Volume 1, Number 7 · November 28, 1963
Wilson's Amerika
By Jason Epstein
The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest
by Edmund Wilson
Farrar, Straus, 118 pp., $2.95
In his middle thirties Edmund Wilson suffered a nervous breakdown from which he was not fully to recover for several years. At about the same time in his own life Wilson's father, a gifted but extremely neurotic lawyer, suffered the first of a series of mental collapses which was to plague him and his family until he died. Naturally Wilson felt that there might be some connection between his father's situation and his own. But there may have been a more immediate explanation too, for when Wilson was in his thirties America was also experiencing a depression and 'the slump,' Wilson wrote, 'was like a flood or an earthquake. It was a long time before many things righted themselves.' Two of his friends committed suicide and others were joining the Roman Catholic Church. Some of them went insane. 'My own generation,' he said, 'has not had so gay a journey as we expected when we first started out.' But for Wilson there was also something stimulating about the crash. 'One couldn't help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud,' by which he meant the era of Big Business. 'It gave us a new sense of freedom; and it gave us a new sense of power to find ourselves still carrying on while the bankers, for a change, were taking a beating.'
Review, 2996 words
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