The man who knew too much

Edmund Wilson Jr. was born in Red Bank, N.J., in 1895. Today, the town features not a single bookstore -- in fact, its best-known landmark is filmmaker Kevin Smith's comic book shop -- but when Wilson was growing up it was a highly literate town with a genteel, sleepy Southern flavor and a cosmopolitan upper middle class. The elder Wilson, a lawyer and one-time attorney general for the state of New Jersey (appointed to the position by Gov. Woodrow Wilson, no relation), sometimes brought socialist pals to dinner, much to Mrs. Wilson's dismay. He numbered among his friends Sigmund Eisner, with whom Wilson shared a passion for improving public education. (Eisner was an ancestor of the Michael Eisner who would one day, as head of Disney, help to propagate the mass culture that Wilson loathed.) His mother's side of the family brought two important strains to the bloodline: Through her Northern relatives, she was a descendant of Cotton Mather, and, through her Southern ties, to Virginians who, whenever they got the chance, reminded young Edmund that there were two viewpoints on the causes of the Civil War.

Wilson's father attended Princeton, and it was inevitable that his son would go there, too. There could have been no university better suited to him; pre-World War I Princeton, in Dabney's phrase, offered "a purely humanistic education in the tradition going back to Erasmus, though absorbed within a country club environment." There he came under the influence of the great teacher and scholar Christian Gauss, to whom he would dedicate "Axel's Castle." Wilson, writes Dabney, took Gauss as the voice of "that good eighteenth century Princeton which has always managed to flourish between the pressures of a narrow Presbyterianism and a rich man's suburbanism."

While at Princeton, Wilson would later write, "We were fascinated by learning to use the language in prose or verse. We wrote sonnets and French forms; we intimated Pepys and Dr. Johnson; we read our work aloud to each other, not in public after the modern fashion, but attempting to find out if it was any good." "The shy little scholar of [Princeton's] Holder Court," as Fitzgerald called him, came under the spell of Carlyle, the great French critic Hippolyte Taine (whose "History of English Literature" provided him with a continental perspective that lasted his entire life) and, most of all, Shaw, to whom he sent a parody of the great man's work, which earned a cheerful postcard reply. (Wilson would credit Shaw, perhaps the most idiosyncratically religious writer of his time, with turning him into an atheist.)

Wilson's world was shaken by the piles of corpses he saw while serving in the medical corps during the First World War. Sobered, and with his horizons expanded, he returned home and became a top-flight journalist and critic for Vanity Fair, never quite comfortable writing in what managing editor Robert Benchley referred to as "the Elevated Eyebrow school of journalism. You could write about any subject you wished, no matter how outrageous, if you said it in evening clothes." Wilson's suits tended to be a bit rumpled. He would later move to the New Republic, where, as literary editor, he helped turn the magazine into the country's premier literary organ. He would eventually find a home at the New Yorker, where fans such as Malcolm Cowley would read the magazine "to see what in God's name he would be doing next," though, as Dabney makes clear, Wilson "lacked The New Yorker's then characteristic tone, [and] was never a member of the club." By 1931 he had written his study of 60 years of the development of symbolism in literature, "Axel's Castle," and had surpassed an early mentor, H.L. Mencken, in both scope and influence. Already, at age 36, his work made Mencken's seem stuffy and provincial in comparison.

In retrospect, it's hard to say what's more impressive, the astonishing body of work or the fact that it was all written under the influence of alcohol. For his entire professional life, Wilson was an alcoholic, "The only well known literary alcoholic of his generation," says Dabney, "whose work was not compromised by his drinking." But his marriages were. He was married four times, once to Mary McCarthy, the wife closest to being his intellectual equal. ("American letters," in Dabney's words, "has not seen another alliance so flawed and distinguished.") He had perhaps dozens of affairs, including sensational trysts with the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay ("A resplendent casualty," wrote one of her biographers, "of sex, drugs and fame") and Anaïs Nin, whose work he may have overrated because of his personal infatuation (hardly a sin for which he can be singled out). Jason Epstein thought him "by nature a pedagogue. He was always in search of a promising student. And this, I believe, was what his love affairs were really all about."

Castronovo and Groth, in their forthcoming "Critic in Love," seem to concur with Epstein. "The special kind of camaraderie and companionship in question," they write, "was simply not something he could get from a man. Vaguely erotic, it depended more on bonds of trust, on speaking the same language, on humor and wit, on flirting and performing intellectually than on going to bed."

Ordinarily, learning the details of the private lives of great writers doesn't do much for me, but in Wilson's case I am happy to find that he had a more human side than previous biographers such as Jeffrey Meyers have revealed. I find it comforting to know that the great interpreter of Joyce and Proust liked to relax with Bing Crosby records. At age 60, he enjoyed sitting down with Frank Sinatra's "In the Wee Small Hours" album. (I like to think that had he been born 25 years later he might have siphoned off some stress by listening to New Jersey's favorite son, Bruce Springsteen.)

Frankly, it's a shame Wilson couldn't have bitten more deeply into the rich vein of American popular culture. Wilson's father was close to several of Red Bank's middle-class black families, and the Wilsons were near-neighbors of Red Bank's most famous native son, William "Count" Basie. In fact, Count Basie Way runs just a block from the house where Edmund grew up, but Edmund never mentioned the Count in any of his writings and never wrote in depth about jazz or contemporary music.

He never quite dug film, either. Shortly before his death he went to see "The Godfather," but if he had anything good to say about it, it has gone unrecorded. "I have rarely watched a television program," he wrote in 1955 in "The Author at Sixty," "and I almost never go to the movies (a word that I still detest as I did the first time I heard it)." In his essay "Education," written about the same time as "The Author at Sixty," he wished that "I could make people talk as contemporary Americans did. I tried injecting some current slang into my purely critical writing, but I found that this was likely to jar and that I later had to take it out." The kind of writer that he seemed to be envying, though he could not know it then, was the next great critical mind of the New Yorker, Pauline Kael, who wrote accomplished criticism in an entirely American idiom. But at that point in his life nothing fired Wilson's imagination as movies would fire Kael's.

Next Page: Will we ever produce another Edmund Wilson?

• View blog reactions