Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 17, 1993 TAG: 9310170210
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Edmund Wilson, it is now clear, was one of America's most distinguished - as he was also one of the most distinctive - writers of the century. Of the generation of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wilder, Dos Passos, Faulkner and Wolfe, he was the intimate friend of most of them. But he was unlike them, unlike even Wilder, in the breadth of his work.
He wrote fiction, verse, plays, critical essays of astonishing range and interest, intellectual history; he became an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Iroquois, Canada, the development of 19th-century European socialism and the literature of the Civil War as well as modern Russian literature, which he learned Russian to read.
Nothing, it appears, was alien to his curiosity.
Now, more than 20 years after his death, we can see that one of his most remarkable accomplishments was his journals, which he began as a boy and kept up, with few lapses, until the end of his life. The journals have been coming out at irregular intervals since his death in 1972, and that does not include his diaries of his early years, "A Prelude," which he saw through the press while still alive.
Grouped by decades, the journals now come to an end with "The Sixties," the final decade of Wilson's life. Carefully edited by Lewis M. Dabney, who takes over from Leon Edel, they show him curious, mentally active to the last, seeing everyone who interests him, learning new things (this time Hugarian), journeying back and forth between his year-round house in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and the old stone family house in Talcotville, New York, whose rediscovery and reclamation he chronicled with such loving care in "Upstate." As always, he sets down his day-to-day activities and affections - and even his gloomy and discouraged periods. His interest in the lives of his upsate neighbors and friends, so unlike the sophisticated world of books and ideas in which he moved in Cambridge and New York, is touching _ and unshared by his wife, who generally stayed behind in Wellfleet. There are frequent trips to Boston, New York and abroad, to London and Oxford and the Continent. And everywhere he goes he manages to see and talk with the best and brightest. But the shadow that overhangs "The Sixties" is the shadow of his own mortality, cast with increasing frequency by periods of illness and infirmity, which grow longer, and by his own thoughts of his impending death and the meaninglessness it often seems to give his life.
Wilson suffers from gout and heart disease and gets around, when at all, with steadily falling agility. He is frustrated by sickness, as all of us are, yet resigned to its apparent inevitability - hastened, he knows too, by his heavy drinking and portliness, neither of which he seems, for very long, to be able to diminish. He is often grouchy and bickers with his wife.
But what saves him - again and again _ is work and the indefatigable curiosity - and the need to answer questions by writing about them - that compels it. More than anyone else I know about, Wilson was always working at something worth doing. He did it to support himself and his family, to be sure, and could never escape that; but he did it mostly because that was how he was.
We are unlikely to see his kind again. Our "educational institutions," so-called, produce narrow little specialists, at their best, ignoramuses who preen themselves on their "visual acuity" and scorn language. Nor despite the growth of "media" do the outlets for the work of broad minds interested in many things any longer exist. Wilson belonged, in fact, to the last generation of 19th-century polymaths, and with his death the reality of general knowledge, if not the urge to possess it, passed, as had long since passed an audience that could appreciate it.
Paxton Davis is a columnist for this newspaper.
by CNB