I crossed paths with Edmund Wilson, literally it seems, in the summer of 1955 when, after a long bicycle ride through New England, I alit at last in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. It was the end of an inadequately trained-for excursion, for just at that place—la plage des intellectuels—both of my Achilles tendons simultaneously “locked”: pedaling, even walking, was no longer possible. At that moment, too, the Provincetown fishing fleet was putting into the Wellfleet harbor to ride out the heavy weather of an unpredicted hurricane. I had to get indoors, then, and recline with a book before the big blow. The innkeeper, eyeing my bookbag, slyly remarked to me that my room would be the favorite of another literary man, Mr. Wilson himself. (Why he should ever have taken a room there, when he owned a house just down the road on Route 6, may be evident to anyone who has read those briskly recorded sexual exploits—in The Twenties (1975), The Thirties (1980), and The Forties (1983)—that have thrown a randy light on the famed old literatus.)

Wilson, however, was not in Wellfleet just then. I have discovered in The Fifties,[1] Leon Edel’s latest installment of his diaries, that Wilson was on his way to Talcottville, New York, where he summered in the Old Stone House on the family’s property. It’s probably just as well that I never tried to see him about his new book, The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, which had just