March 25, 2008
"Edmund Wilson Among the 'Despicable English'"
I came across this essay by Isaiah Berlin while searching the New York Times for references to the historian Perry Miller. It begins:
I MET Edmund Wilson, I think, sometime in the early spring of 1946, after I had come back from Moscow to finish the job I was doing at the British Embassy in Washington. I had been in Washington during the war years, and my friend the Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov, who, like his cousin Vladimir, was a friend of Wilson's, thought that he might like to meet me (I had expressed my intense admiration for ''Axel's Castle'' and ''The Triple Thinkers'') and talk about Russian literature and other topics. Wilson refused. He was convinced that any British official could only want to meet him in order to rope him into the British propaganda machine. He was acutely isolationist: his Anglophobia, which in any case had been fairly acute, was increased by the reflection that England had once again managed to drag America into a dreadful and totally unnecessary war, and he had no wish to meet any representative of that country. However, once the war was over he evidently decided that he was no longer in any danger of being inveigled into pro-British activities, and asked me to lunch at the Princeton Club in New York.