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Edmund Wilson: A Biography

door Jeffrey Meyers

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773344,866 (3.92)3
"This pioneering life of Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) completes the trilogy on modern American writers that Jeffrey Meyers began with his biographies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Wilson, whom Gore Vidal called "America's best mind," had extraordinarily wide interests that ranged far beyond literature. He wrote about art, theater, music, film, and popular culture as well as political events, foreign travel, the revolutionary tradition in Europe, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Zuni and Iroquois Indians, the American Civil War, the culture and politics of Canada. He was a master of the biographical essay and the autobiographical memoir and was the greatest diarist of his time." "Wilson's life was as interesting as his books and, in its own way, as romantic and chaotic as Fitzgerald's. He lived in bohemian poverty in the 1920s and '30s, suffered a nervous breakdown and the tragic death of his second wife, had three other wives (including Mary McCarthy), attracted an astonishing number of beautiful mistresses (including Edna St. Vincent Millay), and was a compulsive chronicler of his own sexual adventures."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (meer)
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Let's say up front that I like the book but not the man described therein. Which is not to say that that man is not interesting.

His father was a district attorney whose everyday conversation style carried over from the courtroom, and his mother was hard of hearing; consequently his own conversational style was loud and hectoring. His reputation as America's twentieth century man of letters perhaps explains his large number of sexual partners which continued to increase well up into his seventies. His promiscuous appetite for sex and alcohol was only exceeded by his love for writing and literary reputation. His high output, however, is at least partially explained by anthologizing and repackaging. He was consistently a critical but not a commercial success.

Physically he was a sorry specimen, never learning to drive and failing to even hit the target during military marksmanship training. His diet left him pot bellied by his thirties and the only time he drove a motorcycle ended in accident and citation if not arrest. The author regards as apocryphal that he once leapt a somersault while waiting for an elevator.

Despite at least two trips to the Soviet Union in the 1930s he only reluctantly acknowledged its social reality in the 1960s. Conversely his service as a U. S. Army medic well behind the front lines in WWI France left him a lifetime pacifist even after the invasion of Russia in 1941.

The book has a number of humorous anecdotes although not enough for 483 pages of text. One of the most revealing was that he hired a taxi to take him from his home in Cape Cod to John Dos Passos' in northern Virginia. Once there Wilson refused to sit at the dinner table with the taxi driver. (The black cook refused to allow a white man to eat in the kitchen.) Wilson had never forgiven Dos Passos for turning against Communism in the 1930s anyway and they never saw each other again after that visit.

Summers he would leave Cape Cod and spend them in his gloomy and secluded ancestral (as he thought of it) home near Utica, New York. Unsurprising his wife refused to accompany him.

A good deal of the text is literary comment and criticism. Occasionally I got the impression the author was being more tactful than candid. ( )
1 stem JoeHamilton | Nov 1, 2020 |
This is a first rate biography, which I am re-reading, of America's 20th century man of letters and one of the premiere reviewers of literature, life, and culture. I never met Wilson, but I had the good fortune of having a long-lived friend, Selden Rodman (1910-2002), another man of letters, who did. When I asked him what "Bunny" was like, he said, "He was like a snapping turtle." I never knew that Wilson was also friends with Stephen Spender as I would have asked him about Wilson, too, when I socialized with him, briefly, at UConn in the 80s. ( )
  JayLivernois | Nov 20, 2019 |
Extremely thorough. I read this since I was always curious who Wilson was and didn't really know. I found out. I gave it four stars because it is an extremely well-researched biography, but in the end, I didn't particularly like the man and, frankly, wasn't convinced of his importance. ( )
1 stem NellieMc | Jun 28, 2010 |
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"This pioneering life of Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) completes the trilogy on modern American writers that Jeffrey Meyers began with his biographies of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Wilson, whom Gore Vidal called "America's best mind," had extraordinarily wide interests that ranged far beyond literature. He wrote about art, theater, music, film, and popular culture as well as political events, foreign travel, the revolutionary tradition in Europe, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Zuni and Iroquois Indians, the American Civil War, the culture and politics of Canada. He was a master of the biographical essay and the autobiographical memoir and was the greatest diarist of his time." "Wilson's life was as interesting as his books and, in its own way, as romantic and chaotic as Fitzgerald's. He lived in bohemian poverty in the 1920s and '30s, suffered a nervous breakdown and the tragic death of his second wife, had three other wives (including Mary McCarthy), attracted an astonishing number of beautiful mistresses (including Edna St. Vincent Millay), and was a compulsive chronicler of his own sexual adventures."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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