Biography: The photograph of Edmund Wilson which adorns the jacket of this magnificent biography is wonderfully revealing. The picture, taken when Wilson was in his 60s, presents him in three-quarters profile, not quite smiling but not quite not smiling, either.
In the set of his big pale Roman head he might be first cousin if not half-brother to Henry James in his beardless middle years. We note Wilson's good three-piece suit and dark tie, the papers on the desk, the ranked volumes in the glass-fronted bookcase behind him. It is a portrait of the critic as Grand Old Man. Then our eye falls upon the deck of cards he is holding in his hands, with magicianly delicacy.
Wilson, the US's greatest literary critic of the 20th century, was an enthusiastic prestidigitator, whose impromptu magic shows enchanted his children - his first daughter, the troubled Rosalind, entitled a memoir of her father Near the Magician - and faintly embarrassed his friends. He loved card tricks especially, though his skill at them was doubtful; Lewis Dabney reports him in the 1930s staying at Trees, the house near Stamford, Connecticut, lent him by the locomotive heiress Margaret de Silver - Wilson had countless women friends, many of them former lovers - where he "grew accustomed to the sight of the playing card that, botching a magic trick, he'd managed to stick to the main room's ceiling".
In his lifetime Wilson had to accustom himself to many far more serious botchings than that one, not the least of them a wilfully self-deluded misreading of the character of Lenin in To the Finland Station, his influential study of revolutionary politics published in the fateful year of 1940. His love affairs, which were countless, for the most part ended disastrously, as did three of his four marriages. His finances were ever a mess, leading to unseemly wrangles with the Internal Revenue Service in the drink-drenched chaos of his final years. Yet for all his faults and flaws he was an exemplary figure, one in a long line of American patriots for whom the US was the last, best hope of civilisation in a brutalised time, a man who positioned himself firmly at what Lionel Trilling called the "bloody crossroads" where literature and politics meet, and a critic who, as he wrote of Turgenev, "sticks to his objective judgment, his line of realistic criticism, his resolve to stand free of movements, to rise above personalities, to recognise all points of view that have any sincerity or dignity. . . "
Edmund Wilson, born in 1895, grew up in Red Bank, New Jersey, some 30 miles south of New York. This was not the New Jersey of Tony Soprano and his clan, but an easygoing, genteel town with a Southern air to it, where in the spring, Rosalind Wilson recalled, "old men would appear on the streets selling soft-shell crabs from baskets of seaweed. The summers were long and hot. . . " The Kimballs, his mother's people, and the Wilsons were patrician stock, and Edmund saw himself as a product of an older and more gracious US than the one in which he lived - late in life he would declare that spiritually he was a man of the 18th century. The "old stone house" at Talcottville in New York state, built by Wilson's great-grandfather, Thomas Baker, became for Wilson an emblem of that venerable US lovingly celebrated - and, Lewis Dabney suggests, largely mythologised - in one his last books, Upstate.
Wilson's father, Edmund snr, was a lawyer of strict Calvinist views who served for a time as attorney general of New Jersey and was offered a number of posts in Washington by president Woodrow Wilson. In his time as attorney general he went after the racketeers who ran Atlantic City and, having "avoided entrapment by several beautiful blondes", succeeded in jailing hundreds of crooks. He was also a severe hypochondriac. His long-suffering wife, who signed her letters to her son "Helen M.K. Wilson", went deaf overnight on a sea voyage to London, where her husband had been sent to consult a neurologist; Mrs Wilson's condition may have accounted for Edmund jnr's loud, high-pitched voice. She called him Bunny, a pet-name which stuck for life.
He was educated at the exclusive Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and at Princeton, where he met F Scott Fitzgerald. He was taught Dante and French literature by Christian Gauss, a lifelong influence who impressed on the young man the duty to be loyal to the truth "no matter where it led or whom it hurt", an injunction Wilson always obeyed, sometimes with devastating results, for himself and others. Dabney sums up Wilson's college experience deftly and with characteristic elegance:
For four years Princeton had given Wilson models as well as an audience for whom to write. A classical standard and the training at reading literatures in their own tongues, begun with Latin and Greek, prepared him to find his way around not only among French and then Russian writers, but also in Hebrew and Hungarian. It was a purely humanistic education in the tradition going back to Erasmus, though absorbed within a country club environment.
Another, harsher dose of learning was administered when Wilson entered the army. He had been living in New York and working as a cub reporter for $15 a week when the US joined the war in 1917. Hating the notion of being required to "kill strangers", he volunteered for the hospital corps and was sent to France, where he was stationed at the spa town of Vittel in the Vosges mountains. Although in those years he developed a deep love for France which never waned, the horrors with which he was confronted as a wound-dresser left scars on him as well as on the soldiers he was treating. In 1919, back in New York and sickened by postwar American jingoism, he wrote a poem called The New Patriotism in which he bitterly celebrated the young men he had seen fight and die, recalling:
How they were bullied and
inspected,
Court-martialled, censored,
and suspected;
How they said "sir" and
snapped their hats
To save the world for
democrats.
Yet even the experience of war could not suppress Wilson's exuberant enjoyment of the New York of the 1920s. He wrote for various magazines, including Vanity Fair and the New Republic, was accepted into the famous Round Table of wits at the Algonquin Hotel, and fell in and out of love with a string of enchanting young women, including the then highly successful poet Edna St Vincent Millay, the actress Mary Blair, who became his first wife, and Frances Minihan and Elizabeth Waugh, two women from sharply contrasting social backgrounds who were to be the central characters in his most famous piece of fiction, The Princess with the Golden Hair, from the story collection Memoirs of Hecate County.
THE WALL STREET CRASH of 1929 radicalised Wilson, as it did so many young intellectuals of the time. He became a communist supporter, though he was never a member of the party; even a trip to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when the country was in the grip of famine and political terror, did not disabuse him of his faith in the party. By this time he had thoroughly immersed himself in the writings of Joyce, Proust, Eliot, Valéry and Gertrude Stein, among others. The result of this immersion was Axel's Castle, his ground-breaking study of modernism.
"A generation discovered modern literature in this book," Dabney declares, and indeed it remains the best starter guide to the work of the great masters of the early decades of the 20th century. It sold badly at first - Wilson jokingly hoped he might sell it to Hollywood, "with Adolphe Menjou as Proust and the Marx Brothers as Joyce" - but it established its author as one of the leading critics of the day.
Despite Wilson's political convictions, Axel's Castle makes no compromises in its defence and celebration of the highest of high art, yet it aims at, in Dabney's neat formulation, "bringing the saints of art into the mainstream". Certainly Wilson was no aesthete. He saw literature as essential to a civilised society and considered art a "revolutionary 'underground'", yet he knew how real was the blood that flows at the crossroads of literature and politics. As Dabney writes:
The suggestion that "ethical and aesthetic" standards be sacrificed in the interests of social justice seems to Wilson fuzzy. Unless one is "trying to function as an organizer or an active politician (and agitational literature is politics)", one should work in good faith by the best traditions of one's art. "A conviction that is genuine will always come through - that is, if one's work is sound."
The publication of To the Finland Station in 1940 - the book had taken eight years to write - marks the close of one phase of Wilson's political activism. Although he recognised clearly the barbarism of Hitler's regime, he was suspicious of Roosevelt's eagerness to join the fight against it, and remained so even after the US had entered the war. He was at the time engaged in a form of warfare of his own, for his marriage to the novelist Mary McCarthy, begun in 1938, was by the early 1940s rapidly deteriorating. Dabney is admirably restrained in his treatment of this famous literary union, or disunion, 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 after their marriage, when McCarthy was pregnant and, according to her, Wilson gave her a black eye, "a real shiner", and, so she claimed, punched her repeatedly and slapped her face. It should be kept in mind that McCarthy was notoriously voluble, to say the least, and as Dabney points out, "no one but McCarthy has claimed Wilson ever hit a woman".
WILSON'S FOURTH MARRIAGE, to Elena Mumm Thornton, at last brought tranquillity and genuine love into his life. Christened Helène-Marthe, Elena was the daughter of the German manufacturer of Mumm champagne, and a Russian mother descended from a long line of astronomers and diplomats. She spoke three languages fluently, was "formidably literate", according to Dabney, had studied art in Paris with Fernand Léger, and had been named one of the world's 10 most glamorous women. She was 40 when the couple married in 1946, and although Wilson was only 51 his health was already deteriorating because of a lifetime of heavy drinking and unremitting hard work. Yet she adored her short, tubby, dough-faced husband, and he returned her adoration, at least for the first couple of decades of their life together.
It was Elena who put Wilson's finances into some sort of order, after it was discovered that he had not been paying income tax for decades. He had a worse than useless accountant, and, as Dabney writes, "he had rarely earned enough money to have to pay taxes and was ignorant of the tax laws". Although certainly his earnings were disproportionate to his great national and international reputation, some of his work brought in considerable royalties - there was a period when the controversially and clinically erotic Memoirs of Hecate County was earning him $1,000 a week.
The wrangles with the IRS, which went on for years, revealed an unsavoury side of Wilson's personality; it was as if the champion of democracy and fair dealing had been jostled aside by the Princeton swell who considered himself above the petty duties of the hoi polloi. The book he wrote on the subject, The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, was one of his graver literary miscalculations. As Dabney remarks, "Wilson failed to grasp the absurdity of his position in The Cold War and the Income Tax, the irony that a former socialist should attack the 'bureaucracy' over this issue, the seeming effort to play the Thoreau of Civil Disobedience after evading taxes."
In his final decade, through the 1960s to his death in 1972, amid assassinations and wars and rumours of wars, he was as busy as he had ever been, living in Talcottville and writing about the other, lost US represented by the "old stone house", but travelling, too, to Europe and the Middle East, learning Hebrew and Hungarian, investigating the Dead Sea Scrolls, writing on the injustices suffered by the Native Americans, and producing one of his greatest works, Patriotic Gore, a broad-ranging survey of the Civil War and its literature. He was a cogent opponent of the Vietnam adventure, rightly recognising the long-term moral damage it would do to the US. As Lewis Dabney points out, the sentiments and opinions expressed in Patriotic Gore - for example, "Whenever we engage in a war or move in on some other country it is always to liberate somebody" - are still relevant today, when the great Republic is again in deep trouble, and when it needs, perhaps more than it ever did, a critic as committed, as passionate and as wise as he was.
John Banville's novel The Sea is now out in paperback
Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature By Lewis M Dabney. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 642pp. $35