The man who knew too much

Edmund Wilson had four wives, dozens of affairs, a drinking problem -- and the sharpest critical mind of his generation.

By Allen Barra

Oct 4, 2005 | Two distinct Edmund Wilsons exist concurrently in American letters. The first is the eminent literary and social critic who, before World War II, in books such as "Axel's Castle" (1931), "The Triple Thinkers" (1938), "To the Finland Station" (1940) and "The Wound and the Bow" (1941), summed up the significant literary and political developments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The second is the crack journalist and non-academic scholar who, from roughly 1950 practically until his death in 1972, popularized such arcane subjects as biblical research ("Scrolls From the Dead Sea," 1955), the state of eastern American Indian tribes ("Apologies to the Iroquois," 1960), the literature of the American Civil War ("Patriotic Gore," 1962), and Canada ("O Canada: An American's Notes on Canadian Culture," 1965).

Both Wilsons transcend periods, trends and fashion, though it's the first one, the literary historian and guardian of taste, who is most with us today. This is the Wilson whose judgments on Dickens, Yeats, Proust, Eliot, Joyce, Fitzgerald and Hemingway have become what Clive James astutely referred to as "permanent criticism." It's hard to think of any modern critic in any language with such an astounding ability to assimilate entire writers -- entire literatures -- and crystallize them in a few pungent and incisive sentences. His method was simple. "Whenever he wanted to write about somebody," recalled Isaiah Berlin after Wilson's death, "he read all their works and accumulated an enormous amount of information until some shape emerged, built itself in his head." When the shape emerged, it was invariably expressed in what W.H. Auden (who once confessed that he wrote for Wilson alone) called "the unassertive elegance of his prose."

For instance, on Yeats, from "Axel's Castle": "The prose of Yeats, in our contemporary literature, is like the product of some dying loomcraft brought to perfection in the days before machinery." On his old Princeton classmate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, from "The Shores of Light": "Fitzgerald has been given an imagination without intellectual control of it ... he has been given a gift for expression without very many ideas to express." (Fitzgerald agreed with his friend's assessment.) From "Eight Essays," on Hemingway, "The weaknesses of the book ["For Whom the Bell Tolls"] are its diffuseness -- a shape that lacks the concision of his short stories, that sometimes sags and sometimes bulges; And a sort of exploitation of the material, an infusion of the operatic, that lends itself all too readily to the movies." (Hemingway still regarded Wilson as the only critic "in the States I have any respect for.")

On G.B Shaw, also from "Eight Essays": "he is a considerable artist, but his ideas -- that is, his social philosophy proper -- have always been confused and uncertain ... the future will exactly reverse the opinion which his contemporaries have usually had of him." From "A Window on Russia," on Nabokov: "In spite of the queer prejudices which few people share -- such as his utter contempt for Dostoevsky -- his sense of beauty and literary proficiency, his energy which seems never to tire, have made him a wire of communication which vibrates between us and that Russian past which still provides for the Russian present of vitality that can sometimes inspire it and redeem it from mediocrity."

For those of us in the 21st century faced with the daunting task of sifting through Wilson's massive and still very much available oeuvre, the question is: Which of these Edmund Wilsons is the real one? Or, at the risk of sounding '60s-ish, which is the most relevant? As proved by two new books -- Lewis Dabney's hefty (600-plus pages) and definitive "Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature,"a feast for the intellectually horny, and David Castronovo and Janet Groth's "Critic in Love: A Romantic Biography of Edmund Wilson," a tasty hors d'oeuvre -- both of these Wilsons are real, and each is indispensable.

Though he yearned for success as a fiction writer, his interests were too diverse, his intellect too restless, to be fully engaged by the abstractions of writing fiction. Still, he left behind some pretty good work: a novel, "I Dream of Daisy," and stories, "Memoirs of Hecate County," whose sexual frankness made the collection scandalous in its day. His best poetry is more than passable, though as he phrased it, "I am not a poet, but I am something of the kind." He wrote several monotonous plays, translations of classic Russian poetry, volumes of social commentary ("Europe Without Baedeker"), memoirs (most notably "Upstate," the story of the good fortunes and hard times of the Wilson family's New York State farmhouse), journals that still serve as windows on the literary scene for every decade from the '20s through the '60s, and numerous thick, rich volumes filled with reviews and essays on everyone and everything from the legacy of Teddy Roosevelt to Wilson's aversion to detective stories to his own New Jersey childhood ("The Shores of Light," "Classics and Commercials," "The American Earthquake," "A Window on Russia," and "A Piece of My Mind"). There are also hundreds of letters -- including an entire collection on literature and politics, the ones to and from Vladimir Nabokov before their famous feud -- written with the same "unassertive elegance" (in W. H. Auden's phrasing) as Wilson's formal reviews and essays. Who in the age of e-mail will ever again write such vivid, authoritative missives?

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