Americancritic

Colm Toibín reviews a
new book about America's most respected literary critic, Edmund Wilson

One of the many anecdotes about the fraught relationship between Edmund Wilson and his third wife, Mary McCarthy, dramatises beautifully the problem of Wilson's legacy.

Slowly, Wilson became politicised, no longer merely a literary critic but a figure on the left. In January 1931 in The New Republic he wrote an influential 'Appeal to Progressives' to 'take Communism away from the Communists' and apply it to American society. When his collection of pieces about his travels in America appeared, Hemingway wrote to Dos Passos, 'Bunny's book was wonderful reporting – wish he had kept on reporting and not to have had to save his soul.' Wilson travelled to the Soviet Union in 1935.

Dabney also faces the difficulty of separating Wilson's labyrinthine sex life from the rest of him or trying to merge the two and make sense of them. We know a great deal about Wilson's sex life because he wrote it down himself in diaries, in his fiction and in letters. It is possible that we know far too much. Do we need to know, for example, that after his return from the Soviet Union, Wilson and a woman named Louise had sex for 36 hours, the sex getting "better and better", until he was "spanking her with a hairbrush, which she explained 'would always bind us together?'" Whole chapters of this exhaustive biography concern Wilson and his wives, girlfriends and lovers.

Colm Toibín's latest novel is The Master, which was nominated for the Booker Prize

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