The survivor

ONE of the most poignant moments in Lewis M. Dabney’s monumental new life of Edmund Wilson is a reference to an eviction threat Wilson received in 1934, when he was at work on the series of articles that would become “To the Finland Station,” his still valuable chronicle of socialism and its founders. Wilson was hard up, but the harassing letter did not deter him; he simply turned it over, put it in his typewriter, and banged out a quick note on Marx.

Such resourcefulness and determination were hallmarks of Wilson’s long career. Wilson was a survivor: He endured failed romances (too many to count), broken marriages (his violent, ill-fated union with Mary McCarthy is still the subject of fevered commentary), spiritual desolation, bad health, money troubles (a lifelong plague; in 1951 he complained to Vladimir Nabokov, his friend and sometime antagonist, “You can’t be any more broke than I am -- I have never been so badly in debt in my life”) and, always, the ever-shifting fortunes of the literary freelance. In the teeth of all this, he became one of the glories of 20th century American intellectual life.

On his death in 1972, the New York Times declared, “If there is an American civilization, Edmund Wilson has helped us to find it and is himself an important aspect of it.” A look back on his work today is an occasion for awe. He was born in 1895, the son of a distinguished New Jersey lawyer, and studied at Princeton, where his best friend was F. Scott Fitzgerald. He then set himself up in New York, where he quickly emerged as a canny operator on Grub Street, tackling nearly any subject that came his way. As a young critic in the ‘20s, he introduced American readers to “The Waste Land” in Vanity Fair, while over at the New Republic he played the role of cultural omnivore, writing about everyone from Harry Houdini to Igor Stravinsky. In 1931, he published his first major work, “Axel’s Castle,” a primer on literary modernism. Wilson came of age at a pivotal time in American culture, which was throwing off the shackles of provincialism; if H.L. Mencken hammered away at the “booboisie,” Wilson saw his task, in part, as putting American letters on an equal footing with the classics of European literature.

The Depression radicalized Wilson, as it did many of the writers of his generation. He did double duty as critic and journalist, reporting from the coalfields of West Virginia and the factories of Detroit and making his first excursions into Marxism. (Though he voted for the Communist Party presidential candidate, William Z. Foster, in 1932, Wilson never joined the party.)

But literary criticism, collected in “The Wound and the Bow” (1941), “The Triple Thinkers” (1938) and elsewhere, remained paramount. Wilson’s essays and reviews -- the bulk of his output -- came in generous torrents throughout the 1930s, the war years and after, when he served as the New Yorker’s book critic and then reporter at large, taking up Hebrew and Hungarian, exploring vanished civilizations and forgotten writers. “Patriotic Gore” (1962), his late, idiosyncratic masterpiece, remains one of the best books on the Civil War, and his five decades of journals are both a vivid tapestry of modern writing -- Wilson’s literary friendships were legion: John Dos Passos, Allen Tate, W.H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Fitzgerald, Nabokov -- and a lacerating self-portrait of the critic as lover and rake, dwelling in doubt and uncertainty.

Dabney’s fine-grained biography has long been in the works. Here it is at last, weighing in at a hefty 642 pages. The sheer wealth of anecdote confronting the Wilson biographer is enough to put one off the task. Not Dabney. We get the sex and the crit -- and then some. Dabney’s estimate of Wilson’s character is measured and humane; he is a sympathetic chronicler throughout but not reluctant to judge when he must. Wilson could behave very badly. He drank too much, made frequent lunges at women and took forensic notes on his sexual conquests. (John Updike, one of Wilson’s best readers, once noted his “unchivalric post-coital eye.”) For a man who looked like a cross between W.C. Fields and Henry James, Wilson had little trouble attracting women. In 1938 he met McCarthy, who would become his third wife. Her striking beauty and fierce intellect were the talk of the New York cultural scene, and Wilson was soon hooked. Their combustible seven-year marriage has provoked much debate -- did Wilson, as is alleged, punch her? -- but Dabney walks through this minefield unscathed. The McCarthy-Wilson relationship was a mutually destructive union of two unstable souls, and Dabney’s conclusion seems to me just: “American letters has not seen another alliance so flawed and so distinguished.”

All the titillating gossip should not obscure the fact that Wilson devoted his life to writing. What should remain are his words. “Restless and tireless, doggedly thinking through subjects, expanding and recycling his work in some thirty-two volumes that still entertain, instruct, and inspire,” Dabney says, “this determined man gave to books and writing their full weight in the human struggle.” He accords Wilson’s literary achievements full consideration, keenly explicating Wilson’s critical modus operandi, though his meticulous glosses drag on a bit for my taste. In the broadest sense, Wilson was a historical critic, a throwback to what he called (in “Axel’s Castle”) “the old nineteenth-century criticism of Ruskin, Renan, Taine, Sainte-Beuve, [which] was closely allied to history and novel writing, and was also the vehicle for all sorts of ideas about the purpose and destiny of human life in general.” Wilson was an idea man, but he was too attracted to the drama of the individual life to get lost in pale abstractions. This habit of mind is what gives a work like “To the Finland Station” such force: He may not have been the most sophisticated theorist of Marxism, but his portrait of Marx is sublime.

In Dabney’s introduction to “The Portable Edmund Wilson,” he remarks that “Wilson educated himself for the benefit of the reader.” Wilson’s method was simple: He would gather up and read everything he could on a given subject. What he wrote of historian Jules Michelet was true of himself: “He was simply a man going to the sources and trying to get down on record what can be learned from them; and this role, which claims for itself, on the one hand, no academic sanctions, involves, on the other hand, a more direct responsibility to the reader.” This responsibility is one that Wilson heeded all his life. He had scholarly instincts but he had no use for the ivory tower, and American literary life was the better for it.

Wilson was not a perfect critic; he sometimes shunned the rigors of close reading, and he could be a lazy, unimaginative stylist. Even so, he penned a great many thrilling lines. The young Alfred Kazin, who idolized Wilson, would often repeat to himself the description of Proust in “Axel’s Castle”: “the little man with the sad appealing voice, the metaphysician’s mind, the Saracen’s beak, the ill-fitting dress-shirt and the great eyes that seem to see all about him like the many-faceted eyes of a fly....”

Tracking Wilson’s growth and maturation through the pages of this biography, his transformation from the adventurous youth of the 1920s to the crotchety elder statesman of the republic of letters during the Cold War years, is a dazzling, if sad, experience. There is a lot of wreckage to get through. In his last decades, Wilson felt out of place in the world; he retreated into the American past and made quixotic forays into minority precincts -- Haitian and French-Canadian literatures, the remnants of the Iroquois culture of upstate New York. He lost interest in the contemporary, though he remained an independent radical.

Shortly before his death, Wilson mournfully observed of his books that “They live, I am ceasing to live.” But for many of us he lives on as the model writer -- vast in his reach, provocative in his judgments, his failures redeemed by a critical spirit that is as enlightening as it is pleasing. *