The Last of a Precious Species
CHASE, EDWARD T.
The Last of a Precious Species The Sixties By Edmund Wilson Farrar Straus Giroux. 968 pp. $35.00. Reviewed by Edward T. Chase Writer and book editor The posthumous publication of The Sixties,...
...Rather, Wilson is preoccupied with his tax troubles, learning Hungarian, travel, working for the New Yorker...
...Dissimilar though the two men were, the recent death of Irving Howe, another literary generalist, underscores the sense of loss...
...Here we encounter his sharp strictures against stereotypical Republicans??thus the taunting of John Dos Passos for worshiping Barry Goldwater??and his condescending toleration of academics...
...As a result, we enjoy a vicarious romp through the period's high culture??very much like the one afforded by Robert Craft's journals of life with Stravinsky...
...I believe that 1 am more or less succeeding in becoming a sedate old gentleman...
...Never one to suffer bores or bullies lightly, especially the famous, he disparages Harold Ross, likens Truman Capote to a fetus with a big head, and ridicules many a lesser mortal...
...At the heart of the book is Wilson's interest in the myriad people around him, virtually all the notable intellectuals and artists of the '60s...
...Manifest, too, is his joy with and love for his fourth wife...
...They remind us that Wilson came of age at Princeton in the more naive, pre-coed days when sex and romance frequently took the form of sporadic adolescent forays...
...It also reports on his constant (though oft-protested) socializing, his heavy drinking and sharp-edged gossiping, his diminished but irrepressible sexual drive...
...Attentive to mundane affairs but undistracted by them, Wilson was above all engrossed in intellectual discourse...
...observes that "Old age is not an emancipation from desire for most of us...
...Indeed, his praise of Francis Parkman's history of Canada could very well be applied to his own writing: "[Parkman's] genius is shown not only in his well-controlled and steadily advancing prose but in his avoidance of generalization, his economizing of abstract analysis, his sticking to concrete events...
...He chides himself for a tendency to bait his victim??as when he asks the humorless John Gaus, who revered President Lyndon B. Johnson, "whether he didn't think a law should be passed making it impossible for a Texan to be President of the U.S...
...The book contains its share of trivia, yes??yet even that never fails to be absorbing...
...Some may disagree and point to Isaiah Berlin, perhaps Alfred Kazin or VS...
...Wilson's journal is flavored throughout by his acerbic brand of humor...
...He found it infinitely depressing, a desert of mind and spirit, and quickly took refuge in his reading: "Happily sunk in Balzac again...
...One feels privileged to participate in this man's extraordinary daily reflections, beautifully and meticulously composed with an inimitable gravitas...
...1 still expect something exciting: drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: an uninhibited exchange of ideas...
...Ronald Blythe, in his classic study of the elderly, The View in Winter...
...Ultimately, of course, The Sixties is a deeply personal diary...
...But I would contend that no one alive today quite matches Wilson's range of interests or depth of penetration...
...One wonders how he could have been so productive...
...Although full of brief, invariably telling comments on countless writers, The Sixties offers little extended literary criticism...
...The Sixties demonstrates once more Wilson's unfailing critical acuteness...
...The world, over generations to come, will be better off for his legacy...
...incessant eclectic reading, and his health problems...
...Wilson's detailed description of the place reads like vintage Evelyn Waugh...
...And he recalls the time he was "pigeonholed by Arthur Kober" at a party with a "trouser leg wet" from such an accident??mischievously adding that during the same encounter Kober called him "a Renaissance man...
...In some respects, The Sixties is a chronicle of aging...
...Elena??a comforting reassurance that the curmudgeon had a warm private side...
...The critic's death later that year, before the scourge of aids and the demise of Soviet Communism, denied us his take on those momentous, utterly unpredictable events...
...The clinical accounts of sex in this volume are as lugubrious as they were years earlier in Memoirs of Hecate County...
...Without flinching, he relates an episode of oral sex in the deserted second-floor lounge of the Princeton Club...
...Each incident, each episode is different, each is particularized, each is presented, when possible, in sharply realistic detail, no matter how absurd or how homely...
...We come to envy such people as Jason Epstein and Roger W. Straus Jr...
...He had a great run...
...Wilson writes with touching insight about his life, his nature and the pathos of his waning years...
...As a character in one of Chekhov's plays says he's 'a man of the '80s.' so I find that 1 am a man of the '20s...
...That he would have been a valuable interpreter of the repercussions of the collapse of the empire that Stalin built we know from To the Finland Station, among the greatest of his 30-odd books...
...Pritchett...
...Scott Fitzgerald's idea that somewhere things were 'glimmering.' 1 am managing to discipline myself now so that 1 shan't be silly this way: diet and non-drinking, non-expectation of sprees...
...In a similar mood and style he describes the incontinence, late in life, that required him to burn his soiled underclothes and shirt...
...In fact, the journal's most devastating passages concern a 1972 vacation in Naples, Florida, "the paradise of the retiring middle class...
...Reviewed by Edward T. Chase Writer and book editor The posthumous publication of The Sixties, the fifth and final segment of Edmund Wilson's journals, seems to formally mark the passing of a precious species: the all-purpose intellectual, the man of letters ever transcending the academy...
...In that work on the roots of the Russian Revolution, Wilson had the imaginative power to capture the motivating idealism of socialist thinking and to demolish the self-congratulatory rhetoric of capitalist free marketeers...
...His ailments notwithstanding, the notion of old age as emancipation would undoubtedly have horrified Wilson...
...who were among Wilson's favorite hosts and companions...
...that is a large part of its tragedy...
...Curiously, he is silent on the civil rights movement, student riots, Woodstock...
...there are intermittent intrusions about Wilson's dreadful dental problems, angina, hangovers, weak erections...
Vol. 76 • September 1993 • No. 11
