A Curmudgeon Comes of Age

By J.D. Reed

THE FORTIES by Edmund Wilson, edited by Leon Edel Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 369 pages; $17.95

In the gin-fueled jazz age, a young Edmund Wilson pursued Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay along a stretch of Cape Cod beach. "By the time we're 50," he promised, "we'll be two of the most interesting people in the United States." He kept his word. By midlife, Wilson was regarded as America's leading man of letters, a redoubtable scholar and a critic whose opinion could make or break a literary reputation. Critic Malcolm Cowley called him a combination of Dr. Johnson, Carlyle and Sir Richard Burton, the 19th century British explorer and linguist. Readers turned to his columns in The New Yorker, Cowley wrote, "to see what in God's name he would be doing next."

Wilson plotted a direct path to prominence. The privileged and provincial son of a Red Bank, N.J., lawyer, he saw that a career in literary journalism rather than academic criticism would lead him to the power he desired. In hundreds of reviews and in books like Axel's Castle, he introduced a wide and insular American audience to the world's leading writers and most important historical events. To the Finland Station gave depth and drama to the Russian Revolution, and his essay "Oo, Those Awful Orcs!" deflated The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit long before they became cult books. By the beginning of World War II, he had failed to examine only one contemporary figure: Edmund Wilson.

The Forties, a collection of notebooks from the decade, catches Wilson at this turning point. Hardworking and hard-drinking, the critic had lived like the free-spirited artists he wrote about. But by 1940 he was suffering from more than a hangover. The early death of his friend from Princeton days, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was an intimation of mortality. His third marriage, to Novelist Mary McCarthy, was headed toward certain divorce, and his growing isolationism was undermining his stature as a serious commentator on his times.

Sensing the disarray in his life and work, Wilson resolved to regroup. The former habitue of cheap apartments and rented rooms writes of buying a house on Cape Cod. He outlines a never-completed novel about lives in transition. There are amorous adventures and travels to Greece, Haiti and New Mexico. He continues to survey the literary scene with visits to a suspicious and embittered Evelyn Waugh, to a mourning John Dos Passos, "whose voice would seem about to choke or tremble," and to a Roman convent where Philosopher George Santayana "slept, in his plain single bed, in the consciousness of the whole human mind."

Wilson gives glimpses of his own bed. Although rotund and stodgy, he never lacked for lovers. He had a reputation as a philanderer. In 1946 he married his fourth and last wife, the aristocratic European beauty Elena Mumm Thornton. Somber, itemized accounts of their love-making suggest that Wilson paid inordinate attention to her feet. "Folded together [her toes] looked so fine and white," he noted. "Sensual pleasures of holding the insteps and kissing the toes at their base."

Wilson is oddly silent on politics and the war. When he tours postwar Greece, his most penetrating thought is artistic. "From the first moment that you see the Ionian islands," he writes, "you realize all that was vulgar in Rome, all that was trashy in the Renaissance." He viewed Hitler as a threat only to the nations of the Continent and refused to lend his pen to the American war effort. He remained naively chauvinistic. "The great mistake about Europe," he wrote, "is taking the countries seriously and letting them quarrel and drop bombs on one another."

During this period, Wilson saw the world as a dark reflection of his condition. Waiting out the divorce from McCarthy in Nevada, for instance, he described the desert with moody precision. "Everything seemed done in washed ink: formless, grandiose, murky, like the poetry of Robinson Jeffers . . . great hanging bank of gray or black mist, as usual perfectly immobile." At the house in Wellfleet, Mass., he took long walks with a dog named Pal and indulged in Thoreauvian metaphor. At a nearby pond, he observed his own sea change in the still water. There was, he wrote, "a darkness into which I sink and a clear round single lens, well guarded and hidden away."

On the surface, The Forties is Wilson's record of a decade of discontent. But Critic Leon Edel's sensitive editing reveals more than the difficulties of middle age. Although happily domestic, Wilson continued to believe that wounded sensibilities were the spurs of art. But could he be loved and secure and still retain the powers of imagination? The answer was affirmative. During the next 20 years, he would produce such rich and varied books as The Shores of Light, The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, Apologies to the Iroquois and Patriotic Gore. --By J.D. Reed

Excerpt

Evelyn Waugh began by pretending to think that I was a 'simple man' from Boise, Idaho, and, alternatively, that I was a Rhodes Scholar, preoccupied with Henry James.. . Later, in his rooms at the Hyde Park Hotel (where I was also staying), I talked about the antagonism to Americans, and he acknowledged it with a wicked gleeful grin in his bright little hard eyes, but went on to say that it was really based on jealousy. He talked about the opportunity for Americans of buying up fine things cheap. At White's (to which he had asked me for a drink), he said that England had better ruins than Italy. When I said that they would have to put up an annex for the overflow from Westminster Abbey, he said that he didn't think there were going to be any more distinguished men. (I said some derogatory things about Brideshead Revisited, and this really rocked him. When I quoted some absurd sentence, he said, 'That doesn't sound like me, does it?' He handed me the book and said, 'Find it.') This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.