America's Johnson
Jeffrey Meyers
Edmund Wilson's America George Douglas George Douglas
(University of Kentucky Press £19.55) Edmund Wilson's interests ranged from
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the historical and psychological nter- Pretation of literature in Axel's Castle and The Wound and the Bow to a study of the revolutionary personality in To the Finland Station. He made a disillusioning journey t° the Soviet Union in 1935, dared to dispute Russian prosody with Nabokov, learned Hebrew to study the Dead Sea Scrolls, defended the Iroquois Indians before the fashionable movement in the fought a hopeless but noble cam- Paign against the arbitrary income tax and PPosed academic specialisation with his ownhumane scholarship. His erudition, in- dustry, subtlety, acerbity, analytic power art. d.Johnsonian manner made him the most distinguished and influential American critic of the century. Wilson was more perceptive as a literary critic than as a social observer. He could be caustic on stockbrokers: 'daily work of a kind In which it is utterly impossible to im- agine a normal human being taking s,atisfaction or pride' or on loutish proles: One wonders how these men and women can feel enough mutual attraction even to breed more of their unattractive kind.' But ab.i.lity generously recognised Hemingway's in a review of his first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems, which he compared to lithographs by Goya and had the last w_ ord on his last novel, Islands in the limitations nearly SO years later. He saw the 'imitations of Hemingway's self-portraits: He is certainly his own worst-invented character,' but also perceived that 'his whole work is a criticism of society: he has responded to every pressure of the moral at- mosphere of the time, as it is felt at the roots of human relations, with a sen- eness almost unrivalled.' The posthumous publication of Wilson's diaries, The Twenties and The Thirties, revealed that his life was as interesting as his work. His forebears were successful doctors and lawyers, he was a friend of Fitzgerald at Princeton and came under the humane influence of Dean Christian Gauss, did intelligence work in America during the Great War, and was closely associated with the New Republic, the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books until his death in 1972. He suffered a nervous breakdown in 1929, had four wives and three children, and was a heavy drinker.
An interesting book could be written on the connection between literature and alcoholism, which claimed most of Wilson's American contemporaries: Sinclair Lewis, Lardner, O'Neill, Fitz- gerald, Faulkner, Hart Crane, Hem- ingway, Wolfe. There were relatively few Britons in this group: Henry Green, Dylan Thomas, Lowry and Behan. Many of the authors found liquor an instant relief from the strain of writing as well as an anodyne for the even greater torments of creative sterility. Dashiell Hammett kept a typewriter on his desk to remind himself that he had once been a writer; Wilson kept a bottle on his desk to help him pour out the words.
Wilson was pudgy and puffy even in youth (a drunk Ted Roethke once brazenly grabbed his jowls and exclaimed: 'you're all flab!'). So it was surprising to discover from the diaries that, like Bertrand Russell, this unattractive intellectual had a very active sexual life — and with girls of all classes: 'she would wet herself and bite my tongue, and when I had finished, I could feel those obscure and meaty regions throb- bing powerfully.' The vividly erotic
'Princess with the Golden Hair,' in his fic- tional Memoirs of Hecate County, was ban- ned in Boston and suppressed in 1946. As a young man, he was in love with Edna Millay; later, he was married to Mary Mc- Carthy for eight years. It would be in- teresting to know what influence they had on each other — apart from her savage por- trait of him in A Charmed Life.
Mr Douglas's explanation that Wilson's novels, plays and poems were distinctly in- ferior to his non-fiction, because he never took fiction writing seriously and his scholarly instincts suppressed his imagina- tion, does not illuminate his lack of creative talent. Nor does it reveal why the non- fiction is much better than the novels of many American writers with no scholarly interests: McCarthy, Mailer, Baldwin, Capote, Vidal.
Wilson clearly deserves (and has received) book-length studies. But this bland, repetitive, meandering and superficial work adds almost nothing to our understanding of his achievement. Douglas is extremely fond of cliches: 'clarion call', 'rich tapestry', 'come to grips,' glittering pro- sperity'; and he sometimes makes no sense at all: Wilson's essay on the Empire State Building 'is divided into two distinct parts, each of which clearly foreshadows the other'.
Douglas calls Wilson 'one of the great critics of the American experience' (though he wrote nothing about Vietnam), criticises him for studying European history, and of- fers simple expositions, a banal reshuffling of accepted ideas: the Depression 'seemed to call for a national reassessment of priorities'; 'Wilson and Mencken discovered that some of the pain and agony of living in American society could be assuaged simply by living in it and loving it'; in 0 Canada, 'Wilson seems to have concluded that Americans have a lot to learn from their neighbours in the north.'
Oddly enough, Wilson has no contem- porary English equivalent, though other Americans — Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe — have approached his achievement. Indeed, it is hard to find his equivalent in this century. Men of letters like Saintsbury and Gosse, Leavis and Snow, Read and Pritchett cannot match Wilson's writing on political as well as on literary subjects. To equal his richness, breadth and diversity, one has to go back to Hazlitt and to Macaulay, of whom Thackeray said: 'He reads twenty books to write a sentence, he travels a hundred miles to write a line of description.'
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