The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960-1972.

THREE years after Edmund Wilson's death in 1972, Farrar, Straus published The Twenties, the first of five projected volumes of Wilson's journals. Now The Sixties has appeared, closing the circle at last. Like its companion volumes, The Sixties contains much of value about Wilson's great contemporaries (W. H. Auden and Isaiah Berlin in particular) and predecessor (it is oddly touching to see the aging polyglot reading Faust in the original for the first time, only to find it boring). Just as Wilson's criticism is rooted in his consummate command of the art of literary portraiture, so is The Sixties at its best a gallery of marvelous vivid dry-point etchings, some of masters and some of frauds:

John Cage was a fellow [at the Wesleyan Center for Advanced Studies] for a year, and Winslow, the head of the music department, swallowed him hook, line, and sinker. He gave a performance after one of our Monday dinners I was stupefied--it was da night when beer was served, and I had had two bottles. The last thing that I remember is being given six slips of paper and told to write numbers on them between 1 and 10. I wrote 3 on them all. After that, I went sound asleep, and the only thing I was aware of was the occasional twanging of a string, as in the last act of The Cherry Orchard.

Yet I wonder whether the publication in extenso of these journals, endlessly readable though they are, has done the best possible service to their author's memory. Certainly to read all five volumes is to come away with an impression of Edmund Wilson very different from that which would have been left by a heavily abridgedd single-volume edition concentrating more closely on cultural matters. The Sixties in particular almost always becomes stupid, even squalid, whenever it strays from the narrow path of art.

Not that this will surprise anyone familiar with Wilson's published writings. His political views, rehashed at length in The Sixties, were left-wing in all the most tedious ways. Though profoundly disillusioned by Stalin and his successors, Wilson remained committed to the idiot notion of moral equivalence between the Soviet Union and the United States which on one memorable occasion he compared to a pair of voracious sea slugs bent on mutual cannibalism. He dismissed the Vietnam War as "disgraceful," doted on grassy-knoll theories of the Kennedy assassination, whooped up Geroge McGovern, and evinced no understanding whatsoever of elementary economics.

One would thus expect Wilson to have had muchd to say about the effects of the Sixties on American life and culture. Yet the author of The Sixties seems strangely unaware of the Sixties, except insofar as they directly impinge on his daily routine. As editor Lewis M. Dabney (who has done a painstaking job of cleaning up what appears to have been a fairly messy text) points out in his introduction, "The Sixties lacks the familiar images of the decade--the civil rights movement, student radicals at Berkeley and Columbia, the Watts riots, chaos in the streets at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the Woodstock nation."

But there is one important aspect of the Sixties which indirectly reflected in the pages of Wilson's journal: its sexual politics. Again, no one familiar with Wilson's published writings will find his consuming interest in sex at all surprising. Especially in Memories of Hecate County, Wilson reveals himself to have been obsessed with the ins and out of promiscuity, and we read in The Sixties of one lubricious encounter after another. Only 19 pages before the final entry, one stumbles across a detailed account of a late-night coupling in the second-floor lounge of the Princeton Club: "It's strange that now that I'm 75 and can only get an erection at half-mast, two such attractive women as she and Z should offer themselves to me. O. said, 'It's your brain,' but couldn't help giggling, as I did."

Dabney calls this "a romantic escapade ... at ease and frankly sensual." Others are likely to find it both sordid and inadvertently revealing. Reflexively hostile to religion (he liked to sign letters to old friends "Hiram K. Antichrist," and once blandly assured a correspondent that he made a point of reading Histoire d'O aloud to his family every year at Christmas), Wilson sought ultimate meaning in the things of this world, a point of view that has led far better men astray. Mostly it led them deeper and deeper into the world of art; sometimes, though, it enmeshed him in the snares of rationalist cults such ask Marxism, and it quite often fooled him into thinking that the search for a transcendent sensuality can be other than vain.

The vanity of human wishes is something Wilson came to recognize at the very end of his life. Not long after his encounter at the Princeton Club, he made this pathetic entry in his journal:

When I look back, I feel quite definitely divided from my earlier self, who cared about things in a way I no longer do. All that comedy and conflict of human activity--one gets to feel cut off from all that. One cannot even imagine any more the time when one had once participated. One ought perhaps to have died before reaching this point, when one still had the illusion of participating. All that energy expended to peter out! One looks down on an empty arena. What were we all doing there?--running about, jostling and shouting, exchanging vita gossip--involved in great world wars now as trivial and futile as we used to think the Balkan wars were.

Much of The Sixties, as this entry suggests, is bound to sadden those who regard Edmund Wilson as one of this century's greatest literary journalists. My own debt to his infectious gusto is all but endless. It was through books like Classics and Commercials and The Bit between My Teeth that I was first inspired to read Max Beerbohm, Cyril Connolly, Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Maurice Baring, Dawn Powell, Edwin O'Connor, the later Kipling, the Holmes-Laski letters, the Mary Chestnut diaries--the list goes on and on. What other critic, one wonders, has shed lasting light on such wildly dissimilar figures as Abraham Lincoln and George Saintsbury? Even when Wilson was most spectacularly wrong, he never failed to stimulate.

But there is no point in pretending that the man who wrote Patriotic Gore was not the same man who thought it important to preserve for posterity a complete record of his senile fornications. In the end, of course, he may have been right. Perhaps one should seek to know the worst about the writers one admires most, if only to be reminded that men are men and not gods.