Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature

Writing a short review of this long biography is impossible, because very few people under fifty -- including those with the fanciest educations -- will have even the vaguest notion of the life, accomplishments, and, it seems (alas), ephemeral significance of the man revealed in it. And hardly any of those will have read a word he wrote. But if they care a jot about ideas, history, and literature, and if they approach reading with passion and seriousness, that is their great loss. Although Wilson was also a playwright, a novelist, a poet, a magician, and a compulsive diarist, his highest achievements were as a critic and a journalist-historian of ideas. Taking an unusual approach that amalgamated biography, history, and unerringly astute literary interpretation, Wilson wrote the greatest book on our Civil War (Patriotic Gore); the most elegant and commanding history of the socialist idea (To the Finland Station, a book that Dabney justly claims is "the most significant imaginative work to come out of the thirties in the United States except for several of Faulkner's novels"); the best essay (along with George Orwell's) about Dickens; and the most searing reportage of America in the bleakest period of the Great Depression (The American Jitters and Travels in Two Democracies -- largely unheralded masterpieces of what's now called narrative nonfiction). Wilson is one of the two or three most astute interpreters of Flaubert and Auden; he was the first critic to take seriously the hard-boiled fiction coming out of California in the 1930s (The Boys in the Backroom); he wrote penetrating portraits of an array of countries and cultures, including Haiti, the Zuni, the Iroquois, and Western Europe at the end of the Second World War; in Axel's Castle he taught a generation of Americans how to read modernist literature; his editing of his close friend and Princeton classmate F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon, and of Fitzgerald's posthumous collection of letters and notebook entries, The Crack-Up, is largely responsible for elevating that author into the canon from the obscurity in which he languished at the time of his death; he revealed and explicated the importance and complexities of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- and he was probably the most astute adjudicator of contending scholarly theories regarding those texts (Wilson read Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Russian, Hungarian, French, and German). Nearly all his books were polished assemblages of pieces he'd written from the 1920s through the 1960s for The New Yorker (where he was the magazine's book reviewer and a staff writer) and for The New Republic (where he was an editor). Wilson had a rare gift for haute vulgarization (which has earned him the disdain of the theory-dominated academy) -- he could tell a compelling, even dramatic, story about ideas. Deploying deft compression and apt quotation, he fused elegant, extended pen portraiture with precise criticism, and he wrote with supreme clarity and authority, yet in graceful, often sinuous prose (no less a judge than The New Yorker's editor William Shawn held that Wilson's style was among the best in the history of the language).

But he was in many ways a deeply distasteful man. Generous, loyal, and intellectually honest, Wilson was also a (frequently lonely) drinker of staggering capacity and a serial fornicator (he lost his virginity to another famously libidinous literary figure, Edna St. Vincent Millay). Not surprisingly, he was prone to rages and was at best imperious and at worst monstrous to his four wives. (His marriage to Mary McCarthy has to be one of the most turbulent unions in literary history. Dabney's scrupulous account corrects some of the more outlandish and self-serving -- and self-dramatizing -- versions promulgated by McCarthy, but both parties emerge from this chronicle as spoiled and destructive.) Thanks to Wilson's meticulous, posthumously published diaries, in which he seems to have recorded his every sexual episode in harshly clinical detail (he appears at times to have bedded women solely for the purpose of recording the experiences), we already know far too much about his routine, which could be summarized as Stakhanovite reading, followed by concentrated writing, followed by boozy seduction, followed by kind of yucky sex. Wilson's previous biographer, Jeffrey Meyers, wrote a rounded if ultimately unsatisfying biography, so interested readers have already been treated to lots of unpleasantness. Dabney's book, for which he conducted dozens of interviews and spent decades digging in the archives, is more complete, and in its sorting of the facts from the rumors and apocryphal accounts that have barnacled Wilson's reputation, it's as definitive as we're likely to get -- and as we need. But Dabney's aim was broader than Meyers's. He sought to write an intellectual biography. He has largely succeeded -- he's a discerning reader and a clear writer, though he periodically oversimplifies the intellectual and, especially, the political context of Wilson's work and that of the people in his phenomenally wide and intellectually glittering circle (Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Isaiah Berlin, Auden, and Nabokov were at one time or another among his closest friends). But the great virtue of Wilson's work is that it needs no introduction. An accessible mandarin and a vivid writer who shunned abstraction, Wilson wrote books any one of which can still be simply picked up and read with enormous pleasure and profit. But I fear they won't be. With the optimism and myopia of a scholar consumed by his subject, Dabney sees Wilson as a vital influence in today's American intellectual and cultural life. I don't. To me, that life is alien and hostile to all that Wilson's work represents.

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