Volume 7, Number 8 · November 17, 1966
Wilson Without Reputation
By F.W. Dupee
Europe Without Baedeker
by Edmund Wilson
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 467 pp., $6.95
This volume is a re-issue—with alterations and omissions duly acknowledged in the Preface—of a book made out of the author's experiences in Europe (chiefly England, Italy, and Greece) during the final terrible months of the Second World War. The writing of it was undertaken on assignment for The New Yorker and the results were first published as a volume in 1947. To this series of vivid 'sketches among the ruins,' as Wilson calls them, are now added some Notes From a Diary of 1963-64: Paris, Rome, Budapest. The Notes were also published, quite recently, in The New Yorker. But they show less of the alertness of someone writing on assignment, more of the fatigue of an ageing—though far from moribund—tourist writing on his own. Piecemeal, often imprecise and cranky, the Notes are, conspicuously, from a diary. Occasion is nevertheless found for including in them a lengthy account—more like a good encyclopedia article than a diary entry—of puppeterring.
Review, 4064 words
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