Books: June 5, 1996
A FALLEN LITERARY LION
Edmund Wilson '16, one of America's best minds, suffers from a posthumous PR problem
Edmund Wilson ['16]: A Biography
Jeffrey Meyers
Houghton Mifflin, $35
On lists of eminent literary Princetonians of the 20th century, three names tend to crop up together: F. Scott Fitzgerald '17, John Peale Bishop '17, and Edmund Wilson '16. Fitzgerald, whose college friends and literary rivals considered him a callow lightweight, flunked out during his junior year -- yet, 80 years later, we all know who he is. Bishop, by contrast, served as chairman of the Nassau Lit. Among his undergraduate contemporaries, he seemed most likely to succeed as a literary lion. But an increasingly overwrought and antiquated poetic style -- combined with the alcoholism that characterized many other writers who came of age in the 1920s (including Fitzgerald and Wilson) -- proved Bishop's undoing.
What became of Wilson? On the Princeton campus today -- and among literate Americans in general -- he is almost as unknown as Bishop. And yet, from around 1930 until his death, in 1972, he was a literary superstar. His name carried the same bookish weight and prestige that names like John Updike, Susan Sontag, and Salman Rushdie do today. Gore Vidal called Wilson "America's best mind." Encyclopedias routinely describe him as "the foremost American social and literary critic of the 20th century." John Kennedy awarded Wilson the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963. Clearly, Edmund Wilson suffers from a posthumous PR problem. Jeffrey Meyers, in the first complete Wilson biography written, sets out to rehang his subject's fallen star.
Born in 1895, Wilson was the only child of a neurotic lawyer and an unloving mother. The family lived in a gloomy Victorian house in Red Bank, New Jersey, due east of Princeton. Wilson's father, Edmund Wilson, Sr. 1885, became a distinguished trial lawyer and New Jersey attorney general. Severe hypochondria, however, cut his legal career short. He spent most of his later years confined either to asylums or to his felt-lined bedroom, lost in a world of phantom pains and ailments.
Young Edmund's mother, Helen Mather Kimball, was a direct descendent of Cotton Mather, the brilliant 17th-century Puritan theologian and witch-hunter. Wilson later wrote that, in his childhood, his mother "would spank me with a silver-backed brush, which she would then complain had been dented."
Wilson coped with his difficult family circumstances by turning inward. As a child, he became completely absorbed in drama, fantasy, magic, and, most of all, books. Ideas, to him, were far more interesting than people. And yet, for an irritable misanthrope who spent most of his time in the solitary pursuits of reading and writing, he played a leading role in America's fascinating literary culture of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.
Wilson's output was large and varied. He produced plays, novels, poetry, journalism, social-political commentary, and literary criticism. His reputation rested mainly on reviews and social-political essays that first appeared in magazines such as The New Republic, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. He would then refashion these essays into chapters of books. In Axel's Castle (1931), for example, Wilson published some of the earliest criticism of defining works of modernism by William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. In The Wound and the Bow (1941), he built on the edifice of his influential treatments of major authors -- this time including Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and Ernest Hemingway.
The Wound and the Bow is, in some ways, Wilson's most characteristic and self-revealing work. In it, he develops the theory that vulnerability and trauma can serve as powerful springboards for creative genius. Wilson's own traumatic childhood (so the theory goes) rendered him famously abhorrent. He had a widespread reputation for belligerence, bullying, self-absorption, rudeness, and eruptions of hysterical anger. His nearly nonstop heavy drinking aggravated this behavior. Mary McCarthy, the third of Wilson's four wives, found him sufficiently loathsome after their divorce that she nicknamed him "Monstro." He fathered two daughters and a son and treated his children as coldly and unsympathetically as his own father had treated him.
In spite of all this, Wilson had many close friends who found his eccentricities endearing and his company brilliant. With these friends, he was often warm, compassionate, and generous. His deep need for human contact and love found notable expression in a satyric appetite for sex. Always the writer, he chronicled these bedroom exploits in his voluminous (and now published) journals.
Meyers makes his way through the difficult tangle of Wilson's life with tact and grace. According to some reports, he wrote this large, thoroughly researched biography in a single year. The book does contain some signs of hasty compilation. Meyers's chronology, for example, sometimes jumps around distractingly. But his mastery of the material, his clear, down-to-earth prose style, and his balanced judgments more than outweigh these peccadilloes.
Despite his careful effort to balance Wilson's light and dark sides, Meyers is at obvious pains to restore his subject to the literary firmament. Wilson's strength lay in his prodigious ability to assimilate an author's body of work, place it in its historical and cultural context, then interpret the work in terms of humanity's universal problems and possibilities. This approach, rooted in history, character, and values, was already fading out of fashion when Wilson's career was at its peak in the 1930s and 1940s.
Today, academic criticism bears little resemblance to the enterprise to which Wilson devoted his intellect and powers. Meyers regrets this. "Wilson wanted to encourage people to read serious books with discrimination and pleasure," he writes. "The academic critics wanted to make their writing even more complex and difficult than the modern authors (Joyce, Pound, Eliot) they most admired."
Wilson was a consummate man of letters, a species of professional writer that is now practically extinct. Meyers's vivid portrait of Wilson brings the species, in the form of one of its last towering examples, back to life, however fleetingly.
-- Craig Canine '81
Craig Canine wrote his senior thesis on Edmund Wilson. His book, Dream Reaper: The Story of an Old-Fashioned Inventor in the High-Tech, High-Stakes World of Modern Agriculture, was published last fall by Alfred A. Knopf.
SHORT TAKES
Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams: A Guide to Awakening Consciousness During Dream Sleep
Charles McPhee '85
Henry Holt, $22.50
I must admit it -- I sleep through my dreams. But after reading Charles McPhee '85's Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams, I realize that I should be paying more attention to my nocturnal activities. First, I'm wasting a good chunk of my life: Every night I dream for nearly two hours. By the time I reach 70, I will have spent more than 20 years asleep, and five of those years will have been spent dreaming. Second, by analyzing my dreams, I'll learn what's subconsciously bugging me. Stop Sleeping Through Your Dreams shows us how to use dreams to unlock repressed feelings and gain a better understanding of ourselves. McPhee starts with the basic mechanics of sleep: what happens to our minds and bodies in sleep and how long and how often we dream. He also shows us how to become lucid dreamers, how to "awaken" ourselves in our dreams and be conscious participants in them. We can observe our dreams and even direct what happens to us in them. Through lucid dreaming, writes McPhee, we will come to resolve our fears and concerns, and ultimately be happier. Maybe I should give it a try.
On a Street Called Easy,
in a Cottage Called Joye:
A Restoration Comedy
Gregory White Smith and
Steven Naifeh '74
Little, Brown and Company, $23.95
For most people, wallpapering a single bedroom is a major renovation project. Imagine restoring a 19th-century mansion with 60 rooms, including 16 bathrooms, and four basements. That's what Steven Naifeh '74 and Gregory White Smith did. In 1989 they left the hubbub of Manhattan and bought robber baron William C. Whitney's estate in Aiken, South Carolina. Through a stroke of luck and circumstance, they were able to purchase the palace for less than what they had sold their New York apartment for. It took them three years and lots of patience and humor to turn the dilapidated house into a home. On a Street Called Easy is a quick, funny read, marked by clean and punchy prose. The authors, who have written several books, including a biography of Jackson Pollock, not only take you on the roller-coaster ride of trying to find good help and renovate a palace on a limited budget, but they also capture the language and details of the local color: We meet Desmond, the cross-dressing cook, and Eugene, the Mafia chauffeur turned master plasterer. Naifeh and White also weave into their story the history of the Whitney family and of Aiken. Anyone who is interested in old homes and a bit of history will enjoy reading their book or touring Joye Cottage, which can take an hour and a half.
Making the Grass Greener
on Your Side: A CEO's Journey
to Leading by Serving
Ken Melrose '62
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, $24.95
Ken melrose '62 has added his two cents to the overanalyzed topic of leadership. Melrose is CEO of The Toro Company, a provider of outdoor maintenance products, including mowers, fertilizers, snowthrowers, and seeders. He espouses "servant leadership," a term coined by Robert Greenleaf in his book by the same title. This type of leader values each employee and creates an environment in which everyone can thrive, writes Melrose. In Making the Grass Greener, Melrose describes how he turned a bureaucratic company into a more worker-friendly, team-oriented one and pushed power down the hierarchical ladder. He invested in the company and its employees for the long haul, instead of focusing on short-term results to please stockholders. Consequently, Toro's productivity and sales went up. There are few new insights about leadership in Making the Grass Greener, but it is useful to see how Melrose got Toro's managers to "walk the talk." Moreover, his faith in people is refreshing, given today's downsizing trend. Managers who are struggling to make their companies less hierarchical will find useful information in this owner's manual for servant leadership.
-- Kathryn F. Greenwood
ON THE PROFESSOR'S NIGHT TABLE
What do professors read in their spare time? That is, if they have any. We put this question to several members of the faculty and got some interesting answers. Though he doesn't have much free time at the end of the semester, Uwe E. Reinhardt of the Woodrow Wilson School, an expert on the economics of the health-care industry, is managing to read Francis Fukuyama's Trust: Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (Free Press, 1995, $24.50), about the moral and ethical aspects of economics. Professor of Economics Faruk R. Gul *86, who specializes in economic theory, is relaxing with fiction -- The Best Short Stories of 1993 (Houghton Mifflin, $11.95), which includes work by Princeton's own Professor in the Humanities Joyce Carol Oates.
Eric F. Wieschaus, Princeton's Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist, is trying to "keep up" with one of his daughters who is studying comparative literature at Yale. On his nightstand are Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers (Oxford University Press, 1992, $7.95) and 19th-century novelist Honoré de Balzac's Pere Goriot (Oxford University Press, 1992, $7.95). Ingrid C. Daubechies, a professor of mathematics, is making her way through a stack of books, two of which are Robertson Davies's The Cunning Man: A Novel (Viking, 1994, $23.95), which chronicles the life of a Canadian doctor, and Oliver W. Sacks's Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995, $25.50), a collection of essays on people with neurological disorders.
Professor of English Deborah E. Nord, whose field is 19th-century British literature and women's studies, told us she enjoys reading detective fiction but doesn't limit herself to that genre. Now she's rereading Jane Austen's Persuasion (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, $14.50), just "for fun."
Professor of Sociology Robert J. Wuthnow, who studies the sociology of religion, says everything he reads is in some way related to his academic work. Wuthnow is plowing through The Future of Capitalism: How Today's Economic Forces Will Shape Tomorrow's Future (William Morrow, 1996, $24.50), by Lester C. Thurow. He's also reading fellow sociologist Rosabeth Moss Kanter's World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy (Simon & Schuster, 1995, $24.50), about the future of business and international economics.