Edmund Wilson: 1895-1972

By Stefan Kanfer

"At Princeton, you specialized in literature; then you went to Columbia summer school to study sociology and labor ... Don't you think you ought to concentrate on something?"

"Father, what I want to do is try to get to know something about all the main departments of human thought."

This stilted exchange might have come from Edwardian comedy. It rises in fact from Edmundian solemnity. When he died of heart disease last week at 77, Edmund Wilson had indeed investigated the main departments of human thought. More than that, he had, in his term, "a synoptic" vision of them all. Literature, politics, history, language, travel --all arenas felt his deliberate footsteps; all were illuminated by his urbane, relentless intelligence. They are still lit; 22 of his books remain in print. His original judgments on 20th century literary masters have been vindicated; his piercing moral arguments against totalitarianism have actually gained force with the movement of history.

Those who came late to Wilsonian autocracy are familiar only with the brooding mandarin, ominously reminiscent of Sydney Greenstreet contemplating the bust of the Maltese falcon. The persona was carefully cultivated by the master, whose "Do not disturb" sign was printed in his face and on his stationery ("Mr. Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to .. write introductions ... make speeches ... judge literary contests ... give interviews ... autograph books for strangers ... donate copies of his books to libraries . . . contribute to symposiums of any kind ... supply personal information about himself"). Critic Alfred Kazin suggests that "anyone so extraordinarily gifted, and obsessed with words, must have grown up deep inside the shell that his own gift created around him."

The gift was obtained at great psychic expense. Wilson's father was a prominent lawyer whose career dissolved in mental illness. Soon after, Wilson's mother--who gave him the detestable sobriquet "Bunny"--went mysteriously deaf. Journalism became consolation, then a career. After Princeton, he reported for the New York Evening Sun, then joined Vanity Fair. Later, as critic at the New Republic, he made the original assessments that launched America's literary renaissance. Wilson was the first important critic to recognize the fragile talent of a fellow Princetonian. "F. Scott Fitzgerald," he wrote in 1922, "has been left with a jewel which he doesn't know quite what to do with." Two years later, Wilson published the first appreciation of a new writer named Ernest Hemingway.

With his studies of Yeats, Proust, Joyce and Valery (Axel's Castle in 1931), he moved from literary magistrate to international judge. All of these artists, he said, "break down the walls of the present and wake us to the hope and exaltation of the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art."

The present--that was Wilson's true vandal of culture. Despite early Marxist explorations (To the Finland Station), he saw hell beckoning in the century of the common man. How could a man of letters combat the tendencies of his era? By manliness and with letters, of course. To that end, Wilson continued to study a dozen foreign languages, write novels, plays, poems, articles, critiques, books on every subject that pleased or piqued him. His fiction is minor. I Thought of Daisy is chiefly remembered for its portrait of the young Edna St. Vincent Millay. Memoirs of Hecate County was ruled obscene in its time (1946), but its overbite was corrected by changing mores. As for his dramas, he will no more be remembered for them than Samuel Johnson is for Rasselas. It is his nonfiction that inspired the London Times Literary Supplement's tribute to Wilson as "a necessary writer, a chosen man. And it is this feeling of watching a man prov ing himself equal to an incontestably important task -- explaining the world to America and explaining America to it self self-which provides the constant excitement of Wilson's work."

Wilson's passion for detail often made his work ponderous, but he also had a quick malicious wit. Archibald MacLeish was skewered by Wilson's burlesque, The Omelet of A. MacLeish, in which the poet is caught doctoring his dish with garlic to fit the new proletarian style. Of a celebrated presidential biography, Wilson wrote: "The crudest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth was to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg."

Unlike his coyer colleagues, Wilson was never afraid to turn his searchlight on himself. He wrote frankly of his youthful intoxication with Communism, of his own nervous collapse, of marital wrangles (four wives).

In the '60s, Wilson slighted contem porary fiction in favor of history. He wrote on the delusions of the Civil War (Patriotic Gore), on the plight of the American Indians (Apologies to the Iroquois), on The Scrolls from the Dead Sea. Academicians, ever suspicious of an untenured authority, attacked his conclusions. Occasionally a justifiable critique appeared: Stanley Edgar Hyman found Wilson curiously unresponsive to poetry. Wilfrid Sheed once saw him crankily thrashing at the Internal Revenue Service "like W.C. Fields, brandishing his cane at the urchins."

Richard Gilman discerned an "avoidance of all the really disturbing and aberrant writers of our own time." Wilson characteristically refrained from counterattack. Only an intellectual peer could elicit a true response. His last lit erary feud was with Vladimir Nabokov over their common mistress, the Russian language.

Late in life Wilson liked to say that "old-fogyism is comfortably closing in."

But it could never obscure so large a fig ure. He continued writing to the end (two posthumous volumes will be published in the fall). Ultimately, his battle was with this century, not with writers, critics or wives. Last week the third Mrs.

Wilson (Mary McCarthy) wrote his fair est epitaph: "He was an immense land mark. He was active, full of industry and now he's not there any more. I don't see any replacement for Edmund Wilson."

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