From a juicy grave
Christopher Hawtree
FROM THE UNCOLLECTED by Edmund Wilson Ohio University Press, £21, pp. 410
Now that his mind has enlarged into such a vast organisation, it's as if conversation has to wait in the lobby till the message has been routed through the proper department. Sometimes it has to come back Monday.
So wrote that splendid novelist Dawn Powell of Edmund Wilson as long ago as 1938 in her magnificent, recently-published Diary (Steerforth Press, $32). They were friends and drinking companions but such comments echo down the years, so much so that, come 1945, all relations with him
are dictated by him — he is the one to name the hour, the place, the subject of conversation . . . he beams with joy and well- nourished nerves as he leaves, like a vampire returning from a juicy grave.
However daunting Wilson might have been in the lobby of the Algonquin, his books — some 42 inches of shelf-space allow the reader to dictate the conversa- tion, words which rarely stale upon repeti- tion. If one regrets being obliged to augment that shelf with the recent biogra- phy by that literary bronco Jeffrey Meyers, here is rapid compensation in the form of 55 unknown essays. The volume is in that pleasingly dumpy format favoured by Wilson (who would surely have added an index) and, ranging across four decades, revisits familiar topics and brings others Christopher Isherwood, Graham Greene — within his purlieu. Ironically, it is pub- lished by a university press, perhaps because Farrar, Strauss has been taken over by a German conglomerate. Wilson always thought himself 'a man of the Twenties', that period of cocktails and conversation, of continual surprise and compliant thighs. As he put it in a 1959 interview with Henry Brandon, here includ- ed,
The period after the Civil War was a bad period for literature, the time when the American writers and painters and other artists in fact emigrated to France and England. It was the period of Whistler and Henry James. But after that a whole new cultural era began for the United States. It got under way slowly and really came to a boil at the time when I was in college 1912-16. So the period of the Twenties, which was awful in some ways, was a good period for literature and art in America. We were preoccupied with American matters, and the whole situation was, again, more like the early part of the 19th century before the Civil War.
Even those that went abroad were trying to create something American. Whatever the subject under discussion, one is aware of Wilson exploring the attitudes of his own era:
It has become a common delusion among Americans to mistake the enjoyment of Boswell's Johnson for an interest in litera- ture. The English departments of the univer- sities are full of people who prefer Boswell's gossip to the study of either art or ideas . if they must have the English 18th century, why, one wonders, do they not choose Swift for a hero? He was more interesting than Johnson and has never been properly done.
He himself was happy to leave in obscu- rity the Waugh-like diatribes against `Things I Consider Overrated', but one rejoices to concur with such fulminations as a genuine love for The Sea being 'one of the rarest things in the world; it is a special and bizarre taste, very seldom acquired.' Rarely has there been so cogent an account of the horror that is The Wedding. There is, once again, that darkening of tone as the world slides into the Depression and The American Earthquake and his parallel study of the Russian Revolution which led to To the Finland Station (readers of which will be startled by his unprejudiced review here of Bertram Wolfe's Three Who Made a Revolution, 'the best book in its field in any language').
Strange to think there was a time when Isherwood was 'principally known in Amer- ica as a collaborator with W. H. Auden in several satirical plays'. Incisive enthusiasm for Goodbye to Berlin — one of the best accounts of Isherwood's art — comes with the question 'can't we arrange to import more Isherwood and cut down on Harold Nicolson a little?' Time has done just that. Even so, one might wonder at his later enthusiasm for the travel book The Condor and the Cows, which one had always thought as boring as The World in the Evening and Ramakrishna and his Disciples.
It was a fine decision by the volume's editors — Janet Groth and David Castronovo — to make all this readily portable, but one is eager for the uncollect- ed uncollected. Wilson is never less than stimulating, bringing to his plain prose that continual tweak of sensibility at apparent odds with hard living. Many are the accounts of this — not least by himself but one is most haunted by an evening in 1961 with Dawn Powell at an Albee play, after which she wrote that they determined to be less than our sleepy age
. . . we knew we wanted a drink but were hardly able to sit up and stay awake. Our feet with one accord strolled into Liquor Store where we each selected pints of rye, strolled out into cab and tore to our separate beds where we could drop our clothes, put nipple on bottle and slurp the whole thing down at ease.
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