Edmund Wilson
From Philosopedia.org
Wilson, Edmund (8 May 1895 - 12 June 1972)
A, if not the, foremost American social and literary critic of the century, Wilson, primarily as a journalist, explored the conditions which have shaped literary ideas. He studied symbolism in Axel’s Castle (1931), a work he called “Asshole’s Cactus” in his letters; compared writers’ critical views of one another in The Shock of Recognition (1943); investigated European revolutionary traditions in To the Finland Station (1940); and analyzed Freudian and Marxist views in The Wound and the Bow (1941).
In 1945 when he called upon George Santayana at the Hospital of the Blue Nuns in Rome, where the noted Harvard author was convalescing, Wilson found that Santayana did not know who he was, although he had written about him and was quite well-known in the literary world, even being a mentor to Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and John Dos Passos. This "nonplussed" him, Wilson wrote in Europe Without Baedeker (1948). But, as pointed out in Lewis M. Dabney's Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (2006), Wilson found Santayana's modesty refreshing.
Contents |
Memoirs of Hecate County
When Wilson wrote Memoirs of Hecate County (1949), many librarians at the time put the work on side shelves because of its alleged obscenities. For a model he used Frances, a Ukrainian whom he once had met after buying tickets at a dance hall on New York’s 14th Street, then danced and rubbed up against her. The memoirs depicted a character named Anna, for whom cunnilingus left her “weak with pleasure” and who enjoyed the ecstasy of having “her little mouth under the moist kisses of my mouth and my finger on her little moist cunt rubbing its most sensitive spot.” (He failed to mention that the real-life Frances gave Wilson not only self-satisfaction but also a case of gonorrhea.)
The Scrolls from the Dead Sea
He criticized religionists in The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955). The latter book when printed in The New Yorker brought the news that a small Jewish religious order, called the Essenes, emphasized the philosophy of love and that Jesus assented to and preached their ideas, the implication being that the ideas were not original with Jesus, who was thought to be a non-supernatural man with an admittedly charismatic personality.
A Piece of My Mind and Patriotic Gore
In 1956, Wilson wrote A Piece of My Mind, which expressed many of the provocative ideas which led many to call him the most important social and literary critic of his century. Patriotic Gore (1962) was a study of major and minor writers of the period as well as of the war’s roots in the national psyche and the futility of war. For Wilson, just as sea slugs stupidly and blindly devour other sea slugs, Lincoln, Bismark, and Lenin were sea-slug-like imperialists who devoured their neighbors–Lincoln, he lamented to many Southerners’ delight, devoured the South. Irrational forces are everywhere, Wilson thought, and the intelligent person’s problem is to recognize that, as Lincoln illustrated, reason can often be powerless. The viewpoint piqued many.
Wilson, Mary McCarthy, and Edna St. Vincent Millay
Wilson, once married to the Catholic-born author, Mary McCarthy, encouraged her well-known non-belief in God, for he had been an outspoken atheist since youth. McCarthy in her Intellectual Memories, New York 1936–1938 (1992), describes him as being “short, stout, middle-aged, breathy . . . with popping reddish-brown eyes and fresh pink skin.” At one point she says she might have married him because “I may have felt a kind of friendship for the poor minotaur in his maze, so sadly dependent on the yearly sacrifice of maidens.” At another she says, “I agreed to marry him as my punishment for having gone to bed with him.” At yet another point, “I could not accept the fact that I had slept with this fat, puffing man for no reason, simply because I was drunk. . . . Marrying him, though against my inclinations, made it make sense. There is something faintly Kantian here. But I did not know Kant then. Maybe I was a natural Kantian.” But although she has said “I never loved Wilson,” she stayed married to him for seven tempestuous years and had a child by him.
Wilson’s first sexual experience had been with Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was not interested in repeating the episode, whom he described in the epilogue to The Shores of Light as well as in his first novel, I Thought of Daisy.
His Eccentricities
Scholars revel in talking about Wilson’s eccentricities. He quibbled about absolutely everything. He once drew a mustache on his passport photo, explaining it was a poor picture. Observing Alfred Kazin working on galley proofs for a review of one of Wilson’s books, Wilson grabbed the paper and started rewriting the evaluation. His high-pitched voice took many off guard, particularly when he spoke with a little gasp, and he detested giving the very few lectures he ever did agree to give. When some British publishers threw a party in his honor, Wilson retired to a corner and said to Kazin, “Let’s get away from these Limeys.”
Although he was an Anglophobe, Wilson was (in the words of Harvard Professor Daniel Aaron) “drenched” in English literature and an expert on all of its literary aspects. Women and booze were constantly on his mind. He did not approve of America’s getting into World War II, saying the Jews had already been killed, so why endanger any American lives. Many of his other outlooks were considered shocking by his friends. His interest in butterflies along with his clinical observations about sex led some to observe that Wilson was a naturalist in the zoo of his own life. They added that the zoo was well equipped, pointing to The Forties, a work in which he described Elena, soon to be his wife number four, as follows: "Her white bosom with the pink just above it looked like a delicious ice-cream brick with strawberry against vanilla.” Although he had wanted to marry Anaïs Nin, she showed no interest, nor had an English woman who, instead, married Arthur Koestler.
His Writing About Religion
“Although his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls brought him into contact with intelligent Jesuits,” John Updike in The New Yorker (29 November 1993) has observed
- “[Wilson] stopped reading a book by Father Martin D’Arcy with the remark ‘I can’t enter into the point of view of someone who talks about this love between God and the human race.’ He sat Wilfrid Sheed down at a party and complained that ‘I couldn’t even understand the idea about Christ: sent down by the Father to suffer and redeem the human race. If you believe this, you will be forgiven. What sense does this make? [Wilson] commented on the moon landing, ‘Heaven and God are not up there,’ and marvelled that ‘we have not yet completely sloughed off the absurdities of those old theologies . . . that have been hanging around our lives for thousands of years.”
To poet Allen Tate, Wilson wrote,
- You are wrong, and have always been wrong, in thinking I am in any sense a Christian. Christianity seems to me the worst imposture of any of the religions I know of.”
Wilson’s interest in Judaism may have started when he found his grandfather’s Bible in Hebrew along with a Hebrew dictionary, according to Mark Krupnick of the University of Chicago’s School of Divinity. This challenge to out-do his grandfather led him to study Hebrew, and Krupnick suggests that when Wilson was no longer intrigued by communism or Freud, he continued his interest in Judaism by research the Dead Sea Scrolls, that he thought of himself as a “kind of Jew,” or at least he incorporated some of Judaism into his “ego ideal.” As a result, and because of his balanced critiques, many Jewish authors looked to Wilson as if he were some kind of Yankee messiah. Marx, Wilson had felt, was a Jewish moralist but a kind of non-Jewish Jew whose emphasis was not on religion but on social philosophy.
Although on the printed page Wilson may have appeared forbidding, two of his friends—Daniel Aaron, author of Writers on the Left, and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. - found him delightful: a good listener, particularly when trivia was described that he did not know about; and a splendid conversationalist, particularly when he was interested in the topic. Aaron has said that upon returning from researching the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wilson took a shower, then regaled him for an extended period with news of what he had found, all the while standing in his shorts. Schlesinger has said that Wilson greatly enjoyed New York City’s dynamism, even impulsively choosing to go to a Broadway play in the middle of a first act. Others have described Wilson as an agreeable man who, like Emerson, dearly loved to deal in ideas and who kept a notebook in order to “Boswellize” himself. Elizabeth Hardwick’s main complaint was that Wilson kept a journal and wrote about his visit in her Boston home. Beware of entertaining individuals who keep journals, she has joked.
Wilson was not a joiner. He never became a Unitarian, but he enjoyed playfully criticizing the Unitarians, many of whom—like himself—were “old American patriots” with whom he sided and who stood in contrast to the less intellectually inclined who were members of other churches. Neither did he ever join the Communist Party, although he flirted with communism in 1932; upon investigation, however, he argued that Americans should take communism away from the Communists because he disliked what he saw when he visited Russia.
Awards
When Wilson received the National Medal for Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences gave him an award, he wrote in his summer 1966 journal:
- These awards I am getting make me rather nervous. They mean that I am an O.K. character like Thornton Wilder. When I think about how stupid old frauds like Herbert Hoover and John F. Dulles get buildings and things named after them, without people’s seriously protesting or considering it inappropriate, I realize that an accepted reputation can be derived from no real merit whatever.
When Arthur Schlesinger Jr. asked Wilson if he was willing to go to the White House to accept a Presidential medal, Wilson answered in the affirmative but only if the President was aware he was writing a diatribe against the Internal Revenue Service, with which he was having a long battle. Although the Internal Revenue Service vociferously objected to giving any such honor to Wilson, the President disagreed, saying the medal was not for Wilson’s mathematical accuracy or honesty but for his skill in writing.
The Critic
Wilson's criticisms were known for being provocative. For example,
- He called the Qur’an “unreadable” (and continued to call the religion Mohammadenism).
- Part 2 of Goethe’s Faust he found lacking all “sense of form.”
- “Hiroshima, Mon Amour,” the film, he found boring and annoying.
- W. H. Auden’s wrinkled face, he observed, looked “like some kind of technical map.”
- Truman Capote, he said upon meeting him, “seemed to me a not unpleasant little monster, like a fetus with a big head.”
- He had many negative views of Bennett Cerf, Roger W. Straus, the publisher, has reported.
- Wilson also enjoyed reporting gossip. In The Last Journal 1960–1972 (1993), he said that Tennessee Williams had once asked Jacqueline Kennedy her analysis of the Warren Commission Report. Also, that Robert Frost, although in Rio de Janeiro at a time when William Faulkner was attending a literary congress, avoided sharing the spotlight with Faulkner.
- Wilson denied, however, ever having punched a business executive’s wife in the nose when she asked, “You wrote “Finlandia,” didn’t you?” Rather, he said he had replied, “No: that was written by a Finn.”
On Politics
Although he had become interested in socialism through the writings of H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw, Wilson scoffed at wording such as “the toiling masses” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” But Wilson found politics only a side issue and, as others have noted, he often jumped to conclusions and was not a student nor an evangelist.
Correspondent
Wilson exasperated individuals who wrote to him. He responded to anyone's requests with the following check marks on printed cards:
Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him without compensation to
- read manuscripts
- contribute to books or periodicals
- do editorial work
- judge literary contests
- deliver lectures
- address meetings
- make after-dinner speeches
- broadcast;
Under any circumstances to
- contribute to or take part in symposiums
- take part in chain-poems or other collective compositions
- contribute manuscripts for sales
- donate copies of his books to libraries
- autograph books for strangers
- supply personal information about himself
- supply photographs of himself
- allow his name to be used on letter-heads
- receive unknown persons who have no apparent business with him.
Criticism
In 1995, the 100th anniversary of Wilson’s birth, Jeffrey Meyers published Edmund Wilson: A Biography. Jason Epstein, critiquing the Meyers volume, called it a squalid work in which Meyers describes Wilson as “an irascible erotomaniac, short, stout, and red-faced, whose chronic irritability is relieved mainly by alcohol. Meyers concedes that Wilson was his country’s foremost literary critic, even though he often overpraised the work of women he had seduced or wanted to seduce and underestimated the work of Robert Frost, whom he disliked personally, as well as that of Wallace Stevens, while largely ignoring American writers who came of age after World War II.” Epstein, the Executive Vice-President of Random House, noted that Wilson in an essay once depicted Abraham Lincoln “as a rationalist disciple of Darwin for whom God does not exist but later professes to be an instrument of God’s will or even God’s spokesman. Wilson sees not a spiritual but a political or, more precisely, a rhetorical conversion reflecting the greater intensity of the occasion.” Wilson is depicted as “a man of the last century, a Darwinian who believed that nature, including his own nature, could be understood by distinguishing its components and identifying their logical connections. “His criticism,” Epstein continues (The New York Review of Books, 8 June 1995), “was essentially journalistic and reflected the same conviction: that if he arranged the components of a work of literature, including the author’s intentions, in a coherent, critical narrative, the various meanings implicit in the work would become clear or at least clearer.”
For Wilson, the irrational components of actual life or of a literary work were themselves data to be fitted rationally into the narrative account.” Wilson is said to have disliked Frost and also T. S. Eliot, except that when he met them he changed his mind somewhat. Although he had thought of Eliot as “too Episcopalian,” he was impressed favorably upon learning that Eliot was cuddly and loving with his new bride, Valerie. Contemporary critics, Epstein argues, do well to turn to Wilson as the master of literary criticism. Wilson’s final years were physically uncomfortable for him, for as he complained in his autumn 1967 journal: “Monotony of my life and its limitations: I wake up first about 4 and read for a couple of hours. I look up from time to time and gauge how near morning is by the blue of dawn outside the window. Then I go to sleep again and have an unpleasant dream, from which I wake feeling rather worse than I had at 4 o’clock. I sit on the edge of the bed for a while and stare at my bare feet. . . . I then go to my bathroom and sit on the toilet, reading Jules Renard’s journal or something, which helps me to face the rest: getting the yellow good off my tongue with a washcloth or towel, hawking up blood-embrowned phlegm, perfunctorily brushing my largely artificial teeth. (After supper) I read or play more solitaire or am so muggy and sleepy that I go to bed and take a Nembutal or a whisky and go right to sleep. . . .” Just the same, Epstein has observed, toward the end of his life when he was having trouble breathing Wilson was still involved with two love affairs. At the age of seventy-seven, with his daughter Rosalind present, Wilson died in his easy chair while his nurse, Elizabeth Stabb, administered oxygen to him. His wife’s tombstone inscription contains Greek, but his own contains Hebrew.
The Final Years
Wilson continued to write in the 1960s and in 1966 received the Emerson Thoreau Medal. Wife Mary McCarthy whom he married in February 1938 he divorced in 1946. Until his death in Talcottville, New York, of unspecified causes, he was married to Elene Wilson.
(See entry for Mary McCarthy, his third wife, who tells of her reasons for marrying Wilson. Also, see the article on Wilson by Louis Menand of the City University of New York in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism [1994].)
{CE; OEL; conversations with Alfred Kazin, 12 April 1995; Daniel Aaron and Arthur Schlesinger, 19 April 1995, and with Lewis Dabney, Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary Meigs, and Roger W. Straus Jr., 24 May 1995; Wilson sent WAS, two rejection cards}
