Critic in Love: A Romantic Biography of Edmund Wilson

What do you get when you bring two Edmund Wilson experts together and get them to collaborate on a book on the women Wilson let into his complicated romantic life? CRITIC IN LOVE is a bit of a mess, but it has the supreme advantage of the casual: the two authors know Wilson and his ways so well that they feel free to toss out sexual secrets another more timid author might have thought he or she had to paraphrase. I don't really understand why all these women are discussed in one volume. To me it would make a lot more sense if they had just written about the women with whom Wilson actually had sex--which would have been a whole boxcar of women anyhow--instead of complicating the issue by including little pen portraits of the women Wilson knew otherwise, perhaps he had a little crush on them but nothing more. Why write about Dawn Powell, for example, while admitting there was nothing romantic between the two of them? It seems to me you could write the same book about any figure, "Paul Lynde's Women," for example, and it still wouldn't make any more sense. That said, my only other objection is that, despite the book jacket claims that these women are treated respectfully as figures in their own right, that is almost comically untrue. They are each of them judged as to whether or not they were able to produce an erection in the great Wilsonian profile. The authors don't seem to be able to feel that any of the writers or artists Wilson slept with were really worthy of him, artistically speaking, and no matter who, Louise Bogan, Penelope Gilliatt, Leonor Fini, Anaia Nin, Mary McCarthy, they're all pretty pathetic and at bottom, untalented. I guess I should have known by picking up a book called "Critic in Love" I wasn't going to be getting some intellectual masterpiece, so that part of it is my fault. How about this, about Anais Nin: "All the while she has been portraying herself in her diaries as a free spirit Nin has had a husband, Ian Hugo. Wilson might have been a bit shaken to learn that there was yet a second husband out on the West Coast, one Rupert Cole (making her an unapprehended bigamist)." What does that mean, "one" Rupert Cole? It's a sort of antique locution, isn't it? How about the horrid crime of bigamy, I smell a double standard when you consider Wilson, no matter how many wives he had, was always on the make for sex. And why call him Rupert Cole when his name was Rupert Pole? Is it that the authors have decreed all masculinity as the property of Edmund Wilson, unwilling to cede a "Pole" to any other man on the scene?