The War Sonnets of John Allan Wyeth: More about the friendship of John Wyeth and Edmund Wilson

Monday, May 21, 2012

More about the friendship of John Wyeth and Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson at Princeton

Several more bits of information regarding the friendship of John Allan Wyeth and Edmund Wilson can be gleaned from two sources, Wilson's A Prelude: Landscapes, Characters and Conversations from the Earlier Years of My Life, and Lewis M. Dabney's Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature. (Thanks to Roger Allen for suggesting both of these sources).

Wilson was first introduced to Wyeth by his cousin and near-constant companion of his early years, Ruell "Sandy" Kimball. Wilson described Wyeth as "one of Sandy's New York friends". (1) This was before their time together at Princeton.

Wyeth was particularly fond of the music of Debussy, which on one occasion he played at such a late hour ("rapt in irridescent dreams", by Wilson's description), that several would-be slumberers shouted from their beds, "Cut out the god-damned noise!", and other similar requests. (2)

The Princeton "Charter Club"

Wilson and Wyeth were both members of the Charter Club, where Wyeth was frequently heard on the piano. The two young men often sat together at meals, conversing. According to Wyeth, Wilson would stick firmly to literary topics even when the general drift of table conversation tended to subjects of more immediate and less esoteric interest. (3)

Wilson describes Wyeth as a loner, "without a crowd of his own", and with little apparent interest in making friends. The one exception was medievalist "Bert" Friend, Wyeth's closest companion, who would later become a leading authority on Byzantine art and early manuscript illumination. (4)

Wyeth and Friend at one point in 1915 made plans to inhabit a cottage in the chateau district of France and "amuse themselves by playing Debussy!" (exclamation point Wilson's). (5)

According to Wilson, the only students at Princeton who had read Henry James seriously were Wyeth and himself, and he credits Wyeth with leading him to a sympathetic understanding of James' mannered period style and involuted dialogue. (6)

Wilson describes Wyeth lingering in Princeton after graduation (in 1916), and quotes him with amusement: "I'm really getting perfectly maudlin, you know. I feel as if I were sliding off a slippery precipice, over a yawning abyss-- just struggling to get a foothold!" (7)

That Wilson and Wyeth remained in contact after leaving Princeton is shown by a conversation referred to in Dabney's biography, which took place between the two men sometime in 1955. Wilson's book The Scrolls from the Dead Sea had recently been published in The New Yorker and Wilson saw his role as helping to put forth an historical view of Christianity, to compensate for the view of Jesus as miracle worker and redeemer, which was waning in those years. To Wyeth he spoke of following in the footsteps of Voltaire and Renan. (8) Wyeth's side of the conversation unfortunately has not been preserved.

Though none of these details is of particular significance as such, taken all together they suggest a long-term friendship between the two men of real intellectual substance and, again, make Wilson's silence towards-- or ignorance of-- Wyeth's poetry all the more inexplicable.

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NOTES
1). Edmund Wilson, A Prelude: Landscapes, Characters and Conversations from the Earlier Years of My Life (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967), p 107.
2). Wilson, A Prelude, p 107.
3). Lewis M. Dabney, Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p 45.
4). Wilson, A Prelude, pp 107-8.
5). Wilson, A Prelude, p 121.
6). Wilson, A Prelude, pp 108-9. Also, Dabney, Edmund Wilson, p 46.
7). Wilson, A Prelude, p 123.
8). Dabney, Edmund Wilson, p 413.

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"Of all the writers of the Lost Generation, there was perhaps none quite so lost as John Allan Wyeth. Until his 1928 book of war poems was reprinted by Fitzgerald scholar Matthew Bruccoli in 2008 (This Man's Army, Univ of SC Press), Wyeth’s literary reputation was non-existent. Not a single scholar of the period had written about him, or even heard of him, and his poems appeared in no anthology of First World War literature from the 1930s to the present. Yet it might have been otherwise. Wyeth had all the requisite credentials of the time for literary fame: an Ivy League education, participation in the World War, followed by nearly two decades as an itinerant expatriate in London, Liège, Paris, Holland, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Provence, Italy and Greece, first as a poet, and then as a painter. Moreover, he was known to Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, members of the Bloomsbury Group and Ezra Pound. His cycle of modernist war sonnets, when it appeared a year before A Farewell to Arms and All Quiet on the Western Front, was perceptively and appreciatively reviewed in a handful of journals, including Poetry. Yet Oblivion followed, swift and absolute, for the next eighty-odd years. Such are the inexplicable vagaries of literary fortune ..."

from BJ Omanson's "John Allan Wyeth: Lost Poet of the Lost Generation". The Best American Poetry. 27 May 2012. (see link below)
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

THE ROAD TO BAYONVILLERS

The sidecar skimmed low down like a flying sled
over the straight road with its double screen
of wire--the blue profile of Amiens sank
below the plain--near by, a hidden blast
of gunfire by the roadside--just ahead,
a white cloud bursting out of a slope of green.
Then low swift open land and the wasted flank
of a leprous hillside--over the ridge and past
the blackened stumps of Bois Vert, bleak and dead.
Our sidecar jolted and rocked, twisting between
craters, lunging at every rack and wrench.
Through Bayonvillers--her dusty wreckage stank
of rotten flesh, a dead street overcast
with a half-sweet, fetid, cloying fog of stench.

Wyeth links

The Joseph M. Bruccoli Great War Series of "lost" literary classics of the First World War. Matthew J. Bruccoli, series editor.

Cadby, Alex. "I have no words to speak of war": The Problem of Silence in the Soldier Poetry of the First World War and Present Day". Student dissertation from the University of Exeter containing a discussion of two of Wyeth's sonnets.

Gioia, Dana. "The Unknown Soldier: The Poetry of John Allan Wyeth". The Hudson Review, Vol LXI, No 2 (Summer 2008). This article appeared again as the introductory essay in the 2008 University of South Carolina Press republication of This Man's Army.

Gioia, Dana. "This Man's Army by John Allan Wyeth, Jr. (1894-1981)". "Recall Roster: recalling forgotten, neglected, underrated, or unjustly out-print-works" in War, Literature & the Arts Journal, Vol 16, Nos 1 & 2 (2004).

Huidekoper, Frederic Louis. The History of the 33rd Division A.E.F. Illinois State Historical Library, 1921.

Kendall, Tim. "French Brothels in Wartime". War Poetry blog. 1 May 2009.

Kendall, Tim. "Long-lost American Poet of the Great War". War Poetry blog. 26 May 2009.

Kendall, Tim. "John Allan Wyeth: 'Souilly: Hospital'". War Poetry blog. 28 February 2010.

Laskin, David. "Refracting war through American vernacular poetry". 14 February 2010.

Omanson, BJ. "John Allan Wyeth: Lost Poet of the Lost Generation". The Best American Poetry blog. 27 May 2012.

Preston, John Hyde. "Poetry, Giants and Lollypops". The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1929. An enthusiastic review of This Man's Army as part of an omnibus review of new poetry titles of 1928. ". . . a corking, exciting piece of work . . . "

Ruzich, Connie. "Picnic". A discussion of Wyeth's poem "Picnic: Harbonnières to Bayonvillers," from the Behind Their Lines blog, 21 October 2017.

Ruzich, Connie. "Transport". A discussion of Wyeth's poem "The Transport, I" from the Behind Their Lines blog, 11 June 2017.

Sisson, JB. "A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets: A reveiw of John Allan Wyeth's This Man's Army. Trinacria. Issue #2, Fall 2009.

Walton, Eda Lou. Review of This Man's Army in "A Sheaf of Poetry", The Saturday Review of Literature, (April 13, 1929).

Williams, Lisa. Review of This Man's Army in The Hollins Critic, (April 1, 2009).