Volume 17, Number 5 · October 7, 1971
The Old Stone House
By V.S. Pritchett
Upstate: Records and Recollections of Northern New York
by Edmund Wilson
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 386 pp., $8.95
This book is the account of Edmund Wilson's love affair with an old family house. The story opens with a good deal of family history and then proceeds with selections from his diary between 1950 and the present day. Such acts of piety toward the past are a natural eccentricity now that society has become mobile and anarchic, where people are uprooted, when cities, towns, and villages disintegrate and become wastelands. The more demoralized the public state of the world and society become, the more in middle age one dreams of disappearing into the small settled hide-out. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin'—if one can find a garden that is not run-down.
Review, 1854 words
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