Edmund Wilson

Figure 1.

On a brisk afternoon in September 1922, a conservatively dressed young man with red hair sat on the upper deck of a Fifth Avenue bus in Manhattan, engrossed in a manuscript. A friend at the literary magazine The Dial had put a long poem into his hands. The Dial was interested in publishing it, and the editors hoped that the young man—Edmund Wilson—would write an essay to elucidate the poem. By the time he reached Greenwich Village, Wilson had completed a first reading of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Decades later he would recall being "bowled over," and his essay called the poem "simply one triumph after another." This recognition of Eliot followed Wilson's account, in the New Republic, of Joyce's Ulysses as a masterpiece fusing naturalism and symbolism, recreating the mind "straining always to perpetuate and perfect itself " and the body "always laboring and throbbing to throw up some beauty from its darkness." He believed the general reader could absorb these works that challenged existing literary forms and commandeered in new ways the powers of language. Both Eliot and Joyce, he thought, occasionally tried one's patience, but he was committed to making them more accessible.

Excerpted from EDMUND WILSON: A Life in Literature by Lewis M. Dabney, published in August by Farrar. Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © by Lewis M. Dabney. All rights reserved.

Edmund Wilson was twenty-seven. He was fortunate to come on the scene as a critic when he did, but he had trained for this moment. At fif teen he had been sure of his literary vocation, and he absorbed all that liberal education had to offer both at the Hill School and at Princeton, where extraordinary teachers encouraged his curiosity and enthusiasm for books and about ideas. He emerged from his parents' uncongenial marriage with emotional scars, but his confidence in his abilities was strong, and he was seasoned by a year as a hospital orderly in France during World War I. He joined Vanity Fair as an editorial assistant, imme diately became its managing editor, and began publishing criticism there as well as in other magazines.

The generation of the 1920s was brought up on the best of the Old World and hoped to equal it, applying the work habit—even as they broke away from Victorian mores—that Americans traditionally brought to com merce. Wilson was indebted to the men of letters of eighteenth- and nineteenth century England and France, as well as to Emerson, and at the beginning of his career owed much to H. L. Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks. While these critics shied away from the transformation of literature after the war, he became the spokesman of writers bringing this about. He found a podium at the New Republic in 1925, and for ten years his work appeared in almost every issue, often twice, a running account of books and of American culture alternating with the studies of the new international literature that became Axel's Castle.

When the Depression hit, he largely put aside criticism to be a reporter on the labor front. As the 1930s ended, he came into full possession of his powers as the biographer-historian of revolutionaries in To the Finland Station and the post-Marxist, non-Freudian critic of The Triple Thinkers and The Wound and the Bow.

In Greenwich Village of the jazz age Wilson explored the newfound freedoms of booze and sex. He was sexually innocent until twenty-five, then lost his virginity and his heart to one of the most desired women of the period, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. His private life became as chaotic as his professional life was disciplined. Wilson was the only well-known literary alcoholic of his generation whose work was not compromised by his drinking, but alcohol undermined his marriages. In addition to four of these—his third, to Mary McCarthy, providing fodder for gossip, attacks and counterattacks that survive in their writings—he had many affairs and sexual encounters. As he aged...