A memoir

Edmund Wilson revisited

T.S. Matthews It would be an exaggeration to say that Edmund Wilson was the mentor of my youth, but an exaggeration with a modicum of truth. For the four years (1925;1929) when we were both on the staff of the New Republic I regarded myself as his pupil, and so, I think, did he. I also learned to like him and laugh at him (behind my hand) as one of the eccentric elders in whose company God or Herbert Croly (the New Republic's founder and editor) themselves a sufficiently eccentric pair, had put me.

When I first met Wilson I was twenty-four and young for my age; he was my eider by only six years, but seemed of a different generation; I considered him and deferred to him as an older man. I thought him rather disappointing to look at: a short, sandy-haired youngish man, at thirty already inclined to stoutness and baldness, with pale, blinking eyes and a high, strain t tenor voice; his profile as regular as a plump Roman emperor's but his expression like an absent-minded, cantankerous professor's. There was something chilly and withdrawn – 'disagreeable' is perhaps not too.strong a word – in the set of his face. • ' He was not so muchhyas uneasy and awkward with people, and his .uneasiness held more than a hint of impatience, as if he felt he was wasting his time in such company and was in a hurry to be off. He had no small talk whatever, but when he was holding forth on a subject that interested him, he seemed perfectly oblivious of his audience, and would go on and on in his rapid-fire, high-pitched voice, gesturing mostly by jerking back his head or wagging it from side to side. When he paused, always at the end of a paragraph, a hearer might wrongly suppose that he had finished, and would sometimes make the mistake of starting a new subject. That this was a mistake was borne in on him when Wilson, having collected his thoughts and regained his breath, broke ruthlessly in at the exact spot where he had left off.

In the first months of our acquaintance I never had any real conversation with him, though I saw him nearly every day. At first he would slip past my office door without stopping, sometimes with a nod and a small whinnying sound meant as a greeting. Then one day he stopped and came in. There was something impressive and something appealing about him – you felt that while his mind was roaming (occupied with very serious matters and in awesomely select company) he might not quite realise that it was beginning to rain, and you felt impelled to open an umbrella over him or guide him to shelter. He did have friends, and his friends felt that way about him; they respected him, laughed at him and called him Bunny. Not I, however; I was too much in awe of him as an older man and a literary figure. I never spoke to him by a less formal name than "Wilson." And there must have been something about him that appealed to women, for he was married four times. His second wife, who died in a tragic accident, was the only one I knew. She too laughed at him but evidently found him lovable. When I first knew him he was divorced and not yet remarried, and I remember the room he was living in – I think it was on Ninth Avenue – a perfect picture of helpless, squalid bachelorhood: an unmade bed, empty gin bottles on the dirty floor, no carpet, one naked electric light bulb. Women too – some of them – wanted to guide him to shelter.

His most famous friend. who had been at Princeton with him, was Scott Fitzgerald. I saw them together only once, but Wilson often spoke of Fitzgerald, and in a surprisingly protective way._ He seemed to believe that in some aspects of life Fitzgerald was a complete innocent and .depended on wiser or more informed heads to guide and tutor him. This may well have been true, but I thought Wilson's evidence unconvincing, to say the least. He told me about a weekend he had recently spent with the Fitzgeralds near Wilmington, where Fitzgerald was hibernating with an unfinished novel.

"You know," said Wilson, "Fitzgerald never reads the papers."

"No?"

"No, he never does, so he doesn't know what's going on in the world, and he relies on me to tell him. On this occasion, after I had outlined the world situation for him, and said to me, 'And I understand there will soon be a presidential election? And possibly a change of administration?' I said. 'Yes.' In that case,' he said, 'I suppose you will be made Secretary of State.'" ''He was pulling your leg," I suggested. "Oh, no, no, no! He really believes that anyone who knows as much as I do will infallibly be made Secretary of State." Once Wilson brought Fitzgerald to the New Republic office. They clumped noisily up the stairs – they had obviously had a good lunch – and stopped at my door. Fitzgerald was about Wilson's height but otherwise a lively contrast to him: alert, compact, grinning, crackling with nervous energy. Wilson introduced us.

"What!" said Fitzgerald, opening his eyes wide, "Not the Mr Matthews?'

"Oh," said Wilson, looking at him in surprise, "do you know him?"

"Know him! I used to fix his teeth!"

This assertion pleased me but seemed to alarm Wilson vaguely.

Wilson had enemies as well as friends. The printers at the Steinberg Press, for instance, where the New Republic was printed, hated him. They had their reasons. Although Wilson had been a journalist, of a literary sort, for years, I don't think he clearly understood or had much interest in the mechanics of printing. Anything he wrote was likely to be rewritten several times before he was satisfied with it; he would cross out paragraphs on his galley proofs and paste in new passages, typewritten, if there was time; if there wasn't he would crowd the margins with his small but legible handwriting, in pencil. (He had a peculiar way of holding a pencil: he seemed to bunch his whole hand about it, using both his middle finger and his forefinger to guide the point.) Worst of all, he would often make drastic revisions on the page proof itself. As anyone who knows the printing process doesn't need to be told, such eleventh-hour corrections entail a lot of extra work for a linotype operator, compositor, proofreader and foreman, and hold up the stereotypers as well. All hands in a printing shop take a strong view of "unnecessary" corrections on page proof.

The printers didn't hold me personally reSponsible for these outrages of Wilson, as they knew I was only a go-between. But one day at the_ press, when, with a sinking heart I had given the foreman some heavily "corrected" page proofs of a Wilson article, he said to me, "This Wilson a friend of yours?" That wasn't quite the way I'd have put it, but I said yes. "Well, let me tell you something. Don't ever let him show his face down here. Why not? The boys would kill'm. That's why." I think it's a pity that Wilson never knew that; but it was characteristic of him not even to suspect it, I suppose it was equally characteristic of me not to tell him – although if I had tried to, I don't think he would have understood.

About this time Wilson more or less took me in tow. I don't remember ever having my copy actually edited by anyone on the New Republic; it was either accepted or not; but he must have given me some guidance and instruction. I have a distinct recollection of his saying once, with a sigh, that I was now able to write a sentence, though still pretty wobbly on my paragraphs. He considered me, good enough, at any rate, to use as a guided missile against certain popular, writers whose reputations he felt should be deflated. On these occasions I was. shottecl to the muzzle, aimed with great care and fired with a loud bang.

D-day was the publication date of the chosen author's new book, but the target was the author himself and all his works. For weeks beforehand, I read or re-read everything he had written, and by the time I was ready to write the review I was fully loaded. I was given a whole page of the New Republic to explode in.

Though we were certainly not intimate our acquaintance was not confined to the office. remember evenings out with him in New York and in Red Bank, where for a time he had a house; he spent two or three weekends with us at Princeton. And when I returned from siX months in Majorca With Laura Riding and Robert Graves, it seemed natural to, make my report to Wilson on the six-month stint I had served with that extraordinary pair. I remember his dry comment: "I think you got away just in time." Our friendship — if that is not too warm a word; it is certainly not too warm for my end of it – came to an abrupt end about 1940, when We met by chance at Princeton Junction and he dumbfounded me by picking a quarrel, the reason for which at the time was quite incomprehensible to me. He had begun by accusing Time (on whose staff I had then been for some ten years) of being "dirty about women," and noted that the higher I rose in Time's ranks, "the dirtier it got." This unexpected attack, by a man whom I had regarded as friendly, if not my friend, left me ruffled, angry and puzzled. I finally came to the conclusion that the animosity behind Wilson's outburst must have arisen from his resentment of Time's review of a book by Mary McCarthy, who was then his wife. The review had been written by James Agee, who was incapable of being 'dirty' about anybody. I had not read the book, The Cornpany She Keeps, but I had passed the review/. I now read the book, re-read the review and found myself in complete agreement with Agee. Later it occurred to me that the underlying reason for Wilson's attack had not been merely this particular review. I think he may have felt disappointed by my giving up writing for the anonymous, executive job of a Time editor; besides, he didn't consider Time respectable journalism. There Was nothing in my accomplishment he could happily take credit for; in a way it was a reflection on himself as an instructor of my youth. He must have felt that the time he had spent on me was quite wasted. had not only left school too young but had gone to the bad straight off. As for me, I remember Wilson as one of my favourite professors. The break in our friendship lasted so long – twenty years! – that I never expected to see him again, and felt free to describe him in 3 book of memoirs I wrote, exactly as he had appeared to me. Then, shortly after the boo, was published, to my surprise and delight 1

received the following letter:

April 4, 1960 Dear Tom, 1 have been reading your book with great interest.

You have turned out to be a writer after all. I think that you did well to decide to do a straight autobiography rather than the usual autobiographical novel. 1 am sorry that our last meeting was disagreeable, and when I heard that you were leaving Time,I had the impulse to wire you congratulations. I hope to see you again in a more cheerful way. It was dreadful to read about Julie's death'.

Here are some observations: First of all, I was surprised to discover that I was only six years older than you. I had thought of you as so much younger. The point is that the younger people are, the more difference a few years make. At first it did not seem to me plausible that you should have been in England in 1911 – I was th re in 1908 and 1914; and that you should remember the old-fashioned Fourth of July. (You don't mention that those Paper balloons were sometimes in the form of animals.) I also read Ralston's Russian Fairy Tales. Which was in my grandfather's library, and also thought they were among the most frightening. You know Gogol developed his story Viy – which I think is the most hair-raising modern tale of horror – from one of those vampire stories

He then proceeded to cite more points on which he either corrected me or had some critical comment to make; ending on a sympathetic note:

1 share your personal reactions to what is goina on in this country. Russia and the US are getting to be more and more alike; and sometimes I feel that I have reached the point when, as the old adage says, good Americans can die and go to Paris....

As ever, Edmund Wilson

This letter made me very happy. It not only conferred on me the diploma he had these years Withheld, but added an apology for his attack on me. From Wilson,such a statement of regret could certainly be construed as an apology. I replied warmly, he invited me to visit him on Cape Cod on my next trip to America; in October of that year I went to his house in Wellfleet for dinner. He had told me to come early, so that we could have a good talk beforehand. I arrived about six otclock, and his Still beautiful wife, Elena, showed me into his study. This room itself was not very large but it Was the ante room to a much larger than ordin

ary library — apparently a series of boxlike rooms containing serried ranks of book-stacks. In the twenty years since I had seen him he had changed very little. He was more so, of

course: much stouter, so that he no longer seemed to have any neck; he was shorter of breath (and perhaps of temper?) but he had not become, as so many old men do, a caricature of his youth. He was impressive. We sat down and Wilson poured us both large whiskies. After the silence of twenty Years there was a great deal to talk about, large areas to cover; I was full of comments and questions. But Wilson had always liked to be in charge of the conversation, and in this respect I found him quite unchanged. After a lame beginning, when he was impelled, to my embar rassment, to repeat his apology viva voce, I tried to change the subject and also introduce various topics from my mental list. But each

time Wilson would say, "Yes, yes, we'll come to that presently!" and imbibe another draught from his glass.

By the time we went in to dinner I had drunk More than I wanted but nothing like as much as Wilson. He managed to carve the leg of lamb and serve us all (his wife and teenage daughter Joined us for dinner), then said to me, in that

characteristic tone of voice that sounded half annoyed, half surprised: "As you see, I am quite unable to carry on 'a conversation." It was only

too true. Elena Wilson did her best to keep the

talk going, and Wilson would occasionally rouse himself and make a drowsy, ineffectual

Pounce as a phrase went past him. We tried to Pretend that nothing was amiss; but as soon as dinner was over I took my leave. What an

anticlimax to my great expectations! And my timetable did not allow another try; that would have to wait till next year.

That meeting, almost a year later, began more auspiciously. As I pulled up in front of his

house, the whole family was gathered in the grassy dooryard, under a spreading elm (?) tree, and a camera crew from Holiday were taking pictures of them. Wilson beckoned to me, calling, "Come join us! Come and join us!" When the man in charge of the crew asked Wilson who I was, he cried, "My son!" Wilson's only son Reuel was in fact there;, also his daughter Helen and her mother Elena. I duly joined them, and a picture was taken.

Wilson was very proud of his son, and told me (not in his presence) what a gifted linguist he was. He gave me to understand that there was a keen rivalry between them in learning a new language; he admitted that Reuel had the advantage of him, in being able to speak whatever language he acquired, while Wilson himself rarely had more than a reading knowledge. He told me he had lately tried to steal a march on his son by secretly studying Hungarian, only to discover that Reuel was there before him. Physically, father and son were much alike, Reuel being also short and square, with sandy hair and a blink like his father's. He was in his twenties; he wore a striped shirt, shorts, sandals and a cropped beard, and said (at least while I was there) almost nothing.

The photographing over, Wilson and I repaired to his study, and on this occasion the flow of talk was not overborne by the flow of whisky; by the time dinner was over we had pretty well covered all the topics postponed from the year before.

During the next ten years, which were also the last ten years of his life, Wilson and I met only four or five times. He came more and more to resemble David Levine's cartoon of him as an owl; and many a prancing Squirrel Nutkin had reason to remember him as Old Brown himself. He and I never corresponded to any extent, but I read everything he wrote and sent him several congratulatory letters; I don't remember his ever responding to any of them. I presumed that Wilson must have found these letters unsatisfactory in some way. They were unsatisfactory to me as well: I felt that I could never manage to control my enthusiasm and make them seem reasonable. But I was over-enthusiastic? I remember writing to him thatPatriotic Gore was a great book and certain to become an American classic; and I don't think that was far out.

I had been particularly impressed by a passage in his introduction in which he likened the cause of wars to the voracity of rival sea slugs. When I next saw him he told me he had expanded this idea in a small pamphlet, The Cold War and the Income Tax, which would soon be published. He also talked darkly about "the

Government trying to take my houses away from me" – not only this house in Wellfleet but the house his mother had left him in upper New York State. It sounded to me like the conversation of middle age; I thought it was perhaps a sign that he was comfortably off at last and was now grumbling about his taxes, like any good Republican. Little did I know.

After reading The Cold War and the Income Tax I understood why he feared that his houses might be confiscated, and I gained some idea of the nature and the extent of his "difficulties" with the government. He had fallen into such arrears in paying his income tax (for nine years he had not even filed a return) that he was not only liable to a large fine but to arrest and imprisonment. He had gone for advice to a friend and Princeton classmate, high in the legal profession, who told him frankly that the best thing he could do was to become a citizen of some other country. This he refused to do.

The upshot was that, after he had paid $16,000, all the money he could lay his hands on, towards back taxes, he still owed the Internal Revenue more than $68,000. Besides this he had unpaid lawyers' bills, an unpaid loan of $10,000, and a mortgage. His despair was only mitigated when the IRS informed him that in 'fact he could settle his bill for only $25,000, this sum to be paid by garnisheeing his income for the next three years. (How this was to be accomplished in so short a time was a mystery. Except for the years when he was being paid a salary by the New Republic and then the New Yorker, and the year of his only best-seller, Memoirs of ,Hecate County, his usual earnings were about $2,000 a year. In addition a trust fund set up by his mother brought him an annual $8,500).

How on earth did he land himself in such a pickle? Sheer negligence, as he himself confessed. In some practical ways he really did need someone to look after him; and most of the time someone did. For him money and all its appurtenances were only an interruption and a nuisance; his literary labours preoccupied him to the exc.usion of everything else. This fact must have become apparent even to the vengeful bureaucrats who pursued him.

Now he had another, overriding, preoccupation that shadowed his life like a pillar of cloud: the constant pressure of his unpayable debt. He had always been a serious person (he must have been a fiercely serious little boy) but when I knew him in earlier days he had been continually intent but occasionally hilarious. Not off the cuff — he had cast off that sort of improvisation with his undergraduate days — but deliberately, professionally, as a writer. I remember particularly two pieces, both of which appeared in the New Republic but which I cannot find in any of the twenty-odd books of his that I have. One, written in the style of Finnegans Wake, was about three New York critics and was titled Three Limperary Cripples. The other was A Lexicon of Prohibition, a deadpan list of terms describing the various stages of drunkenness, from A ("tight") to X Y Z ("to have the whoops and jingles, to have the heeby-jeebies, to burn with a low blue flame").

In the years of our renewed acquaintance, however, I don't think I once heard him laugh heartily. There was too much on his mind, and I think too he must often have felt far from well. I never knew him to take any exercise, he was obviously much over-weight, and he drank more whisky than was good for him. In spite of these obstacles he did an amazing amount of work and lived a long life.

Wilson's discovery of the income tax led him to investigate the uses to which the government put the tax money; and his findings horrified him. Most of the money was spent for 'defence' — a word which not only meant the opposite of what it said but included the secret manufacture and storing of vast quantities of such horrors as napalm and deadly or contagious bacteria. He came to the conclusion that "the people of the United States are at the present time dominated and driven by two kinds of officially propagated fear: fear of the

Soviet Union and fear of the income tax" . . that "our country has become today a huge blundering power unit controlled more and more by bureaucracies whose rule is making it more and more difficult to carry on the tradition of American individualism; and since I can accept neither this power unit's aims nor the methods it employs to finance them, I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me." And he saw what America's image had become to the world at large: "self. intoxicated, homicidal and menacing."

Perhaps, if he had been twenty years younger, he might have carried out his threat to leave his native land. But I doubt it. Where would he have gone? The British would have felt it an honour to welcome him, but he was too deep-dyed a Yankee to return the compliment. The state of Europe only deepened his gloom. His younger love affair with Russia ("the moral top of the world, where the light never quite goes out") had long ago been cured by a visit to the Soviet Union. He was not the type for Latin America or the South Seas.

Wellfleet suited him much better than Red Bank had; I only wish I had seen him in his family house at Talcottville. But it was New York, where I had first known him, that left me my happiest memory of him. We met at the Princeton Club, where Wilson was staying, some business having brought him to the city, and he invited me to have lunch with him. 1 was on my way to a physical check-up and had been told by the doctor to come with an empty stomach, so I sat with him in the dining room while he had lunch. Except when he guffawed or was about to, Wilson's expression never changed, but when he was feeling exceptionally well or in a very good mood his face sometimes twinkled. I remember it twinkling on this occasion. He offered several times to drive out with me to the airport, although I kept telling him I was not taking a plane but going to a doctor.

Another scene I like to remember was in his study of Wel!fleet. I was just preparing to take my leave when Wilson said he had something for me. It wouldn't take him a moment to get it: his filing system was so good that he could lay his hands in a jiffy on anything he wanted, anything at all. He vanished into the shelf-filled rooms behind his study. From time to time in the next few minutes I caught glimpses of him padding purposefully from stack to stack. Eventually he reappeared empty-handed and ruefully admitted that for once his filing system had failed him.

The idea came to me too late but I still think it was a good idea: Wilson should be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, whose cash value was going up every year, and had then reached the neighbourhood of $50,000. That sum would not only wipe out his debt to the government but put him on Easy Street, an address that might not have appealed to him but would make life much pleasanter for his family. Alas for good intentions, nothing came of this well-meant scheme.

In July 1971 I saw Wilson for the last time. I had heard that he was not well and telephoned to ask if he could see me. Elena Wilson let me in and went to fetch him, leaving me in a sitting room. When he shuffled in, in a dressing-gown. I was shocked at his appearance: his face was quite chop-fallen and a bad colour. But he seemed glad to see me. He asked why my wife hadn't come; I told him that she had sent her respects but thought we would do better without her. Elena brought him a whisky; I chose • iced tea. The whisky seemed to revive him, but presently he said reproachfully to Elena, "You see! My speech is affected" (as it was): cannot pronounce my words properly." She said to him soothingly that he was talking very distinctly. But quite often I lost the operative word in one of his sentences, or had to ask him to repeat a name.

He was no longer the ruthless pursuer of a single conversational fish: often one sentence would be enough to finish a subject, and he was quite amenable to the shifts and changes of a rather gossipy conversation. He told me he had just written a book about his father's house in upstate New York, and hoped to finish several other things — "if God spares me."

Elena said, "He has a present for you." It was the long-missing photograph. I got him to sign it (which he did willingly but with complaints about the increasing difficulty of writing even so much as his name). Elena also signed it, and later their daughter Helen. Wilson gazed at the photograph and said, with a hoot, "You look rather like a benignant bishop."

He had lately suffered a bad fall, he said, followed by at least two strokes, and he was unable to work more than two or three hours a day.

When I asked Wilson if he ever saw Conrad Aitken, who also lived on the Cape, Wilson said, "Not for a long time. He has denounced me publicly." He didn't make it clear what Aitken had denounced him for — but I heard later that Aitken had become rather crotchety and for some reason had taken against Wilson. He was obviously ailing and exhausted, and I soon took my leave. I felt that I would not see him again, and I was right: he died the following June.

Wilson was the foremost American man of letters of the twentieth century. He,was also, I think, a great American sage. He embodied that rare combination of stubborn scepticism, inveterate innocence and sturdy, clarifying common sense which we used to consider peculiarly American — almost an American invention — but whose exponents are now sunk under the horizon, as deep as Atlantis. Wilson's sort, if it has not quite vanished from America, is in the fast-dwindling, minuscule minority: although once dominant in the Republic's affairs, this old American type is now almost completely disfranchised and disregarded.

I no longer wish that he had been given the Nobel Prize — except for the material help the money would have been to him. The honours he deserves and will certainly be awarded will be bestowed by a larger and better informed panel than any Swedish committee: generations of civilised readers. His place in the hall of literary immortals is secure; in fact, he is there already, looking unimpressed by the company, and seated between Sainte-Beuve and Dr Johnson.

T. S. Matthews was formerly editor of Time. His latest book, Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot, is published this week by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.