THE FORTIES

To an even greater degree than previous volumes of Wilson's notebook/diaries, this third installment is largely taken up with travel/reporter notes for future books and journalism: here he is visiting end-of-the-war Italy and Greece, postwar Haiti and the Zuni—and editor Edel scrupulously indicates, sequence by sequence, the sources of passages in Europe Without Baedeker and Red, Black, Blond and Olive. Disappointingly, however, there are only a couple of pages of notes for The Wound and the Bow. And there are fewer personal ruminations than before: ten pages of political "Thoughts," 1943-1944 ("Soon the globe will be known and a bore"); elaborate erotic descriptions of his courtship of fourth wife Elena; a touching visit to old-flame Edna Millay (some of which went into The Shores of Light); the funeral of John Dos Passos' wife Katy, killed in a car accident; and a visit to the home of an old Princeton friend—where nothing is quite what it seems. ("I went over to look at something which I fancied was a rare book in a glass case—it turned out to be a cheap green boys' book in a small empty aquarium.") Still, students of Wilson's oeuvre will, as always, find illuminating notes-into-essay clues here, as well as a few jottings re an unfinished novel; and the travel material includes offbeat run-ins with such contemporaries as George Santayana, Evelyn Waugh, and Felix Frankfurter—who told EW in 1949, at Tanglewood, that he approved of Hecate County.