Volume 40, Number 18 · November 4, 1993
A Nineteenth-Century Man
By Gore Vidal
The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960–1972
by Edmund Wilson, edited with an introduction by Lewis M. Dabney
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 968 pp., $35.00
'Old age is a shipwreck.' Like many a ground soldier, General de Gaulle was drawn to maritime metaphors. Of course shipwrecks are not like happy families. There is the Titanic-swift departure in the presence of a floating mountain of ice, as the orchestra plays the overture from Tales of Hoffmann. There is the slow settling to full fathom five as holds fill up with water, giving the soon-to-be-drowned sufficient time to collect his thoughts about eternity and wetness. It was Edmund Wilson's fate to sink slowly from 1960 to June 12, 1972, when he went full fathom five. The last entry in his journal is a bit of doggerel for his wife Elena: 'Is that a bird or a leaf? / Good grief! / My eyes are old and dim, / And I am getting deaf, my dear, / Your words are no more clear / And I can hardly swim. / I find this rather grim.'
Review, 4470 words
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