Edmund Wilson’s review of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” appeared in The Dial one month after the poem was published. His first reading of the poem occurred on a brisk September day in 1922 on the upper deck of a Fifth Avenue bus headed for Greenwich Village. The Jazz Age was tuning up, the Village was enjoying one of its periodic Bohemian revivals, and, at twenty-seven, Wilson was on the brink of his career as one of the twentieth century’s most influential American literary critics.
In his review, Wilson took careful note of the poet’s enormous erudition, “piling up stratum upon stratum of reference, as the Italian painters used to paint over one another.” But then, characteristically, he argued that Eliot’s harrowing vision of “strained nerves and shattered institutions” did not require the reader to grasp every arcane illusion. Wilson would hate it said of him, but, in contemporary parlance, he was clearly operating in marketing mode. It was a signature tendency of all his critical work to come—a strength usually, but occasionally a weakness. He would become the great evangelist of the art and artists he admired, an explainer when necessary, but always an advocate. And, in Lewis Dabney’s wonderful account of the critic’s life and times, Wilson emerges as the cataloguer and promoter of literary currents that would wash over the United States from the 1920s to the 1970s. When, in the 1930s and later in the 1960s, he would take up politics, it was with decidedly mixed results. But even there, he only confirmed his centrality to an American culture then struggling with profound political change.
Mr. Dabney, a veteran Wilson scholar who edited the critic’s last journal, The Sixties, is an academic who knows how to write. The result is a book that will seize any passionate reader of literature by the throat. It does what Wilson himself so often did, reminding us all that it is individual genius that moves and shapes the culture. And it takes a cue from Wilson’s own critical method by finding illumination of Wilson’s work in the character and incidents of his life.
Wilson was a product of the professional upper-middle classes, an heir to an already desiccated Calvinism who would reject religion early on and, in his later years, seek to undermine traditional Christianity. He was a romantic, yet he pursued a huge cast of women with what can only be termed a schoolboy’s prurience and greed. He had four bad marriages, his best and last a kind of truce, his worst, with the redoubtable novelist and critic Mary McCarthy, a Rashomon-like nightmare of exchanged insults and recriminations that boiled away for years after they mercifully divorced. He processed three children (there is no better way to describe it) with lamentable emotional consequences. Two of the three repaid him with critical memoirs. The third, an accomplished painter, balanced disapproval of his worst behavior with an artist’s understanding of the creative temperament.
All his life, Wilson considered himself a passionate patriot. Yet, after the 1929 crash, he embraced first Marxism, then Leninism, finally tottering at the threshold of Stalinism, before stumbling back to “Republican institutions” as the infamous show trials got underway in Moscow. He would later admit that he covered up obvious Communist shortcomings during an early sojourn in Russia; for a time, he occupied the Moscow apartment of Walter Duranty, the New York Times correspondent who famously never managed to find a man-made famine that killed millions in the Ukraine. He shared with his deceased father an early passion for the Great Emancipator and used it to turn on Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War in what remains his most controversial major work, Patriotic Gore. The book betrays an increasingly naïve pacifism.
Mr. Dabney pronounces Wilson an alcoholic. On the evidence, he appears to have been a very hard-working and productive drunk, who abused alcohol continuously but never lost control of his professional life.
Above all, Wilson seems to have had a rare gift for friendship, and an even rarer desire to see his friends succeed. One of his elect was F. Scott Fitzgerald, a fellow student at Princeton for a time, who began as a literary competitor when Wilson thought he might make his own mark as a writer of fiction. Later, when Wilson found his true métier as a critic, he badgered his friend to focus on serious work, like The Great Gatsby, and to cease writing the slight magazine stories that paid the bills. He never gave up on Fitzgerald, even unto dread Hollywood, and paid him homage after his death by editing a collection as The Crack-Up and the unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon. He refused payment for either project, more than a gesture for a man who was broke and in serious debt most of his life.
He displayed further generosity toward friends when they chose a different politics. He remained close to John Dos Passos even after the novelist abandoned Marxism for a full-throated conservatism. He remained friends with that odious Stalinist, the playwright Lillian Hellman, to the end, although this may have had something to do with his ex-wife Mary McCarthy’s celebrated doubts regarding Hellman’s veracity. From Mr. Dabney’s telling, McCarthy may have had some problems with the truth as well. Interestingly, as much as Wilson may have liked Dos Passos and Hellman, he rarely put on critical blinders; he rightly thought Dos Passos a writer in precipitous decline, and he thought Hellman should write plays about Jews, rather than projecting Jewish family dramas unconvincingly on a canvas of Southerners.
Wilson’s loyalty to aesthetic truths did get him into serious trouble with friends, perhaps most famously Vladimir Nabokov, with whom Wilson enjoyed a long and usually productive conversation about the nineteenth-century Russian masters. Wilson committed his first blunder by advising against the publication of Lolita, which eventually made Volodya a wealthy grandee ensconced in a luxurious Swiss hotel. Wilson’s second, unpardonable offense was his criticism of Nabokov’s translation of their beloved Pushkin. This resulted in a fierce exchange of letters in The New York Review of Books and a permanent rift between Wilson and the notoriously touchy Russian.
One of the strengths of this book lies in the portraits and comments of Wilson’s friends and associates. Mr. Dabney has a fine wit and an eye for characterization, which make this a more entertaining book than it might have been. The humorist Robert Benchley describes Vanity Fair, the magazine that gave Wilson his first important job, 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.” (Predictably, of the three magazines for which Wilson wrote most—the others being The New Republic and The New Yorker—Vanity Fair produced the fewest pieces that survived to become part of his many books.) Here, too, is a snapshot of W. H. Auden in New York:
The squalor in which Auden first lived in the United States was legendary—his shack on Fire Island shocked [Stephen] Spender, and in his journal, “The Fifties,” Wilson notes that [Igor] Stravinsky called him “the dirtiest man I ever liked,” perhaps because one evening the composer’s wife, finding “a basin of dirty fluid on the floor” of his filthy bathroom in the East Village, threw out the chocolate pudding Auden’s partner Chester Kallman had intended for dessert… . Though Wilson knew the value, for an artist, of asserting one’s independence, putting oneself to the test of living without the amenities, he came to see such “sordid and grotesque lodgings” as part of a Puritan effort to acquire merit.
In the end, however, this book is about Wilson’s work, and Mr. Dabney is usually a knowledgeable guide. When his Wilson gets it wrong, as he did when he produced such heavy breathing over Dr. Zhivago, for example, the author notes that there is growing critical agreement that it is a bit of a potboiler. He considers it a measure of Wilson’s influence that his assessment made Boris Pasternak’s reputation, at least until a large number of serious people began reading the book for themselves. Mr. Dabney also provides measured and helpful assessments of Wilson’s greatest books, including 1931’s Axel’s Castle, which introduced the great Modernists (Yeats, Proust, Joyce, et al.), the neo-Freudian The Wound and the Bow (1947), which includes his classic study of Charles Dickens’s childhood trauma and how it made him, and the most pungent of his five journals, from the 1920s and 1960s. Regrettably, Mr. Dabney seems to believe another Wilson classic, To the Finland Station, which covers the origin and progress of the Soviet experiment, was a victim of bad timing. It first appeared in 1940, when the scales had fallen from many eyes. This is far too generous to a book that is clearly infatuated with the murderous tyranny of Lenin.
Mr. Dabney is helpful on the crankier, later Wilson writing, especially on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which the critic apparently hoped would cast Christianity as just another squabbling sect rather than a religion with eternal claims. Mr. Dabney wryly notes that Wilson never lived to see some portions of his material appropriated by today’s Evangelical Christians. He also provides valuable insights on the collected criticism from Wilson’s other contributions to The New Republic and The New Yorker, which later became Classics and Commercials (1951), The Shores of Light (1952), and The Bit Between My Teeth (1965). Some of these essays stand up remarkably well, including Wilson’s shrewd assessment of the humorist Dorothy Parker as a particularly regrettable victim of Hollywood (“Absolute Hollywood corrupts absolutely”), his exalting appraisal of Evelyn Waugh (“The only first-rate comic genius that has appeared in English since Bernard Shaw”), a poignant memoir of the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, an early lover, and a wonderful portrait of Algernon Swinburne.
If there is a serious fault in this book it is Mr. Dabney’s reticence regarding the morality or maturity of Wilson’s behavior toward the many women in his life. About the most severe criticism he can summon is “disquieting,” when he considers a particularly sordid liaison with a working-class woman who put more faith in Wilson than he deserved. With popular culture sanctifying narcissism at every turn, it’s more important than ever to call these matters to account.
What is, perhaps, the most breathtaking thing about the enormous Wilson output is that it was largely written for a general reader, albeit a reasonably sophisticated one. It is easier to imagine a Saturday Night Live skit on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” than it is to imagine a contemporary career like Edmund Wilson’s. We are the poorer for it.
