The Thirties /Our Neighbor from Talcottville
Nolte, William H.
THE THIRTIES Edmund Wilson / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / $17.50 EDMUND WILSON: OUR NEIGHBOR FROM TALCOTTVILLE Richard Hauer Costa / Syracuse University Press / $11.95 William H. Nolte Rveading...
...Unable to recall the exact wording, I finally, after about the fifth or sixth whisper in my ear, looked it up...
...He fails to bring any of that country to mind's eye...
...As every reader of our literature knows by now, Scott was much concerned about the dimensions of that famous organ...
...Hence this note of warning...
...Professor Edel ascribes this characteristic, or deficiency, to his early years, thus agreeing that the child is father to the man: "There had been, as we know, a deaf mother and a depressed and often apathetic father...
...It is not made clear how long Margaret had been in California, or whether she intended to rejoin Wilson in the East...
...Scott had the same problem, alas...
...Of course I may be wrong...
...Nowhere is that narcissism more evident than in the descriptions of his sexual relations...
...Needless to say, these journal notes would never have been published had they been written by anyone of less renown than Wilson, certainly our premier critic-at-large during the last thirty years or so of his life...
...His confessions have a ghoulish quality, and the candor with which he describes their sexual relations is simply embarrassing...
...I find it hard to believe him when he says, "After she was dead, I loved her...
...But then he also admits that his heavy drinking may have had something to do with it...
...Costa's memoir is generously padded and he makes rather too much of himself in the telling, he does give us a credible likeness of the crusty old man of letters...
...The thing is a bore-a lifeless and seemingly endless bore...
...Robinson a much better poet than Robert Frost...
...Indeed, he appears,, whether he was or not, emotionally sterile...
...As Leon Edel remarks in his introductory essay, the journals "served largely the function of memory and self-discipline...
...And so on...
...Wilson confesses that he "did not understand this...
...What he is saying, it seems to me, is that he loved the "idea" of her once she ceased to exist...
...Now that they have been gathered between covers, as he intended them to be, they will receive wide notice though I seriously doubt that many readers, even those who most admire Wilson, will stay with them to the end...
...his interest in ideas was infectious...
...The little boy Edmund had considerable difficulty communicating with those close to him...
...Choose whichever cause seems to you the more convincing, but I have always believed that Scott's and Edmund's problem stemmed from their having attended Princeton...
...Although Mr...
...Hemingway told Fitzgerald that it looked small because he viewed it from above, that he should instead look at himself in the mirror...
...Indeed, we are seldom given so much as an opinion about the goings-on in politics, government, literature-the matters of most concern to Wilson at that time...
...But when most intimate-that is, when the emotions were called into play, as they constantly are in our everyday goings and comings-he seemed mechanistic and joyless...
...They also served as a repository which Wilson mined for such books as The American Earthquake, but here we have only what was left over-in effect, the splintered wood and shavings of his mental workshop...
...It's the opening line of a poem by Henry Reed: "Today we have naming of parts...
...In Upstate he gave us his warm, albeit somewhat cranky, recollections of life in that rural area...
...THE THIRTIES Edmund Wilson / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / $17.50 EDMUND WILSON: OUR NEIGHBOR FROM TALCOTTVILLE Richard Hauer Costa / Syracuse University Press / $11.95 William H. Nolte Rveading Edmund Wilson's The Thirties is a numbing experience, a true test of the reader's endurance...
...We have' instead the finger exercises of a compulsive writer-long descriptions of various places here and abroad...
...In the painful, guilt-ridden chapter on his relations with his second wife, Margaret Canby, written after her death in 1932-she died from a fall down some steep Spanish steps in her hometown of Santa Barbara-he dutifully records her having called him "a cold fishy leprous person...
...For anyone who is still in the dark but wishes to pursue this tiny matter, I can only recommend the full-size account in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast...
...In an imperishable essay written in 1933, the thirty-eight-year-old newly hired staff critic on The New Republic writes of returning north, after many years away, on the Utica-to-Boonville milk train, seeking renewal and rebirth "up in the country...
...The astonishing thing about these notes is, as I say, the fact that they are lifeless...
...The book tells us very little about the thirties, about any of the distinguishing features of that decade...
...I no longer consider it a major concern...
...Because of the bad writing, especially in the preface and opening chapter, discriminating readers may leave before the main course is served...
...In his best books and essays Wilson cpn-veyed his learning to the reader...
...As I read about his couplings with this fair one or that not so fair one, except for "Anna" each one identified by a single letter, a line of verse kept running through my mind...
...involved, sexual matters generally are comic, and when not comic they are revolting...
...They were the notebooks of a chronicler, a way of tidying the mind for his craft of criticism...
...Among other things, we learn that Wilson was fond of eating sweets while drinking his daily pint of Johnny Walker Red...
...that he disliked the novels of Conrad, particularly Nostromo...
...He was no stranger to the twin Joys of masochism and sadism...
...At times he tries to capture the sense of place by noting native expressions- as .in New Mexico...
...When he first met Wilson, in 1963, Mr...
...they provide no semblance of shared experience...
...Don't be put off by such jawbreakers as: "Perhaps my memory of the quality of the mind that, from the first, charged the hours in his company with vibrancy may have led me occasionally into over-feeling, perhaps over-writing...
...For example this note on the late Granville Hicks, a performing seal of the far Left back in the thirties: "When the orders from Moscow for tolerance came, the comrades inaugurated the new policy nobly by at once throwing out poor Granville Hicks, who had been trying so hard to comply with what he had understood to be the previous policy and who would undoubtedly have done his best to live up to the new one if they had only given him time.'.' There is surprisingly little in the book about Fitzgerald and Hemingway, or, for that matter, about the other important writers of the period...
...he was indeed a cold fish...
...There are of course a few grains to be found amid all the chaff...
...Now in Edmund Wilson...
...It seems odd that a man so materialistic (in the philosophical sense of the term) should have also been so narcissistic...
...From then until Wilson's death nine years later they kept in touch through correspondence and visits in Wilson's home...
...that he liked very much the novels of Maurice Baring...
...Our Neighbor from Talcottville, Richard Hauer Costa adds a few interesting items of Wilsoniana to the public domain...
...Costa was teaching at the Syracuse University branch in Utica...
...Having thus skirted the issue he moves on to the problem of impotence: "It seemed to me that ideas of impotence were very much in people's minds at this period-on account of the Depression, I think, the difficulty of getting things going...
...But Wilson, that most owl-like man, was ever on the lookout for experience, not for the sake of experience, but for the opportunity to embalm the experience in the amber of his prose...
...He records lengthy conversations overheard in homes of acquaintances, pieces of idle gossip, weather reports, his dreams, etc...
...By the time I got to it, on page 694, I was neck-deep in the Slough of Despond...
...that he thought E.A...
...The description of moments, little vignettes, are self-conscious-for example, this one on "Provincetown beach life": "Little tiny girl with the legs of a little brown boy coming back from a boat ride with her parents and stepping over the thing they slid the boats down with, her head of long blond hair down her back and her little pale-green sweater pulled down over the trunks of her blue bathing suit-balancing with her little brown arms...
...Unfortunately Wilson failed to realize that to nearly everyone but those immediately (intimately...
...It's people like Wilson who give lechery a bad name...
...He seemed compelled to record in detail all the worst things he had done or said during their short time together, as if in the recording there were expiation...
...In an effort somehow to exorcise the memory of his shabby treatment of Margaret, he authenticates her remark...
...One winces at all the littles...
...The dis-tancings were carried into adult life...
...According to Wilson, who got it from John Bishop, Scott was in the habit of telling everyone he met-even "the lady who sat next to him at dinner and who might be meeting him for the first time"- that his penis was too small...
...that he sometimes got up at four a.m...
...On the next page one encounters this hop-legged, highfalutin waywardness: When, as was inevitable, the more compelling intellectual and social stimulations of prep school and college and travel fully rescued the teenage "Bunny" Wil-son from Red Bank, they also left Talcott-villeand the "old stone house," for a long time, in the pale...
...Idle gossip, perhaps, but then who isn't interested in gossip?'t interested in gossip...
...That prepositional disaster occurs in the preface...
...To begin with, the title is misleading...
...Still, I am happy to report that Wilson remembered to report on F. Scott's penis- an object of no little speculation during those Hard Times...
...that he considered Hemingway a post-adolescent (which was-already known by Wilson's readers...
...He would doubtless have been astonished if someone had reminded him that some things are better left unsaid...
...Before leaving The Thirties behind I should note that the book does have one (intentional) funny remark in it...
...But this simple note, despite the fact that I seem to recall having heard it before, restored my strength and lifted my liver: "The California girl she had met at a party: her husband had said about somebody: 'He's a big shot out on the Coast!' His wife had said, 'And don't forget to dot the i!' " Beginning in the early fifties Wilson spent his summers in the upstate New York house he inherited from his mother...
...to read old reviews of his books...
...In the process there was a short-circuiting of the common articulations and joys of childhood...
...that he liked Italian and Hungarian women but had all his life been wary of Frenchwomen, and so on and so forth...
...But, as I say, things get better, or perhaps one just gets accustomed to the bouncy ride...
...Instead, the journey he chronicles is to limbo, caught as he is between the Upstate worlds of the Bakers and the Talcotts-his maternal ancestors -and the making-it maelstrom of Manhattan and The Village which is inclining him, as it did his friend John Dos Passos, toward a vast leftward leap over his shadow...
...Was it the Depression, or was it liquor...
...In effect, there seems to have been an imbalance between heart and head, or rather a bifurcation between feeling and thought, body and mind -the two seem never to be joined...
Vol. 14 • April 1981 • No. 4
