cape Cod; and his explorations of the American past,
his own life, and other cultures – French Canadian, Iroquois,
Haitian, Israeli, Zuni Pueblo – in his last decades. During those
years he no longer felt connected to contemporary life as he
encountered it in the pages of Life magazine, but felt stranded, like
his father, in “a pocket of the past”. Dabney stresses the effects of
Wilson’s Puritan background, but also his serious effort to declass
himself, partly through an allegiance to art and culture. He recoiled
from Christianity but was drawn to Jews, ancient and modern, for
their peculiar moral urgency. His mother was a collateral descendant
of Cotton Mather, his paternal grandfather a learned Presbyterian
minister, yet Wilson made the leap from Victorian gentility to 1920s
bohemianism. He opened himself to fresh experiences, first in the
army hospital corps in France, where he rubbed shoulders with people
he could not have known at boarding school or Princeton. He plunged
into popular culture, which was so remote from his classical
education, into “dissipation” and sexual experimentation (reported in
his journals with almost clinical precision), and then into politics
and Depression journalism, focusing on the travail of ordinary
Americans. His travels across America were followed, in 1935, by a
five-month trip to the Soviet Union, where, during a long hospital
stay, he read Marx and Engels by day, Gibbon at night. He was
exploring radical movements from the French to the Russian
Revolutions, and, after that failed him, began searching for a
republican ideal of virtue and character in figures such as Grant,
Lincoln, and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. If Wilson’s course of
downward mobility at first resembled Orwell’s, by the end he sounded
like Henry Adams, a sardonic observer formed for a different world, a
disaffected link to an almost forgotten past.

Since Wilson’s father left him no money directly, and his mother
tightly controlled the purse strings, he spent much of his adult life
in genteel poverty. Along with his ferocious work ethic, this
constant need for cash helped democratize his point of view. So did
his passionate affair with a working-class woman, Frances Minihan,
between 1927 and 1933. As described in his journals and his sexually
explicit novella The Princess with the Golden Hair, it was the most
tender experience of his life, the notable exception to his many
destructive relationships with women of his own class. She was
utterly devoted to him, tolerant of his affairs, and sexually
uninhibited in a way that delighted him. She loved him
unconditionally and marvelled at his intelligence, but the social gap
kept them from marrying. Instead, Wilson had a breakdown, at almost
the same moment as the larger breakdown of American society.

Wilson’s personal crisis and the relative failure of his novel shook
his confidence as a writer and made him fear that he would go the way
of his father. His parents’ marriage was a union of opposites. His
father grew neurotic, solitary, and reflective, spending his happiest
hours amid the woods and streams of upstate New York; his mother was
gay, social, anti-intellectual, and felt constantly thwarted by her
husband’s self-absorption. As if in protest, she suddenly went deaf
on the way back from a trip to Europe, and she came to think that
brilliant people, her husband and son among them, “always had
something wrong with them”, a notion that may have contributed to the
thesis of one of Wilson’s best collections of essays, The Wound and
the Bow (1941). Largely written during his marriage to McCarthy, the
book was anchored by two long biographical pieces, on Dickens and
Kipling, both studies of the effect of childhood trauma on the
writer’s creative life.

Wilson himself was an unhappy child, shy, bookish and socially
awkward. All his life he was a disaster as a lecturer or teacher. “He
was an uncomfortable man, uncomfortable with himself”, according to
his friend Isaiah Berlin. Edna St Vincent Millay, who epitomized the
sexual freedom of Greenwich Village, relieved Wilson of his virginity
in 1920, when he was twenty-five, and he spent decades making up for
lost time. Though never a theorist, he grew as hungry for new ideas
as for new sexual encounters. His work became an adventure in
crossing boundaries: between national literatures, between the
classics and the moderns, between journalism and criticism,
literature and history, writing and politics. His formation as a
critic was Victorian. An early reading of Hippolyte Taine’s History
of English Literature introduced him to the historical approach to
literature in terms of time and place, narrative and portraiture.
From Wilson’s celebrated study of modern writers Axel’s Castle
(1931) onwards, he never wavered from this model, even when the new
technical criticism made it unfashionable. The great nineteenth-
century critics, including Taine, Michelet, Georg Brandes and Matthew
Arnold, oriented Wilson’s work towards history and biography, but his
own mentors were crisp cynics like Shaw and Mencken, who favoured
witty broadsides over lengthy tomes, and brought criticism closer to
the common language. Concision became Wilson’s watchword. From his
teacher at Princeton, Christian Gauss, he learned the Coleridgean
principle that “every word, every cadence, every detail, should
perform a definite function in producing an intense effect”. And he
praised George Saintsbury and Ford Madox Ford “because they found out
how to manage a fine and flexible English prose on the rhythms of
informal speech rather than on those of literary convention”. As
early as the late 1920s, Wilson worried that criticism was growing
too abstract and academic. As Literary Editor of the New Republic, he
groused to one his reviewers, R. P. Blackmur – a formidable
intellectual at twenty-five – that “there has lately been such a
reaction against the impressionistic criticism of the day before
yesterday that there is a tendency entirely to eliminate any
intimation of what the work under consideration looks, sounds, feels,
or smells like”. The New Criticism, a discursive, pedagogical
offshoot of Modernism, did not yet exist, but Wilson was already
instructing it in the exigencies of literary journalism, ensuring
that scholastics would dismiss him as an “introductory critic”
writing for the uninitiated.

Wilson’s intellectual ambitions went far beyond book reviewing. He
looked to “general ideas” to place each book in a larger context –
social, biographical, comparative. Just as he’d turned to French
Symbolism as a way of framing his approach to the writers considered
in Axel’s Castle, he relied on a psychoanalytic template for The
Wound and the Bow and a Marxist framework in his other major
collection of essays, The Triple Thinkers (1938). By interweaving
personalities and ideas, he lent drama to the development of Marxism
in To the Finland Station. But he made use of these systems in the
most undogmatic manner imaginable, never subsuming his feeling for
art or forcing his response to the works themselves. Mining Dickens’s
fragment of a memoir, especially his early experience in the blacking
factory, and working through every one of his novels, Wilson created
the modern Dickens out of whole cloth, just as he rescued Kipling
from being dismissed as a bluff Imperialist. His Dickens was much
darker, more haunted, his Kipling more damaged and divided than their
contemporaries could have realized. All through his essay, Wilson
blends Marx with Freud to make sense of Dickens’s class consciousness:

“His behaviour toward Society, in the capitalized sense, was
rebarbative to the verge of truculence; he refused to learn its
patter and its manners; and his satire on the fashionable world comes
to figure more and more prominently in his novels. Dickens is one of
the very small group of British intellectuals to whom the opportunity
has been offered to be taken up by the governing class and who have
actually declined that honour.”

Wilson goes on to show how Dickens, like his admirer Dostoevsky,
gained from his “social maladjustment”, for it gave him a privileged
vantage point outside or between the social classes. Elsewhere, he
sees how writers, including some of his Princeton contemporaries,
lost their edge when they married rich women and settled back into a
life of comfort. Writing in the throes of the Depression, he
cherishes his own independent position.

Dabney is a sure guide to every stage of a long career, but never
more than in the early 1940s, when Wilson “entered upon several years
without a regular job or salary, adrift in a nation at war, where
intellectual life was on the back burner”. He had broken with the New
Republic over its support for America’s entry into the war; he
thought of the owners as British agents. His marriage to McCarthy was
turbulent, perhaps violent on his part, and punctuated by her
breakdowns and repeated efforts to leave him. His drinking led to
volatile mood swings and towering rages, though it never interfered
with his writing. The couple behaved like two prima donnas sharing
the stage, or, as David Laskin describes them, “two tyrants under a
single roof, always amazed that they had failed to cow or convince
the other”.

Wilson’s life shifted from the city to the house he bought on Cape
Cod and eventually to his ancestral stone house in upstate New York,
where he would retreat each summer into an earlier world. He began
writing for the New Yorker, longer and less timely pieces than those
he had done for the New Republic, and he watched his generation
unravel. He edited Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon,
and uncollected essays, The Crack-Up, which did much to restore
Fitzgerald’s faded reputation. “So began the flood of retrospection”,
says Dabney, “that included portraits of teachers, family, and close
literary friends.”

And so began Wilson’s work on Patriotic Gore (1962), his
retrospective account of American writers in the decades after the
Civil War. It proved to be an ambitious and idiosyncratic book,
perhaps 200 pages too long and missing the narrative arc of To the
Finland Station, but it was full of revealing things about neglected
or forgotten writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin and
Mary Chesnut, whom academics would discover only years later.

With the help of much unpublished material – including some 70,000
letters among the Edmund Wilson papers at Yale – Dabney gives a
balanced account of even the most contentious episodes of Wilson’s
life, including his friendship and acrimonious quarrel with Vladimir
Nabokov. They bonded and broke over Russian literature, but the ill-
will went back to Wilson’s dislike of Lolita and perhaps some envy of
the fame and wealth the book brought its author, whom Wilson had long
sponsored. The immediate occasion was Wilson’s review of Nabokov’s
altogether perverse edition of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, but it led
Wilson to overreach his own knowledge of Russian, as it led Nabokov,
who had admired Wilson’s essays, to denounce his “old-fashioned,
naive, and musty method of human-interest criticism”. Here Nabokov
unwittingly put his finger on what was strongest about Wilson’s work.
Though his mask as a critic was impersonal, judicial, he always
reached for the human centre of a book, and always, as Isaiah Berlin
pointed out, in a personal way. While other critics wrote “just
intelligent sentences”, Berlin told Dabney, “everything Wilson wrote
was filled with some kind of personal content”. Frank Kermode took
note of his ability to proceed from “passionate identification with
the work under discussion” to “detached appraisal” and “historical
inference, which does not neglect the primary response”.

Dabney is scrupulously fair about Wilson’s life and character but
finds it difficult to say anything unkind about the work. He defends
even his 1947 attack on Kafka, which, he points out, “has been said
to mark the outer limits of his sensibility”. (The same could be said
of his baffling rejection of Lolita.) Lewis Dabney suggests that
Wilson “was reacting against the Kafka cult” and that the hero’s
helplessness “was remote from Wilson’s Protestant heritage and –
though anticipated in Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ – not in
the American grain”. Wilson was put off by his sense of Kafka as “a
man constitutionally lacking in vitality”. Along with Max Brod,
Kafka’s loyal but obtuse friend, he wonders why Kafka was unable to
escape the power of his parents. “Why should he have allowed his
father so to crush and maim his abilities?” Wilson’s own fortitude,
strengthened by Hebrew Scripture, kept him working through long
periods of illness and unhappiness. Yet only a few years earlier, in
The Wound and the Bow, he had shown how great writing could be bound
up with neurosis, weakness and early damage. That book included one
of the best essays ever written about Hemingway, gauging the terror
at the heart of his best work and its dissolution in the bluster and
affirmations of his later writing. Wilson dismissed the
“politicos” (read: Marxist critics) who accused Hemingway (as they
accused Kafka) of “an indifference to society”. “His whole work is a
criticism of society: he has responded to every pressure of the moral
atmosphere of the time, as it is felt at the roots of human
relations, with a sensitivity almost unrivalled.” This could not only
be transferred to Kafka but read as a credo for Edmund Wilson’s own
form of “human-interest criticism”. For him, the critic, like the
artist, is a sensitive barometer of the moral weather of society,
best measured not in general terms but in the atmosphere of feeling,
the minute pressure of actual human relationships.

Copyright 2006 The Times Literary Supplement Ltd.