The man who knew too much

By the time he had reached 60, he stopped making any attempt to keep up with the new American writers, and he also missed the rise of the most interesting new Europeans, Italo Calvino, Alain Robbe-Grillet and others. The truth is that the great champion of modernism was always something of an old fogy. As one of his admirers, another great old fogy, V.S. Pritchett, put it, "He was the old-style man of letters, but galvanized and with the iron of purpose in him."

Many have wondered why that iron of purpose shifted in late middle age from literary criticism on the grand scale to high journalism -- after 1950 he scarcely heralded the emergence of a single significant new American talent. (He seemed to be losing interest in criticism even before then; despite having some interesting things to say about Faulkner, it was mostly the European critics who rescued him from near obscurity.) There was no diminishing of his intellectual vigor; the '50s and '60s saw several of his best books, including "Apologies to the Iroquois" and "Patriotic Gore," but virtually nothing about post-World War II literature, no attempt to place the work of Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow or Tennessee Williams in the pantheon -- or even to establish that the pantheon, or his idea of a pantheon, still existed.

Why, exactly? No one, not even his new biographers, have provided an entirely satisfactory answer. There are several plausible explanations, beginning with the decline of Marxism as an intellectual stimulant. Almost alone among his friends and colleagues in the '20s and '30s, Wilson was skeptical of Marxism, but he never completely escaped its lure. (Apparently his interest had nothing to do with Marxist economics but rather a conviction, says Dabney, "that Marx's true authority was moral.") Wilson's father often took his son to visit the community of Phalanx, a well-known experiment in cooperative living, which undoubtedly had much to do with setting him on the path toward "To the Finland Station." What he wanted was to see an American form of Marxism take root, but the Second World War and then the Cold War dashed his hopes, and with them the vision of an artistically radical new American literature that would prefigure such a dream.

Then, he had already predicted 10 years before the war that such a literature might never come about. Symbolism, he wrote in "Axel's Castle," "sometimes had the result of making poetry so much a private concern of the poet's that it turned out to be incommunicable to the reader." Paraphrasing French poet Paul Valéry's pessimistic view of the future of literature, Wilson wrote: "as language becomes more international and more technical, it will become also less capable of supplying the symbols of literature; and then, just as the development of mechanical devices has compelled us to resort to sports in order to exercise our muscles, so literature will survive as a game -- as a series of specialized experiments." In 1931, Wilson was not altogether certain that Valéry was correct, but could not entirely hide his own pessimism -- from here on, the book seems to be hinting, it's all downhill. By the time he died, scarcely a fraction of literate Americans were reading modern poetry.

Indeed, in less than two decades after "Axel's Castle" was published, American literature, Western literature, world literature began to fragment, exploding in too many directions down too many tributaries for even someone with as wide a range as Wilson to keep track. In fact, it may well be that his having cast such a wide net in his youth made it more difficult for him to maintain a bead on developments in art, literature and politics.

And, in truth, he had some gaps as a critic -- huge, baffling, yawning gaps. By drawing a blank on Kafka, he shut himself off from one of the most important currents in literature after 1930. He never truly understood the great novels of Nabokov, either; his failure to appreciate "Lolita" was probably the genesis of their eventual falling out. He could never connect emotionally or intellectually with anything Spanish -- he never finished reading "Don Quixote" -- which means that even had he lived longer and been in better health, he would never have understood the greatest wave in world literature that came after the '20s, namely the Latin American boom and the remarkable works of Borges and García Márquez. At the time of his death, younger readers may have wondered why he had such a reputation as a literary critic.

It's often been lamented that we have failed to produce another Edmund Wilson -- the last of the public intellectuals, as a symposium a few years ago proclaimed him. But it's more likely that we lack the unity of vision that once produced Yeats, Proust and Joyce. We can be optimistic that such an age will come again. Meanwhile, enjoying the benefits of multiculturalism while we wait, we are nonetheless nostalgic for a time in which literacy was so prized.

• View blog reactions