THE THIRTIES

FROM NOTEBOOKS AND DIARIES OF THE PERIOD

by Edmund Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1980

Like The Twenties (1975), this massive assemblage from Wilson's journals is more impressive as evidence of his energy, curiosity, and diligence than as illumination or entertainment; editor Edel is right on the mark when he says that the journals "served largely the function of memory and self-discipline." Not surprising, then, that virtually all of the significant reportage here—shorthand notes on the 1932 Kentucky coal strike, visits to Depression cities, the 1935 journey to Russia—found its way into more focused form (in The American Earthquake, To The Finland Station, Travels in Two Democracies, and Red, Black, Blond and Olive) and is therefore of compelling interest only to students of the essay-making process. (One doesn't really get, as Edel suggests, a sense of EW's developing "social consciousness," despite some wrestlings with the pros and cons of Communism.) Similarly, the Wilson taste for clinically erotic episodes—with ladies known only as Anna, D., K. (whose masochism EW happily gratified with a hairbrush), etc.—was later reflected in the far more hospitable framework of Memoirs of Hecate County. And the bulk of the rest exerts a decidedly limited appeal: endless visits to and from friends (mostly rich and/or literary), notes on parties, conversations, the latest slang, clothes, family, Jews, psychoanalysis, and—less than you'd expect—books and writers. However, there is one stretch of prose that arrives with undeniable power (if not, strangely enough, much real emotion)—a free-associative, 30-page monologue that EW wrote on the plane to California, where his second wife Margaret had just died in a fall: "After she was dead, I loved her. . . She used to rinse out my socks and golf-stockings. . . I said once that I wanted a tall child—she said that in view of both our shapes, we'd probably have turtles"; likewise, EW's subsequent dreams about his dead wife, turning up in bunches through the years, always grab attention. And, throughout, Wilson's sour wit, keen eye, and near-perfect ear (for all brands of dialogue) produce glorious lines and scenes amid the dense detail. Grand descriptions: in Truro, "bluffs like tomato bisque with lots of milk in it." Searching for the right words for Los Angeles: "flou, floozy, goosy, goozley, goofy, floozent, flooey, floozid, foozled, the flooffy goosey beach. . ." Literary one-liners: "André Gide, the old flawed Protestant diamond, still able to make a scratch on the smooth surface of French culture." Nicely skeptical asides on FDR: after the 1936 landslide, "I felt that the popular enthusiasm for him had more warmth and force than he. . . How much was he moved—how much merely gay at winning the college boat race?" Oblique angles on the famous: E.E. Cummings overstaying his Provincetown welcome (being "a nuisance by lying down in the surf when I was taking him home and letting the water come over him: 'It wants me! Don't you see the sea wants me, Edmund?"'); Louise Bogan leaving for Europe in a new brown suit ("Do I look like a Lesbian? I don't look like a Lesbian, do I?"). A few gems, much dross—so, with better Wilson to be found in the Letters (1977) and elsewhere, this will be nobody's bedside reading. But, for students of the man and the period (especially since EW had a finger in so many pies): a hefty, varied sourcebook.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1980

ISBN: 0333212118

Page Count: 753

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1980

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION