Inquiring mind

Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature
By Lewis Dabney
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 642 pp., illustrated, $35

When writing recently about John Bayley's collected book reviews, I called the indefatigable and versatile British critic ''England's Edmund Wilson." Wilson (1895-1972) himself, during his crowded lifetime and afterward, was likened to the influential 19th-century French critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, whose varied oeuvre and tireless intellectual curiosity were specifically echoed in Wilson's hunger to travel everywhere, read everything, and never -- even at the exhausted end of an almost unbelievably industrious life -- never cease studying and learning.

Lewis Dabney's respectful and replete biography, which offers a welcome corrective to Jeffrey Meyers's earlier warts-and-all life, is, quite properly, as much a portrayal of 20th-century America as of Dabney's slippery subject.

Despite Dabney's concluding suggestion that in the long run ''Wilson may well be perceived, like Dr. Johnson, at the center of his age," he's no hagiographer, assiduously recording the numerous temperamental shortcomings, critical blind spots, and personal bad habits that accompanied -- and, to varying degrees, fueled -- decades of sustained achievement.

Relying heavily (and wisely) on both Wilson's own scattered autobiographical jottings and other people's writings about him and memories of him, Dabney assembles an impressively rounded picture of ''a rationalist and classicist who was also a restless romantic." The earliest sources of such polarities are located in Wilson's early years in New Jersey and New York State, as the only son of a dedicated, socially conscious attorney and a haughty, tightfisted mother.

Wilson's literary vocation was recognized early, and confirmed during his prep-school years, when he wrote voluminously in many forms (including poetry and drama) while losing his religious faith and cultivating a rational skepticism inspired by George Bernard Shaw and H. L. Mencken. Wilson moved on to further precocious scholarly accomplishment at Princeton, where he became both friend and de facto mentor to the gifted, unstable young F. Scott Fitzgerald. And then World War I sent him to France as an ambulance driver, and imbued him with a subsequent lifelong pacifism blended with contempt for authority in virtually all forms.

The postwar years introduced the ardent young literary man to the New York literary establishment. He found editorial work with Frank Crowninshield's Vanity Fair, later accepting an influential post at The New Republic (where he was, writes Dabney, ''cultural man-of-all-work" in the late 1920s, as -- years later -- he would be, as a freelance contributor, to The New Yorker), while writing brilliant critical essays, losing his prolonged virginity to promiscuous poet of the moment Edna St. Vincent Millay, and weighing in on such volatile current events and issues as the trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

The 1920s and 1930s -- the first decades recorded in his voluminous, invaluable journals -- also saw the first of Wilson's disastrous matrimonial misadventures: a miserable first marriage to stage actress Mary Blair, and a rocky second one to his high-spirited soulmate Margaret Canby, whom he grew to love only after her early accidental death. This was also the period of his intense five-year affair with poet Louise Bogan, and bruising involvements with the succession of brilliant and beautiful women who were drawn to this increasingly adipose, argumentative, and alcoholic would-be Lothario like gorgeously colored moths to a scrubby, stubborn brushfire.

Dabney makes the most of an irresistibly engrossing story in Wilson's inflammatory third marriage to the irredeemably unstable writer-troublemaker Mary McCarthy -- and persuasively contrasts this doomed union with his last and happiest marriage, to European champagne heiress Elena Mumm Thornton. She bore the youngest of his three children, and lovingly nursed the aging literary lion through his difficult, albeit honor-laden, latter years, spent reading and writing as always.

And, running parallel to Wilson's years of arduous editorial and freelancing tasks, political activism (he was a New Deal Democrat), frequent European travel, and exhaustingly labyrinthine personal relations, there was the work. And what a rich treasure-trove of information, commentary, and analysis it became.

It's no exaggeration to say that Wilson set out to educate himself about every subject he studied, and to educate his readers in everything he wrote. The spirit of the Jazz Age and its immediate aftermath is memorably preserved in the journalistic essays collected in ''The American Earthquake." According to Dabney, ''A generation discovered modern literature" thanks to his brilliant study of the modern European masters, ''Axel's Castle." The psychology of revolutionary political thought is analyzed with impassioned empathy and keen skeptical reserve in ''To the Finland Station," which is perhaps his best book. Wilson taught generations of scholars to seek the roots of artistic creation in the experience of early-life trauma in his seminal critical masterpiece ''The Wound and the Bow." He integrated ''art, psychology, and politics as he [played] off his generation's experience against the writers on whom he grew up," notes Dabney, in dozens of commanding literary essays gathered in the endlessly informative, irresistibly entertaining volumes ''The Triple Thinkers," ''Classics and Commercials," and ''The Shores of Light." His scope kept widening, reaching a glorious peak with the trenchant analyses of, to quote Dabney, ''American character and culture as they were dramatized by the Civil War," in his magnificently combative, illuminating ''Patriotic Gore." Nor was Wilson's great love, literature, his only mistress -- his final years produced a searching consideration of the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls, a bilious screed provoked by his problems with the IRS (''The Cold War and the Income Tax"), and a passionate defense of the rights of Native Americans (''Apologies to the Iroquois").

Wilson's influence will last. In the late 1960s, Dabney writes, he earnestly continued ''pushing his idea for a uniform series of affordable high-quality reprints of American classics, on the model of the French Pleiade," an idea finally realized when the first Library of America volumes began appearing in the 1980s. Wilson's own best work -- informed, lively, opinionated, and animated by his unquenchable love for the best that has been thought and said -- belongs in that library, in all libraries, and in the American consciousness.

Bruce Allen is a regular contributor to Kirkus Reviews, the Washington Times, and other publications. He lives in Kittery, Maine.