The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal (23 page)

Of a certain Victorian Englishman it was said that no lady's shoe, unescorted, was safe in his company. It could be said of Edmund Wilson that, like Cecil B. DeMille, “he never met a woman's foot he didn't like.” Is there any reader of Wilson's novel
I Thought of Daisy
who does not recall Wilson's description of a girl's feet as being like “moist cream cheeses”? But Wilson's podophilia did not stop there: he could have made a fortune in women's footwear. From
The Thirties
: “…shoes, blue with silver straps, that arched her insteps very high…,” “Katy's little green socks and untied gray moccasins…,” “young Scotch girl M.P. [with] large feet bulging out of black shoes…,” “…silver open-work shoes that disclosed her reddened toenails, such a combination as only she could wear….” In
The Thirties
, I counted twenty-four references to shoes and feet; each, let me quickly say, belonging to a woman. When it came to shoes, Wilson was sternly heterosexual—not for him the stud's boot or the little lad's Ked. But, to be absolutely precise, there is one very odd reference. Wilson is struck by the number of Chicago men who wear spats. Reverie: “Excuse me, sir. But a hook is loose on your left spat. As chance would have it, I have with me a spats-hook. If you'll allow me, sir….” Whenever Wilson strikes the Florsheim note, he is in rut.

As a lover, Wilson is proud of his “large pink prong.” (Surely, Anaïs Nin said it was “short and puce”—or was that Henry Miller's thumb?) In action, “My penis went in and out so beautifully sensitively, caressing (me) each time so sweet-smoothly (silkily)….” Yet he refers, clinically, to his “all too fat and debauched face” not to mention belly. He was a stubby little man who drank a lot. But his sexual energy matched his intellectual energy; so much for Freud's theory of sublimation.

The section called “The Death of Margaret” is fascinating, and quite unlike anything else he was ever to write. He started scribbling in a notebook aboard an airliner in 1932, en route to California where his wife of two years had just died of a fall. A compulsive writer, Wilson felt, instinctively, that by a close running description of what he saw from the plane window and in the air terminals he could get control of the fact of death and loss, or at least neutralize the shock in the act of re-creation. He writes a good many impressionistic pages of the trip before he gets to Margaret. Some very odd items: “—touching fellow passenger's thigh, moving over to keep away from it, did he move, too?—shutting eyes and homosexual fantasies, losing in vivid reality from Provincetown, gray, abstract, unreal sexual stimulus—also thought about coming back with Jean Gorman on train as situation that promises possibilities; but couldn't stomach it—young man too big, not my type—” Then impressions of his time together with Margaret: “I felt for the first time how she'd given me all my self-confidence, the courage that I hadn't had before to say what I thought….”

In Santa Barbara, he stays with her family. “At Mrs. Waterman's house [Margaret's mother], when I began to cry, she said, I've never broken down….” “Second night: homosexual wet dream, figures still ratherd im, a boy. Third night: nightmare—the trolls were in the dark part of the cellar….” Finally, the inevitable epitaph: “After she was dead, I loved her.” That is the story of every life—and death. For the next decade, Wilson dreams of Margaret and writes down the dreams. In these dreams he usually knows that she is dead but, somehow, they can overcome this obstacle. They don't; even in dreams. Eurydice always stays put: It is the blight man was born for.

During the Thirties, Wilson's interests were more political than literary. The Depression, the New Deal, the Soviet experiment absorbed him. Wilson is at his most attractive and, I should think, characteristic when he describes going to Russia. He wanted to think well of Communism, and, to a point, he was enthralled by the “classless” society and by the way that one man, Lenin, “has stamped his thought and his language on a whole people.” This is not the treason but the very nature of the true clerk: the word as absolute can be motor to behavior and to governance. Gradually, Wilson is disillusioned about Stalin and the state he was making.

But what is fascinating to read today is not Wilson's account of what he saw and did but the way that he goes about taking on a subject, a language, a world. This is what sets him apart from all other American critics. He has to get to the root of things. He will learn Hebrew to unravel the Dead Sea scrolls. Read a thousand windy texts to figure out the Civil War. Learn Russian to get past the barrier of Constance Garnett's prose. He was the perfect autodidact. He wanted to know it all. Or, as he wrote, after he had a nervous breakdown in the Thirties, “I usually know exactly what I want to do, and it has only been when I could not make up my mind that I have really gone to pieces.”

Early in
The Thirties
, Wilson is a fellow traveler of the American Communists'
faute de mieux
. He can see no other way out of the Depression than an overthrow of the form of capitalism that had caused it. Before the election of 1932, he wrote: “Hoover stands frankly for the interests of the class who live on profits as against the wage-earning classes. Franklin Roosevelt, though he speaks as a Democrat in the name of the small businessmen and farmers and is likely to be elected by them in the expectation that he can do something for them, can hardly be imagined effecting any very drastic changes in the system which has allowed him to get into office. Whatever amiable gestures he may make, he will be largely controlled by the profit-squeezing class just as Hoover is.” This is prescient. Apropos the fireside chats: “Roosevelt's unsatisfactory way of emphasizing his sentences, fairyish, or as if there weren't real conviction behind him—in spite of his clearness and neatness—but regular radio announcers, I noticed later, did the same thing. (The remoteness of the speaker from his audience.)” It is a pity that Wilson, who was on the fringes of the New Deal, never got to know the president. “Roosevelt is reported to have answered when someone had said to him that he would either be the best president the country had ever had or the most hated: No—that he would either be the most popular or the last.”

Wilson often traveled to Washington in the Thirties and he had a sense of the place (derived from Henry Adams?) that makes him sound like one of us cliff-dwellers: “Washington is really a hollow shell which holds the liberalism of the New Deal as easily as the crooks and thugs of the Harding Administration—no trouble to clean it out every night and put something else in the past Administration's place.”

Wilson goes to see one Martha Blair—“a rather appealing mouth and slim arms, though pale thyroid eyes: pink flowered print dress, with sleeves that gave a glimpse of her upper arms…she complained of the small town character of Washington—if you said you had another engagement, people asked you what it was—when she had said she was going to Virginia for the weekend they had asked her where in Virginia.” It is odd to see this old formidable “socialite” of my childhood (she was then in her early thirties) as viewed from a totally different angle. Martha Blair kept company in those days with Arthur Krock of
The New York Times
. They were known as Martha'n'Artha. Wilson thinks they were married in 1934. I don't. At about that time, I remember there was a great row between my mother and her husband over whether or not the unmarried couple Martha and Arthur could stay overnight at our house in Virginia—where she was so often headed. My mother won that round. They were often at Merrywood, and Arthur Krock was the first Jew that I ever met. Anti-Semitism was in full boisterous American flower in the Thirties, and Wilson's record of conversations and attitudes haunt a survivor in much the same way that the background of a Thirties movie will reverse time, making it possible to see again a
People's Drug
store (golden lettering), straw hats, squared-off cars, and the actual light that encompassed one as a child, the very same light that all those who are now dead saw then.

Wilson notes, rather perfunctorily, friends and contemporaries. Scott Fitzgerald makes his usual appearances, and in his usual state. Once again we get the Hemingway-Wilson-Fitzgerald evening. “When Scott was lying in the corner on the floor, Hemingway said, Scott thinks that his penis is too small. (John Bishop had told me this and said that Scott was in the habit of making this assertion to anybody he met—to the lady who sat next to him at dinner and who might be meeting him for the first time.) I explained to him, Hemingway continued, that it only seemed to him small because he looked at it from above. You have to look at it in the mirror. (I did not understand this.)” I have never understood what Hemingway meant either. For one thing, Fitzgerald had obviously studied his diminutive part in a mirror. Even so, he would still be looking down at it unless, like a boy that I went to school with, he could so bend himself as to have an eye to eye, as it were, exchange with the Great American (Male) Obsession.

“Scott Fitzgerald at this time [1934] had the habit of insulting people, and then saying, if the victim came back at him: ‘Can't take it, huh?' (I learned years later from Morley Callaghan that this was a habit of Hemingway's, from whom Scott had undoubtedly acquired it.)” There is altogether too little about Wilson's friend Dawn Powell, one of the wittiest of our novelists, and the most resolutely overlooked. But then American society, literary or lay, tends to be humorless. What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and
not
seen the joke?

Wilson's glimpses of people are always to the point. But they are brief. He is far more interested in writing descriptions of landscapes. I cannot think where the terrible habit began. Since Fitzgerald did the same thing in his notebooks, I suppose someone at Princeton (Professor Gauss? Project for a scholar-squirrel) must have told them that a writer must constantly describe things as a form of finger-exercise. The result is not unlike those watercolors Victorian girls were encouraged to turn out. Just as Wilson is about to tell us something quite interesting about e. e. cummings, he feels that he must devote a page or two to the deeply boring waterfront at Provincetown. A backdrop with no action in front of it is to no point at all.

There were trolls in the cellar of Wilson's psyche, and they tended to come upstairs “When I was suffering from the bad nerves of a hangover….” There is also an echo of Mrs. Dalloway's vastation in the following passage: “Getting out of an elevator in some office building—I must have been nervously exhausted—I saw a man in a darkened hall—he was in his shirt sleeves with open neck, had evidently been working around the building—his eyes were wide open, and there seemed to be no expression on his face: he looked, not like an ape, but like some kind of primitive man—and his staring face, as I stared at him, appalled me: humanity was still an animal, still glaring out of its dark caves, not yet having mastered the world, not even comprehending what he saw. I was frightened—at him, at us all.
The horrible look of the human race
.”

As a critic, Wilson was not always at his best when it came to the design or pattern of a text—what used to be called aesthetics. He liked data, language. He did not have much sympathy for the New Critics with their emphasis on text
qua
text. After all, nothing human exists in limbo; nothing human is without connection. Wilson's particular genius lay in his ability to make rather more connections than any other critic of his time. As Diderot said of Voltaire: “He knows a great deal and our young poets are ignorant. The work of Voltaire is full of things; their works are empty.”

But Wilson was quite aware that “things” in themselves are not enough. Professor Edel quotes from Wilson's Princeton lecture: “no matter how thoroughly and searchingly we may have scrutinized works of literature from the historical and biographical point of view…we must be able to tell the good from the bad, the first-rate from the second-rate. We shall not otherwise write literary criticism at all.”

We do not, of course, write literary criticism at all now. Academe has won the battle in which Wilson fought so fiercely on the other side. Ambitious English teachers now invent systems that have nothing to do with literature or life but everything to do with those games that must be played in order for them to rise in the academic bureaucracy. Their works are empty indeed. But then, their works are not meant to be full. They are to be taught, not read. The long dialogue has broken down. Fortunately, as Flaubert pointed out, the worst thing about the present is the future. One day there will be no…But I have been asked not to give the game away. Meanwhile, I shall drop a single hint: Only construct!

The New York Review of Books
September 25, 1980

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

1

On May 1, 1886, American workers in general and Chicago's workers in particular decided that the eight-hour workday was an idea whose time had come. Workers demonstrated, and a number of factories were struck. Management responded in kind. At McCormick Reaper strikers. were replaced by “scabs.” On May 3, when the scabs left the factory at the end of a long traditional workday, they were mobbed by the strikers. Chicago's police promptly opened fire and America's gilded age looked to be cracking open.

The next night, in Haymarket Square, the anarchists held a meeting presided over by the mayor of Chicago. A thousand workers listened to many thousands of highly incendiary words. But all was orderly until His Honor went home; then the police “dispersed” the meeting with that tact which has ever marked Hog City's law-enforcement officers. At one point, someone (never identified) threw a bomb; a number of policemen and workers were killed or wounded. Subsequently, there were numerous arrests and in-depth grillings.

Finally, more or less at random, eight men were indicted for “conspiracy to murder.” There was no hard evidence of any kind. One man was not even in town that day while another was home playing cards. By and large, the great conservative Republic felt no compassion for anarchists, even the ones who had taken up the revolutionary game of bridge; worse, an eight-hour workday would drive a stake through the economy's heart.

On August 20, a prejudiced judge and jury found seven of the eight men guilty of murder in the first degree; the eighth man (who had not been in town that night) got fifteen years in the slammer because he had a big mouth. The anarchists' counsel, Judge Roger A. Pryor, then appealed the verdict to the Supreme Court.

         

During the short hot summer of 1886, the case was much discussed. The peculiar arbitrariness of condemning to death men whom no one had seen commit a crime but who had been heard, at one time or another, to use “incendiary and seditious language” was duly noted in bookish circles. Yet no intellectual of the slightest national importance spoke up. Of America's famous men of letters, Mark Twain maintained his habitual silence on any issue where he might, even for an instant, lose the love of the folks. Henry James was in London, somewhat shaken by the recent failure of not only
The Bostonians
but
The Princess Casamassima
. The sad young man of
The Princess Casamassima
is an anarchist, who has had, like James himself that year, “more news of life than he knew what to do with.” Although Henry Adams's education was being conducted that summer in Japan, he had made, the previous year, an interesting comment on the American political system—or lack of one:

Where no real principle divides us…some queer mechanical balance holds the two parties even, so that changes of great numbers of voters leave no trace in the sum total. I suspect the law will someday be formulated that in democratic societies, parties tend to an equilibrium.

As the original entropy man, Adams had to explain, somehow, the election of the Democrat Grover Cleveland in 1884, after a quarter-century of Republican abolitionist virtue and exuberant greed.

Of the Republic's major literary and intellectual figures (the division was not so clearly drawn then between town, as it were, and gown), only one took a public stand. At forty-nine, William Dean Howells was the author of that year's charming “realistic” novel,
Indian Summer
; he was also easily the busiest and smoothest of America's men of letters. Years before, he had come out of Ohio to conquer the world of literature; and had succeeded. He had been the first outlander to be editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
. In the year of the Haymarket Square riot, he had shifted the literary capital of the country from Boston to New York when he took over
Harper's Monthly
, for which he wrote a column called “The Editor's Study” and a thousand other things as well. That summer Howells had been reading Tolstoi. In fact, Tolstoi was making a socialist out of him; and Howells was appalled by Chicago's judge, jury, and press. He was also turning out his column, a hasty affair by his own best standards but positively lapidary by ours.

         

In the September 1886 issue of
Harper's
, Howells, who had done so much to bring Turgenev and Tolstoi to the attention of American readers, decided to do the same for Dostoevsky, whose
Crime and Punishment
was then available only in a French translation. Since Howells had left school at fifteen, he had been able to become very learned indeed. He had taught himself Latin and Greek; learned Spanish, German, Italian, and French. He read many books in many languages, and he knew many things. He also wrote many books; and many of those books are of the first rank. He was different from us. Look at Dean run! Look at Dean read! Look-say what Dean writes!

While the Haymarket Square riots were causing Howells to question the basis of the American “democracy,” he was describing a Russian writer who had been arrested for what he had written and sent off to Siberia where he was taken out to be shot but not shot—the kind of fun still to be found to this very day south of our borders where the dominoes roam. As Howells proceeded most shrewdly to explain Dostoevsky to American readers, he rather absently dynamited his own reputation for the next century. Although he admired Dostoevsky's art, he could find little similarity between the officially happy, shadowless United States and the dark Byzantine cruelties of czarist Russia:

It is one of the reflections suggested by Dostoevsky's book that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing…. Whatever their deserts, very few American novelistshave been led out to be shot, or finally expelled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth…. We invite our novelists, therefore, to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and to seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests. It is worth while even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true to our well-to-do actualities.

This was meant to be a plea for realism. But it sounded like an invitation to ignore the sort of thing that was happening in Chicago. Ironists are often inadvertent victims of their own irony.

         

On November 2, 1887, the Supreme Court denied the anarchists' appeal. On November 4, Howells canvassed his literary peers. What to do? The dedicated abolitionist of thirty years earlier, George William Curtis, whose lecture
Political Infidelity
was a touchstone of political virtue, and the noble John Greenleaf Whittier agreed that something must be done; but they were damned if they were going to do it. So the belletrist who had just enjoined the nation's scribblers to address themselves to the smiling aspects of a near-perfect land hurled his own grenade at the courts.

In an open letter to the
New York Tribune
(published with deep reluctance by the ineffable Whitelaw Reid) Howells addressed all right-thinking persons to join with him in petitioning the governor of Illinois to commute the sentences. No respectable American man of letters had taken on the American system since Thomas Paine, who was neither American nor respectable. Of the Supreme Court, Howells wrote, it “simply affirmed the legality of the forms under which the Chicago court proceeded; it did not affirm the propriety of trying for murder men fairly indictable for conspiracy alone…” The men had been originally convicted of “constructive conspiracy to commit murder,” a star-chamberish offense, based on their fiery language, and never proved to be relevant to the actual events in Haymarket Square. In any case, he made the point that the Supreme Court

by no means approved the principle of punishing them because of their frantic opinions, for a crime which they were not shown to have committed. The justice or injustice of their sentence was not before the highest tribunal of our law, and unhappily could not be got there. That question must remain for history, which judges the judgment of courts, to deal with; and I, for one, cannot doubt what the decision of history will be.

Howells said that the remaining few days before the men were executed should be used to persuade the governor to show mercy. In the course of the next week the national press attacked Howells, which is what the American system has a national press for.

On November 11, four of the men, wearing what looked like surgical gowns, were hanged. Of the others, one had committed suicide and two had had their sentences commuted. On November 12, Howells, undaunted by the national hysteria now directed as much against him as against the enemies of property, wrote another public letter:

It seems of course almost a pity to mix a note of regret with the hymn of thanksgiving for blood growing up from thousands of newspapers all over the land this morning; but I reflect that though I write amidst this joyful noise, my letter cannot reach the public before Monday at the earliest, and cannot therefore be regarded as an indecent interruption of the Te Deum.

By that time journalism will not have ceased, but history will have at least begun. All over the world where civilized men can think and feel, they are even now asking themselves, For what, really, did those four men die so bravely? Why did one other die so miserably? Next week the journalistic theory that they died so because they were desperate murderers will have grown even more insufficient than it is now for the minds and hearts of dispassionate inquirers, and history will make the answer to which she must adhere for all time,
They died in the prime of the first Republic the world has ever known, for their opinions' sake
[original emphasis].

Howells then proceeds to make the case against the state's attorney general and the judge and the shrieking press. It is a devastating attack: “I have wished to deal with facts. One of these is that we had a political execution in Chicago yesterday. The sooner we realize this, the better for us.” As polemic, Howells's letter is more devastating and eloquent than Emile Zola's
J'accuse
; as a defense of the right to express unpopular opinions, it is the equal of what we mistakenly take to be the thrust of Milton's
Areopagitica
.

         

Unfortunately, the letter was not published in the year 1887. Eventually, the manuscript was found in an envelope addressed to Whitelaw Reid. The piece had been revised three times. It is possible that a copy had been sent to Reid who had not published it; it is possible that Howells had had second thoughts about the possibilities of libel actions from judge and state's attorney general; it is possible that he was scared off by the general outcry against him. After all, he had not only a great career to worry about but an ill wife and a dying daughter. Whatever the reason, Howells let his great moment slip by. Even so, the letter-not-sent reveals a powerful mind affronted by “one of those spasms of paroxysmal righteousness to which our Anglo-Saxon race is peculiarly subject…” He also grimly notes that this “trial by passion, by terror, by prejudice, by hate, by newspaper” had ended with a result that has won “the approval of the entire nation.”

I suspect that the cautious lifetime careerist advised the Tolstoian socialist to cool it. Howells was in enough trouble already. After all, he was the most successful magazine editor in the country; he was a best-selling novelist. He could not afford to lose a public made up mostly of ladies. So he was heard no more on the subject. But at least he, alone of the country's writers, had asked, publicly, on November 4, 1887, that justice be done.

Howells, a master of irony, would no doubt have found ironic in the extreme his subsequent reputation as a synonym for middle-brow pusillanimity. After all, it was he who was the spiritual father of Dreiser (whom he did nothing for, curiously enough) and of Stephen Crane and Harold Frederic and Frank Norris, for whom he did a very great deal. He managed to be the friend and confidant of both Henry James and Mark Twain, quite a trick. He himself wrote a half-dozen of the Republic's best novels. He was learned, witty, and generous.