The Two Wilsons: A Slightly Deeper Introduction (2/6)
In the first blog in this series (link here), I briefly introduced the literary critic Edmund Wilson (hereafter Edmund) and the biologist E.O. Wilson (hereafter Ed). Here, I provide a brief biographical sketch of each person (they are very different!) and describe their principal lines of work.
Both Wilsons came from families that lived in the United States for generations, but in many respects their childhoods could not have been more different. Edmund was born in New Jersey (within commuting distance from New York City) in 1895; his family—dating back to colonial times—was financially comfortable and well connected. His father (Edmund Sr.) was a successful lawyer, who became attorney general of New Jersey and was widely respected throughout the region. His mother was well-educated, well connected, well read. An only child, Edmund was the center of their attention, concerns, aspirations.
An only child as well, Ed Wilson was born in Birmingham Alabama in 1929. His family was not well off; they moved from one place to another; his parents divorced when he was young. His father (also named Edward Osborne) wandered from one job to another, became an alcoholic, and eventually died by suicide—leaving a note in which he implied that he did not wish to become a burden to his son.
Not surprisingly, as children, both Wilsons were precocious and largely loners. At an early age, Ed became fascinated by nature and particularly by ants, for whom he had a passion; he spent countless hours exploring the landscape around his many homes. His loss of sight in one eye (due to an accident) and his diminished hearing did not reduce his ardor, though it may have nudged him toward studying small organisms. Edmund was a bibliophile (as were his parents) and readily devoured varieties of literature. In short, “ant lover” and “book worm”.
Because of his family’s status and resources, Edmund was able to attend the Hill School, a well-regarded private secondary school, and then Princeton University. He considered his experiences at the Hill School especially formative because he was introduced there to foreign languages (years of Greek, Latin, French) and to the panorama of American and European literature and history. He also was a serious student at Princeton but lamented the lack of intellectual interests on the part of most of his classmates. At both Hill and Princeton, he had knowledgeable and supportive mentors who quickly noted his dauntingly wide knowledge and his gifts as a reader and critic of literature. His writing talents were also recognized, as he ran the gamut from non-fiction, to stories, poems, and plays. Though he was in the military for a year in WWI and travelled a bit in Europe thereafter, it was clear to all—including Edmund—that he would become a writer and seek to make his living exclusively through that craft.
Ed Wilson’s interest in the biological world, nature, and especially ants was as deep seated and all-consuming as Edmund’s literary flair. But he was necessarily more of an autodidact, and, accordingly, his educational deepening and expanding took place gradually, over a longer period of time. He attended the University of Alabama (by no means the intellectual equivalent of Princeton a century ago); recognizing his unusual knowledge of insects and of biology more broadly, his teachers allowed him to pursue his own studies. But only when admitted as a graduate student to Harvard’s Department of Biology did, he encounter teachers and peers in whose company he could unabashedly exhibit his knowledge and skills and enhance both.
Though his biographer Richard Rhodes does not make much of it, I suspect that Ed’s stint as a “Junior Fellow” at Harvard in the early 1950s was crucial for his intellectual development and breadth. This unique three-year fellowship has long enabled a small group of exceptionally promising scholars to pursue whatever interests they have. Talented young persons (at the time, only men) have regular opportunities to mix with outstanding senior scholars as well as extraordinary peers. It seems clear to me that the Fellowship exposed Ed to realms of knowledge, skills, issues, and questions of which he had been barely aware before.
Also, and possibly relevant to this series of blogs, Ed Wilson recounts how the intellectual historian Crane Brinton, then the designated Senior Fellow (and thereby guide for the Junior Fellows), helped him to understand his own specific slant on the life of the mind. Ed Wilson came to believe that he fit Brinton’s informal definition of an anti-intellectual—a person who does not believe that human nature can easily be changed. Ed Wilson, an intellectual in all the traditional connotations of that label, was a political conservative who had no sympathy for socialist or communist ideas—the very ideas that fascinated and animated his namesake Edmund Wilson (Rhodes, p.23).
No rising intellectual star has a completely easy run—the bumps of life intrude. Yet, compared to most of their peers, by the age of thirty, both Wilsons were marked for success and, indeed, for leading roles in their respective spheres. When 30, Ed Wilson had become a tenured professor of biology at Harvard—a status rarely achieved so early in life. He never wanted for research support, status, or conventional success thereafter. Similarly, by the age of 30, Edmund was already a leading writing and editor for American periodicals…this at a time when one could make a decent living simply by doing one’s job competently at Vanity Fair, The New Republic, or later The New Yorker.
Nonetheless, each of the Wilsons had his struggles. For Ed Wilson, it was the disdainful downgrading—and even dismissal as ‘stamp collecting’—of his traditional approach to the field of biology. The chief critic was his age peer James (Jim) Watson (co-discoverer of the structure of DNA) who argued fervently that the entire discipline of biology should focus sharply on molecules and genes. A struggle between their respective visions occurred at Harvard as well as on the national and international biology scenes—and the field moved sharply in the molecular direction. One can speculate that Ed Wilson’s later stretch to encompass all of biology—and, indeed, the full spectrum of knowledge—was in no small part a retort, a response, a reaction to Jim Watson’s hyper-focused conception of biological science.
Edmund Wilson’s struggles were more personal. He had the ambition to be a writer of fiction (plays, novels, stories,) as well as a poet, but it became clear that his special talent—indeed, his genius—lay in criticism, broadly construed. He displayed admiration for—but also jealousy of—his peers who succeeded in penning well-regarded serious literature—his Princeton friend Scott Fitzgerald, as well as novelist John Dos Passos and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. After a very late initiation into sexual relations, Edmund had a multitude of partners—women from the most diverse social and cultural backgrounds, including four wives, quite different from one another. (He documented in unexpurgated fashion several dozen liaisons in multiple journals kept over the decades.) His relation to his three children (by three wives) was vexed. He drank to excess. And he also suffered what was then termed a nervous breakdown in his early 30s. But with all that, Edmund Wilson was still able to read quickly (though with exemplary care and remarkable memory) and write deftly for much of each day. Like Ed Wilson, Edmund ended up with a remarkable array of publications on a wide set of topics.
Both men have been the subject of biographical studies—both article and book length—as well as ample summaries in encyclopedias and Wikipedia. I will not attempt to describe their research and writing in any detail. (See References below.) In Ed Wilson’ case, he was widely recognized as the world’s expert on ants, as well as impressively knowledgeable about other species of insects. With well-chosen colleagues, he carried out pioneering work on insect communication (via pheromones) and on the distribution of diverse species across different ecological settings. In mid-life he wrote a major work on sociobiology (a term that he may not have coined but over which he eventually was awarded ownership). In this mammoth volume, he sought to apply the lessons learned about ant (and insect) societies to invertebrates and vertebrates, including, in a highly controversial final chapter, human beings. His research and writing on ants continued unabated; he changed his views dramatically about the causes of altruistic behavior; and in his later years, sought to reconcile or even merge the various forms and facets of human knowledge. This attempt at synthesis takes front stage in the succeeding blogs.
Ed Wilson’s daily life consisted of making field trips to various sites and studying insects in his laboratory. Edmund Wilson’s diurnal pattern consisted of reading widely on all manner of topics and publications, mixing with scholars and artists of all sorts on a very regular basis; and, while continuing to write stories, novels, plays and ditties, he is best known and most valued for his works of criticism, broadly construed. He wrote hundreds of book reviews (as well as reviews of plays, and other artistic productions) as well as critical essays about creative individuals, chiefly writers.
Most of Edmund Wilson’s fans (including me) know him best and value him most for his books. For the most part, his books were simply collections of his reviews (perhaps better described as review essays), with some loosely connecting materials. But the most important books stood on their own: Axel’s Castle, an introduction to key innovative “symbolist” writers in the early 20th century; The Wound and the Bow, making the case that literary giants suffer a major handicap or injury which paradoxically leads them to their greatest work (one ponders to what extent this was autobiographical); To the Finland Station, a study of the rise of socialism and communism from the early 19th century, to the crucial writings of Marx and Engels, culminating in Lenin’s arrival in April 2017 at the train station in St Petersburg—in effect launching the Russian Revolution; and Patriotic Gore, a remarkable survey of the leading literary, political, and military leaders in the US at the time of the Civil War—an era much closer to those of Wilson’s vintage than to those of us alive in the 21st century.
Others may well and justifiably focus on other strands of Ed Wilson’s scientific work or of Edmund Wilson’s literary output, but this sketch—and the sources cited below—should provide highlights.
In the next blogs, I attempt to describe the synthesizing methods and ambitions of these two master synthesizers.
References
Dabney, Lewis. Edmund Wilson: A life in literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Edmund Wilson: A Biography. New York: Cooper Square Publishing, 2003.
Rhodes, T. Scientist: E O Wilson: A Life in Nature. New York; Doubleday, 2021.
Wilson, Edmund. Axel’s Castle. New York: Scribner’s 1931.
Wilson, Edmund. To the Finland Station. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1940
Wilson, Edmund. The Wound and the Bow. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978.
Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the literature of the American Civil War. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1962.
Wilson, E.O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975.
Wilson, E.O. Naturalist. Washington D C: Island Press, 2006.