Edmund Wilson The Sixties: The Last Journal, 1960-1972.
Edited, with an introduction, by Lewis M. Dabney.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 968 pages, $35
reviewed by Jeffrey Meyers
Edmund Wilson carried on the cultural and critical tradition of Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold. His erudition, intelligence, and insight made him the most distinguished and influential American man of letters in the twentieth century. “He read,” as Thackeray said of Macaulay, “twenty books to write a sentence, and traveled a hundred miles to write a line of description.” His interests ranged from the biographical and historical interpretation of literature in his masterpieces—Axel’s Castle (1931), The Wound and the Bow (1941), and Patriotic Gore (1962) —to a study of the revolutionary personality in To the Finland Station (1940), from biblical scholarship to the traditional ceremonies of the Zuñis and Iroquois.
During the last twelve years of his life Wilson frequently shifted between his home in Wellfleet on Cape Cod and his ancestral Stone House in Talcottville, north of Utica, in upstate New York, between Boston and Manhattan, London, Paris, and Rome. He also took trips to Hungary in 1964 and to Jordan and Israel (where he read “Dick Tracy” at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) in 1967, and spent a recuperative month in Jamaica in 1969. He taught the literature of the Civil War at Harvard, endured a fellowship year at “the blind little backwater” of Wesleyan, published Night Thoughts, Patriotic Gore, O Canada