“Mommy, you mean my father is a great critic?”—and he smiled—“I always thought he was just a two-bit book reviewer.”

—Mary McCarthy, recalling a post-divorce conversation with her then nine-year-old son Reuel Wilson

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“You wrote Finlandia, didn't you?,” the wife of the Aspen Institute's president asked Edmund Wilson at a dinner in New York at which the Institute awarded him a $30,000 prize. If Wilson were alive today at a similar event, he might be less likely to be confused with the composer Jan Sibelius than with the sociobiologist and entomologist Edward O. Wilson. Twenty years from now, perhaps ten, the question might be, “Edmund who?”

Through the last decades of his life (he died in 1972), the label tediously affixed to Edmund Wilson was “our last great man of letters.” Over a long career, he had tried his hand at every literary form—fiction, poetry, drama, intellectual and literary history, travel-anthropology, journal-keeping. But in the end, a critic is what Wilson primarily was, and such reputation as he still enjoys is based on his literary criticism. The body of this criticism is one of the main emphases of the exhaustive new biography of Wilson by Lewis Dabney,¹ a work decades in preparation and altogether admiring of its subject.

Born in 1895, Wilson lived through what the poet Randall Jarrell, in a famous essay of the 1950's, called the Age of Criticism. But when one thinks of the names of the other critics of the time—Van Wyck Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, Yvor Winters, Newton Arvin, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin—names first fading from prominence and now beginning to fade from memory, one realizes that literary criticism is not an easy path to immortality.

Does Edmund Wilson's literary criticism figure to endure any longer than that of these others? One thing going for him was that, unlike the critics mentioned above, Wilson never had a permanent academic appointment. He worked at editorial jobs, beginning in the 1920's at Vanity Fair and then moving on to the New Republic; from the 1940's until the end of his life, he was under contract to the New Yorker. Late in life he also inherited money, but not enough to maintain him and the children produced by his four marriages. Chiefly, he lived off his voluminous writing, and this independence was part of his cachet.

Apart from Memoirs of Hecate County (1967), a collection of short stories whose commercial success was aided by its having been censored for pornographic content, none of Wilson's books sold particularly well. But the readers who cared for him cared a very great deal. His admirers formed a cult, in which, I ought to delay no longer in saying, I was once a member in good standing. Wilson introduced us to a vast number of important writers—he was something of a walking version of the Modern Library—in prose that seemed virile, informed by a long literary tradition, and wonderfully free of academic jargon. To young men and women with literary aspirations, there was also something more: as early as 1929, Lionel Trilling remarked of Wilson that “he seemed, in his own person, and young as he was, to propose and to realize the idea of the literary life.” That was it, exactly.

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Metropolitan in his manner, his sweep, the breadth of his interests—he wrote about burlesque and about the Dead Sea Scrolls—Wilson was the contemporary and friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos. He had been the first critic to spot and praise the writing of Ernest Hemingway, who once told him that his opinion was the only one “in the States that I have any respect for.” All this conduced to make Wilson himself seem a key figure of the 1920's, the last unequivocally rich, even glamorous, period in our national literature. Nor did it hurt that Wilson had family connections going back in American history to the 17th century, giving him something like patrician standing in a field increasingly occupied by Jewish sons of immigrants eager to find jobs in formerly anti-Semitic university English departments.

A major part of Wilson's modus operandi was his sheer authoritativeness. Since in literature no one can finally prove anything, except perhaps the technical defects of prosody in a poem, criticism lives or dies by the persuasiveness of the critic, a persuasiveness based largely on his confidence and the strength of his assertions. No one was more aware of this than Wilson, who put the case perhaps as well (and as baldly) as it can be put:

The implied position of the people who know about literature (as is also the case in every other art) is simply that they know what they know, and that they are determined to impose their opinions by main force of eloquence or assertion on the people who do not know.

Adding to this authoritativeness was that Wilson, who from late adolescence seemed to have the gift of perpetual middle age, became, when middle-aged, precociously old. Crankiness, of opinion and of manner, became part of his armament. By the 1950's he had bowed out of contemporary literary life, ceasing to comment on current work: “If I now play at being old,” he wrote in The Sixties, one of the collected volumes of his journals, “I never played at being young.” From then on he responded to requests from editors and readers with a postcard listing all the things he refused to do, and the list was impressive in its inclusiveness.

Until the 1950's, though, Wilson was very much a man of his time. In the 1920's he was a powerful advocate of literary modernism (a term he grew to dislike), and in his book Axel's Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930(1935), he explained to the uninitiated the meaning and mechanics of the work of James Joyce, W.B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, and other avant-garde writers. In the 1930's, he became politicized, reporting on union strikes and on unemployment and poverty in America. This writing was later collected in The American Earthquake (1951).

Anti-Americanism had long since become a strong strain in Wilson's intellectual makeup; the country was always letting him down. His politics had begun in pacifism, brought on by a stint as an ambulance driver in World War I, where he witnessed at close quarters the chewed-up bodies of the war's wounded and dead. High on the camaraderie he felt with his fellow enlisted men, he then also declared himself a socialist. By the 30's, with the Depression, he added the anti-capitalist component, and in 1932, along with a large number of other intellectuals, he voted for William Z. Foster, the Communist candidate for President.

Exuberant about the prospects of socialism, Wilson wrote a long book about it, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History (1940). The story told in this book culminates in the arrival in Petrograd of its hero, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, to take control of the Russian Revolution. Wilson could never quite bring himself to say flat out that Lenin was no hero but one of the great barbarians of history and that it would have been much better for the Russian people had his train never arrived.

By the 50's, a broad touch of snobbery, of the I'm-well-out-of-it variety, was brought on board; in a book called A Piece of My Mind (1956), Wilson remarked that he did not recognize the country depicted in the pages of Life magazine. All of this came together in The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest (1963). Wilson, who owed taxes for several years running, purported to be outraged at the realization that some of his (as yet unpaid) tax money would go for weapons that might be used in war.

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Those unpaid taxes were emblematic of another facet of Edmund Wilson's life. One of the unintended consequences of Lewis Dabney's biography, which fully endorses Wilson's politics and general point of view, is to establish the grave disorder of that life in its every phase and aspect.

It is no secret that Wilson was what is euphemistically called a functioning alcoholic; the euphemism lies in the suggestion that one can drink a lot and still function. Function, true enough, Wilson did, at least as a writer: his literary production never slackened. I used to think of him awakening in the morning after a hard night's boozing, shaking himself like a dog coming in out of the rain, then repairing to his desk to take notes and write out a summary of some dreary southern Civil War diary for another of his thick literary-historical books. But Wilson's drinking also left his life in almost perpetual disarray and, until his final marriage, bohemian squalor.

Much is made by Dabney, as by commentators before him, of Wilson's following in the tradition of his father. Edmund Wilson, Sr. had been the Republican attorney general of New Jersey, from which office he prosecuted important corruption cases with such success that President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, offered him various jobs in his administration, none of which he accepted. A man of great probity, the elder Wilson believed that investing in the stock market was a species of gambling, and therefore steered clear of it; he gave popular lectures with a note of moral uplift; he provided for the family of his ill younger brother.

Edmund Wilson, Sr. also suffered from hypochondria, to the point of undergoing what Dabney describes as lengthy “eclipses.” This tightly strung, neurotic element is something that Dabney speculates may have been inherited by his son. Little else was. Upon his death, the elder Wilson put his wife in charge of his estate, under the assumption that his son was incapable of managing his own finances. This was not a foolish assumption: Edmund Wilson was the sort of person who could get into a cab in Manhattan and tell the driver to take him to Cape Cod.

Ineptitude in the details of life is a motif playing throughout Dabney's lengthy biography. Not only was Wilson incapable of driving a car, he could not type, could not handle money, and had no sense of practical politics. He also had no notion of how to be affectionate with his own children. With women, his method of seduction was often the fatal one of proposing marriage. Sexually, he was ardent; physically, repellent. “If you were just prose,” a woman named Elizabeth Waugh wrote to him, “I'd be mad about you.”

But he wasn't just prose, and he certainly wasn't poetry. He was instead a bald, pudgy little man with a drinking problem and a mean streak.

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Wilson at his meanest shows up in Dabney's account of his marriage to the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy—a marriage made in 1937 when he was forty-two and she was twenty-five. “I was too young,” McCarthy would later claim, and “I was too old,” Wilson would counter. It would be closer to the truth to say that both were too selfish and wanting in the least human insight. McCarthy always mistook her snobbery for morality; Wilson mistook life for literature. Dabney, summing up this wretched partnership, writes: “American letters has not seen another alliance so flawed and so distinguished.” So flawed and so distinguished—what a way to characterize the union of a true bitch and a genuine bully.

The Wilson-McCarthy marriage does supply Dabney with the most interesting chapter of his book. As recorded in Dabney's deadpan prose, this nightmare had everything: abortion, cuckoldry, beatings, the exchange of insults meant to maim, desertion, unhelpful psychotherapeutic counseling, and lots of drunken rage and hysteria to go around. My favorite moment occurs during the testimony, in court, of Nathalie Rahv, the wife of Philip Rahv, the co-editor of Partisan Review and formerly Mary McCarthy's lover before she left him for Wilson. According to Mrs. Rahv, Wilson humiliated McCarthy by accusing her of poor housekeeping in front of friends. Mary McCarthy a poor homemaker—shocking!

After the break-up of Wilson's marriage to McCarthy in 1945, Dabney's biography begins to lose its interest. Much of Wilson's literary criticism entailed the elaborate summary of the works he was commenting on, so Dabney is left with the dreary task of summarizing summaries, interspersed with the recital of trips on and off the wagon. Dabney neglects to mention that Wilson's books and journals can be longueur-laden well beyond the legal limit; one of his specialties in his journals was great boring descriptions of landscape. In his later life Wilson spent a good deal of time in the half-ruined old house in upstate New York that he had inherited and that his last wife hated. There he drank and scribbled away, living a role resembling nothing so much as a character out of Tennessee Williams, but in a northern setting and with a Calvinist work ethic added.

Wilson, Dabney reports, “was the only well-known literary alcoholic of his generation whose work was not compromised by his drinking.” That begs the question of why he drank so much. Among the reasons one can think of is that he did not really set out to be a literary critic. He wanted instead to be a literary artist: as Dabney puts it, “a writer of poetry, drama, or fiction who also writes criticism, or someone whose literary criticism feeds a larger historical project.” It took him a long time—and the production of a fair amount of drab fiction—to admit that such strengths as he possessed lay in writing not about life directly but about literary and historical figures.

Lionel Trilling, the only American critic who rivaled Wilson for renown during their lifetimes, was also less than content in his career. Trilling was a larger, more philosophical, more finely meshed thinker than Wilson, yet, as published portions of his diaries make plain, he wished he had had the courage to devote himself to fiction instead of settling for a life of teaching and criticism.

The sad fact is that, for a capacious and lively mind, literary criticism, the job of regularly registering opinions of other persons' work, is for the most part an insufficient activity. “You know Plato's contempt for the image of an image,” George Santayana replied to a correspondent who once suggested that he give up metaphysics to devote himself to literary criticism:

[B]ut as a man's view of things is an image in the first place, and his work is an image of that, and the critic's feelings are an image of that work, and his writings an image of his feelings, and your idea of what the critic means only an image of his writings, please consider that you are steeping your poor original tea leaves in their fifth wash of hot water, and are drinking slops.

Thanks all the same, Santayana summed up, but he would stick to philosophy.

In the history of literary criticism written in English, very few names have survived, or probably deserve to survive. Samuel Johnson is one, perhaps the only true genius who put his mind chiefly to criticism; and Johnson also happens to have been a great man, which gives his writing all the more authority. Matthew Arnold is another, not so much for his particular pronouncements, which could be very smart and sharp, as for their cultural sweep and continuing relevance.

Some might include William Hazlitt in this company, though he was a better writer than critic, and what he thought of the actors, poets, and painters of his day is less important than that he understood the spirit of his age and wrote brilliantly and courageously about it. Others might claim a place for T.S. Eliot, but much of Eliot's best criticism is rather narrowly confined to adjusting the canon of English poetry—Metaphysical poets up, John Milton down—and to the principles behind literary creation.

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Does Edmund Wilson belong in this short list of critics of enduring interest? I certainly thought so once—and I was hardly alone. To his many admirers, Wilson—courageous in his opinions, deep in his culture, broad in his point of view, unassailable in his integrity—seemed to exist in the closest possible relationship with literature itself. Versatile, productive, cosmopolitan, he was a being organized for writing. To judge by the reverential reviews of Dabney's biography, this is still the received opinion.

In Axel's Castle, Wilson observed that W.B. Yeats, whose poetry in this respect he likened to Dante's, could “sustain a grand manner through sheer intensity without rhetorical heightening.” Citing this remark, Dabney tells us that the writer Clive James has singled it out as an example of “permanent criticism.” How permanent it is cannot be known; but it does strike the characteristic Wilson note.

As a critic, Edmund Wilson was at his best explaining how literature worked; what seemed to interest him most was the mechanics of creation. He was able to demonstrate why the modernist writers were important by showing precisely how they went about doing things not hitherto done. He was less good, I think, at what Henri Bergson defined as the center of the critic's task—namely, “developing in thought what artists wanted to suggest emotionally.”

As a young critic, Wilson fancied himself a director of traffic in literary reputations. T.S. Matthews, who worked as Wilson's assistant on the cultural pages of the New Republic, recalled in his autobiography how Wilson “aimed” him, giving marching orders on which authors to praise and which to deflate. The poet E.E. Cummings neatly captured this generalissimo aspect of Wilson when he called him “the man in the iron necktie.”

As a literary cop, however, Wilson did not always get his man. He failed to recognize the importance of Robert Frost and of Wallace Stevens, the two most lasting poets writing during his lifetime. Although on to Hemingway from the start, he underrated Willa Cather, and allowed himself to be so put off by Theodore Dreiser's clumsy style as to miss his power. Later he much overrated James Baldwin, probably for political reasons. Aloof patrician though Wilson wished to seem, he was also a bien-pensant, and broadcast no opinions likely to give offense in the academic and editorial quarters of the literary establishment that had come to dominate culture in the United States during the last decades of his life.

Saddest of all, Wilson could not quite bring himself to get full-out behind his friend and Princeton classmate F. Scott Fitzgerald. (T.S. Eliot, in a letter to Fitzgerald, called The Great Gatsby the first major step forward for the American novel since Henry James.) After Fitzgerald's death, Wilson edited his notebooks, published under the title of The Crack-up (1945), and completed (not very successfully) Fitzgerald's unfinished novel The Last Tycoon (1960). Yet, as Dabney writes, Wilson “would never be free of the need to measure himself against his wonderfully talented friend”—and, as Dabney might have added, to come up short. Wilson must have found it galling that Fitzgerald, an Irish arriviste with pathetic social aspirations who could not spell and barely made it through Princeton, had magical gifts—of storytelling, of phrasing, of human understanding—that he himself would never come close to attaining.

Wilson's stately, confidently cadenced prose is another of the items that come up for commendation in the standard praise for his work. And yet it is difficult to think of memorable phrases, or powerful formulations, in Wilson's criticism. (An exception is his remarking that “the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.”) He was a man, as I have indicated, for the long summary, heavily burdened with the extensive quotation. He was perhaps at his best at literary portraiture. The flashiest single piece of criticism he wrote is his interpretation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, a novella about household ghosts corrupting young children. In Wilson's reading of this tale, every word of which shimmers with James's deliberate ambiguity, the solution to the problem of whether the ghosts really exist lies in realizing that the story itself is the delusory neurotic invention of the governess who tells it.

This interpretation, whatever its persuasiveness, happens to be in some ways characteristic not only of Wilson's critical method but of his intellectual spirit. In re-reading him, one realizes how unoriginal he could be: a Marxist in a time of Marxists, a Freudian in a time of Freudians, he did not strike out much on his own. Another of his famous essays, “Philoctetes, the Wound and the Bow,” holds that artistic creation is bound up with psychic wounds. In a collection of essays entitled The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (1947), Wilson accordingly marched Dickens, Kipling, A.E. Housman, John Jay Chapman, and Hemingway through the same gauntlet, showing that all of them labored under the burden of serious wounds acquired in childhood, the sublimation of which resulted in significant art.

If such heavy psychologizing seems less compelling today than it did 50 or so years ago, that may be partly owing to the fact that, as Proust wrote, “each generation of critics takes the opposite of the truth accepted by their predecessors.” But partly, too, it is because Freudianism itself is no longer so compelling as an explanation of human behavior, let alone of artistic creation.

Wilson was impressed by the two idea systems of Freudianism and Marxism, my own view is, because he was insufficiently impressed by life's mysteries; as a professional explainer, he preferred problems that had solutions, questions for which there were answers, and in Freudianism and Marxism he found no shortage of both. I suspect his difficulty with Joseph Conrad and Franz Kafka, two major writers whose power he could never quite comprehend, stemmed from the fact that each took as his subject, precisely, the complex mystery of life: Conrad on the cosmic level, asking why we are put on earth; Kafka on the level of human nature, asking why we are as sadly and comically limited as we are.

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One sees this weakness most glaringly in Wilson's essay on Abraham Lincoln in Patriotic Gore (1962), his collection of studies of American Civil War figures. What troubles Wilson most is Lincoln's belief in God. That Lincoln felt there was a design in the universe (he referred to God as “the Almighty Architect”), that he called on God's help in attempting to keep the Union together, is interpreted by Wilson as either self-delusion or political convenience, or both. He concludes his thoughts on Lincoln's assassination by suggesting that “it was morally and dramatically inevitable that this prophet who had crushed opposition and sent thousands of men to their deaths should finally attest his good faith by laying down his own life with theirs.”

This poor attempt at irony is further evidence that Edmund Wilson had decided morality was beside the point in political life generally and in dealings among nations specifically. In his preface to Patriotic Gore, he concluded that an appropriate metaphor for the behavior of nations was that of sea slugs, each trying to engorge itself on the next. This instinctive animalist behavior, he claimed, is what also characterized our dealings with the Soviet Union, and it “prevents us from recognizing today, in our relation to our cold-war opponent, that our panicky pugnacity as we challenge him is not virtue but at bottom the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism.” The Civil War, the cold war, probably World War II, and every other conflict among men were merely thin disguises behind which lay more or less hidden imperialist appetites—especially American ones.

In his own final summation, Dabney suggests that, like Samuel Johnson, Wilson may one day be viewed as the central figure of his time. “In the meantime,” Dabney concludes, “he and his writing, in a word that he took over from Emerson, are fortifying.” Samuel Johnson was indeed central to the second half of the 18th century, but Edmund Wilson hadn't anything approaching Johnson's gravity, his conviction, his scholarship, his subtle insight into everyday life, or his irradiating moral force. As for whether Wilson's writings are fortifying, just whom they fortify is less than clear. On re-reading, I find they no longer fortify me.

One of the advantages artists have over critics is that they can be nearly complete damn fools and still produce interesting and important, even lasting, art. Critics are not permitted such large margins of stupidity. It matters that they get things right; their opinions, which is all they chiefly have, are crucial. Wisdom, in a critic, is never excess baggage. Edmund Wilson, it begins to be clear, always traveled light.

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¹ Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 656 pp., $35.00.

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