Volume 33, Number 15 · October 9, 1986
Edmund Wilson at Ease
By Jason Epstein
The Fifties: From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period
by Edmund Wilson, edited with an introduction by Leon Edel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 663 pp., $25.00
Readers of Edmund Wilson's diaries for the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s may have regretted that in these volumes Wilson omitted sustained accounts of the literary life in which he had been immersed for thirty years, and supplied only glancing sketches of such youthful companions as John Bishop, Edna Millay, and Scott Fitzgerald. Wilson's diaries for those decades were remarkable mainly for their descriptions of his many love affairs, pursuits for which this distinguished and reputedly austere literary personage was not widely known. One reviewer has recently gone so far as to call the erotic passages in these diaries pornographic, and even for Wilson's less easily inflamed readers his amatory descriptions must have come as something of a shock, for Wilson's candor is as defiant, as limitless, and as innocent as Stieglitz's in his erotic photographs of Georgia O'Keefe. Perhaps for this reason these amatory writings have not received their due, particularly the long elegiac piece on his second wife, Margaret Canby, in The Thirties.
Review, 3803 words
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