The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960-72.

THE SIXTIES

The Last Journal, 1960-72

Edmund Wilson 

Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Lewis M. Dabney

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35,968 pp.

These journals, skillfully edited by Lewis Dabney of the University of Wyoming, are the last stand of one of America's greatest literary critics and cultural observers. A rugged "literary worker" who set up shop in the 1920s as a book reviewer, arts critic, and political journalist, Wilson built a career that lasted--with hardly a pause for illness or old age--until his death in 1972. Not even death could seal off Wilson's pipeline of cultural reports: we still keep hearing from him every few years as journals, letters, and other posthumous works appear.

With a bluff disregard for the trendy and the fashionable, Wilson spent half a century telling intelligent general readers what he thought about leftist politics, psychoanalysis in literary criticism, the Ziegfeld Follies, California writers, the tyranny of the IRS--and just about every artistic tendency and political pressure that had an influence on the lives of his fellow citizens. He also explored a daunting array of broader concerns--the origins of revolution in To the Finland Station, the idea of Jewish righteousness in The Dead Sea Scrolls, the power drive in Patriotic Gore, and the development of literary symbolism in Axel's Castle. In his last years he exhaustively recorded his private life and impressions: his mammoth journals move from an upper-middle-class boy's innocence in pre-World War I Hill School and Princeton to perhaps the fullest account in American letters of an intellectual' s experience of modernity. For him writing was a civic duty to be fulfilled with clarity, candor, and thoroughness.

The Sixties is a good introduction to Wilson's unique way of balancing intellectual elitism and populist outreach. Wilson certainly does not come across as a haughty mandarin or a remote academic: in search of a "truly human culture," he wanted to be his sovereign literary self while at the same time making points about the suffering of the Iroquois in New York State, the absurdities of the Pentagon, and the power mania of bureaucrats. He always sought the opinions of ordinary workers and unglamorous locals. He cultivated many friends at his family retreat at Talcottville, New York; here he was far enough away from literary Manhattan and chic Wellfleet, his more official summer residence, to allow him to escape the exclusivism of the intelligentsia.

The modem intellectual' s desire to connect ideas with the sometimes imperceptible events of family, neighborhood, and nation is Wilson' s master theme. He hated expensive vacation resorts like Naples, Florida, and Jamaica; of the latter he mused, "Peculiar footlessness of ideas that pass through my head--importance of being somewhere where people are doing something." With a holy horror of idleness and a fear inherited from his brilliant lawyer father about "weltering around in a Dead Sea of mediocrity," Wilson champions the yoking of the elitist's ambition and the socialist' s dream of fulfilling labor. The Sixties should be required reading for politicians who talk endlessly about work and social stability. John and Robert Kennedy both admired Wil son: the latter read Europe without Baedeker on line at a polling place; the former gave him the Medal of Freedom.

But Wilson has found precious few of these public figures to read his books. Your local chain bookstore will probably follow its computer and regard Wilson as a frill for highbrows rather than our twentieth-century Emerson. And the reading public today wants the autobiographer to cut to the chase, provide the juice upfront, and edit out the undramatic. These are accommodations that Wilson never provides for his readers. Elaine May, Mary McCarthy, Jackie O., and W.H. Auden make vivid appearances in The Sixties, but Wilson balances them with hundreds of small discourses on Diderot, Balzac's melodrama, Hungarian translations of Shelley and Poe, Hebrew scholarship-- in short the business of the heroic humanist.

Besides his commitment to evaluating classics and his insistence on his own pacing and nineteenth-century copiousness of notation, there is the problem of a cultural critic who judges without diplomacy or much qualification. Fortifying himself with middle-of-the-night-readings from Macaulay's History of England and drinking like a man of the 1920s ("Scotch" must be one of the most frequently used words in the book), he harrumphs his way through the culture of the 1960s and what remains of his older modernist world. With a certain bad grace-- combined with the old radical' s impatience with ignorant nonconformists---he opens fire on "louts," "beatniks" (in the sixties?), whining young people with their vague criticisms of the system, literary "slobs" (I'll supply no names). The nasty edge--partly 1920s' iconoclasm, partly irascibility--is everywhere. At times it does some good. The Partisan Review "boys" are impervious to delight and have none of the verve of connoisseurs in their criticism of literature; the crowd on la plage des intellectuels at Well fleet dare not express certain opinions because they work for universities and other large institutions. One can also see what Wilson means when he finds Bunuel's film La Belle de Jour pornographic and Antonioni' s Blowup "empty."

But Wilson's coldness--in discussing sex and in evaluating people--makes him, at his worst, rather inductive. Lovemaking seems like so many zoological transactions; and although this creepy presentation is sometimes mitigated by episodes of tenderness and old-fashioned gallantry, it never goes away, Nor does the tendency to throw the weakness of important writers into high relief: Malraux' s elusiveness about power politics and morality makes him a double-talker at the JFK White House; Robert Frost' s rustic "act" about the neglect of the poet in America makes him an old bore; Isaiah Berlin's overflowing excitement about ideas makes him a conversation grabber.

But just when you are about to lose patience with these high-horse pronouncements, you come face-to-face with Wilson' s devotion to his mission and his standards. He is saddened by the fact that his old friend Waldo Frank "had no humility before his medium, never in fact taught himself to write." But Wilson does not need to agree with you to see what you have built in a life of writing or action. Anais Nin is treated kindly because of her insight and fortitude; she is forgiven for portraying Wilson as a patriarchical bully in her journals. Wilson the honest atheist also takes courage from the dying John XXIII and his tireless efforts to reform the Catholic church.

At a dinner party in 1963, Wilson had been thundering about the American Empire and threatening to go to Switzerland. Adolf Berle, a former assistant secretary of state, began badgering him about not being a good American. Paraphrasing his wife Elena's comment on the scene, Wilson writes, "there'd be America anywhere where I was." With his battered panama hat and his insatiable curiosity, he was a modern emblem of American individualism.