Off the rails
JOHN ROWAN WILSON
This book represents an interesting idea which has gone hopelessly off the rails. It claims to be a combination of biography and expert psychological analysis of President Wilson, the political and biographical material being pre- sented by William C. Bullitt and the psycho- logical analysis by Dr Freud. Such a combined study might be interesting and even valuable if both authors were able to take a reasonably detached attitude towards the subject of the biography. Unfortunately, with the present book this is far from being the case.
William Bullitt began by being a fervent admirer of Wilson. However, with greater ex- perience of his idol he became increasingly dis- illusioned and ended in a state of emotional resentment against the President and everything that he stood for. In the biographical sections of the book Wilson is presented as a scheming, sanctimonious hypocrite. His appearance is un- prepossessing, his intellect second-rate, his am- bition inordinate, his vanity pathological. He is incapable of telling truth from falsehood. During the war he was the dupe of the Allied governments. His behaviour at the peace con- ference is explained by an unconscious desire to play the part of Jesus Christ.
The portrait is implausible, and seems at times to reveal more about the emotional attitude of the writer than that of the subject. What passes comprehension is that Dr Freud should have been prepared to engage in a painstaking analysis on such a very suspect biographical foundation. The explanation seems to be that he, too, felt emotionally about President Wil- son. In his introduction to the book he admits to antipathy towards Wilson. He claims that during the .course of writing the book 'those emotions underwent a thorough subjugation.' This claim would be difficult to accept on his own behalf. But when he makes it for Mr Bullitt also, the reader's credulity is strained to break- ing point.
The psychological comments are inserted into the text in such a way that it is not always pos- sible to say who is writing; Bullitt or Freud. However, there is plenty of material here for the collector of bizarre psychoanalytic explana- tions for human behaviour. It is suggested, for example, that Wilson's unjustified distrust of the White House secretary Joseph P. Tumulty prob- ably originated in the fact that Tumulty's christian name, like that of Wilson's younger brother, was Joe. And when Wilson wrote, in his grief after the death of his first wife, 'I read detective stories to forget, as a man would get drunk' we are told that this shows that he had begun to think of himself subconsciously as a woman.
It is up to the reader to decide on the plausi- bility of these interpretations and the reliability of history written on such a level. Bullitt ex- plains that publication of the book was delayed for reasons of courtesy until the second Mil Wilson had died. It would have done no harm to delay it even longer.
Previous page
