by James Atlas
Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.*7 Too late! Which didn’t prevent me from looking him up in the Manhattan phone book.
He wasn’t listed.
*1 Its title, settled on after much discussion, was Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet. Roger Straus had wanted to call it Delmore.
*2 I also received a letter from Philip Roth, his name and Connecticut address neatly typed in the upper-left-hand corner of the envelope. He had just finished my book, he wrote, and was still “under its spell.” I spent a whole day drafting a reply with mounting hysteria as I described the joy of reading Portnoy’s Complaint when I was a sophomore in college; praised Letting Go for its “Jamesian amplitude”; and ostentatiously displayed my knowledge of Roth’s entire oeuvre (a word I actually used). When I showed it to Annie, she suggested cutting it down. “Why not just say that you’re a great fan of his work and were deeply honored by his praise?” I did as I was told—in general, a good idea when she gives advice. (She also persuaded me to cut my opening sentence: “When I received your letter, I felt like K. in Kafka’s The Castle, only I had been waiting for it not months but for my entire life.”)
*3 Who does?
*4 I smiled at this idea of a “close relationship” between seven-year-olds: it made it sound as if they were business colleagues rather than two small Jewish boys growing up on the streets of New York and trading baseball cards.
*5 Included in Golub’s letter was an entry on Delmore from the yearbook for Public School 115: “In writing he can take a hand / And as an actor takes his stand.” That would have been nice to put in my book—along with a thousand other things.
*6 Lanning recalled that Mizener, “with his big convertible and striped polo shirts, looked like an ad for the best Scotch whiskey”—and he probably wore spotless tennis whites, too.
*7 Forty years later, it turns out that he is living, but is in a nursing home and in no shape to discuss Humboldt’s Gift or anything else.
Edmund Wilson Credit 15
XV
I still had to earn a living; being a literary biographer isn’t a highly remunerative occupation. (The advance for Delmore had been three thousand dollars, which came out to a thousand dollars a year.)
After much strenuous lobbying of the human resources department of Time Inc., I had gotten a job as a staff writer for the magazine, which, despite what Dwight would have deplored as its “middlebrow” reputation, had at one time or another employed Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, James Agee, and Dwight himself as book reviewers.*1
I arrived in New York on July 14, 1977, just a few weeks before my book was published, leaving Annie behind to finish her last semester at medical school. It was the day after the blackout that sparked arson and rioting throughout the city, and as I came up the steps from the subway at 79th and Broadway, the air was acrid with stale smoke. Garbage littered the street. So this was Manhattan, where Hershey Green, the hero (“O New York boy”) of Genesis, had celebrated the city’s energizing pulse; where the Partisan Review crowd had carried out its backstabbing work; and where Annie and I were to spend the next year in a one-bedroom apartment, with black iron garden furniture in the kitchen, that I had sublet from an ad in The New York Review of Books.
My tenure at Time was ignominious. I was a “floater,” assigned each week to whatever section of the magazine was short-handed. Often it was Milestones, the page that recorded the deaths of famous people or significant—usually malign—events in their lives, such as divorces or prison convictions or spectacular financial crashes. In the next cubicle sat Michiko Kakutani, chain-smoking unfiltered Camels as she turned out fast-breaking stories with a machine-gun clack of typewriter keys. Who could have predicted that within a decade she would land the job of daily book reviewer for The New York Times and become the most feared critic in America?
After fifteen months, I was released from this benign journalistic bondage when Harvey Shapiro, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, called me up and offered me a job as an editor. It was a lucky break. A few years before, I had interviewed Harvey, then an editor at the Times Magazine and a poet of considerable distinction, about Delmore, whom he’d known in his later Greenwich Village days. Not long afterward he was made editor of the Book Review and responded to my bold request for assignments by sending me books to review. I used to lie rigid in bed on Saturday mornings, praying the phone would ring; usually the call came in around eight o’clock (if it came at all), and an operator would read a telegram: WOULD YOU REVIEW H. MONTGOMERY HYDE’S BIOGRAPHY OF OSCAR WILDE STOP NEED 800 WORDS DUE NOVEMBER 17 STOP.
A few hours later, the telegram itself would arrive at the door in a yellow envelope, the words pasted on white strips of paper. The way everything, including the period, was spelled out in CAPS made the message seem urgent—which, to me, it was.
What I loved about reviewing biographies—apart from the thrill of seeing my byline in The New York Times Book Review—was that I didn’t have to know much of anything about the subject under review. Harvey trusted me. I would “work up”—to use Edmund Wilson’s phrase—Melville or T. E. Lawrence or Ford Madox Ford, speed-reading their books and previous biographies in marathon sessions at the New York Public Library; after a week or so of late nights, I usually knew enough to write a passably well-informed review. The brevity of the form required ruthless selectivity, and you needed to keep in mind that you were writing for a newspaper, not for Partisan Review. Only a few reviewers had mastered this skill. Cyril Connolly, editor of the important literary journal Horizon, was one, and I kept a volume of the weekly reviews he’d written for the London Times in the 1940s and ’50s close at hand. Another was Wilfrid Sheed, himself a regular reviewer for the Book Review who had left the paper to become a “full-time writer”—an exalted vocation that I hoped someday to emulate.
Wilson was my model. On my shelf were the successive volumes of his book reviews for The Nation, The New Republic, and later on, The New Yorker, collected decade by decade: The Shores of Light (the 1920s and ’30s), Classics and Commercials (the ’40s), and The Bit Between My Teeth (1950–65). He had a knack for distilling the essence of the book before him, the author’s career, and his place in the cultural history of his time, all in the space of a thousand words. I read these collections straight through, as if they were brief chapters in a novel with a hundred plots.
I owned all of Wilson’s books: not just the review collections but plays, poetry, novels, and as they accumulated over the years, the letters and journals, also in decadal form. They took up, literally, a whole shelf and included the late works of reportage, Israel and the Dead Sea Scrolls and Red, Black, Blond, and Olive: Studies in Four Civilizations: Zuñi, Haiti, Soviet Russia, and Israel, written at a point when Wilson had read virtually the whole of the Western canon; Night Thoughts, an eccentric miscellany of poems; even O Canada, a collection of essays about writers no one had read or, based on his droning plot summaries, would ever feel compelled to read. I was one of the few fans of the novels, Memoirs of Hecate County and I Thought of Daisy, noble failures that were nonetheless compelling as portraits of the sexual manners and morals of the 1930s. (The first was briefly banned.) The plays, I had to admit, were pretty lame; This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches, about some guy who wants to marry a girl who refuses to marry him, was as bad as its title and never got produced. It was hard to picture the word sandwiches on a Broadway marquee.
What I admired most about Wilson was the no-nonsense way he treated the job of critic. His prose was workmanlike, almost aggressively unliterary. He was a great popularizer (a quality that gave some critics an excuse to condescend to him), capable of covering a vast amount of ground without breaking a sweat. He wrote in a voice that spoke directly to the reader, and he went about his work with a sleeves-rolled-up, elbows-planted-on-desk enthusiasm, sharing his discoveries with a muted passion that gained power from its restraint. And he got the job done. I admired his dogged determination to read a write
r’s entire oeuvre: who else could have persevered at the self-assigned and unrewarding task of plowing through George Saintsbury’s three-volume History of English Prosody from the 12th Century to the Present Day?
Wilson’s vivacity of style reflected the excitement of discovery; he always spoke in plain language, never showing off his vast erudition. That literature excited Wilson—sometimes in the literal sense—was evident: he derived “a pleasure almost sensual” from learning languages;*2 as an undergraduate at Princeton, he claimed to have once had an orgasm while reading a book. (He didn’t specify its title, but I assume it didn’t come in a brown wrapper.) He was “exhilarated” by Waugh, “stimulated” by Voltaire, “thrilled” by the eighteenth-century critic Hippolyte Taine, whose History of English Literature became his model: “He had created the creators themselves as characters in a larger drama of cultural and social history, and literature, for me, has always meant narrative and drama as well as the discussion of comparative value.” Narrative and drama: those were the engines that drove Wilson’s most ambitious books, among which I count Axel’s Castle, his primer on the Modernists, whose work was then still new enough to require a level-headed guide; the eight-hundred-page Patriotic Gore, his stoically comprehensive survey of the literature of the American Civil War (the one book of Wilson’s, I confess, that I could never finish);*3 and To the Finland Station, subtitled, in a deliberate effort to heighten the drama, A Study in the Writing and Acting of History.*4
Many of the figures Wilson wrote about are long forgotten now, and others already were by the time I encountered these reviews. Who reads—who has even heard of?—Glenway Wescott, Paul Rosenfeld, or Max Eastman? Still others (Katherine Anne Porter, William Saroyan) will go in their turn, as the present recedes mercilessly into the past, and the past recedes further into the deep reaches of obscurity. It didn’t matter. I read Wilson to read Wilson.
He had his weaknesses. He could be naïve; the timing of To the Finland Station, an excitable defense of the Russia Revolution, happened to coincide with Stalin’s consolidation of power, preparing the way for the Terror. He had a tin ear for poetry, tending to overpraise mediocrities like Phelps Putnam, and opportunistic enthusiasms; he crassly praised the work of Anaïs Nin in order to get her into bed. And he had blind spots: “Must we really, as his admirers pretend, accept the plight of Kafka’s abject heroes as parables of the human condition?” he asked in a somewhat bellicose essay entitled “A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka.” (Yes, Edmund, we must.)
His great strength, or originality, was not as a formal critic—he lacked the sensitivity to literary style the job requires—but as what might be called a biographical journalist. Among my favorite books of Wilson’s was A Piece of My Mind, essays on diverse themes (“War,” “Sex,” “Religion”) that displayed his unique hybrid, a form that combined personal essay, formidable scholarship, and closely observed reportage. I was especially taken with the last essay, “The Author at Sixty,”*5 a meditation on his relationship with his father that seemed to me, then and now, Wilson at his best—a memoirist whose conversational, forthright manner conveyed a kind of brusque self-knowledge. There was something melancholic and fusty about this essay that I found appealing: Wilson wrote as if he were winding down his career, though he would live another seventeen years and add seven more titles to his imposing bibliography.*6
Looking back now, I wonder if it might have been the hybrid of biographical and autobiographical portraiture—the fugitive presence of the writer in the writing—that I admired. Wilson’s sketch of his depressive father, a lawyer who willfully thwarted his own career and suffered a nervous breakdown, had a quality of empathic observation that I sensed, even before I began to write biography myself, was a key to the whole enterprise. Knocking about the old stone house in Talcottville, New York, that had been in the family for generations—it would serve as the stage for his book Upstate—he conjured up his father’s visits there in long-ago summers, recalling how “he would occupy himself with the inspection of his fishing tackle or whittle sticks into slender canes.” The antiquity of the house, with its fireplaces and small-paned windows and wideboard floors, prompted Wilson to brood on his own self-chosen obsolescence: “Am I, then, in a pocket of the past? I do not necessarily believe it. I may find myself here at the center of things—since the center can be only in one’s head—and my feelings and thoughts may be shared by many.”
They were—at least by one. On a hot August day in 1975, when I was in the middle of my Delmore book, driving to a friend’s wedding in a small town on the shore of Lake Ontario, we made a detour to go by the house in Talcottville. I recognized it instantly as the one pictured on the cover of Upstate. I went up on the porch and peered into a first-floor window. The heavy wooden furniture was still in place. I could imagine Wilson at his desk, reading a volume of Tennyson’s poems (as he did in his final days, according to one of the last notations in his journal). His presence—he had only been dead three years—seemed almost palpable, a ghost risen from the pages of all the books I had read over the years with such rapt absorption.
On the essay’s last page, the thought occurs to Wilson that he might be “stranded,” out of touch with his own life and times.
Even at twenty-five, I felt this way.
—
One day in the spring of 1980, while I was sitting at my metal desk in the Book Review’s office, a dusty open space with chicken-wire windows, fluorescent lights, and linoleum floors—these were the pre-cubicle days—my black rotary phone rang.*7 It was Roger Straus, with a proposal: was I interested in writing Edmund Wilson’s biography? I agreed without hesitation. Why would I not?
Wilson had lived a fascinating life and known everyone worth knowing: John Dos Passos (“Dos”); F. Scott Fitzgerald (“Fitz”); Ernest Hemingway (“Hem”). He had been everywhere: he drove an ambulance in France during World War I; lived in Greenwich Village during the Roaring Twenties; traveled around America, notebook in hand, during the Depression; filed dispatches from a ruined Europe in the aftermath of World War II. He had dined with Kennedy in the White House and Santayana in Rome. He offered a large canvas on which you could draw a map of the twentieth century—the ideal subject for a big, “definitive” biography.
Wilson’s personal life was also—I put the word out there with some embarrassment—juicy. He was married four times—most notably to Mary McCarthy—had a massive problem with alcohol, and struggled with depression: the failure of his first novel, I Thought of Daisy, precipitated a full-scale nervous breakdown. There were chronic money problems: he was in a state of near-permanent penury. His advance for To the Finland Station was $1,700—less than $300 for each year he worked on it. A regular writing job at The New Yorker, where he signed on as a staff writer when he was forty-eight, provided some measure of stability, but his finances were precarious up until the end.*8 That he had survived as “a man of letters”—perhaps the last one—was a tribute not only to his remarkable breadth as a critic and scholar but also to his sheer endurance.
Why, then, did years go by while I procrastinated? I never even made it up to Yale to look at his papers. After a while, whenever I passed my Wilson shelf, I averted my eyes, hurrying past as if it were a friend I’d dropped. Part of the problem was the sheer surfeit of available documentation: after Upstate and his autobiographical essays, the volumes of letters and journals—The Twenties, The Thirties, The Forties—there wasn’t much left for a biographer to discover. I knew all about the wives: the actress Mary Blair; the hard-drinking Margaret Canby, a wealthy California socialite who fell down the stairs drunk and died; and Wilson’s last wife, the stylishly cosmopolitan Elena Thornton, an heir to the Mumm champagne fortune, who managed to keep the marriage together by spending several months of each year in their cottage on Cape Cod while Wilson sequestered himself in the stone house upstate. As for Mary McCarthy, the story of their combative relationship—the drunken fights that once resulted in Wilson slugging her after an argument
over who should take out the garbage; the sexual misfires; the dramatic public displays of marital animosity—had already been told in a number of books, most notably McCarthy’s own.*9 And then there was the parade of girlfriends: Dawn Powell, Edna Saint Vincent Millay, and others less renowned, such as “a little Roumanian Jewess” and a woman named Bernice Dewey whose only identifying trait was “the smell of her light dress washed with Lux.” I would have been a mere literary custodian, collating and organizing the published data into a tidy narrative. Wilson had done the job himself.
It wasn’t only the number of women Wilson “bedded” that got on my nerves. It was his insistence on recording the mechanics—what Richard Ellmann called “the precise anatomical convolutions”—at great and annoying length in his journals. Wilson’s cold clinical accounts of sex made Kinsey seem like Henry Miller. I was startled not only by his profligacy but by his potency: at the age of seventy-four, he seduced the bibulous New Yorker film critic Penelope Gilliatt on a couch at the Princeton Club and also managed to work in a hot affair with his dentist’s wife. He seemed to have no taboos, even dabbling in bondage and discipline. (He briefly owned a whip). He was a prodigious engine; women marveled at what one described as his “bull-like physical stamina.” He was so insatiable that I sometimes wondered how he could have slept with so many women while reading as many books as he did. And it didn’t even sound like fun. Cyril Connolly, reviewing Memoirs of Hecate County, complained of the “insect monotony” of its couplings. It’s not enough to say that Wilson was clinical; he could be downright creepy. He described his penis as “meaty” and compared his mistress’s feet to “moist little cream cheeses.”*10