The Sixties, by Edmund Wilson and edited by Lewis M. Dabney
Birkerts, Sven
THE SIXTIES, by Edmund Wilson. Edited and with an introduction by Lewis M. Dabney. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993. 968 pp. $35.00. I find that I am a man of the twenties. 1 still expect something...
...One ought perhaps to have died before reaching this point, when one still had the illusion of participating...
...Wilson drinking too much with W.H...
...We get a lift from imagining famous people having uninhibited exchanges...
...They are not his reading log or his critical laboratory...
...Paging across the whole shelf of Wilson's journals one is struck by the core steadiness of the man, a quality nowhere more manifest than in his prose...
...The journals reveal just how a great sensibility, a Johnsonian sensibility, faced up to infirmity, bodily outrage, and death...
...She seemed well and normal again, almost robust—no make-up, a dreary white-flecked gray dress, which, however, she insisted had come from a very expensive and good place...
...And in the rare instances when he does, the thoughts are basic, resolutely nonmetaphysical: December 12, 1971, Well, When I look back I feel quite definitely divided from my earlier self, who cared about things in a way I no longer do...
...He asked what conclusions I had come to about the Civil War...
...My not being able to make love, not being able to swim or take much exercise and now, with my lower teeth gone, not being able to eat anything but the softest food is getting me down and making me feel frustrated...
...and a caring if preoccupied husband and father...
...I answered that I couldn't very well tell him then and there and referred him to the Introduction...
...All along he has trusted in his body, in his capacity for robust give-and-take, and now, suddenly, the rules of the game have been changed...
...In his attitude toward illness and death we discern something of the prodigy who wrote so much and so well because he refused to be mystified by literature...
...The man still drinks his way through a lake of booze every day (though now he notes the effects more, makes the occasional vow about tapering off...
...This reader will surely not fail to be moved by the evidence of unglamorous private struggles and the equally private victories achieved...
...The social FALL • 1993 • 565 Books and political life of the times (assassinations, riots, the bourgeoning counterculture) is a smudge in the background...
...Vincent Millay): Edna...
...There is, especially in the first years, an essential continuity...
...Wilson notes the collapses and indignities without flinching (remarking on impotence and incontinence into the bargain), but then, remarkably, he gathers his energies and his cheer and soldiers on—drinking, reading, and socializing at a pace that would flatten the hardiest debutante...
...Champagne at lunch—Svetlana insisted on making the cork pop to the ceiling...
...We hardly ever learn what the talk was about, much less who said what to whom...
...Here is the man on his 74th birthday: I spent the day in sloth and doldrums...
...a solicitous neighbor (mostly in Talcottville, in upstate New York, where he often stayed alone in the family manse...
...Nothing about his labors at the desk, even though Wilson passed this last decade, like the others before it, in a state of high productivity, writing a memoir, Upstate, The Dead Sea Scrolls (there are a few entries on his discussions with scholars), as well as a stream of substantial essays for the New Yorker...
...Rather, entries are for what would appear to be the private record: reports of daily circumstances, travels, meetings with editors and fellow writers, life with friends and family, sexual preoccupations and (though quite rare by this point) adventures...
...Auden . . . Muriel [Spark] and Ved Mehta, luncheon with William Shawn, luncheon with Dawn [Powell], Renata [Adler], Brett-Smith, Roger Straus, Leon Edel (some of these overlapping—I made them come to the Algonquin, when possible...
...All that energy expended to peter out...
...To be sure, there are some diverting and readable set-pieces in the volume: Wilson joining a roster of famous writers for a dinner at the Kennedy White House ("Kennedy told me he has seen a review of Patriotic Gore and asked why I had called it that...
...And he is still actively in contact with many of the leading thinkers and writers of the day: Robert Lowell, Isaiah Berlin, W.H...
...But there is another recognition that attends our reading of the journals...
...Alas, Wilson seldom gratifies our curiosity...
...Wilson himself was its cynosure...
...But one does not turn the The Sixties for intellectual stimulation or to seize an unexpected angle on the history of the times...
...1 still expect something exciting: drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: an uninhibited exchange of ideas...
...The entries are also implicitly about the life that attended his eminence...
...She is small, with nice soft brown hair, rather large brown eyes of a peculiar pale color of green, a somewhat elongated and pointed bird-like nose and a small mouth...
...Wilson opted to present himself directly, assuming the artifice of no artifice...
...the onset of retirement age does not bring any sudden transformations...
...There is surprise, too, at how little he reflects in these pages on the approach of death...
...The prose, so much of it devoted to a patient accounting of arrangements made and people met, is of interest less on its own merits and more because it marks the trail of the man who was Edmund Wilson...
...But as we read on we see that the great arc has passed through its meridian and has begun to falter...
...This last volume, which begins in 1960 and ends with Wilson's death in 1972, runs to over nine hundred pages...
...His believing may have helped to make it so...
...But these are not by themselves quite reason enough to purchase the book or invest the quantities of time needed to work through it...
...One might well ask: how much is too much...
...From 1969 (on Svetlana Alliluyevna): She is over 40 but does not look her age...
...It is to acknowledge that even at his most diaristic, his most ephemeral, he repays reading...
...All of which does get us wondering: how could the man so effectively banish his reading and thinking self from his ongoing project of transcribing his life...
...The unvarnished quality of the self-portrayal would almost suggest the diarist's lock and key, but of course Wilson knew that he was writing for readers...
...One cannot even imagine anymore the time when one had once participated...
...Indeed, if anything they whet our appetite for all of the things we wish to hear about but don't...
...And one might fairly answer, without slighting the critic or his reputation: this much is enough...
...She is very pretty and with her character and brains must have had men after her all her life...
...Though he is somewhat less priapic—and less able to consummate at will—some of the old spirit remains...
...The reader who engages the book will do so because of a devotion to Wilson and to everything he represented in our literary culture...
...Her hands and feet and ankles were so much larger than they used to be that I could hardly believe they were the same ones I had loved...
...The project must therefore be viewed as an artist's deliberate effort to fashion a public portrait of his non-public self...
...The third person pronoun, the awkward diction— Wilson is clearly not comfortable with this sort of speculation...
...Though four decades have passed, the seeing eye has not so much as blinked...
...Auden is more interesting to read about than John Doe having a few with John Q. Public...
...He was a Rousseau, a Rembrandt, insofar as he trusted that in a warts-andall presentation the warts would not so much mar as enhance the effect of the whole...
...Nor did her throat seem so beautiful—I think her putting on flesh had spoiled its contour—and her mouth, which seemed thicker than it used to, revealed two big square front teeth...
...It is almost as if he were surprised at old age, the fact of it, as if it were something he had not thought about before...
...The journals are the housing for what is left over from the other enterprises...
...Indeed, he manifested the same unblinking faith in the life of that culture as he did in the fundamental durability of his body...
...Of course, writer and contents cannot be neatly separated...
...Did he hold to some private conviction about the separation of art and life, or did he believe that he had some writerly obligation to render the facets of his experience that his literary obsessions bypassed...
...The style may change slightly over the years—the younger Wilson was more prone to the literary turn of phrase—but the voice is basically the same...
...The Wilson that emerges from The Sixties—he is sixty-five in 1960—is very recognizably the Wilson of the earlier decades, only under the aspect of diminution...
...Simply, we cannot avoid seeing how much has changed in our culture even since the time of his death...
...Wilson observing at close hand the Mike Nichols/Elaine May romance...
...For all the pages given over to the inventory of dissolution, Wilson can be seen to triumph...
...There is little, almost no, mention of Wilson's prodigious reading (a few remarks on Balzac, Macaulay...
...Had some drinks and went to sleep very early, but had bad dreams and woke up feeling horrible . . . . But read Macaulay and somewhat regained my equanimity and my inspiration to live...
...Wilson is also still a fairly energetic traveler, making his way to Quebec, Hungary, Jamaica, Israel, and Europe (his reports, sadly, tend to focus mostly on who he socialized with...
...I invited her to do fellatio, but she said, 'I'm a lady...
...A problematic endeavor, but the author is so set on candor and so little given to preening that he more or less succeeds...
...Reading Wilson, we hearken to a particular kind of spirit, and we learn about its limits and its strengths...
...An entry for 1962, plucked almost at random (for there are many, many such entries) runs: I couldn't rush around as much as I usually do, had continually to put on the brakes: two evenings with the Lowells, two with Mike Nichols, two with the Epsteins, two evenings at The Little Players . . . the Jonathan Millers at the Epsteins and The Little Players...
...Wilson's served him thus all the way to the end...
...She has small hands and feet...
...Auden, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Schlesinger, to name just a few...
...This is not the place to argue the causes of the dissolution of that literary life, only to remark sadly upon its passing...
...He keeps coming back from his falls, not only because he is proud and determined, not only because he knows nothing else to do, but also because in his long life he has never caught the bacillus of what might be called existential despair...
...Both descriptions confirm a writer rooted deeply in the here and now, a writer who cannot resist making and publicizing discriminations, no matter what the subject...
...Triumph, that is, in the only way that any mortal finally can—through attitude, through selfmastery...
...From the start the journals were the selfaccounting of a strong-minded, gregarious, erotically avaricious, and doggedly commonsensical man—a man of premodern appetites and energies...
...Last summer, alone here all summer," he writes in an early entry, "I felt, when I had an erection, what a 564 • DISSENT Books pity it was that so splendid a thing should not have a chance to enjoy itself...
...The reader can only be amazed at Wilson's elasticity of spirit, his ever-renewed ability to discover some grounds of incentive after each new bodily betrayal...
...Nothing, really, about his ongoing intellectual activities...
...Wilson carrying on a late-game flirtation with the wife of his Talcottville dentist ("She liked the way I 'touched' her but wasn't in love with me—sex may not be real love...
...Straightforward, incisive, ever alert to physical nuance...
...And to remark on the feeling one 566 • DISSENT Books has on finishing, after reading the fmal entry, a sad, whimsical little verse to Elena—the feeling that the last truly solid bridge between higher culture and common culture has collapsed, that we are all stranded on one side or the other of what seems to be a widening chasm...
...Her appearances on TV and in photographs give a misleading impression of her because they make her look much bigger and more substantial than she is...
...Journal entry, 1961 With the publication of The Sixties, the fifth consecutive compilation of Edmund Wilson's journals, the author takes his place as one of the most thoroughly self-documented of American literary figures...
...Yet this incredulity is also the source of his tremendous staying power...
...Scott Fitzgerald's idea that somewhere things were "glimmering...
...No Rilke, this man...
...Behind the sketchiest of annotations we can glimpse an intellectual and literary society far more vigorous than anything we have today...
...All that comedy and conflict of human activityone gets to feel cut off from all that...
...Wilson's body starts to give out on him—there are heart attacks, bouts of angina, gout, and grievous dental woes...
...It is heartening—truly—to see how a cultivated mind can serve as a bulwark against despair...
...Still, The Sixties is a journal, and it exhibits over long stretches the uninflected ordinariness of selfreportage...
...From The Twenties (on Edna St...
...For the Wilson we encounter is not Wilson the legendary reader and critic or Wilson the novelist and would-be playwright...
...To say this is to pay Wilson a backhanded compliment...
Vol. 40 • September 1993 • No. 4
