Wilson did not show any special modesty or hesitation in his contentious review of Nabokov’s Eugene Onegin; however, the scholar Clarence Brown found Wilson guilty of the “unbelievable hubris of reading Nabokov’s petulant little lessons about Russian grammar and vocabulary, himself blundering all the while.” The pages of literary magazines were stuffed to grogginess with Wilson and Nabokov eloquently engaged about the properties of Russian and English pronunciation, metrical traditions in both languages, personal and literary qualities. John Updike’s review of The Nabokov-Wilson Letters takes its title, “The Cuckoo and the Rooster,” from an Ivan Krylov fable. In the midst of the battle, Nabokov wrote with his characteristic left-handedness, “I have always been grateful to him [Wilson] for the tact he has showed in not reviewing any of my novels while constantly saying flattering things about me in the so-called literary circles where I seldom revolve.”
Wilson reviewed Nabokov’s book on Gogol with a generous degree of plus and a scattering of minus. His reservations are the clue to an irreconcilable difference in the practice of the two writers: the style of composition. Nabokov’s Gogol book is one of the most exhilarating, engaging, and original works ever written by one writer about another. Wilson acknowledges its uniqueness, but he finds himself annoyed by Nabokov’s “poses, perversities and vanities.” These “perversities” are the glory of Nabokov’s writing, and they are the grandiloquent, imaginative cascade of images and diversions Wilson could not normally accept. He dismissed Lolita: “I like it less than anything of yours I have read.” After The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov’s first novel in English, Wilson was more or less “disappointed.”
In Patriotic Gore, a dazzling monument in the national literature, Wilson has a chapter on “American Prose.” It is his idea that American writing abandoned the cultivated standards of the eighteenth century and in the first half of the nineteenth century fell into deplorable exaggeration, rhetorical display, fanciful diversions more or less arising out of the models of the sermon and public addresses. Therein, he writes a shocking appraisal that suggests the impossibility of his finding pleasure and beauty in Nabokov:
There is nothing in the fiction of Hawthorne to carry the reader along: in the narrative proper of The Scarlet Letter, the paragraphs and the sentences, so deliberately and fastidiously written, are as sluggish as the introduction with its description of the old custom house. The voyage of the Pequod in Moby-Dick, for all its variety of incident and its progression to a dramatic end, is a construction of close-knit blocks which have to be surmounted one by one; the huge units of Billy Budd, even more clottedly dense, make it one of the most inappropriate works for reading in bed at night, since it is easy to lose consciousness in the middle of one.
The chapter on Charles Dickens in The Wound and the Bow is one of Wilson’s glowing achievements. It is rich in complexity, original in ideas, moves around the challenge of the novels and of the life of Dickens with a speculative and interrogating ease that is altogether remarkable. The essay is also a perfect example of Wilson’s method as a critic. The title of the collection is suggested by Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, and the theme is that the sufferings and traumas in the lives of artists have a deep connection with the release of creativity.
In the case of Dickens, the “wound” is well known: The family fell on hard times, and the boy was taken out of school and sent to work in a blacking factory, a cruel, degrading, and forever damaging fate. At the end of the day, the boy would visit his family, now residing in Marshalsea Prison due to the father’s debts. Even when the elder Dickens received a legacy, the family did not immediately take the boy out of the factory and return him to school, a lapse he could never forgive. This wound in his youth has naturally been seen as the base for Dickens’s hatred of cruelty to children, his exposure of hypocrisy throughout society, his contempt for knavery, social and intellectual pretense, money grubbing, lying—all embodied in a host of characters, an army invading London. These smarmy characters have their opposites in good, long-suffering, generous little people and sometimes good big people.
It is Wilson’s idea that the bad people/good people duality arose from Dickens’s inability to create characters of mixed motives and believably warring inclinations. He feels the author was approaching this in the unfinished novel, Edwin Drood, which is examined in great detail. Scholarship, recounted by Wilson, has shown that there were other humiliations in Dickens’s past: His grandparents had worked as domestic servants in the household of Lord Crewe; the father of Dickens’s mother was found guilty of embezzlement and fled. The facts about Dickens’s past were hidden by Dickens himself. One of the most interesting stories is told by his son; not long before the author’s death, the family was playing a word game and Dickens came up with: Warren’s Blacking, 30 Strand. No one present understood what he was talking about. So there is a feeling, as the essay maintains, in Dickens himself of a kind of inauthenticity. By an argument too dense and detailed to examine here, the number of murders in the novels, the obsession with the murders indicate in the end that Dickens had murdered himself, a psychological element in Wilson’s study.
So there is the “wound,” but what about the “bow”—Dickens’s style? The breathless flow of adjectives, metaphors, and similes, the description of clothes, houses, streets, alleys, and occupations, the skewered visual genius of one who describes the knobs on an impostor’s head as “looking like the crust of a plum pie.” The perpetual motion of Dickens’s outrageous imagination seems wearisome for Wilson.
Nabokov’s lectures at Cornell on Bleak House seize the novel when it is flying off the page, seize it with delight. The listeners are invited to note the lamplighter as he goes about his rounds, “like an executioner to a despotic king, strikes off the little heads of fire” or the Jellyby children “tumbled about, and notched memoranda of their accidents on their legs, which were perfect little calendars of distress.” On and on the lecturer goes, remarking on names, alliteration, and assonance.
In his essay on American prose, Wilson explains his own preference in literary style. He sees the tragedy of the Civil War as breaking the fabric of romantic exaggeration, embroidery, false eloquence. His models are the stories of Ambrose Bierce and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, among other examples. Sobriety, terseness, lucidity, and precision—and, indeed, his own compositions are wonderful in clarity, balance, movement, language, always at hand to express the large capacity of his mind and experience, whether current fiction, the Russian Revolution, or the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And yet Wilson, for all the practicality of his method, could be unpredictable and never more so than in his embrace of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, another language to learn, as it were. “In conception as well as in execution, one of the boldest books ever written,” he remarks in the essay devoted to the novel in The Wound and the Bow. The essay is somewhat parental in approach as he guides the reader through whatever factual information might be useful, such as the age, occupation, marriage, and children of Earwicker. There are some rebukes, typical of Wilson’s household rules: “And the more daring Joyce’s subjects become, the more he tends to swathe them about with the fancywork of his literary virtuosity.” Still, he brings to Finnegans Wake a beaming affection and solicitude.
Sex, Mary McCarthy, Memoirs of Hecate County, and so on. Mary McCarthy has written in her memoirs of her detestation of Wilson’s body and soul, information provided by her decision to become his wife. She has disguised him in satirical portraits in her fiction, a disguise on the order of sunglasses. They were divorced after a span of seven years during which she bore a son by Wilson and after which she lived, wrote, and added two more husbands. A marriage, however successfully escaped, rankles more in the memory than an old, ferocious bout of the flu, but no matter, her preoccupation is extreme. She had much in common with Wilson, especially in the need to instruct. Some persons are not content to have a deep aversion to another but feel the command to have others share the documented
distaste. This is different from jealousy of, for instance, Wilson’s subsequent marriage to the attractive, cosmopolitan, domestically gifted, and loyal Elena Mumm Thornton. It would appear that McCarthy wanted to instruct Elena in the true nature of her husband, instruct Elena and everyone else. Otherwise consider the oddity of the amount of repetitive energy put into denunciation of the past by one so pleasantly situated in life, so rich in experience, friendships, new loves, handsome surroundings—all of that.
What was Wilson thinking of in descriptions in his diaries of his swaying home after an “encounter,” only to awaken the next day and put it all down? He was, of course, thinking of himself, the principal actor in the drama, the “I.” The “I” in a partnership on the bed or couch, or whatever, will, if he is in a mood to leave a record, need to move into the sensations of the “she.” About Marie, a pickup, “Her cunt, however, seemed small. She would not, the first time, respond very heartily, but, the second, would wet herself and bite my tongue, and when I had finished, I could feel her vagina throbbing powerfully.”
Memoirs of Hecate County, a fiction, more or less, with the real-life persons serving in the short and the longer story run down by the biographer, like a policeman tracking suspects. The book was banned, but it has survived and is probably still read because of its interesting reputation for salaciousness and the genuine interest of the book. It was a bizarre composition to add to the stately list of literary and cultural studies already long and commanding when it was published in 1946. “The Princess with the Golden Hair,” the principal, most arresting tale, became the occasion for a good number of amusing, unfavorable reviews. The “princess,” a remote and withholding beauty of the pre-Raphaelite sort for whom the narrator longs, did not arouse a like yearning in many readers. Interest, if not quite yearning, arrives when the princess-frustrated, first-person narrator, an art critic, takes a diversionary spin down to Fourteenth Street and a dance hall called the Tango Casino. There he meets Anna, a “hostess.” She is poor, has spent time in an orphanage, has a brutal husband and a little girl and much misery and deprivation in her life. This background is finely done by Wilson as it flows in and out of the “couplings.” Anna is a “relief”—not much more, if a lot of relief. Her lower-class “hard protruding little thigh bones” seem inadequate when at last the “luxurious” princess is brought to bed. “Her little bud was so deeply imbedded that it was hardly involved in the play, and she made me arrest my movement while she did something special and gentle that did not, however, press on this point, rubbing herself somehow against me—and then came, with a self-excited tremor.”
“Clinical” was applied to the sex writing in the diaries and in the fiction. Cyril Connolly thought the fornications had “a kind of monotony,” and John Updike found the writing “leaden and saturnine”; Raymond Chandler said Wilson managed to make “fornication as dull as a railroad timetable.”
Jeffrey Meyers has produced a long book, 483 pages. There is a lot of Wilson to be sifted, and so there is a lot of Meyers. We might think the biographer has brought together the immense flow of Wilson’s life and work, both of which are scattered in the many publications and collections. Meyers has certainly not made of the object of his labors the worst one could imagine—drinking, vanity, and so on—nor has he been able to create the brilliant, irreplaceable mind and spirit. Too many facts, of whatever laudatory or dismissive nature, destroy the shape of all lives as they are experienced by even the most unreflective in a flashing, quick, and unstable form. But that cannot be the way of biographers. And so we bid farewell to the unlikely presence in our literature of a great thinker, writer, and unusual being. Farewell, until the next time, the Wilson biography Professor Dabney has been working on for lo, these many years.
1997
PARADISE LOST
Philip Roth
AMERICAN Pastoral is Philip Roth’s twentieth work of fiction—an accretion of creative energy, a yearly, or almost, place at the starting line of a marathon. But his is a one-man sprint with the signatures, the gestures, the deep breathing, and the repetitiveness, sometimes, of an obsessive talent. Roth has his themes, spurs to his virtuoso variations and star turns in triple time. His themes are Jews in the world, especially in Israel, Jews in the family, Jews in Newark, New Jersey; fame, vivid enough to occasion impostors (Operation Shylock); literature, since his narrators or performers are writers, actually one writer, Philip Roth. And sex, anywhere in every manner, a penitential workout on the page with no thought of backaches, chafings, or phallic fatigue. Indeed the novels are prickled like a sea urchin with the spines and fuzz of many indecencies.
In American Pastoral, we are, on the first page, once more in Newark; and on page sixteen we are told “I’m Zuckerman the author.” Nathan Zuckerman is the author of Carnovsky (Zuckerman Unbound), an alternative title like those sometimes used in foreign translations. In English, the novel is, of course, Portnoy’s Complaint, which provoked among many other responses an eruption of scandal. The author of the book that brought about a fame and a “recognition factor” equal to that of Mick Jagger is Philip Roth. Or so it is in Zuckerman Unbound, where even a young funeral director, attending the remains of a Prince Seratelli, pauses to ask for the author’s autograph—all part of this wild, very engaging minstrel show in which the writing of a book, not just any book, may serve as the lively plot for a subsequent book. Of course, we cannot attach Zuckerman or David Kepesh or Peter Tarnopol or Alexander Portnoy to Philip Roth like a fingernail. Not always.
However, if he follows Zuckerman to The Anatomy Lesson, the reader will gain or lose a shiver of interest if he knows that the late critic Irving Howe published in Commentary some forthright reservations about Roth’s work and that Howe is the “source” of the character Milton Appel. Howe had written—among other thoughts, some favorable—that “what seems really to be bothering Portnoy is a wish to sever his sexuality from his moral sensibilities, to cut it away from his self as a historical creature. It’s as if he really supposed the super-ego, or post coitum triste, were a Jewish invention.”
Zuckerman or Roth cries out some years later in The Anatomy Lesson: “Milton Appel had unleashed an attack upon Zuckerman’s career that made Macduff’s assault on Macbeth look almost lackadaisical. Zuckerman should have been so lucky as to come away with decapitation. A head wasn’t enough for Appel; he tore you limb from limb.” If he is indeed torn limb from limb, this ferocious paraplegic author pursues Appel/Howe in a motorized wheelchair for almost forty pages.
The structure of Roth’s fiction is based often upon identifying tirades rather than actions and counteractions, tirades of perfervid brilliance, and this is what he can do standing on his head or hanging out the window if need be. The tirades are not to be thought of as mere angry outbursts in the kitchen after a beer or two, although they are usually angry enough since most of the characters are soreheads of outstanding volubility. The monologues are a presentation of self, often as if on the stage of some grungy Comédie-Française, if such an illicit stretch may be allowed. Here is Monkey, the trailer-park Phèdre of Portnoy’s Complaint, in a cameo appearance:
Picking on me all the time—in just the way you look at me you pick on me, Alex! I open the door at night, I’m so dying to see you, thinking all day long about nothing but you, and there are those fucking orbs already picking out every single thing that’s wrong with me! As if I’m not insecure enough, as if insecurity isn’t my whole hang-up, you get that expression all over your face the minute I open my mouth. . . . oh, shit, here comes another dumb and stupid remark out of that brainless twat. . . . Well, I’m not brainless, and I’m not a twat either, just because I didn’t go to fucking Harvard! And don’t give me any more of your shit about behaving in front of The Lindsays. Just who the fuck are The Lindsays? A God damn mayor, and his wife! A fucking mayor! In case you forget, I was married to one of the richest men in France when I was still eighteen years old—I was a guest at Aly Khan’s for dinner, when you were stil
l back in Newark, New Jersey, finger-fucking your little Jewish girl friends!
There you have Monkey and her expressive grievance.
For tirades and diatribes of a more demanding content, nothing Roth has written equals the bizarre explosions of Operation Shylock, a rich, original work composed with an unforgiving complexity if one is trying to unravel the design. It is about the double, the impersonator, the true self, one’s own estimation, and the false self known to the public, the latter brilliantly examined in an account of the trial in Jerusalem of Ivan the Terrible, the allegedly murderous Ukrainian at Treblinka, who is also John Demjanjuk, “good old Johnny, the gardener from Cleveland, Ohio.” And standing at not too great a distance from the actual ground of the novel we are reminded of the bad Philip Roth, creator for laughs of American Jewish life in its underwear; and, on the other hand, Philip Roth, artist, observer, inspired comedian, “the litanist of the fleas, the knave, the thane, the ribboned stick, the bellowing breeches”—comedian of the folkloric Portnoys and others of their kind.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 57