Edmund Wilson: A Biography.

King, Daniel Patrick

Few writers' legends linger for very long beyond their own lifetime. To the current student of letters, Edmund Wilson is not perhaps an immediately attractive figure. He was opinionated, irascible, and downright rude. Interrupted by an admirer, he exclaimed: "Since you admire my work so much, why don't you go away and let me get on with it?" In many ways he was not in tune with his contemporary world. A willful, spoiled only child, Wilson epitomized classicism in its most rigorous way. He was controversial and contentious, but also bookish, dignified, and fastidious. He had, writes biographer Jeffrey Meyers, a strong dose of "curiosity, energy, intelligence and erudition, clear thought, pure style and good taste, personal courage, defense of the underdog." His life was a struggle against mindless authority, exhibiting independence and integrity.

Edmund Wilson is Meyers's third book on major American writers; he completed biographies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald last year, and the present volume is the first major study of Wilson. While he does not present an amazing amount of personal information largely emanating from other people's memories of Wilson, Meyers seems not to have had a particularly coherent outline when he wrote the book. There is a disconnectedness about it that requires careful reading. The wealth of information is, admittedly, staggering, although sometimes irrelevant.

Wilson's life is without doubt as interesting as his writings. The author of some fifty books and hundreds of articles and reviews, Wilson lived a rather bohemian existence in his early years. He had a number of wives and attracted numerous mistresses (including Edna Millay), and was an exhaustive compiler of his amorous adventures. He wrote of the coal miners' strike in 1932, had a falling out with the communists after visiting Russia in the late 1930s, and saw his salacious (for its time) Memoirs of Hecate County suppressed and burned. Meyers details Wilson's well-publicized entanglements with the IRS, his battles over the Dead Sea Scrolls (his book on this subject was, surprisingly, his only best seller), and his defense of the Iroquois against the electric-power authority in New York in 1959. His efforts as a teacher at Harvard were not well received; Philippe Radley, a student, remarked, "Wilson was not at Harvard because he loved teaching. He was there to earn money to pay off the IRS."

Wilson's creative work is slight yet distinguished. He had, however, a fertile imagination and produced such seminal works as Axel's Castle (in print continuously since 1930), To the Finland Station (a readable and revealing book on the Russian Revolution), and Patriotic Gore (his longest and most ambitious book on Civil War literature). He was the best critic of his generation, and his penetrative judgments, while sometimes wrong, never lacked for clarity and courage.

Wilson demonstrated that an artistic and independent thinker can succeed as a professional author. His insights, intellect, and humanistic virtues are aptly chronicled by Meyers, whose straightforward account of this prolific writer awaits the authorized life by Wilson's editor Lewis Dabney, not yet published. The final word comes from Wilson himself (from an article in The Nation in 1938); "The young . . . are today not enthusiastic . . . about books: they merely approve when the book suits their politics. . . . I think it is a pity that they do not learn to read for pleasure. They may presently find that an acquaintance with the great works of art and thought is their only real assurance against the increasing barbarism of our time."

Daniel Patrick King Whitefish Bay, Wi.