Odd Jobs (20 page)

He had talent: a big man with great eyes. He had intensity, and nobody practiced longer or thought harder about the niceties of the little war between pitchers and hitters. But he also had poignance, a flair for the dramatic. His career abounds with thunder that remained etched on the air: the last-day six-for-eight that lifted his average in 1941 up from .3995; the home run that same year that won the All-Star Game in Detroit; the home run he hit in 1946 off of a Rip Sewell blooper pitch; the home run with which he went off to Korea (he flew thirty-nine missions, crashlanded a bullet-riddled plane, and hit .407 in the two baseball months after he returned); and the one that concluded his career. But behind that thunder stood a multitude of hot days and wearisome nights, games that didn’t mean much beyond the moment, to which Williams brought his electric, elegant best. We loved him because he generated excitement: he lifted us out of our own lives and showed us, in the way he stood up at the plate, what the game was all about.

TRIBUTES

I
N THE LAST FIFTY YEARS
, literary criticism, and for that matter literary consumption, has become increasingly academic. Who would read good books if college students were not compelled to read them? And who would write about them if professors were not obliged, for reasons of career advancement, to publish something from time to time? Yet the leading American critic of this era was a man, Edmund Wilson, who held no more advanced degree than a bachelor of arts from Princeton and whose stints of teaching were brief and few. He once wrote that “after trying to do something with teaching and rather enjoying it at first … I’ve decided that the whole thing, for a writer, is unnatural, embarrassing, disgusting, and that I might better do journalism, after all, when I have to make money.” Not that he was against education. Indeed, he seems to have enjoyed and cherished his own more than most. He maintained until the older man’s death an affectionate correspondence with Christian Gauss, the favorite of his Princeton professors, and wrote an admiring and grateful memoir of his prep-school instructor in Greek: “The thing that glowed for me through Xenophon and Homer in those classrooms of thirty years ago has glowed for me ever since.” To Greek and Latin, French and Italian, Wilson added self-taught German, Russian, Hebrew, and Hungarian. One of his complaints about academicians, indeed, was that they were too lazy to read much, and hence elevated the reputations of unprolific writers like T. S. Eliot. Wilson was a great reader who communicated on almost every one of his thousands
of pages of criticism the invigorating pleasure—the brisk winds and salubrious exercise—to be had in the landscape of literature.

There was a musty, walled-in quality about his childhood. He was born in 1895 in Red Bank, New Jersey. His father, Edmund Wilson, Sr., was a brilliant and successful lawyer, attorney general for the state of New Jersey under two administrations, yet with something eccentric and delicate about him; he was often, his son tells us in his memoir
A Prelude
, “in eclipse in some sanitorium for what were then called ‘neurasthenics.’ ” The mother of the household, the former Helen Mather Kimball, was hard to get at in another way; she was deaf (she went deaf, in fact, shortly after being told that her husband was mad) and devoted herself to her gardens. Wilson was an only child. His solitude found relief in the array of aunts and uncles that his genteel Presbyterian background provided, and in books. He early pointed himself toward literature. Before he was able to read, he tells us in another memoir,
Upstate
, he suddenly said to himself, “I am a poet,” and then corrected this to “No: I am not quite a poet, but I am something of the kind.” By the age of seventeen he was exchanging with his friend Alfred Bellinger precocious literary opinions upon Kipling, Meredith, Shaw, and Pater. At Princeton he fell in with Scott Fitzgerald and John Peale Bishop and remained ever after their enthusiastic, if sometimes chastening, comrade in the pursuit of literary immortality. Though he could be brusque and was invariably frank, loyalty and friendship were among the gifts and appetites the shy boy from Red Bank developed. The Princeton idyll ended in 1916; he got a job as a reporter with the New York
Evening Sun
and extended his collegiate life pleasantly into Manhattan’s bohemia. But all pleasantness ended as America entered the war; though he had “never really felt it [his] duty to fight in this war,” he enlisted in a hospital unit and served as a stretcher-bearer in France. Like Hemingway, though he made much less of it, Wilson handled the mustard-gas-blinded, the mutilated, and the dead. World War I was the rite of passage for the “lost” generation, from which it emerged wiser than its years and furious to live and to achieve.

Wilson did not set out to be a critic. He settled into New York in 1919 to be a free-lance writer, and some of his projects during the Twenties sound Dadaesque: a letter of 1922 gleefully announces a “tremendous burlesque … which will deal with the expedition to capture the glyptodon or plesiosaurus or whatever it is in Patagonia,” and in 1924 he travelled to California in hopes (vain) of persuading Charlie Chaplin to take
a role in a “great super-ballet” he had written. Wilson composed much poetry, for which he had an indifferent ear, and wrote plays, one of which,
The Crime in the Whistler Room
, was produced in New York by the Provincetown Players. (The leading actress, Mary Blair, became the first of his four wives.) He served as theatre critic for
The Dial
, as managing editor for
Vanity Fair
, and as literary editor for
The New Republic;
he wrote reviews for the latter but the three books he published in this decade were all belles lettres:
The Undertaker’s Garland
(poems and stories, with John Peale Bishop, 1922);
Discordant Encounters
(plays and dialogues, 1926); and
I Thought of Daisy
(a novel, 1929). The novel, which cost Wilson much Proustian cerebration, now seems a somewhat crabbed valentine to the Greenwich Village of bootleg gin and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Wilson as a fiction writer is far from contemptible: he creates a solid world, has an unforced feel for the macabre and for moral decay, and allows eroticism its centrality in human doings. But away from the erotic episodes, something leaden and saturnine depresses our attentiveness; Wilson could never skim along the way a story-teller must, simply delighted by surfaces.

The truth may be that the personalities he encountered in life meant less to him than those he met in print. After 1930 his biography becomes largely bibliography. While revising, with much difficulty,
I Thought of Daisy
, Wilson was with relative ease enlarging some essays on Symbolism and its successors into a critical work,
Axel’s Castle
(1931): here his indispensable oeuvre begins. Though the individual chapters on Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Stein, and Rimbaud might be faulted, the sum portrait of modernism was vivid, appreciative, historically informed, justly balanced, and unprecedented: authors and writings still little more than rumors or jokes to the general public (and the academic establishment) were, without a trace of popularizing tendency, placed in clear perspective. Wilson was an exemplary animator of authors; his ability to distill out of a mass of reading the personality and bias of an oeuvre showed a strength of the earth-moving kind and a confidence we might call patrician. A. E. Housman and Henry James would never be the same for those who read the essays on them in
The Triple Thinkers
(1938). The long essays on Dickens and Kipling in
The Wound and the Bow
(1941), which added a phrase to the language, excite us like detective stories as Wilson probes the works for the wounded psyche behind them. He was fearless in judgment; who else in 1938 was praising Henry Miller and panning Louis Bromfield? He would tackle anything; it occurred to him
one day “that nobody had ever presented in intelligible human terms the development of Marxism and the other phases of the modern idea of history.… I knew that this would put me to the trouble of learning German and Russian and that it would take me far afield … but I found myself excited by the challenge.” The result was his magnum opus of the Thirties,
To the Finland Station
(1940).

He faithfully and with confessional honesty kept journals, which toward the end of his life he had begun to edit for publication and which Leon Edel has posthumously ushered into print. Wilson’s life did seem to fall into decades; he caroused and clowned with the Twenties and brooded over Socialism with the Thirties. In 1941, he withdrew from metropolitan life, buying a home in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, and a few years later he found in
The New Yorker
the ideal sponsor for his physical and mental travels. In 1946, he published his one best-seller,
Memoirs of Hecate County
, and married the last of his four wives, Elena Mumm Thornton. His second wife, Margaret Canby, had died of a fall in Santa Barbara in 1932; his third, Mary McCarthy, recorded her own impressions of the early Wellfleet years in her novel
A Charmed Life
and some brilliant short stories. Without forsaking Wellfleet, Elena, or
The New Yorker
, Wilson was drawn in his later decades more and more to the old family summer estate in Talcottville, New York, and to reflections upon family history and his own past. His once-vivacious interest in contemporary writing settled instead upon such subjects of recondite research as Indian land claims and the Dead Sea Scrolls. But to the end of his life in 1972 he remained a lodestar—an American mind European in its scope and its delight in its own play. One of his late collections is entitled
A Piece of My Mind;
an irreverent friend of mine suggested it should have been called
Kiss My Mind
. Wilson might have appreciated the joke; he tolerated the undignified nickname of “Bunny,” wrote limericks in letters to his friends, was an amateur magician who put on shows for children, and to the end of his days showed a cheerful capacity for liquor.

His virtues were old-fashioned American ones: industriousness, enthusiasm, directness, integrity. Among his books is an invaluable anthology,
The Shock of Recognition
(1943), subtitled
The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It
. He urged the creation of a definitive series of the classic American literary texts, like the French Pléiade editions—an idea now being handsomely realized by The Library of America. If in Wilson’s last decade he soured on
the official United States, it was a possessive grandee sourness in the style of Thoreau and Henry Adams. Tax difficulties over his
Hecate County
royalties led to the self-serving fulminations of
The Cold War and the Income Tax
(1963) and the Swiftian preface to the mockingly titled
Patriotic Gore
(1962). Yet
Patriotic Gore
itself is a masterpiece of appreciation of nineteenth-century minds and moral struggle and constitutes a substantial bequest to Wilson’s native ethical tradition. In even the quirkiest corner of his production, he enriched the American scene as a paragon of intellectual energy and curiosity.

This poem by E. B. White, entitled “A Forward Glance O’er the Obituary Page,” appeared in
The New Yorker
in 1948 but, judged perhaps too morbid or too slight, was never placed by the poet in a collection. As prophecy it has proved its worth, for White has died, on the first day of October 1985, in Maine, at the age of eighty-six, leaving the world a perceptibly less classy place. He possessed abundantly that most precious and least learnable of writerly gifts—the gift of inspiring affection in the reader. Affection and trust: for why should we like a writer who gives us anything less than the trustworthy truth, in his version of it, delivered up without fuss or shame? In White’s version of his own career, transparently fictionalized for a “Mr. Volente” in a story called
“The Hotel of the Total Stranger,” it all began when a waitress, in a Childs restaurant, spilled a glass of buttermilk down his blue serge suit: “Mr. Volente had written an account of the catastrophe at the time and sold it to a young and inexperienced magazine, thus making for himself the enormously important discovery that the world would pay a man for setting down a simple, legible account of his own misfortunes.” The magazine, of course, was
The New Yorker
, and for more than half a century after that spilled buttermilk White’s confessions, comments, poems, and stories awakened the laughter and enhanced the alertness of
New Yorker
readers. Elsewhere, too, in other magazines and in surprising forms—in three classic small novels for children and in the revision of a Cornell professor’s guide to English usage—his intensely graceful and lucid brand of simple legibility sparkled. He would try anything, from a rondeau to a cartoon caption, from collaborating with James Thurber on a book ostensibly about sex to collaborating with his goddaughter on a non-posthumous volume of his own letters, and his widely assorted oeuvre is lit from within by a certain jaunty restlessness. Though timid of air travel, he moved nimbly on land and, in one of his series of essays, dispatched letters from all points of the compass. He ranged far, in his quest for artistic freedom. His young life was animated by a number of sudden excursions and departures. Mr. Volente recalls with pleasure “the renewal of liberty” that comes with quitting a job: “the sense of the return of footlooseness, the sense of again being a reporter receiving only the vaguest and most mysterious of assignments, was oxygen in his lungs.” Young and aspiring in an era when urban gaiety was plentiful and witty humorists were common, he became a humorist, and, with his fastidious verbal timing and frequent sensations of bemusement, one of the best; but he was a humorist with broad perspectives, a light-verse writer who could also ask, in the poem “Traveler’s Song,” “Shall I love the world / That carries me under, / That fills me full / Of its own wonder / And strikes me down / With its own thunder?” White was a man attached to beauty, to nature, and to human freedom, and these concerns lifted his essays to an eloquence that could be somber and that sets them on the shelf with those of Thoreau. The least pugnacious of editorialists, he was remarkably keen and quick in the defense of personal liberty and purity of expression, whether the threat was as overt and ugly as McCarthyism or as seemingly innocuous as Alexander Woollcott’s endorsement of Seagram’s whisky and the Xerox company’s sponsorship of
an article in
Esquire
. American freedom was not just a notion to White, it was an instinct, a current in the blood, expressed by his very style, his efficient and engaging informality, his courteous skepticism, his refusal to be held within accepted genres, his boundless, gallant capacity for seeing the world afresh.