Edmund Wilson was America’s premier man of letters (The Wound and the Bow) during the mid years of the 20th century. To the Finland Station and Memoirs of Hecate County are still in print, as are his journals about the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. He was a literary critic par excellence, a friend of both Scott Fitzgerald (whose death at 44 years of age shook him greatly, as Wilson was one year older than the tragic Scott) and Hemingway, who counted Wilson as one of the few men he would not bully. Wilson was much married, his third wife being the very beautiful Mary McCarthy, as good a writer as he was, and one he divorced in 1946 for the equally intellectual champagne heiress Elena Mumm Thornton.
I like Wilson for many reasons, as well as for his prescient thoughts on Greeks back in 1945, when he flew into that tortured country with an American mission, reporting for the New Yorker. One of the first Americans he met on the ground asked him whether the war between Sparta and Athens was still going on (The Forties, page 144). Wilson does not comment on the breadth of the ignorance. He lets it stand by itself, which does the job perfectly. Uncle Sam’s foreign policy has always and will always be based on total ignorance of history. Mind you, there was a war going on back in ’45, and it was a civil war, but Athens and Sparta were not the protagonists; nationalists versus communists were centre stage. The poor ignoramus who asked the dumbest of all questions long before George W. asked about Sunnis and Shiites had an excuse: he was just a simple military adviser, not president of the United States.
Wilson sees a Kiosk on Syntagma Square with books on flagellation. While he looks at them, a British officer buys a whole lot of them. A GI in a truck going into Athens tells him that the city is a fine place, cleaner than Italy. He writes that this was a place where the people had nothing — ‘but they were more self-respecting than in Italy: few beggars or prostitutes, little servility. Men somehow more decently dressed than in Milan [hard to believe that], people serious, cared nothing about making a show. Women not nearly as attractive as in Italy.’ (Easy to believe.) I was eight years old and living in Athens at the time, and his remarks bring back lots of memories, not all of them pleasant. But, yes, the people were still very proud back then, not a bunch of moochers like today, and, yes, we had beaten the hell out of the Italians, and, yes, we held out against the Germans for longer than the Dutch, Belgians and French combined — hence we could hold our heads high.
Wilson is not a fan of the Italians, nor of Italy, for that matter. He describes the big pink buildings with green blinds, which I happen to like, as rather ridiculous, as well as the ‘ludicrous gigantic plastery-looking statues’.He witnesses such poverty and filth in Naples that at times he feels, ‘Let the Americans take it over and make it into something which will be much better if it is only as good as Stamford Conn.’ All I can say is, golly, Stamford for Naples, Jesus H. Christ! He thinks Italy and Greece might be kept on as quaint and picturesque old places, a bit like New Orleans is with the Americans. Don’t forget, this is 1945, and we Europeans have seen war, whereas the Americans back home have not.
He writes how the Brits and Yanks do not like each other and how the English were the first to refuse to pick up hitchhiking GIs, with the Americans returning the compliment almost immediately. American soldiers tell him how the British are not friendly in the bars, and how much of that unfriendliness is based on GIs having so much more money than the Brits do. All I can say is plus ça change.
I write this the day after I watched Birdsong on television, and the needless butchery of the first world war: 120,000 Americans gave their lives so that the French would not be speaking German today, definitely not a very good thing as far as I’m concerned. It would be better to have German philosophers appearing on the telly, rather than phonies like Bernard-Henri Lévy.
No matter which side one’s on, no matter how one looks at it, nothing can ever explain how Europe committed suicide back in 1914. It was suicide warfare by 19th-century armies equipped with 20th-century weapons. If it weren’t for the Americans plunging in, the war would have been won by Germany. Yet all leaders — Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, the Kaiser, Hindenburg and Ludendorff, not to mention that arch-criminal Haig — should have been shot in the back as cowards who had sent young men to die for ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, the bullshit they fed people as ignorant as the American who asked Edmund Wilson about Sparta and Athens 30 years later.
And the statues of these men — because it was men who sent others to die, not a single woman — still stand commemorating the fact that they ordered young men to advance on an enemy who possessed weapons of mass destruction and commit useless suicide. Go figure, as Edmund Wilson never said.
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