Volume 42, Number 10 · June 8, 1995
The Man with Qualities
By Jason Epstein
Edmund Wilson: A Biography
by Jeffrey Meyers
Houghton Mifflin/a Peter Davison book, 554 pp., $35.00
From the Uncollected Edmund Wilson
selected and introduced by Janet Groth, by David Castronovo
Ohio University Press, 373 pp., $32.95
The Edmund Wilson of Jeffrey Meyers's squalid biography is an irascible erotomaniac, short, stout, and redfaced, whose chronic irritability is relieved mainly by alcohol. Meyers concedes that Wilson was his country's foremost literary critic, even though he often overpraised the work of women he had seduced or wanted to seduce and underestimated the work of Robert Frost, whom he disliked personally, as well as that of Wallace Stevens, while largely ignoring American writers who came of age after World War II. According to Meyers many of the women whom Wilson approached found him repugnant, though many others, impressed by his reputation, submitted despite his obesity and ill temper. A few, Meyers suggests, may actually have loved him or been attracted to him sexually, but it is hard, from this account, to see why. To his four wives and his three children, according to Meyers, he was occasionally brutal and often cold, and for this reason unloved and resented by them. Meyers emphasizes that as an academic lecturer, a job Wilson took from time to time when he needed money, he was a bore, too busy with his own work to prepare lectures that might interest his students.
Review, 3475 words
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