The Last Empire Read online

  Ms. Nin was of sterner stuff. In her diaries she is kittenish about Wilson and herself. In life she told me that they had never had an affair, which—in Nin-speak—meant that they did. But he did not do enough for her work and so she wrote bitterly about him in the diaries that she was now preparing for publication. Since the publishers had insisted that she get a written release from each person mentioned, she writes Wilson, who sees her; finds her enchanting. In the next room, her long-suffering husband, Hugo Guiler, is editing a film. “What about?” asks Wilson. “Me,” she replies. Then

  she leaned down and put her cheek against mine. She told me that she would send me the first volume of the diary—in which, I believe, I don’t appear. . . . I don’t know how much her reconciliation and the favorable picture of me may have been due to an eye to publicity on the publication of the diary. . . . She gave me a copy of her last book, Collages, and told me it was her first “funny” book. It is actually not much different from her others: stories about exquisite women told by an exquisite woman.

  Later Wilson reads her account of him: “she found me aggressive, arrogant, authoritative, like a Dutch burgher in a Dutch painting, and with shoes that were too big. She had become frightened of me and had had to escape. . . . I made her correct a few details about Mary [McCarthy] and a few characteristic inaccuracies. She had said that I had given her a set of Emily Brontë—as if there could be such a thing, actually it was Jane Austen—and she had been offended and sent it back—which was not true, she had kept it.”

  The relationship between Wilson and Elena, his wife, is occasionally stormy: she prefers her Wellfleet garden and Manhattan to rough Talcottville. Wilson’s description of a dinner at the Kennedy White House shows him at his journalistic best and Elena, his handsome German-Russian fourth wife, at her most grand. Wilson’s cold eye analyzes her, too. “I had never before been with her anywhere remotely resembling a court, and wasn’t prepared for her stiffening attitude. The first sign of this was her ‘squeamishness,’ as she calls it—this Russian groping for brezglivost . . . in the presence of Tennessee Williams—after all he had been in our house at Wellfleet,” but, as they stood in line behind Williams, Elena tells Wilson in Russian that she “feels such physical repulsion that she . . . cannot stand to be near him.” One would like to think that this was due to his drunkenness.

  James Baldwin, as writer and as a black, appeals to both of them. He makes a successful visit to Talcottville. Wilson thought him “one of the best writers that we have,” though “when Elena left the table to go into the kitchen, he turned on his adjectival ‘fucking’ like the people in his novel. . . . I have been wondering whether ordinary people really talked to one another in that way now. I reflected, after seeing later in New York Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, whether most of the dirty language in fiction and on stage didn’t occur in the work of homosexuals? Albee, Tennessee Williams, Isherwood, Baldwin, Genet, and the beatniks Ginsberg and Burroughs.” Actually, this is off-the-wall. A degree of candor about same-sexuality is the most that these writers have in common. Four-letter words seldom occur in Tennessee’s “poetic” dialogue, nor do they in Isherwood or even in Genet except when he is rendering underworld argot where such words are a normal part of speech. Actually “fuck” entered the general language as ubiquitous epithet thanks to World War II, in which 13 million Americans served. If Wilson had bothered to read The Naked and the Dead or From Here to Eternity he would have noted the sea-change in language from Hemingway and Dos Passos to our time. But then he liked to say that he himself was a man of the nineteenth century.

  Wilson writes apropos Elena’s “theory that Jews are bitterly jealous of the attention that Baldwin and others are directing towards the Negroes”:

  I did not take this seriously at first, but I now think there’s something in it: Podhoretz’s article in Commentary about his having been persecuted in his childhood by the Negroes, Lillian Hellman’s play with its white boy who champions the Negroes, then is robbed by the Negro to whom he has been making an impassioned speech. Elena’s conversation . . . with the young Jewish Greek teacher from Brandeis—when Elena asked this young man if he had heard Baldwin’s lecture at Brandeis, he had answered certainly not: he had been to school with Baldwin. The Negroes were inferior, they had never produced anything. Why associate with them, or bother about them? They were making capital out of their sufferings, but the Jews had suffered much more. One does get the impression that the Jews regard themselves as having a monopoly on suffering, and do not want the Negroes to muscle in.

  Wilson’s eye is not only on the great of the world but on those who attract him as well, like Mary Pcolar, who lives in the Talcottville region; she is married with two children and holds various jobs that he describes with Balzacian precision. He is sexually drawn to her but notes his debility in these matters; nothing much happens but then, unlike in the early journals with their sexual graphicness, Wilson seems unable to perform the act to which he had devoted so much time in the past—not to mention so many words; yet, every now and then, oddly there will be a description of a sudden lust for Elena which ends in a successful coupling despite “half-mast” erections.

  I suspect that future literary chronicles will find it odd that the generation of Wilson and Miller and Williams and McCarthy—names more or less taken at random—should have felt duty-bound to tell us at length exactly what they did or tried to do in bed. The effect is sometimes bracing, like reading a good description of applied physics, say, but it is never erotic. The thought of Wilson in the act is profoundly depressing. D. H. Lawrence—first in this field?—is not much better in his fictive renderings. On the other hand James Boswell delights us with his drunken swoops on complaisant chambermaids, and his poxy member takes on a plangent life of its own: one responds to its rises and falls as one never does to the clinical Wilson’s plumbing.

  Wilson enjoys Auden’s company; Auden’s unremitting pedantry matches his own. When they met it was to exchange lectures until, with alcohol, Wilson would start barking and Auden mumbling and wheezing.

  Wystan tends nowadays to plug with me that we both belong to the professional middle class, who are the pillars of civilization. There was, he thought, no distinction [in the United States] between professional people and those in trade. . . . I said that when I was in college, there had been a marked distinction and this surprised him. He asked me whether it wasn’t true that I never felt myself inferior to anybody. I told him that in my youth I had rather resented the millionaires. I think that he himself had actually resented being looked down upon as a doctor’s son. . . . He said that he had regretted not having been sent to Eton.

  Auden complains to Wilson that critics never note his mastery of the technicalities of verse.

  For example, nobody had mentioned in writing about his last book that it contained a poem in stanzas. I said that I thought William Carlos Williams had ruined American poetry by leading most of the poets to give up verse altogether and lapse into “shredded prose.” He said he didn’t care about the early Williams but that he had learned something from the later Williams. I said I couldn’t see any influence. “It’s there.” “What do you mean?” “Technically.” “How?” “Length of lines.” I still don’t know what he meant.

  Glumly Wilson notes, “The last lusts gutter out.” He concludes man-woman sex is nothing to fuss about. “Yet homosexuals don’t seem to have flowered and borne fruit, don’t seem to have fully matured. Auden with his appetite for Tolkien.” Surely, Auden’s poetry is . . . well, one of the fine mature fruits of this century while a liking for Tolkien can be philological as well as infantile.

  What Wilson maintains to the end is a clear eye for what is in front of him, whether a text or a person. Great critics do not explicate a text; they describe it and then report on what they have described, if the description itself is not the criticism. Some of his reports—or even asides—make sense where most readers make none or nonsense. A friend />
  had just read Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich, which had made a great impression on him. I do not care for this story as much as many people do. I don’t believe that a man like Ivan Ilyich could ever look back on his life and find it empty and futile; I don’t believe that Tolstoy, in the period when he was writing his great novels, would ever have invented such a character.

  This is simply put; it is also, simply, true. Ivan Ilyich would not have regarded his past life as empty and futile any more than Edmund Wilson, despite his aches and pains, could ever have found his life anything but fascinating and full, as through him marched the Iroquois, the protagonists of the Civil War, the Dead Sea Scrolls, recollections of Daisy and Hecate County, Axel’s Castle and To the Finland Station, as well as these journals—first begun at Box Hill in Surrey, close to the small chalet where the great lost poet-novelist George Meredith wrote “half a dozen great novels.”

  The editor, Mr. Dabney, notes, I think correctly, that Wilson in his journals “was creating an art of portraiture in the tradition of Dr. Johnson, Taine and Sainte-Beuve.” He is certainly at his best when he turns the lights on a literary figure whom he knows and then walks, as it were, all around him. He mentions occasionally that he is reading Jules Renard’s journals; it is a pity that Wilson has none of that journalist’s aphoristic wit. But he might have said, with Renard, “Be interesting! Be interesting! Art is no excuse for boring people,” not to mention “I was born for successes in journalism, for the daily renown, the literature of abundance; reading great writers changed all that. That was the misfortune of my life.” But their misfortune is our good fortune. They existed to give the dull a glimpse of unsuspected worlds hidden in the one that we daily look at. One admires in Wilson what he admired in Parkman, “the avoidance of generalization, the description of the events always in concrete detail. The larger tendencies are shown by a chronicle of individualized persons and actions. It is what I try to do myself.” Successfully, one might add. In the four-volume Literary Criticism: A Short History (1957), by W. K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, the Almanach da Gotha of critics, Wilson is cited in three footnotes. Three! Fame!

  The New York Review of Books

  4 November 1993

  * DAWN POWELL:

  QUEEN OF THE GOLDEN AGE

  In November 1987, after a year of reading the published works of Dawn Powell (1897–1965), I published my findings in The New York Review of Books.* There is now a somewhat blurred perception that she was always very much on the minds of such exciting critics and taste-makers as James Wolcott and John Updike, and that I had simply leapt onto a merrily moving bandwagon. Actually, all her books were out of print and her name was known only to those of us whose careers had overlapped hers. In the twenty-two years that had passed since her death, she had been thoroughly erased, as original writers so often are, in the United States of Amnesia. But then she had never had much success in her lifetime either. She was a wit, a satirist, and a woman, a combination that did not enchant the bookchatterers of that era. Worst of all, she did not affirm warm mature family values. She herself was the principal third of an interesting ménage à trois in Greenwich Village; the other two thirds were her lifelong (his life long) husband, Joseph Gousha, and Coburn Gilman, a man about town and sometime magazine editor. All three were serious drinkers but then so was everyone else in those days when she could (with no irony) write a book about Manhattan and call it The Happy Island.

  Since my description of Powell’s fifteen novels, she is now almost entirely in print, here and abroad, and some of her work is even, as she would say, compost for movies and television. As I contemplate Dawn’s posthumous victory, I feel incredibly smug. With sufficient diligence, bookchat can serve a purpose, indeed its only proper purpose: to persuade the few remaining voluntary readers to turn to a writer whom they have never heard of because authority for so long either ignored or disapproved of her. If I sound unduly proprietary, I am. Also, I liked not only the Powell novels but Dawn herself. (“Yes, I know I have the name of an unsuccessful stripper. It is my strong suit.”) She was the best company in the world, with a fine savage wit, “that Irish strain in me.” Now one Tim Page has taken on Powell’s case and he is busy editing and republishing her work, most lately the diaries that she kept off and on from 1931 to her death in 1965, aged sixty-eight. He has, he tells us, “algebraically tightened many of the entries.” Personally, I would have plane geometrically loosened them but then I am old school and would have kept some of the drunken entries. She is, he tells us, “one hell of a writer,” the ultimate canonical praise from the likes of John Crowe Ransom and the New Critics of yesteryear. But so she is, Tim, so she is.

  Biographical data: Powell was born at Mount Gilead, Ohio. Shunted about from relative to relative. Obliged to amuse the unamusable. When wicked stepmother destroys her writing, Dawn flees home. Works as a waitress. Eventually graduates from Lake Erie College and heads for New York City, where she writes anything to live. But always remains a novelist, writing either of her Ohio home, always further and further away, or tales of Manhattan life.

  Now the diaries. For me, it is like having her back to life—very small, very plump—seated at a banquette in the Blue Angel, a long thin shiny black-walled night club, known to our friend John Latouche (of whom more later) as Juliet’s Tomb, and presided over by its owner, Herbert Jacoby, a somber Frenchman who would introduce each comedy act with a melancholy sigh and then turn from Imogene Coca, let us say, with a look of absolute despair. Meanwhile, Dawn would be knocking back fiery waters and the wit would start to rise. It should be noted that she never complained to friends of her ongoing ill health, her retarded son, or chronic poverty. But occasionally in the diary she gives it to Fate for what Fate has done to her; yet at the end, she did have a degree of success with her last (and perhaps best) novels, The Golden Spur and The Wicked Pavilion. Astonishingly, she was nominated for a literary prize. She notes: “Will success spoil Dawn Powell? I don’t see why not. I’m no better than anybody else, never said so.” She failed to get the award.

  Although Dawn was admired as a writer and bright companion by such contemporaries as Hemingway and Dos Passos, it was Edmund Wilson who helped her most, if a bit too late in the game. When finally he praised her in The New Yorker, he failed to elevate her to those heights where the important lady writers sunned themselves or, as Dawn characterized one lady writer with inherited money, “as she doesn’t work for her success, therefore has it, along with prestige, handed to her on a silver platter with warning to God, ‘Right Side Up.’ ” In 1934 she contemplates three fashionables of the day: Nancy Hale, Louise Bogan, Kay Boyle:

  I was impressed with how women now made their art serve their female purpose whereas once it warred with their femininity. Each page is squirming with sensitivity, every line—no matter how well disguised the heroine is—coyly reveals her exquisite taste, her delicate charm, her never-at-a-disadvantage body (which of course she cares nothing about and is always faintly amused at men’s frenzies over her perfect legs, breasts, etc.). What gallantry, what equalness to any situation in the home, the camp, the yacht, the trenches, the dives—what aristocrats these women writers are, whose pen advertises the superiority of their organs. Fit companions and opposites of the he-man writers—Hemingway, Burnett, Cain—imitation he-manners whose words tersely proclaim their masculinity, every tight-lipped phrase shows the author’s guts, his decency, his ability to handle any situation—insurrection (he is an instinctive leader or else too superior to show it), shipwreck, liquor, women. Through the words shot out of the typewriter clip-clip one watches the play of his muscles; one sighs to lay one’s head upon that hairy shoulder.

  “Started job with Paramount doing over ‘Quarantine’ at $1000 a week.” Plus ça change, as they say at the Beaux Arts. Dawn found the girls every bit as hilarious as the boys. This even-handedness is not the surest path to popularity.

  “Happiness as a rule brings out the worst in people’s characte
rs. No longer afraid, they radiantly flaunt their smugness, small vices and worst sentimentalities. . . . Happiness has given [X] a sword; respectability has given her the right to be stupid.” Although many of Dawn’s novels deal with “career” women in New York who need each other for company between marriages and love affairs, Dawn is constantly suspicious of girlfriends. “Always be kind to strangers,” she told Elaine Dundy at my house when they first met. “It’s the friends to beware of.” In the diaries she notes: “I am perpetually surprised at my own stupidity about women and cannot really blame men for the same lack of perception.” But Dawn, though stringent, lacks all malice even when she zeroes in on someone she truly dislikes. She does a splendid send-up of Clare Boothe Luce, in A Time to Be Born, which “I have been denying for years . . . I insist it was a composite (or compost) but then I find a memo from 1939—‘Why not do novel on Clare Luce?’ Who can I believe—me or myself?”

  There are few intimate revelations in the diaries. There is a hint that she and the Communist playwright John Howard Lawson once had an affair but one doubts that with the other points to her triangle—Joe and Coby—they would have bothered much about sex when wit and work and the company of each other and the passing parade of the Village was more than enough to occupy them. One is astonished at the amount of work that Dawn was obliged to do in order to pay for the institutionalized son, with not much help from Joe, himself feckless in money matters. She even made an obligatory trip or two to Hollywood to write for movies. Of Hollywood: “The climate picks you up and throws you down in the most amazing way.” That was about it. She endures a production or two in the theater, dealing, usually unhappily, with the Group Theater and the Theater Guild. Except for Robert Lewis, a director very much on her wavelength, Dawn found the Strasbergs and Clurmans and Crawfords pretty lethal in their egotism and pomposity while actors regard “the author and his work as nasty stumbling blocks between them and the public.” She was a good comic playwright who had the bad luck to fall into the hands of the Group Theater at its most didactic. After she saw what they had done to one of her plays, she hoped that they would get their heavy hands on Shaw and Pirandello and reduce those masters to agit-prop sermonizers.