Final Thoughts re. Wilson

So, three more scattered tidbits that might (or might not) be worth sharing.

(1) Wilson thought so highly of his attack on Tolkien ("Oo Those Awful Orcs") that he sent a copy to Cabell, asking his opinion of Tolkien's book. [EW to JBC, Apr 12 1956; LETTERS ON LITERATURE AND POLITICS, p. 542-543]. There's no record of Cabell's response (I even once asked Leon Edel to help me find if there was one, but to no avail), other than that Wilson found it "a delightful surprise" [EW to JBC, May 16th 1956; ibid p. 543].

(2) There's no record, so far as I know, of Wilson's ever having read C. S. Lewis (I suspect he wdn't have considered any of CSL's fiction "literature"*), but as an equal-opportunity insulter, he did once make a passing slap at Charles Williams, in the poem "The Mass in the Parking Lot"

. . . And whom should we meet there, on the loose,

But Andre Gide in a big burnoose.

What were his words of wisdom? Damn it,

He was whooping it up for Dashiell Hammett.

More correctly garbed, we encountered later

T. S. Eliot, the Great Dictator.

Having just awakened from troubled sleep,

He told us Charles Williams was terribly deep.

And Wystan Auden, with rigorous views

But his necktie hanging around his shoes,

Expounded his taste for detective stories,

Which he reads to illumine the current mores . . .

[NIGHT THOUGHTS, 1961, p. 181]

(3) Finally, yesterday I found out that Edmund Wilson's son with Mary McCarthy was named . . . Reuel Wilson.

Can't make this stuff up.

--JDR

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*what with the trilogy being science fiction, and the Narnia books children's books. TILL WE HAVE FACES might have interested him, but that book of Lewis's didn't do v. well and there's no reason to think Wilson ever heard of its existence. Plus, of course, Wilson disliked Xianity, and CSL's apostlizing was the single best-known thing about him.

Well, This is a Weird Twist

So, pursuant to crossing a few 'i's and dotting a few 't's, as it were, re. Edmund Wilson and Tolkien, today I found a strange one.

I was already aware of the passing reference in a 1966 letter [LETTERS ON LITERATURE AND POLITICS, 1912-1972, p.660] where he notes his daughter's fondness for THE HOBBIT ("[she] read it or had it read to her innumerable times")* and concedes it must be a pretty good children's book, though noting he'd never read it himself (apparently he did not see reading aloud to the young daughter as one of his parenting duties).

Today I found a few new ones, all minor and all dating from the 1960s, but one came in such a strange context, and with odd connotations, that it floored me. Musing in old age (1967-68) on how much fuss sex has caused, good and bad, he suddenly veers (as Thorne Smith's Mr. Owen wd put it) into the following remarkable observation/assertion:

"Yet homosexuals don't seem to

have flowered and borne fruit,

don't seem to have fully matured:

Auden with his appetite for Tolkien."

(Edmund Wilson, THE SIXTIES, p. 642)

[posthumously published, 1993]

So, when in his famous Tolkien-bashing review back in 1956, when he concluded that "certain people, in England at least, have a lifelong appetite for juvenile trash", was this code for homosexuals, conceived of like Waugh's Sebastian Flyte carrying his teddy bear around Oxford? I don't like to think it, but that seems to be the implication here.** By that interpretation, he approves of writers who by contrast include plenty of old-fashioned philandering, like JURGEN or (I'm told) many of the characters in MEMOIRS OF HECATE COUNTY, uncensored tales about traditionally male seducers of a long string of all-too-willing maidens, (other people's) wives, &c.

In any case, V. odd.

--John R.

*this wd be the same little girl who at age 7 loved THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

**in any case, he's quite wrong: LotR has never been a book adopted by and championed by the gay community, so far as I can tell. There have been one or two gay Tolkien scholars over the years, but that's far fewer than we might reasonably expect.