Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature - Hardcover

Dabney, Lewis M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374113122 ISBN 13: 9780374113124

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005

Synopsis

From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In his own youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write three classics of literary and intellectual history (Axel's Castle, To the Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore), searching reportage, and criticism that has outlasted many of its subjects. Wilson documented his unruly private life--a formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, a tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and volatile friendships with Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, among others--in openly erotic fiction and journals, but Lewis Dabney is the first writer to integrate the life and work.

Dabney traces the critic's intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a deep commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Along the way, Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained--in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity--a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader. Edmund Wilson will be recognized as the lasting biography of this brilliant man whose life reflected so much of the cultural, social, and human experience of a turbulent century.

Lewis Dabney edited the Edmund Wilson Reader as well as Wilson's last journal, The Sixties. He is professor of English at the University of Wyoming.

A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

 

From the Jazz Age through the McCarthy era, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) stood at the center of the American cultural scene. In his own youth a crucial champion of the young Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson went on to write three classics of literary and intellectual history (Axel's Castle, To the Finland Station, and Patriotic Gore), searching reportage, and criticism that has outlasted many of its subjects. Wilson documented his unruly private life—a formative love affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, a tempestuous marriage to Mary McCarthy, and volatile friendships with Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, among others—in openly erotic fiction and journals, but Lewis Dabney is the first writer to integrate the life and work.

Dabney traces the critic's intellectual development, from son of small-town New Jersey gentry to America's last great renaissance man, a deep commentator on everything from the Russian classics to Native American rituals to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Along the way, Dabney shows why Wilson was and has remained—in his cosmopolitanism and trenchant nonconformity—a model for young writers and intellectuals, as well as the favorite critic of the general reader. Edmund Wilson will be recognized as the lasting biography of this brilliant man whose life reflected so much of the cultural, social, and human experience of a turbulent century.

"Dabney . . . is diligent . . . All the information one needs about Wilson is here."—Colm Toibin, The New York Times Book Review

"Dabney . . . is diligent . . . All the information one needs about Wilson is here."—Colm Toibin, The New York Times Book Review

 

"A thoroughgoing, authoritative and consistently engaging look at one of the giants of American letters by an acknowledged expert on his life and writings. Wilson's trenchant literary criticism, his long career, his uproarious domestic life and his manifold friendships are all set down in enthralling detail."—Los Angeles Times Book Review

 

"Lewis Dabney's Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature is by far the most comprehensive deep-dish study of both his life and work . . . [It] makes one nostalgic for such a time and such a man."—Allen Barra, The Star-Ledger (Newark)

 

"Dabney sums up Wilson's college experience deftly and with characteristic elegance . . . [and he] is admirably restrained in his treatment of [the] famous literary union, or disunion, [with novelist Mary McCarthy], out of which a lesser biographer would have plucked much dirty linen. He is careful and, so far as one can tell, fair in his account of the famous fight between the couple a few months into their marriage."—John Banville, The Irish Times

 

"Dabney's [new book] is a wonderful, meaty biography of the greatest American critic of the 20th century."—John Banville, The Guardian

 

"Edmund Wilson was the most distinguished and influential literary critic of the twentieth century; he was also a fascinating character and fascinated by life. Lewis Dabney does justice to all aspects of Wilson's career in this incisive, measured, and reflective biography."—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

"Edmund Wilson survives as a critic because of his endless vitalism and fierce love of literature. These are the qualities admirably conveyed in Lewis Dabney's eloquent biography."—Harold Bloom

 

"Briskly written and packed with revealing details about a very complicated man, Lewis Dabney’s Edmund Wilson is the most satisfying account to date of this accomplished critic, literary journalist, and cultural historian. Lurid episodes in Wilson's personal life blend with Dabney's incisive commentary on the diverse books and articles Wilson steadily turned out for more than fifty years. This is a solid, serious, and entertaining book."—Daniel Aaron, author of Writers on the Left

 

"Dabney follows Wilson's brilliant trajectory from protected youth to Jazz Age high-liver and liver-damaged 'literary alcoholic,' from sexual naïf to the chronicler of suburban sexual high-jinks in Memoirs of Hecate County, from somewhat snooty highbrow to much more worldly highbrow. For all the life changes—and all the adventures and misadventures in the company of Edna Millay, Mary McCarthy, the Algonquian Circle, Vladimir Nabokov, and such—Wilson remained consistent to at least a few principles and pleasures, confessing, for instance, 'that he was never happier than when telling people about a work they were unfamiliar with in a language they didn't know.' That he did so in the pages of The New Yorker, The New Republic, and Vanity Fair ought to make his admirers—and Wilson still has many, having, as Dabney observes, passed the ten-year test for longevity long ago—yearn for better, more lettered days. A solid, much-needed work of literary biography."—Kirkus Reviews

 

"Dabney, who edited The Sixties (1993), the final volume of Wilson's published journals, presents a meticulous biography that is lapidary and illuminating in its proficient explications of Wilson's volatile personal relationships and benchmark writings." Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

 

"This thorough biography gives the definitive treatment to the life and work of one of the early 20th century's most highly revered men of letters . . . A complex account . . . Comprehensive, well-researched."—Library Journal (starred review)

 

"Dabney meticulously unfolds the circumstances behind the writing of his most significant books while tracing the evolution of Wilson's thought . . . Readers seeking an introduction to Wilson will find their perseverance through this hefty tome rewarded with a rich context for approaching his writings."—Publishers Weekly

About this title

About the Author

Lewis Dabney edited Wilson's last journal, The Sixties as well as Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections. He is professor of English at the University of Wyoming.

Reviews

By the late 1930s, as H.L. Mencken gradually lost interest in new books and turned his gaze to cultural and political matters, Edmund Wilson had become the predominant literary critic in the United States. He remained that until his death in 1972, without any real competition, and three decades later he still towers above everyone else, the standard against which everyone else must be measured and, inevitably, found wanting. His range was astonishingly broad, his intuition keen, his taste impeccable, his prose bold and lucid. By contrast with the "critics" in academia today, who write in jargon and speak only to one another, Wilson saw it as his mission to introduce worthy writers to intelligent lay readers, to "persuade people of their importance and persuade people to read them."

If Wilson is to this day a monumental figure in American letters, Wilson himself was something considerably less: arrogant, demanding, self-centered, priapic, alcoholic, abusive. His only son, Reuel, remembered his "fear-inspiring temper" and "stentorian voice." He had four wives and was repeatedly unfaithful to all of them. The most notable of those marriages, to Mary McCarthy, was tempestuous, and there is reason to suspect that he struck her in anger. He had important literary friendships, most notably with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, but he was an unreliable friend who could turn venomous and derisive without warning. He thought the world owed him a living, mooched off his mother when he felt the occasion warranted it and declined to pay taxes for many years until the IRS finally caught up with him.

All of which is to say that he presents formidable difficulties for a biographer. On the one hand there is his immense life's work, to be sorted out, evaluated and interpreted. On the other hand there is his frequently sordid private life, also to be sorted out, evaluated and interpreted. Lewis M. Dabney, a professor of English at the University of Wyoming who has dedicated much of the past four decades to tending Wilson's flame, approaches both tasks methodically and dutifully, though one senses from time to time that he really does wish Wilson had been a nicer fellow. His reading of Wilson's work is careful, sometimes thoughtful, and he is inclined to give Wilson the benefit of the doubt when private matters arise, occasionally when Wilson clearly doesn't deserve it.

Wilson was born in 1895 in New Jersey (in Red Bank, the birthplace a decade later of another important but very different American, William "Count" Basie), the only son of a prominent lawyer and his extroverted, complicated wife. His mother called the baby "Bunny," a nickname that stuck to him for the rest of his life, becoming ever more incongruous as he matured into a fat, clumsy, owlish man. He went to Princeton, where he assumed leadership of the literary set, befriended Fitzgerald, John Peale Bishop and others, and began to give evidence of his remarkable critical faculties. By 1920 he was in New York, working at Vanity Fair and having an affair with Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poet who "portrayed herself as buried alive, yet embraced the world with passion." She had charisma and sexuality to burn, and though her liaison with Wilson didn't last long, "her dramatic presence would resonate in his mind for thirty years, portrayed in poems, a novel, his journals, and his memoir."

The job at Vanity Fair didn't last long, either. Wilson was by inclination and temperament a freelance, and although he later had important connections with the New Republic (his tenure from 1926 to 1931 as an associate editor in charge of the literary section was one of uninterrupted brilliance) and the New Yorker, mostly he lived from assignment to assignment, book to book: "The magazine criticism he wrote produced little income, and he had an inkling that, in Melville's phrase, he would be 'damned by dollars' -- always pressing publishers for advances and haggling over contracts, doing reviews that distracted him from larger projects, reusing magazine pieces in book form. Until the 1950s his lifestyle would be far from his parents' comfortable Edwardian one."

Wilson published a novel, I Thought of Daisy, in 1929, but it was two years later, with Axel's Castle, that he made his reputation. His readings therein of Proust, Joyce, Eliot and others were acute and, "though its sales amounted to no more than a thousand copies a year," hugely influential; it is no exaggeration to say, as Dabney does, that "a generation discovered modern literature in this book." With that he was on his way, publishing more than three dozen books. Some were collections of his own work, some were compendiums of the work of others. Among the latter, the most important is The Shock of Recognition (1943), which may have done as much as any other book to introduce American readers to their own country's literature.

Late in life, alarmed by the war in Vietnam and embittered by his struggles with the IRS, Wilson had something of a falling out with his native land, but for most of his career he was a passionate advocate of its literature. He believed that literature was "an instrument of human progress" and an ally in "the struggle for a better American society." Like innumerable other American intellectuals of his day, he flirted with Marxism, but exposure to Stalinist Russia left him "pleased to discover again the resilience of his own country, where, despite vast inequalities of wealth, the money is always changing hands and 'we have the class quarrel out as we go along.' " He believed that a healthy American literature was essential to a healthy America, and he sought to lead readers to what he saw as the best American writing.

That, however, was only the beginning of Wilson's interests. In The Wound and the Bow (1941), he explored the influence of psychological suffering in the work of various writers, most notably in the essay "Dickens: The Two Scrooges." Though in time he came to regret his early infatuation with Lenin, his account of the Russian Revolution, To the Finland Station (1940), remains vigorous and perceptive. Late in his life, at a time when most writers are winding down -- if they haven't already done so -- he caught a second wind and produced three extraordinary books. The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955) made an important archaeological discovery accessible to the general reader. Patriotic Gore (1962) explored "American character and culture as they were dramatized in the Civil War." Upstate (1971), about his own life in the New York countryside he so deeply loved and about his family's connections there, made that little corner of the world a metaphor for everything that was important to him about America.

All of this is what matters to us about Wilson. The rest of the story that Dabney tells does not. He tells it conscientiously and, as mentioned above, dutifully, but the net effect of Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature is to leave one wondering why, precisely, books such as this are written. To be sure, one must marvel that Wilson could have done such an incredible amount of major work when so much of the time he was drunk, but that is merely another footnote to the long story of writers and booze. Our curiosity about the innermost sources of any writer's work is understandable and legitimate, but page after page of drunken bouts and sexual conquests really tell us little except that this is a man we care to meet only in the words he wrote. As the fourth of his wives once said, "When I read his work I forgive him all his sins." Wise words indeed, to which must be added: If the sins have been forgiven, why bother to chronicle them?

Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

A divisive character deserves a split decision, and Edmund Wilson and his "authorized" biographer Lewis Dabney suffer from mixed reviews. Some critics welcome the new treatment as a balanced, sober look at a life that was anything but. Comparisons of the biographer’s literary style with that of his subject are unfair, but the criticism of Dabney’s tendency to linger on the sordid details while parsing out dry readings of Wilson’s work hangs over the negative reviews. These questions seem less pointed at Dabney’s work than at the metalevel value of personal information in a biography: is Wilson—or any writer—just his work, or are we simply happier to view him that way?

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Dabney, who edited The Sixties, the last volume of Wilson's posthumous journals, brings a deep familiarity with his subject to this critical biography. Wilson (1895–1972) was mid–20th-century America's most influential literary critic, and Dabney meticulously unfolds the circumstances behind the writing of his most significant books while tracing the evolution of Wilson's thought. Wilson was equally skilled at criticism and reportage, and fairly successful at fiction—including the scandalously erotic (for the 1940s) novel Memoirs of Hecate County—and Dabney confidently sorts out these varied writings and their part in Wilson's legacy. Biographical details are generally filtered through the literary perspective, but the life story does get a thorough if sometimes slow rendering. The account of Wilson's "nightmarish" marriage to Mary McCarthy, for example, carefully weighs everything that both authors wrote about the relationship after the fact, as well as the perspectives of other sources, before judging that accusations that Wilson abused her are probably unfounded. Often, though, the best source on Wilson is his own detailed (and uncensored) journals, which frequently add a welcome personalizing touch. Readers seeking an introduction to Wilson will find their perseverance through this hefty tome rewarded with a rich context for approaching his writings. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edmund Wilson was a man of great intellect and voracious appetites. He adored women, bedding many (beginning with Edna St. Vincent Millay) and marrying four (including Mary McCarthy). He drank to excess and traveled widely, following his interests in Native Americans, Haiti, and Judaism, which led to his groundbreaking work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. The most expansive, questing, and influential critic of his time, Wilson read deeply and wrote keenly about the work of his contemporaries, including his friend and rival, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and was one of the first to recognize the significance of Yeats and Proust. Holding staff jobs at Vanity Fair, the New Republic and theNew Yorker, Wilson critiqued theater, literature, music, architecture, and movies. He wrote prose famous for its "concreteness, its glinting exactness." Fascinated by creativity and psychology, deeply concerned with politics, race, and justice, he was an astute observer and master craftsman difficult to live with but a profound pleasure to read. Dabney, who edited The Sixties (1993), the final volume of Wilson's published journals, presents a meticulous biography that is illuminating in its explications of Wilson's volatile personal relationships and benchmark writings. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature by Lewis M. Dabney. Copyright © 2005 by Lewis M. Dabney. Published in August 2005 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.

Introduction

On a brisk afternoon in September 1922, a conservatively dressed young man with red hair sat on the upper deck of a Fifth Avenue bus in Manhattan, engrossed in a manuscript. A friend at the literary magazine The Dial had put a long poem into his hands. The Dial was interested in publishing it, and the editors hoped that the young man—Edmund Wilson—would write an essay to elucidate the poem. By the time he reached Greenwich Village, Wilson had completed a first reading of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Decades later he would recall being “bowled over,” and his essay called the poem “simply one triumph after another.” This recognition of Eliot followed Wilson’s account, in The New Republic, of Joyce’s Ulysses as a masterpiece fusing naturalism and symbolism, re-creating the mind “straining always to perpetuate and perfect itself” and the body “always laboring and throbbing to throw up some beauty from its darkness.” He believed the general reader could absorb these works that challenged existing literary forms and commandeered in new ways the powers of language. Both Eliot and Joyce, he thought, occasionally tried one’s patience, but he was committed to making them more accessible.
Edmund Wilson was twenty-seven. He was fortunate to come on the scene as a critic when he did, but he had trained for this moment. At fifteen he had been sure of his literary vocation, and he absorbed all that liberal education had to offer both at the Hill School and at Princeton, where extraordinary teachers encouraged his curiosity and enthusiasm for books and about ideas. He emerged from his parents’ uncongenial marriage with emotional scars, but his confidence in his abilities was strong, and he was seasoned by a year as a hospital orderly in France during World War I. Though he hated the suffering he saw, he liked being on a footing of relative equality with Americans of diverse backgrounds, and returned to his country skeptical of institutions and of rank and social privilege. He joined Vanity Fair as an editorial assistant, immediately became its managing editor, and began publishing criticism there as well as in other magazines.
The generation of the 1920s was brought up on the best of the Old World and hoped to equal it, applying the work habit—even as they broke away from Victorian mores—that Americans traditionally brought to commerce. Wilson was indebted to the men of letters of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England and France as well as to Emerson, and at the beginning of his career owed much to H. L. Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks. While these critics shied away from the transformation of literature after the war, he became the spokesman of writers bringing this about. He found a podium at The New Republic in 1925, and for ten years his work appeared in almost every issue, often twice, a running account of books and of American culture, alternating with the studies of the new international literature that became Axel’s Castle. The Depression deepened the perspective on his class attained in the army, and he largely put aside criticism to be a reporter on the labor front. He absorbed Marxism while doing the studies reprinted in The American Earthquake and overcame his naiveté about the Soviet Union. As the 1930s ended, he came into full possession of his powers as the biographer-historian of revolutionaries in To the Finland Station and the post-Marxist, neo-Freudian critic of The Triple Thinkers and The Wound and the Bow.
In Greenwich Village of the jazz age Wilson explored the new found freedoms of booze and sex. He was sexually innocent until twenty-five, then lost his virginity and his heart to one of the most desired women of the period, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. His private life became as chaotic as his professional life was discipline. Wilson was the only well-known literary alcoholic of his generation whose work was not compromised by his drinking, but alcohol undermined his marriages. In addition to four of these—his third, to Mary McCarthy, providing fodder for gossip, attacks, and counterattacks, which survive in their writings—he had many affairs and sexual encounters. As he aged, the once handsome man became physically unattractive, but still had no difficulty as a seducer. When asked how he got “all those dames” into bed, he answered that he “talked them into it” by discussing subjects in which they were interested. Jason Epstein described Wilson as “by nature a pedagogue. He was always in search of promising student. And this, I believe, is what his love affairs were really all about.”
The early forties were his dark period, a midlife crisis not of identity but of morale, due not only to his failing marriage to McCarthy—he was sexually faithful, she not—but to the deaths of friends and the grim spectacle of a second world war. A resilient temperament, a new literary platform, and marriage to Elena Mumm Thornton enabled him to recover and achieve a second career. In The New Yorker he progressed from reviews to long essays and reportage, again trying out the materials of his books in magazine form. He brought a single-minded concentration to everything from nineteenth-century American writing and the Russian classics to Native Americans, Israel, and the ancient texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls. His contemporary Malcolm Cowley wrote that one followed The New Yorker “to see what in God’s name he would be doing next.” He turned his literary journalism into chronicles, began editing his diaries, created The Twenties and The Sixties as well as his book about American character and culture in the Civil War, Patriotic Gore. Wilson’s experience as a free-living man of the twenties meant more to him as it became memory and history. In later life he came full circle, embracing “the old provincial America” that the family home in Talcottville, New York, represented.
Wilson’s story—in the words of Paul Horgan, who knew him in various settings—is that of the artist “searching for a rational design in the world through his own life and the act of writing.” This story is carried by his letters, verse, fiction, and memoirs, and reflected in his generation, the confession d’um enfant du siècle—a child of the century—that Christian Gauss suggested he write but Wilson himself could not see as a whole. His multi-volume journal, a record of American life from 1914 to 1972, looks out ward from the self to the world. Yet the glimpses of Wilson are accurate, though he sometimes gets a detail wrong when he retells the anecdotes of others. Just as he does not spare the women with whom his sexual experiences are eventually made public, he never tries to make himself look good. He describes an outburst in drunken quarrel with his second wife, Margaret Canby, in 1932 exactly as this was overheard and recalled by a neighbor in their building in a memoir published after Wilson’s death and before the appearance of his journal for these years.
The stories of others—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Dos Passos, Malraux, Nabokov, and Auden, along with Millay and McCarthy, Louise Bogan and Dawn Powell—who helped define the literary and intellectual life of Europe and the United States over these fifty years are interwoven in this biography. Their voices in the correspondence complement Wilson’s, and so do those of non-authors—Stanley Dell, an early friend, Margaret Canby, Mamaine Paget Koestler—who have their own eloquence on paper, the mark of an era that, though culturally narrower than ours, was in many ways more literate. But it is Wilson whose voice is dominant.
It is tempting to explain Wilson’s powers in terms of the pain and psychic struggle of his life, which was his method in portraying writers and historical figures. He wished to have made better connections with his father, who died when Wilson was twenty-seven. His youthful affection for his mother faded as, impressed neither by her son’s career nor by what she saw of his private life, she doled out on her terms his share of the estate left by his father, while Wilson haggled with magazines and publishers for money. The critic, journalist, and portraitist never had the success he wanted as a fiction writer or playwright. His first three marriages were failures. One can see Wilson—Edgar Johnson, the Dickens scholar, seems first to have suggested this—as the wounded archer of his account of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, a play that offered him metaphors for the tension between the writer and society as well as the relationship of art and neurosis. Philoctetes has a suppurating ulcer and a magical bow, a gift of the gods on which the conquest of Troy depends. But if Wilson projects himself as Philoctetes, in his portaiture he is also young Neoptolemus, who, sent to acquire the weapon, realizes it will not work without the willing presence of the exiled, sick, irascible warrior.
Isaiah Berlin integrated these two figures in his view of his friend. Thinking Wilson by nature “disharmonious,” Berlin linked this to his profound understanding of the artists and public figures he wrote about. “He was always worried about whether he thought this or that was true of false,” Sir Isaiah said. “He was an uncomfortable man, uncomfortable with himself; and that’s what caused the friction, and the friction caused the genius.” In proposing Wilson as the most important critic of their century, Berlin accounted for his staying power in terms attractive to a biographer: the other critics mostly wrote “just intel...

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374113122
• ISBN 13: 9780374113124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 656