EDMUND WILSON: THE PRIVATE SIDE:

...In fact, Wilson gives us more than 200 entries of nature description that represent just such acutely observed pictures of external reality...

...The choice was not dictated by sentiment...

...But again, to the reader who values Wilson most for his courageous discharge of what a British colleague, Frank Kermode, has called "the legitimate and exhausting tasks of criticism" Edel's psychological approach will seem exactly right...

...The volume ends on a mellow note, with a touching moment of understanding between himself and Mary Blair- achieved, poignantly enough, on the occasion of their having been granted a divorce...

...Finally, toward the very end, the notebooks hint at the possibility that, as Edel suggests, an immersion in a certain kind of literature (Wilson was reading the Symbolists at the time, in preparation for Axel's Castle) was having a liberating effect on Wilson's life...

...Take, for example, a series of entries from February, 1924: Wilson is on a train heading for California...

...In the second half of The Twenties the functions of sex take over the territory formerly occupied by these external landscapes, absorbing a great deal of Wilson's time, and nearly all the attention of his notes...

...BOOKS EDMUND WILSON: THE PRIVATE SIDE JANET GROTH The Twenties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period, by Edmund Wilson LEON EDEL, ed...

...There is another demonstration of art affecting Wilson's attitude toward life in the notebook entry he wrote after seeing the film, Spread Eagle...

...Edel's attempt is to see through the often flat, often repetitive notes in these notebooks with a double vision, understanding them as the acts of a man for whom making them at all was a gesture of brave defiance in the face of unacknowledged terrors...

...The Edel introduction is, after all, very like the approach he had taken to another American man of letters, Henry James, and Wilson must have realized it would be this line of country in which Edel would place him...

...Ultimately, Wilson is able to take the reader into his confidence and into his bedroom even when he is in the presence of one of his wives (actually it is a sort of pre-wed-ding honeymoon which he shares with Margaret Canby, in Connecticut...

...There is a little girl on the tram-one Maxine, age eight, travelling alone from Milwaukee...

...The most surprising revelation The Twenties holds is the insight it affords into the ironic, even tragic fate of Edmund Wilson-that he, possessor of one of the most eminent literary sensibilities of our age, could respond emotionally to life only at the remove of art...

...He was much moved by the guns being transported up to the front to the tune of "and those caissons go rolling along...

...It was deliberate and therefore an implicit endorsement of Edel's psychological orientation...

...Mary Blair, Wilson's first wife (an actress who appeared in many O'Neill plays) is scarcely referred to except as a shadowy figure who shares, for a time, an apartment with Wilson on Washington Square...

...Of their daughter, Rosalind, there is barely a trace, save for one passage in which Wilson manifests a linguistic interest in the speech habits she has acquired...

...People who value Wilson as the cerebral reporter (ever clear and concise, yet always somewhat aristocratically remote) will no doubt be annoyed by what the more polite will term this "soft-focus" frame, and the rest will call plain "fuzzy-minded...

...In contrast to this reticence about the women close to home, many entries contain extensive descriptions of taxicab rides and conversations on couches with an assortment of Follies girls, streetwalkers and sales clerks with whom Wilson struck up frequent but fleeting acquaintances...

...There are isolated entries in these notebooks in which Wilson shows that he understands in part the nature of his problem...

...Whether or not it was his intense personal reaction to, say, the lustiness of Joyce, that helped bring it about, the fact is that-in the greater tenderness Wilson shows for his sexual partner, and in his greater air of relaxation before the task of writing about sex- the last entries seem to take on the note of a freer man...

...An entry from Wilson's journal, Upstate, suggests that one reason for his delay in bringing out the '20's notebooks was that he both wanted and did not want to go back over those years: I can hardly believe, at my age now (he was 72) and so far away from that period, that I really lived through all that and did all the things that I did: Mary Blair, Frances (the Anna of the present volume), Margaret...

...After a while the Greek play begins to have a morbid effect on him...

...He made the significant decision, should he not live to bring this volume out personally, to bring it out under the direction of Leon Edel...

...That is the serious implication of the entries on Electra and Spread Eagle and the burden of this book...

...my italics) Wilson saw the act of reporting as a way of bringing art to the service of staving off the pains of life, as if by clinging to the external factual world, by observing and setting it down accurately, an outward order could be achieved, a valuable defense to pit against the chaos within...

...Again and again reality is portrayed as the wounder, the conveyer of rude shocks and human life as a disease against which some, i.e., the critic, may prefer to be immunized by the protective inoculations of art rather than "risk the more serious and perhaps for him fatal, infection of life itself...

...The way his working class girl friends look, feel to the touch, taste and smell is minutely noted by Wilson, who seems more than ever enveloped in the pathos of alienation as he resolutely records the pertinent facts about the agitated limbs, the furry cavities, the undergarments and the personal histories of his plebeian bedmates...

...He is reading Sophocles' Electra in Greek...

...It is a problematic one for the reader because it means that, aside from the glimpses Wilson gives us of his art-induced emotions and those we are able to piece together from between the lines with the help of Leon Edel's commentary, the book remains a curious phenomenon-a piece of personal writing nearly devoid of personal feeling...

...to the good nature of a comrade...

...Finally, although it is not the harmonious rendering of traumatic experience into art that he undoubtedly longed to give us, it...

...Some wonderful things to look back on, but also some naive and nasty things that I hate to have to remember...

...The entry seems to reflect a displacement of the emotion and wonder Wilson may well have felt for his infant daughter, registering it instead as a warm appreciation of the cleverness, beauty and ingenuity he finds in her set of German blocks...

...I never loved humanity so deeply and sincerely before and I never expect to again-" Remembering Wilson's earlier A Prelude (the notebooks covering 1908-1919), it is interesting to note that here, in response to the artificial stimulus of a movie, he is writing more expressively and with more emotion about the war than he was able to do under the stimulus of war itself...

...Vanity Fair, the New Republic...

...For these readers there is some consolation in the bulk of the text itself- a matter of some 500 pages-which is as devoid of psychology as it is full of song titles, advertising slogans, slang and regional reportage...

...Farrar, Straus, $10 The first of several posthumous volumes of Edmund Wilson's notebooks and diaries has now been published under the title, The Twenties, and it is of considerable interest because it offers an index to Wilson the man of a kind that only notebooks and diaries can provide...

...In Wilson's account of his relations with women, for example, the emotional block is pronounced...

...He thinks of other gruesome murders closer to home -some real and some fictional ones he has just read about-all Californian...

...is, as much as was within his power to arrange, the book Wilson wanted us to have.book Wilson wanted us to have...

...Poor Maxine-one can't help but feel that she might have fared better if Wilson had been reading Antigone instead...

...We learn from his notes Wilson's conviction that "Literature is merely the result of our rude collisions with reality...

...Edna St...

...The tension of waiting for the girl's revenge to work itself out in the murder of her mother tells on his mood...

...he speaks deprecatingly of the praise he had, even in the '20's, already begun to receive for his "sober judgment" in literary matters, saying: "-yet, except when I was writing about literature, nobody could have worse judgment and I-I was invariably either treating occasions of importance either too casually or too flippantly or extravagantly overdoing other occasions which were intrinsically trivial-" He tells us of his propensity, when in the midst of one of those archetypal '20's parties, complete with Greenwich Village setting, bad gin and Bohemian company, to leave it and go off to one side and write about it...

...As it is, even admirers of the factual Wilson would have to admit that, from the factual point of view, the book is repetitious and often dull -at best a social chronicle of an interesting period in American life written by one of the leading figures in it...

...Vincent Millay (Wilson's unrequited love) is here, as are Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, and others, but somehow it all fails to be as diverting as the mere cataloguing of its contents would suggest...

...Wilson takes note of her as she lunches on Zu-Zu gingersnaps, cries from homesickness, laughs at her own jokes and stalls so she won't have to go to bed in a berth...

...Or, better still, What Maisie Knew, a Henry James novel he rather liked that has a child heroine...

...In its dogged, careful observation of the way things were, it becomes the document of a man will-ing into life a more compassionate nature for himself than the one he really possessed...

...the two men were not very close...

...In the event, Wilson's devotion to the truth prevailed over both his ambivalence and his procrastination...

...The last report Wilson gives on the little girl concludes this way: "I am afraid she is going to grow up into a mealy-faced, mole-specked, hard-r'd, pale-green-eyed Middle Western girl, who says 'This Here...

...Undoubtedly many of the entries would have been cut or polished if Wilson had lived to complete work on the manuscript...

...Another selection might properly take its place as a key item in the Wilson index...

...Wilson was involved at this time with a girl, Anna, in a more than usually lasting, more than usually satisfying affair...

...Providentially, this is precisely the approach invited by the penetrating, insightful and frankly psychological essay of Leon Edel's which introduces the book...

...It prompted him to muse: "How the war-by fettering our activity and our attention to inhuman, uninteresting things, to the deliberate, methodical, relentless machinery of destruction- made us appreciate human beings . . . With what relief, what delight, one turned from the guns...

...The Twenties both painfully exposes Wilson's inadequacies of personal response and gives expression to some triumphant overcomings of those inadequacies...

...The most satisfying way to read The Twenties is as a fascinating, revealing, but largely subtextual history of the "wound" that drove Edmund Wilson to great successes as a literary critic and reporter par excellence but which exacted from him a fearful toll of aborted relationships and, to some extent, failed artistic ambitions-Wilson's novels, 1 Thought of Daisy and Memoirs of Hecate County and his poems never achieved the success of his non-fiction prose...