Among the many charms and interests of her unfinished memoir are the accounts of the volatility of her relations with the men in her life. She will say that she doesn’t know why she left her first husband, backed out on John Porter, and deserted Philip Rahv. That is, she doesn’t know exactly but can only speculate. What, perhaps, might be asked nowadays is why the gifted and beautiful young woman was so greatly attracted to marriage in the first place, why she married at twenty-one. She seemed swiftly to overlook the considerable difficulties of unmarried couples “living together” at the time: the subterfuge about staying overnight, facing the elevator man, hiding the impugning clothes when certain people appeared, keeping the mate off the phone lest there be a call from home—unimaginable strategies in present-day cities. There were many things Mary didn’t believe in, but she certainly believed in marriage, or rather in being married. She had no talent at all for the single life, or even for waiting after a divorce, a break. However, once married, she made a strikingly independent wife, an abbess within the cloister, so to speak.
In her foreword to the paperback edition of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, she speaks of the treasures gained from her education in Catholic convent and boarding schools, even finding a benefit in the bias of Catholic history as taught.
To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious non-conformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.
Nonconformity can be a tiresome eccentricity or arise from genuine skepticism about the arrangements of society. Think of the headache of rejecting charge cards, the universal plastic that created a commercial world in which trying to use a personal check would bring one under suspicion. Going along with fidelity to old-fangledness, Mary and her husband declined the cards and had to carry about large sums of money, rolls of bills that reminded me of nothing so much as men in fedoras in gangster movies. Still they did it and I think with some amusement in a trendy restaurant or Madison Avenue shop.
So, we meet her here, in 1936, marching in a Communist May Day parade, marching along with John Porter, a new man who looked like Fred MacMurray. The conjunction of romance and the events of the day is characteristic of Mary at all points in her life. At the end of her memoir, two years have passed, and she has covered a lot of ground: divorce, a new marriage, unhappy, one that lasted seven years, “though it never recovered.” Never recovered from Wilson’s mistakes and shortcomings as she saw them.
I would have liked Mary to live on and on, irreplaceable spirit and friend that she was, even though I must express some relief that her memoirs did not proceed to me and my life to be looked at with her smiling precision and daunting determination on accuracy. She had her say, but I never knew anyone who gave so much pleasure to those around her. Her wit, great learning, her gardening, her blueberry pancakes, beautiful houses—none of that would be of more than passing interest if it were not that she worked as a master of the art of writing every day of her life. How it was done, I do not know.
1992
EDMUND WILSON
EDMUND Wilson, one of our country’s supreme men of letters, is sometimes remembered as being autocratic and intimidating. My own memory, not the most intimate, is of a cheerful, corpulent, chuckling gentleman, well-dressed in brown suits and double martinis. As a literary and cultural critic, Wilson produced many volumes on an astonishing range of subjects. And beyond that, every scrap of his diaries, his letters, and his autobiographical writings appears to have been collected and published. He liked to write about himself, his friends, his wives, his love affairs, his days and nights, sometimes formally composed in an essay, sometimes transformed, more or less, into fiction or preserved in his voluminous daily jottings. With the author having left so few gaps, it is not surprising that the present biography by Jeffrey Meyers can be said to be the first devoted to Wilson.
A “first” is something of a rarity for the very productive Meyers, who has practiced his craft in the prevailing scene of biography, in which the lives of writers and the remains of certain flamboyant artists and musicians are examined in one large volume after another. A new letter here or there, an untapped acquaintance, a passing stranger remembering a misdemeanor, might offer what is called in court “a window of opportunity.” In any case, Jeffrey Meyers has produced biographies of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Robert Lowell, Joseph Conrad, and others. In this field study, each new digger will need to explore the previously looted pharaonic tombs in search of an overlooked jewel in the stone eyes prepared for eternity.
If Jeffrey Meyers has broken the tape in the matter of Wilson’s biography, he might not hold the title for long. The scholar Lewis Dabney has been “working on Wilson” for some years, and his labor is known as “authorized.” What that distinction means is not always clear. Is it to be thought of as similar to the Queen of England’s stamp on Pear’s Soap? For a biographer, authorization seems to indicate the choice and support of family or heirs by providing access to papers, letters, drafts, mementos, photographs not available to all and sundry. In fact, almost everything or its equivalent—another photograph, for instance—is available to all and sundry, leaving the family members or others interested in restriction with not much beyond the power of refusing a personal interview.
Papers are sold, deposited, given as gifts or charitable deductions to libraries and other institutions suitable for preservation, cataloging, and reproduction, and they are for the most part open to academics and others with useful credentials. Collections are not meant usually as an honor to the collector but as a source of cultural history. If a biographer sets about his task, writes letters and receives replies about the subject, goes here and there for interviews, visits birth and burial sites perhaps, reads the work and the critical response to it, offers or stresses a few preferences, then with reasonable experience in doctoral programs or independent critical work, a biography can be produced. They are far from being, in most cases, a rich source of income; a lot of time is consumed, and if one is led to wonder just to whom the works are addressed, there is always one answer—the subsequent biographer.
Auden, George Orwell, and T. S. Eliot come to mind as distinguished writers who pleaded that there be no biography. They were like old wanderers on the road in Russian fiction, crying, “Have mercy on me, good folk!” The prayer seemed to have been heard as an impertinence and certainly an alert. Each got his biography and not one but several, the “interpretation” of Eliot’s life flowing down to Tom and Viv on the stage. Scandal, or merely selfish and imprudent behavior, can be found in most lives as surely as the dates and ancestral records. It happened, didn’t it? The unguarded moment or lifelong indiscretions, yes, or most likely, and so the biographer proceeds, as if under oath “to the best of my knowledge.”
In the Victorian period, great figures often shared some of the majesty of the monarch, but even there the authorized memorialist could turn out to be somewhat less awed by the connection than the great one had imagined. Carlyle asked his friend and more or less disciple, the historian James A. Froude, to edit his memorial to Jane and to tell the tale, as it were. Froude wrote: “Carlyle never should have married.” A curious emendation or explosion about the celebrated couple who lived together for forty years and famously reigned at 5 Cheyne Row. This assertion later led the unreliable Frank Harris to report that a doctor had examined Jane in her forties and found her to be “virgo intacta.”
The poet Philip Larkin may have believed he was out of the literary scene by spending a good part of his life acting as a librarian in the provincial city of Hull. But he spoke and complained and wrote letters that achieved his own damnation by way of deeply unpleasant opinions promiscuously expressed. These utterances of ideas and prejudices appear in the recent bi
ography by his sincere admirer, Andrew Motion. Larkin’s contemptuous disapproval of blacks, wogs, foreigners, and so on bleakly enshroud the dour melancholy of his witty, beautiful poems—for the moment.
There have been outstanding biographies in our time, works of unremitting scholarly labor that add to our knowledge, elucidate the texts, and are composed with a refinement of style and judgment that honor the subject and give pleasure to the reader. Although these large undertakings are admirable in documentation and many other qualities, English literature is also enriched by odd, personal, less than definitive, glories—De Quincey’s exhilarating memories of the Lake Poets, Henry James on Hawthorne, and a forgotten book, a quirky biography of Stephen Crane by the poet John Berryman.
“But they are wrong!” biographers in the stacks complain about so many irreplaceable documents of the past. Even Wilson is condescending to the miracle of Boswell’s life of Johnson. Wilson promotes, with reservations, a newer work by Joseph Wood Krutch, itself, of course, superseded. To speak of Dr. Johnson: the heart-rending, brilliant Life of Mr. Richard Savage is etched in falsehoods offered by Savage himself. Johnson’s “life” is a sort of unwitting forgery written with genius, alive after the original, the true Richard Savage, has fallen into dust.
Edmund Wilson, were he living now, would be over one hundred years old. Jeffrey Meyers begins his biography with the chapter heading: “Red Bank, 1895–1907.” Red Bank, New Jersey, was the scene of Wilson’s birth, and for those of a literary inclination he may be said to have put the town on the map. His great-great-grandfather Kimball, on the mother’s side, had married a Mather of New England. Meyers’s first paragraph opens with this fact or stress:
Edmund Wilson’s ancestors served the altars of learning and committed murders in the name of God. He was descended from Cotton Mather, seventeenth-century puritan divine and zealous witch hunter during the Salem trials, and shared many characteristics—intellect, bookishness, linguistic ability, temperament, energy, productivity and multiple marriages—with his eminent forefather. The prodigiously learned Mather, more widely read than any other American of his time, had entered Harvard at the age of twelve and spoke seven languages. Known for his arrogant manner and aggressiveness in controversy, he overtaxed his nerves by indefatigable industry, poured out more than 450 works on an enormous range of subjects and still managed to acquire three wives.
Except for the demonism that captured the extraordinary mind of Cotton Mather with abominable results, Wilson does share the learning and immense productivity of his ancestor and managed to exceed him in the matter of wives by having four. Perhaps the opening of Meyers’s book is not so much to indicate the intellectual brilliance of the two as to alert the reader to a consanguineous “arrogant manner and aggressiveness in controversy.”
During his formative years Wilson grew up with a secure place in upper-middle-class society (a position he was unable to maintain for most of his writing career) and became attached to his ancestral home. He was shy and sensitive, interested in flowers and in drama, fantasy and magic, and always absorbed in books. He felt alienated from his parents, developed a difficult, demanding character, and inherited from his father an irritable disposition and a peremptory mode of discourse.
Wilson was not a New Englander of the seventeenth century in temperament or attraction to religion. When the poet Allen Tate became a Roman Catholic, or a sort of Catholic since he subsequently took advantage of the civil law and obtained two divorces, Wilson wrote him in a letter: “I hope that becoming a Catholic will give you peace of mind; though swallowing the New Testament as factual and moral truth seems to me an awful price to pay for it. 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. Even aside from the question of faith, the morality of the Gospel seems to me absurd.”
Jeffrey Meyers’s Edmund Wilson is organized in the conventional chronological manner, which serves well here and follows more or less the organization Wilson employs in his autobiographical volume, A Prelude, which takes him up to 1919, the date of his release from service in World War I. Wilson was not much like other young men. He was clumsy and bulky, short, five feet six inches, immune to the attraction of competitive sports. And yet, at the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, he made interesting friendships, learned to admire certain of his teachers, studied among other subjects Latin, Greek, and French without, as Meyers tells us, making especially good grades but nevertheless building the foundation of his interest in languages. He went on to Princeton, an important part of his life, and there wrote and studied, made friends, notably Scott Fitzgerald and the scholar Christian Gauss.
Princeton social life lay in the eating clubs: “These clubs are remarkably uninteresting,” he wrote, and added: “Since I did not play billiards or bridge, there was nothing to occupy me except to sit, as I sometimes did in winter, in front of our big open fireplace and read the papers and magazines.” Odd as Wilson might have been, it does not appear that he felt himself so or in any way suffered from shame or anxiety about his nature or how he might appear to others.
Wilson grew up an only child, but he had a very well-populated family of connections. On his first trip to Europe when he was thirteen years old, the party was large: his parents, uncles, aunts, and cousins, each of whose character and fate he describes. The diary of this thirteen-year-old is printed in A Prelude. “I do not recommend for its interest the 1908 diary of my first trip to Europe, but I am printing it for the sake of completeness, and because it provides me with a pretext for explaining certain family matters.”
The existence of the diary is the interesting consideration here. The keeping of diaries and, in Wilson’s case a lifelong journal, are marks of confidence and self-esteem, an early sense of vocation. What one experiences is important to record, even when events are trivial, because the diarist is present. Still, the confidence, the being comfortable with his body and mind, are perhaps clues to the daunting and, in a way, unexpected inclusion in later years of precise, he believed, details of sexual adventures. Wilson’s diaries were not published until after his death, and then they were edited and arranged by decades such as The Twenties, The Thirties, and so on up to The Sixties. They are a remarkable exercise of creative, intellectual, and physical energy produced as if under some self-appointed duty by one who was forever publishing reviews, extended essays, complex books, and undertaking exhausting journeys all over the world. The diaries are casual, perhaps, but they show a workman’s sense of care, craft, and also thrift. Some of the recordings therein, such as those on Scott Fitzgerald and Edna Millay appear intact or, expanded, in book collections.
Throughout his life, here and abroad, Wilson was acquainted with a great number of distinguished and interesting people, and many became attached to him for his charm, his knowledge, his vivid conversation—indeed, the specially high quality of his work and of himself. But there is a latitudinarianism in Wilson, an open spirit, not disclaimed by a certain gruffness at times. As he writes about his daily life, he will give many pages to, for instance, an old farming family, the Munns, to their daily affairs, the various members of the family. The diaries, as we have them, are not different in style from his professional work. The collections of literary articles, written for The New Yorker and other magazines, found in Classics and Commercials and in The Shores of Light and The Bit Between My Teeth, are not diminished by thinking of them as the diaries of a professional man at his desk, with the texts to be examined, the author’s life to be wondered about, in much the same way as he approaches the vast army of real persons who have passed his way.
In Meyers’s biography of Wilson, wives and other ladies, “mistresses” and fumbles, have their place and their more than considerable number of pages. The publications of books are mingled with the calendar of life events and critical judgment is supplied by the reviews lying about in the attic of magazines and newspapers. The “fight�
�� with the IRS over unpaid taxes owes its details to Wilson’s book on the subject. More interesting for literary history and personal display is the “quarrel” with Vladimir Nabokov. The combats with the IRS and Nabokov were comedies, however painful each might have been for the participants.
About the IRS: There was Wilson, a gentleman always broke and with expenses not unwarranted, if often uncovered. He worked more diligently and with more conspicuous concentration than a president in the Oval Office. Wilson must have felt that as an independent, self-employed producer of strange small-business goods he was somehow not a wage earner required to give his deputed allotment with a burdensome regularity. The use of the nation’s taxes for the Cold War and other misappropriations, as he viewed them, probably entered his mind later, although his distaste for militarism, weapons, and so on was sincere and marked by vehemence. The fact probably was that he simply didn’t want to pay his taxes and this led to a pleasing amnesia as the time rolled around and led in the end to grimly calculated penalties and much harassment. Still, the affair was a comedy in the operatic sense, with the distracted, tousled hero and the rogues looking for gold under the bed.
Nabokov’s translation with commentaries of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin was a folly of such earnest magnitude that it might have been conceived in Bouvard and Pécuchet. It was attacked by Slavicists for its wild, peculiar vocabulary in English and for its “original” dissertations on matters of prosody. Wilson was critically dismayed and moved without hesitation to say as much. He felt himself competent in the Russian language and certainly knowledgeable about Pushkin, to whom he had devoted an essay in The Triple Thinkers. Indeed, in that volume he translated “The Bronze Horseman” into “prose with an iambic base.” The translation is a gift to those who wish to receive it. It is instructive and agreeable to read, much in the helpful spirit of the prose translations at the bottom of the page in the Penguin series of poetry in German, Spanish, and other languages. Wilson had embarked on a formidable accomplishment in his study of Russian, which he followed with his astounding assault on Hebrew. In his mid-sixties, we find him in a state of excitation about Hungarian. About this late effort, he was heard to say that he felt like “an old character in Balzac, huffing and puffing to his last liaison.”
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