Volume 30, Number 17 · November 10, 1983
Unwrapping Edmund Wilson
By John Gross
The Forties
by Edmund Wilson, edited with an introduction by Leon Edel
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 369 pp., $17.95
The Portable Edmund Wilson
edited by Lewis M. Dabney
Viking/Penguin, 647 pp., $6.95 (paper)
The journals and papers which make up The Forties are of great interest—coming from Edmund Wilson, it would be very odd if they were not—but taken as a whole the book is not really in the same class as The Twenties and The Thirties. For one thing, as Leon Edel makes clear in his excellent introduction, it lacks the advantage of Wilson's own preliminary editing, and of the retrospective passages that he would have added if he had lived. For another, the material that Mr. Edel has had to work on—the more intimate and informal material, at least—is relatively skimpy. During the first half of the 1940s, while he was still married to Mary McCarthy, Wilson scarcely kept a personal diary at all. He slipped back into the habit from 1946 onward, but on a much less substantial scale than before; and as a result, the greater part of The Forties is taken up with first drafts of material that has already appeared elsewhere, often in very similar form—principally in Europe Without Baedeker and in his accounts of the Zuñi Indians and his visit to Haiti, the 'red' and 'black' sections of Red, Black, Blond and Olive.
Review, 2874 words
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