Notebooks and Diaries
By Edmund Wilson (5 vols., 1975-93)
1. In the late 1960s Edmund Wilson began sorting through his voluminous journals and notebooks, to supplement his memoirs. But the project was unfinished at his death and taken up by editors Leon Edel and, later, Lewis M. Dabney in five volumes that remain the best, certainly the most entertaining, account of the literary life in the middle of the 20th century. Even as a Princeton undergraduate Wilson had a critical sense, jaundiced eye and natural pre-eminence. He seemed to know everybody in bohemian Greenwich Village, he turned up everywhere in Depression-era America and Europe, and he followed the cultural politics of the Cold War. His dismay at Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s delight in serving as Camelot’s cruise director is hilarious. And the occasionally hurried tone gives the journals a brutal concision and candor: Meeting Truman Capote at a party, in 1964, he doesn’t immediately recognize the “tiny little man with a high piping voice. . . . When he had come to see us at Wellfleet, he had seemed to me a not unpleasant little monster, like a fetus with a big head. But now he seemed more birdlike, as if his head had shrunk.”
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