Edmund Wilson had just returned from a visit to “The Old Stone House” in upstate New York, and he was feeling, in 1932, nostalgic and melancholic. He had been almost from the start.
As I go north for the first time in years in the slow, the constantly stopping, milk train, which carries passengers only in the back part of the hind car and has an old stove to heat
it in winter, I look out through the dirt-yellowed double pane and remember how once, as a child, I had felt thwarted till I had gotten the windows up so that there should be nothing between me and the widening pastures . . . .
….
Rivers stony and thin, or deeper and dark—where do they go.? I used to love to follow them—should still.
Born in New Jersey, Wilson lived then in Manhattan, and he had by then, too, been long away from the house in Talcottville, New York, where he had spent memorable summers as a child. The small town, quite in the middle of rural north central New York state, was settled by Europeans – Americans – in 1793, and these settlers, Wilson tells us, were migrating west from New England – Ipswich, in the case of Wilson’s family, and the “crampedness” of Boston: “That narrowness, that meagerness, that stinginess, still grips New England today.”
Recognizably, Wilson’s essay is a meditation on going home again, on not being able to go home again, and on finding home having lodged itself, nonetheless, irremovably, melancholically, irresolvedly inside you.
By 1933, Wilson was over a decade into establishing himself as the premier American literary critic for nearly half a century, though he always insisted on designating himself a journalist. A friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton, he wrote almost from the beginning for Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New Yorker. He showed himself quickly to be one of the best readers in American letters. His 1922 review for The New Republic, soon after publication, of Joyce’s Ulysses – without decades of scholarship and prior readings to stand on, and at the still near-tender age of 27 – exemplified his skills, as did his reception of “The Waste Land,” in The Dial. In less than a decade he would produce Axel’s Castle, a landmark work on Symbolism and the path it laid into Modernism. Among the scores of his works, of literary and cultural criticism, history, fiction, poetry, memoirs, and drama, he produced, too, memorably, To the Finland Station (for which he taught himself Russian), on Marx and the route to Russian Communism, and Patriotic Gore, about the American literature of the Civil War era. His final book published the year before his death in 1972 was Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York.
The “records and recollections” of Upstate, are of Wilson’s two decades living in the old stone house, starting nearly two decades after writing “The Old Stone House,” when his mother left it to him on her death. He did go “home” again and died there. Among his reasons were financial. A highly regarded writer Wilson certainly was; a well remunerated writer he certainly was not. His books did not sell well, and he long lived on publisher advances, for which his royalties rarely adequately compensated him to repay. Worse, in the 1950s, he failed to pay his taxes for an extended number of years. Still, he was brilliant, admired, and famous, and four-times married, including to the equally and differently famous, and significantly younger writer, Mary McCarthy.
Wilson was feeling none of that during his 1932 visit to Talcottville or on his return. Nothing, he decided from his visit, persisted in the present as he remembered it. Nothing, he concluded, had even existed in the past as he remembered it.
. . . how I used to love coming up here! It was a reunion with cousins from Boston and New York, Ohio and Wisconsin. . . . Later on, I got to dislike it: the older generation died, the younger ceased to come back. I wanted to be elsewhere, too. The fulness with life of the past, the memory of the many families of cousins and uncles and aunts, made the emptiness of the present more oppressive.—Isn't it still?—didn't my gloom come from that, the night of my first arrival?—Wasn't it the dread of it that kept me away?—
The receding from the present of the past has overwhelmed him, as it does all melancholics of time: “My great-aunt is dead, and all her generation are dead—and the new generations of the family have long ago left Talcottville behind and have turned into something quite different.”
And then we stray, flittingly, almost imperceptibly, beyond the personal: “They were very impressive people, the survivors of a sovereign race who owned their own pastures and fields and governed their own community. Today their descendants perform minor functions in a machine which they do not control.”
And then again: “you can see exactly how rural Americans lived a century and a half ago. And who would go back to it? Not I.”
Wilson says it multiple times, of the “dark nights and prisoning winters”: “And I would not go back to that old life if I could: that civilization—why idealize it?—was too lonely, too poor, too provincial.”
Well, we know that he did go back, perhaps only from financial exigency, and journalist that he was, reader of every aspect of life, he intellectually engaged the experience of that return over twenty years and produced a final book from it. But by the time he returns home to Manhattan from the 1932 sojourn, his mood has reached its darkest depth: “Yet as I walk up the steps of my house in New York, I recognize suddenly with a sinking that I have never been able to leave it. This old wooden booth I have taken between First and Second Avenues—what is it but the same old provincial America?” He begins to conclude:
So here is where I live: in an old cramped frame house, having failed even worse than my relatives at getting out of the American big business era the luxuries and the prestige which I should unquestionably very much have enjoyed.
And then Wilson writes, just lines from his end:
Here is where I end by living —among the worst instead of the best of this society—the sordid and unhealthy children of my sordid and unhealthy neighbors who howl outside my windows night and day. (Emphasis added)
Huh? What?
Where did that come from?
Who are these “worst . . . of this society,” the “sordid and unhealthy . . . who howl outside” the windows? Was Wilson living beside some Dickensian institution for the criminally insane?
We won’t find answers in the text of the essay, though we might begin to find them there.
Upstate is an arbitrary orientation, like north and south (up and down) or the choice of left-right longitudinal boundaries and placement on the historic Mercator projection maps impressed on all our minds. Upstate New York, as terminology, is a geographical and social projection from the orientation of New York City. (The old New York City joke is that “upstate” is anything above Columbus Circle – less than a third of the way north in Manhattan alone. Also, to New York City people, that is, to New Yorkers, “New York” is New York City. New York state? Are you kidding?)
These orientations become ingrained, part of the seemingly natural, both spatial and social, orientation of the mind. In New York State (including the city), they produce profound social, political, and class antagonisms. We may see ways in which Wilson is torn by these (perhaps even to some degree unrecognized) orientations: rural/urban, agricultural/industrial-commercial, maybe more.
Where, then, we may ask, was Wilson living in Manhattan at this time?
“[B]etween First and Second Avenues.” But in what neighborhood? We can find the answer even on Wikipedia but we find a lot more, and more interesting, in Edmund Wilson, by Jeffrey Meyers’ or Lewis M. Dabney’s Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature.
The neighborhood is known as Turtle Bay. In contemporary times – my lifetime, if you’ll permit me – Turtle Bay has existed as a relatively quiet and genteel eastside Manhattan neighborhood somewhat removed from the more intense hubbub of midtown, if not quite in the almost bucolic character of Riverside Drive and West End Avenue on the Upper West Side. Katherine Hepburn and Stephen Sondheim famously owned townhouses there. Turtle Bay is the neighborhood, sitting right at the East River, of the United Nations and its many nearby consulates and missions.
But in the days Wilson lived there, at the time he wrote “The Old Stone House,” Turtle Bay was only just beginning to rebound, in the many developmental phases of Manhattan neighborhoods, from two decades of rough decline. The Third Avene and Second Avenue elevated subway tracks darkened the streets with shadow. Breweries, power plants, and slaughterhouses lined First Avenue, the last of which were not removed until construction of that future U.N. in 1948. Wilson lived precisely at 314 East 53rd Street, now, with its neighbor 312, a designated historic landmark, as among “two of seven remaining wooden houses on the East Side of Manhattan north of 23rd Street” (a rather specialized designation, one must say).
And beginning in the late Nineteenth Century, the neighborhood received an influx of poor immigrants, who lived in decaying buildings of a kind that, when housing the immigrant or the poor, will commonly be known as tenements.
There is one earlier, very brief but clear indication of something extra-textual afoot in the mood of the essay. Five paragraphs before his conclusion, Wilson writes, “And what about me ? As I come back in the train, I find that—other causes contributing—my depression of Talcottville deepens (emphasis added).
Three years prior, Wilson had been hospitalized in Clifton Springs Sanatorium for effects of a nervous breakdown. Then, he had moved into the house on 53rd Street just that year – in an always tumultuous personal life – as a consequence of his second wife’s accidental death in a freak fall on some steps, apart from him on the other side of the country.
Who wouldn’t he be in a dark mood?
Wilson writes “other causes contributing” because the honest reporter in him feels compelled, if only by a vague phrase that contributes nothing of substance other than to draw our attention, to acknowledge context, but Wilson doesn’t want that context to be part of the essay. Yet if we’re reading closely, it now is, and if we attend to absences, to gaps, we will seek what’s missing.
And “the worst of this society”?
Contrary to the impression, Wilson was a political liberal – even, like so many others during the 1930s, a Communist sympathizer, though he never joined the Party. (He was not a joiner, which means he would have been shot.) He devoted much of that decade to encouraging writers and other artists to the cause of the poor and the industrial working class. To the Finland Station emerged as an outgrowth of those interests and concerns. Even when its research in Russia led to clear-eyed disillusionment, his leftist inclinations, though sometimes perhaps confused, didn’t waver. And here is where I think the deeper, more complex and contradictory autobiography of “The Old Stone House” can come into view, beyond the recognizable nostalgia for youthful, pastoral beginnings, sprinkled with historical-cultural observation.
Talcottvile, Wilson tells us, was the product of old New England spreading west, seeking more space, and settling in to recreate itself in what became Lewis County, New York. Wilson himself was a New York product of that expansion and of those deep American roots: he was a descendant of Cotton Mather, with the two sides of his family having reached the Colonies by the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. His was a patrician heritage of professional men: doctors, lawyers, professors. Yet his social and aesthetic sensibilities identified him with artists and advancing modernity, which produced, too, over the course of the Twentieth Century, the popular and mass commodification of culture we know today. Wilson, as critic and author, represents far from an unusual contradictory phenomenon – of the avantgarde, fringe bohemian spirit that champions the life of the common folk even as it disdains the common, wherever that spirit spies it, in thought or in person. In one form of populist sympathy, the avant-garde impulse resists the oppressive nature of the state and rebels against cultural conformity, yet it also recoils from mass popular culture as another form of oppressive conformity, of the intellect and sensibility. (Conversely, Tristan Tsara may have championed the proletariat, but the proletariat never championed Tristan Tsara.) A person of Wilson’s qualities would always respond accordingly.
One might expect Wilson to have developed into a cultural neoconservative in the Saul Bellow and Allan Bloom mold, but he didn’t. Living the last two decades of his life in rural retreat, though hardly in retirement, and as the seeds of neoconservatism were sown, he engaged the lives of the small-town New Yorkers around him and even championed the nearby Iroquois as subjects of his interest. But he was never of them. A female farmer on a tractor might draw his attention and provoke his symbolic admiration, but he wouldn’t be interested in befriending her.
Wrote Wilson in a foreword to Ada Nisbet’s Dickens & Ellen Ternan, about the challenges of writing a great man’s biography, which might equally apply to reading an autobiography:
[T]he works he gives to the public do not tell the whole of his story, for they must always be artificial arrangements in the interests of ideal values. The real struggle of the ideal with the actual can only be seen at close range in the relationships and vicissitudes of the man’s own life.
So it is here with “The Old Stone House.” I suggested in “Missing in Memoir 1” that Joyce Carols Oates’ “They All Went Away” is unreliable as memoir. Given its very narrow range of biographical attention and the gaps and aporia that mark its unreliability, it’s hard to receive it meaningfully as memoir at all. Are we really supposed to believe we know Oates from it, or something about her as a person, differently from what we might think we know of a writer by reading her fiction? I suggested the essay dangles other fruits, of creative nonfiction. (Oates, by the way, edited The Best American Essays of the [20th] Century, in which she included Wilson’s “The Old Stone House.”)
The extremes of Wilson’s character and behavior were many: the discipline of the mind went unreplicated in the life, and he did not suffer fools, who replicated in his vision the more he drank, which was a lot. Those very extremes challenge any effort to reduce him, even only politically, to the intemperate, if still revealing, eruption at the essay’s close. To know the “real struggle of the ideal with the actual” in him, we need to look at him at “close range.” In reading his and other memoirs, that requires paying close attention not only to what is there but also to what isn’t.
Next “Missing in Memoir”: Wilson’s third wife, Mary McCarthy, confesses!
AJA