The Sixties:

...At times it he was a modem emblem of American in- Canadian postage: S2 a year, Foreign, $5 does some good...

...what he thought about leftist politics, psychoanalysis in literary criticism, the Ziegfeld Follies, California writers, the FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THE FRANCISCAN FRIARS tyranny of the IRS-and just about every AND SISTERS OF THE ATONEMENT artistic tendency and political pressure AND THEIR ASSOCIATES, that had an influence on the lives of his CONTACT: VOCATION DIRECTOR, fellow citizens...

...Box 139, the neglect of the poet in America makes pages...

...ing, on the significance of the pseudonym...

...Paraphrasing Address ties...

...With his battered edge-partly 1920s' iconoclasm, partly panama hat and his insatiable curiosity, One Year, $39 Two Years, $67 irascibility-is everywhere...

...Fortifying insight and fortitude...

...Auden flowing excitement about ideas makes make vivid appearances in The Sixties, but him a conversation grabber...

...and although this creepy presenta- Notes...

...BOX 300, GARRISON, NY 10524-0300 ing array of broader concerns-the origins Commonweal 22 October 1993: 29 vides for his readers...

...It's a graceful polemic, a at Talcottville, New York...

...30: 22 October 1993 Commonweal...

...Classified payable sex and in evaluating people-makes him, into the study, Auden: A Carnival of Intell- with order...

...he wanted to be his sovereign literary self cut to the chase, provide the juice upfront, Not even death could seal off Wilson's while at the same time making points and edit out the undramatic...

...here he was far our demands...

...he exhaustively recorded his private life bition and the socialist's dream of fulfilland impressions: his mammoth journals ing labor...

...Qualifications: Desire to integrate faith and justice, commitment to ers into high relief: Malraux's elusiveness I hope Jack Deedy's Auden as Didymus the poor, skilled administrator, fundraiser...

...irresponsible in accepting stimulant, and a contribution to the gen- enough away from literary Manhattan and what we, not doctors and the govern- eral medical education everyone needs in chic Wellfleet, his more official summer ment, must do...

...John and Princeton to perhaps the fullest account and Robert Kennedy both admired Wilson: Ir hese journals, skillfully edit- in American letters of an intellectual's ex- the latter read Europe without Baedeker ed by Lewis Dabney of the perience of modernity...

...He also explored a daunt- GRAYMOOR, P.O...

...He to solve the health-care crisis sometimes ernment...

...He culreader...

...A rugged Wilson's unique way of balancing intel- local chain bookstore will probably fol"literary worker" who set up shop in the lectual elitism and populist outreach...

...But Wilson does Christmas pacing and nineteenth-century copiousness not need to agree with you to see what you is coming...

...tural critic who judges without diplo- Anais Nin is treated kindly because of her Send COMMONWEAL to: macy or much qualification...

...of the latter he mused, "Peculiar footlessness of ideas that pass through my head-importance of being somewhere where people are THE SIXTIES of revolution in To the Finland Station, the doing something...

...willing to be well-informed about health Melvin Konner says we must be...

...The Sixties should be required David Castronovo move from an upper-middle-class boy's reading for politicians who talk endlessinnocence in pre-World War I Hill School ly about work and social stability...

...O "boys" are impervious to delight and have none of the verve of connoisseurs in their COMMONWEAL criticism of literature...

...These are acpipeline of cultural reports: we still keep about the suffering of the Iroquois in New commodations that Wilson never prohearing from him every few years as journals, letters, and other posthumous works appear...

...Auden himself used passages from Position Opening tion is sometimes mitigated by episodes the "Notes" in later essays, whose titles reof tenderness and old-fashioned gallantry, flect the doubleness of Didymus, such as The Jesuit Volunteer Corps: Midwest seeks it never goes away...

...City, State, Zip rumphs his way through the culture of the At a dinner party in 1963, Wilson had With notification, as a gift, from: 1960s and what remains of his older mod- been thundering about the American ernist world...

...Konner' s and illness, and to cooperate in our care, York State, the absurdities of the Pentagon, strong feeling and conviction about how and we believe ourselves to be the gov- and the power mania of bureaucrats...

...always sought the opinions of ordinary translate into a judgmental flailing of the Still, Medicine at the Crossroads is workers and unglamorous locals...

...With a certain bad grace- Empire and threatening to go to Switzercombined with the old radical's impatience land...

...COMMONWEAL, 15 seems like so many zoological transac- has some additional references to "Lecture Dutch St., NYC 10038...

...In the Epilogue he lambastes an jampacked with interesting information tivated many friends at his family retreat "us" for being infantile and unrealistic in and insight...

...the essay also commented, in passup "empty...

...of notation, there is the problem of a cul- have built in a life of writing or action...

...monthly in advance for more at his worst, rather reductive...

...Wilson balances them with hundreds of But just when you are about to lose pasmall discourses on Diderot, Balzac's tience with these high-horse pronouncemelodrama, Hungarian translations of ments, you come face-to-face with Shelley and Poe, Hebrew scholarship- Wilson's devotion to his mission and his in short the business of the heroic hu- standards...

...And the reading that lasted-with hardly a pause for ill- ic: in search of a "truly human culture," public today wants the autobiographer to ness or old age-until his death in 1972...

...720 six times...

...Send resume by November House...

...Many of "us" are more than providers, policy makers, and consumers clusivism of the intelligentsia...

...about power politics and morality makes succeeds in bringing Auden's Common- Three-to-five year commitment, salary him a double-talker at the JFK White weal columns to a wider audience-pos- $28,000-30,000...

...Nor does the tenden- "Hic et Ille" and "The Well of Narcissus," an executive director to begin in February, cy to throw the weakness of important writ- subsequently collected in The Dyer's Hand...

...He hated A SINGULAR AMERICAN expensive vacation resorts like Naples, Florida, and Jamaica...

...Zip "slobs" (I'll supply no names...

...tions...

...This mystified and an- order to become the good health-care residence, to allow him to escape the extagonized me...

...low its computer and regard Wilson as a 1920s as a book reviewer, arts critic, and Wilson certainly does not come across as frill for highbrows rather than our twenpolitical journalist, Wilson built a career a haughty mandarin or a remote academ- tieth-century Emerson...

...In his last years champions the yoking of the elitist's amFarrar, Straus & Giroux, $35, 968 pp...

...O The modern intellectual's desire to connect ideas with the sometimes imperceptible events of family, neighborhood, and nation is Wilson's master theme...

...the last stand of one of dor, and thoroughness...

...whining young people with their his wife Elena's comment on the scene, vague criticisms of the system, literary Wilson writes, "there'd be America any- City...

...The nasty where where I was...

...He is saddened by the fact that manist...

...Wilson the honest atheist and drinking like a man of the 1920s also takes courage from the dying John Address ("Scotch" must be one of the most fre- XXIII and his tireless efforts to reform the quently used words in the book), he har- Catholic church...

...With a holy horror of The Last Journal, 1960-72 idea of Jewish righteousness in The Dead idleness and a fear inherited from his brilEdmund Wilson Sea Scrolls, the power drive in Patriotic liant lawyer father about "weltering around Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Gore, and the development of literary in a Dead Sea of mediocrity," Wilson Lewis M. Dabney symbolism inAxel's Castle...

...Experimenting With a bluff disregard for the trendy and the fashionable, Wilson spent half a cen- with tradition tury telling intelligent general readers Since 1898...

...Elaine May, Mary him an old bore...

...Your critics and cultural observers...

...For him writing was on line at a polling place...

...RATES: 800 a word, one time...

...the crowd on la plage 15 Dutch St., New York, N.Y...

...his old friend Waldo Frank "had no huBesides his commitment to evaluating mility before his medium, never in fact classics and his insistence on his own taught himself to write...

...But Wilson has found precious few of America's greatest literary The Sixties is a good introduction to these public figures to read his books...

...EDWARD CALLAN Clarkston, Ml 48347-0139...

...Isaiah Berlin's overMcCarthy, Jackie 0., and W.H...

...The Partisan Review dividualism...

...Adolf Berle, a former assistant sec- Name with ignorant nonconformists-he opens retary of state, began badgering him about fire on "louts," "beatniks" (in the six- not being a good American...

...she is forgiven for himself with middle-of-the-night-read- portraying Wilson as a patriarchical bully Name ings from Macaulay's History of England in her journals...

...Lovemaking ect (Oxford University Press, 1983), which than three times...

...One can also see what Wilson means Yeats," described these columns as Auden's when he finds Bui uel's film La Belle de attempt to formulate a Christian theory of CLASSIFIED Jour pornographic and Antonioni's Blow- literature...

...76¢ three But Wilson's coldness-in discussing This material was subsequently incorporated times...

...the former gave University of Wyoming, are a civic duty to be fulfilled with clarity, can- him the Medal of Freedom...

...1994 (negotiable...

...Robert Frost's rustic "act" about sibly as a topic for a symposium in your 15th: Search Committee P.O...

...10038 CORRESPONDENCE des intellectuels at Wellfleet dare not ex- 10/22/93 press certain opinions because they work (Continued from page 2) for universities and other large institutions...