THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 30, 1995 TAG: 9507270596
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY KEITH MONROE
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
EDMUND WILSON
A Biography
JEFFREY MEYERS
Houghton Mifflin. 554 pp. $35.
FROM THE 1920s to the 1970s, Edmund Wilson occupied a unique position in American letters. He was a literary tastemaker, a social critic, sometimes a scold, always a delight to read. Not since Emerson had anyone played the role of cultural panjandrum so convincingly.
Jeffrey Meyers' thorough Edmund Wilson: A Biography details the man as writing machine, and less appealingly, as sex machine.
Born in 1895, Wilson helped make the reputation of many of his contemporaries, notably Ernest Hemingway. He resurrected the reputation of his fellow Princetonian, F. Scott Fitzgerald, when he was all but forgotten. (Meyers has written biographies about both American writers.) And he convinced readers that Dickens and Kipling were serious artists, not merely potboiling populists.
But Wilson also ranged far beyond literature. He mined the intellectual trail that led from 18th-century utopians through Marx to Lenin, consummating a revolution in To the Finland Station. In Apologies to the Iroquois he reminded America of its ill treatment of its first inhabitants. He brought the drama and the theological questions raised by the Dead Sea Scrolls to a wide audience. He wrote about Canada and Haiti, the Civil War and his own life.
In his prose Wilson was coolly analytical, a plain-spoken but magisterial figure. Meyers reveals a private life, however, that was quite often chaotic and sensual.
Wilson was descended from Cotton Mather, and his father was a New Jersey attorney general who suffered bouts of mental illness. His mother was aloof and superficial. Neither had a talent for parenting. Wilson, a pampered, lonely only child, retreated into books. He showed little talent for human relations or patience with them. Yet he managed to attract a succession of female lovers, including Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anais Nin, and male friends such as Vladimir Nabokov and Andre Malraux.
An Army wound-dresser in World War I in France, Wilson said ``the war made me see. . . that respectable life is a living death.'' His parents' example may have had something to do with that observation, as well. In any case, through a life that ended in 1972, he managed to do exactly what he wanted to do most of the time. That was read, write, drink and fornicate. He married four times - writer Mary McCarthy was No. 3 - and had dozens of liaisons that he chronicled in a clinically detailed diary.
He seems to have possessed outsized appetites - for drink, work, sex and intellectual stimulation. He pursued topics that caught his imagination with the same zeal that he pursued women. To be free to do so, he was prepared to sacrifice steady income. He lived in a succession of squalid, rented rooms until an inheritance in his 50s allowed him to own a home. For seven years, he simply ceased paying income tax. When the Internal Revenue Service caught up with him and assessed a whopping penalty, he attacked them in a blistering polemic - The Cold War and the Income Tax.
Wilson was a longtime contributor to the New Republic, the Nation and The New Yorker. He hated teaching, was no good at it, and scorned most academics as timid and conventional. His work ethic amazed colleagues. Though he drank excessively for decades, he was at his desk each morning pushing forward. Once a subject possessed him, he'd consume all the available literature until he knew more than the professionals, then write his piece. Often, it was the last word.
Wilson may have been America's last old-fashioned man of letters. No one on today's cultural scene comes close to matching his gifts. He was actually more British than American, more a man of the 19th than the 20th century, in being a lively amateur rather than a dreary academic, a wide-ranging polymath rather than a narrow specialist, an eccentric iconoclast rather than a member of the herd.
Meyers' biography is admiring without being slavish, well-informed without being pedantic, showing the warts without letting them overwhelm the accomplishments. For those curious about Wilson's curious life, it does the job. But it's no substitute for Wilson himself. Interested readers should run, not walk, to Axel's Castle, The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, The Shores of Light, A Piece of My Mind, Patriotic Gore and many more.
- MEMO: Keith Monroe is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Jacket design by ANN GALLAGER
Jacket photo by NATHANIEL HARTSHORNE
by CNB