There are three ways in which the word “magician” may be applied to the critic and author Edmund Wilson: in his relationship to the printed word, in his relationships with women, and, more literally, as a straightforward reference to the fact of his having been a lifelong student and practitioner of “magical” tricks. All three senses of the term are met with and explored in this memoir by his daughter, and indeed all three are shown to be not just inseparable but closely intertwined.

This is an interesting, generous, dignified, touching, and finally rather sad book by a woman who, without complaining, nevertheless suggests by indirection a life—her own—scored strongly by loneliness and disappointment. Rosalind Baker Wilson was born in 1923 to Mary Blair, the distinguished actress and first wife of Edmund Wilson. Although the couple was married seven years, they remained separated during the last five of these: “The only times I ever saw my parents together,” Miss Wilson writes, “were during the few minutes they visited when he dropped me off at her apartment [in New York City].” The child Rosalind had been delivered in her maternal grandmother’s house in Red Bank, New Jersey, and went on living there for most of her childhood. “I stayed in Red Bank because my mother became tubercular; my grandmother felt, ‘Rosalind is my child.’ For the next twenty-eight years, my father was to come down to Red Bank almost every weekend and sometimes for longer periods of time to see his mother and me until I went out on my own, and even then we still met in Red Bank. I spent the summer months with him; between his marriages to Mary McCarthy and Margaret Canby, it was he and I alone during those months.” And then, in a single paragraph’s jump: “His trained nurse and I were with him when he died on June 12, 1972, in his mother’s family house in the hamlet of Talcottville, town of Layden, county of Lewis, in upper New York State.”

In his early middle age, Edmund Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown and spent time in a sanitarium, where he thought that a pencil was writing away for him all by itself Afterward a psychiatrist told Miss Blair that he had a mother complex and ought never to marry anyone. Even after the psychobabble has been discounted, the biographical fact is that Wilson did indeed have a peculiar relationship with his mother (he was an only child) that lasted throughout her—and his—life: a relationship that was further complicated by the fact of his father’s having left everything to Helen Mather Kimball Wilson, who doled money to her son when and in whatever amount she thought he required it—the when and what being frequently determined in his mother’s mind by her evaluation of her granddaughter’s needs. The frustrations attended—and produced—by these arrangements must often have seemed nearly intolerable to Rosalind’s father; who, the daughter reports, reserved his worst scenes (with the possible exception of those he and his third wife, Miss McCarthy, collaborated on) for his visits to Red Bank, where a room of his own and iced bottles of ginger ale were invariably maintained and where he would lecture his mother on her alleged financial incapacities. In his rages, according to Miss Wilson, her father was “like a person possessed in the oldfashioned sense. Elizabeth Waugh [a Provincetown friend] . . . had thought my father looked like Caligula. Liquor may have brought it out sometimes, but it was fundamental and had nothing really to do with drinking. . . . He was fascinated by monsters, loved movie ones, referring to them affectionately: ‘There’s the old monster.’ He doted on a record I gave him a few years before he died called ‘The Monster Rally.’ These creatures appealed to his terrible, lonely, isolated, evil side.” When he wanted Rosalind with him, he wanted her; when not, then not. “He had known what he wanted to be at an early age and never let anything divert him from his chosen path. He was a domestic tyrant who never presided over a household in which the occupants were comfortable. It seemed almost as though if they were comfortable, he was not.” Yet, when Rosalind had a breakdown of her own, “he saw me through gallantly”; and a valentine that he sent her in the final year of his life, for her said it all: “Ours has been a strange and wonderful relationship.”

Perhaps the best parts of the book deal with Miss Wilson’s childhood summers spent with her father in Provincetown on Cape Cod, in those faroff times when the population included the Eugene O’Neills, the John Dos Passoses, and an assortment of White Russian emigres, and before it had become an annexed colony of New York and Boston perverts. With her friends the Russians and others, Rosalind fished for pickerel that were transformed into gourmet meals, drank champagne, and listened to fine piano performances, from which she frequently arrived home in the early hours of the morning. One night, encountering resistance behind the door,

I pushed a little farther, [and]

recognized the leg of a rocker,

on top of which was a

Hitchcock chair, and on top of

that a bread box, which came

crashing down as per my

father’s plan. He had

booby-trapped the door.

“Rosalind!” he bellowed as

only he could pronounce that

name disapprovingly. “What are

you doing?”

“Getting in from George’s.”

“What’s going on?”

“He played some music.”

“You woke me up.”

“Why did you put the chairs in front of the door?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Underneath the joking, the japing, the gaming, the champagne, and the general good feeling, however, there is a hectic quality—or perhaps, there is simply the quality of something missing, of something left out. It is reasonable to suspect that her father’s procession of marriages and amours has something to do with this; if so. Miss Wilson has been a brick in her description of them and of their dramatis personae, her stepmothers in particular. Of Margaret Canby, who died in California by falling off a stair as she left a dinner party, Rosalind says simply that she “adored” her; of Elena Mumm Wilson, Edmund’s last wife (in his most successful marriage), that she was “a great lady, a fighter, a terrific worker”; and, while remarking of Mary McCarthy (from whom she learned “two practical things . . . : how to make the best cucumber sandwiches and Tom Collinses in the world”) that “she was Anna Karenina without the warmth,” she magnanimously relates that, in relation to herself at least, the novelist “did the best she could with the situation.”

In Near the Magician there is but a single sentence referring to Wilson’s love of magic tricks.

It was a funny dichotomy in his character, this love of illusion and magic contrasting with his career, which depended on analyzing and taking apart literary works and removing the magic.

For Rosalind Wilson, I believe, her father was the master magician who succeeded in removing magic from literature even as he created it there, as he removed love from romance by marrying it. For her, he was an alchemist, capable of transmuting a thing into its opposite; and the emblem of his genius in doing this was the performance of his magical tricks—in which, by the way, he was not above stealing a playing card and keeping it until the spirit moved him to return it. “What can you say about a man like that?” the card’s owner, the popular novelist Phyllis Duganne, had asked; and I suspect that the man’s daughter didn’t know the answer to that question. So she wrote this very interesting and valuable book, to find out.

 

[Near the Magician: A Memoir of My Father, Edmund Wilson, by Rosalind Baker Wilson (New York: Grove Weidenfeld) 287 pp., $18.95]