Never Apologize, Always Explain the Fifties

By Otto Friedrich

The '50s were an important time for Edmund Wilson, a time of personal re- examination and rededication, a time of prodigious work despite illness, irritability and alcoholism. His mother died in 1951, and he inherited a 150- year-old stone house in upstate New York. There he began looking through a Hebrew Bible of his grandfather's and regretting that he could not read God's word as the Americans of an earlier generation did. So, although he was already at work on the Civil War studies that eventually became Patriotic Gore (1962), he now took up the study of Hebrew. In the course of these studies, he heard talk of a controversy over some ancient documents that had recently been found near the Dead Sea. And so he persuaded The New Yorker to send him to the new state of Israel to learn more, and that was how he came to write The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955).

This was the kind of life Wilson led, not as a literary theoretician or fashion setter but rather as a kind of foreign correspondent in the world of art and ideas. Oddly enough, the sections on both the Civil War and Israel in The Fifties are rather skimpy, almost as though Wilson were too busy to keep up with himself in his journals. But there are some striking encounters along the way. In Paris he discusses Indochina with Andre Malraux and observes that the Frenchman has a tic that "is something like a snort from the nose, and when he becomes excited and voluble, it sounds like the exhaust from a car." He visits W.H. Auden in a completely unheated New York City loft. "Wystan started up some queer kind of little stove, but we sat in our overcoats and our breath went up in vapor." Vladimir Nabokov comes for a visit, and they start arguing about how various English and Russian words should be pronounced. Wilson concludes that the novelist has "something in him rather nasty -- the cruelty of the arrogant rich man."

Wilson, always combative, was made more so by whisky, but he met his match in Robert Lowell, who was then entering one of his periodic descents into insanity and was involved with a "pretty little girl in Cambridge, who wanted to write poetry." Lowell asked the girl to join them at dinner, and to disguise the scene a little he invited quite a few others. Mrs. Lowell, who had only planned on dinner for four, did her best to disinvite some of the new guests. "She was in a dreadful state of tension and apprehension, having realized that Robert was going off his trolley," Wilson wrote.

Lowell and Wilson began arguing about Robert Frost, whom Wilson called a "dreadful old fake." So Lowell immediately telephoned Frost to invite him to the dinner too. "He told Mrs. Frost over the phone that I was a great admirer of Frost's." When the venerable poet arrived at the increasingly disastrous dinner, Lowell kept moving him from chair to chair, allegedly because Frost had a bad ear but effectively making "sustained conversation impossible."

Finally Lowell threw his harpoon. He "said to Frost that I wanted to ask him how his reputation had become so exaggerated." Wilson does not report how Frost responded to that -- perhaps he just gasped -- but adds that the victim "looked like a clever old elephant." And after dinner, Mrs. Lowell "went upstairs to her room and burst into tears."

The self-portrait that Wilson provides is hardly flattering -- he often appears waspish, rude, disagreeable -- but he makes up for it to some extent by being fully aware of his faults. At one point he reminds himself: "Don't talk all the time. It is an error to suppose that other people can have nothing interesting to say." At another, while dining in a Parisian cafe with his fourth wife, Elena, he sees himself in a wall mirror and "was horrified at the contrast between my big-bellied person and my red and swollen face, with a not too pleasant expression about the eyes and the mouth, and Elena's exquisite slimness and delicacy."

Throughout all this, there was always the work to be done. Wilson kept careful lists of what he read and what he thought about it. This was the period when he gathered together many of his earlier essays in Classics and Commercials (1950), The Shores of Light (1952) and Red, Black, Blond and Olive (1956). His 60th birthday in 1955 prompted him to offer A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty (1956). Though this may seem a rather heterogeneous outpouring, there was an underlying coherence. "Much of Wilson's postwar energy," as David Castronovo has written in a critical biography, "was devoted to the analysis of the Western power drive -- where it came from, the forms it takes, what we can do about it." Thus, even as Wilson continued working on Patriotic Gore, his journals suddenly began to include long accounts of life among his neighbors, the Iroquois. Even in midwinter, hobbled by gout, the old man tottered around to Indian meetings and religious ceremonies (all this was to become Apologies to the Iroquois, 1960). Often rebuffed by Indians who didn't want to answer his questions, the foreign correspondent was pleased to find a group of Americans (who stoutly denied being American citizens) as proud, independent and stubborn as himself.