Edmund Wilson - The Forties

Edmund Wilsons The Twenties and The Thirties were printed from typescripts he prepared and partially edited before his death. The Forties does not have the benefit of his editing; it is a wholly posthumous book and lacks the retrospective passages Wilson would have written had he been able to put it together. Certain portions are fragmentary; others are very full and require little gloss. A few sections existed in typed form: the European notes, which were extracted from the authors notebooks in the preparation of Europe Without Baedeker; and the account of the Zui, amplified for EWs later book Red, Black, Blond and Olive. The Haiti portion has been assembled from almost illegibly scrawled notesput down on the spot in a kind of semi-shorthand, like a reporters notes. Wilson usually clear-copied such notes into his journals, but in this instance he seems to have expanded them directly into the three articles he wrote for The Reporter, the New York liberal magazine.

The other portions of this volume came from the large-sized ledgers in which he kept his journals. The years from 1940 to 1945 are the scrappiest of all his journal-keeping, and had to be assembled from loose pages and sporadic entries in the back covers of his notebooks. To these I have added the undated scenario for a novel, The Story of the Three Wishes or The Red Bank and Moscow Novel. I also found a few tentative retrospective notes, which I have included. The meagerness of the entries of 194045 results not so much from Wilsons malaise over the war as from the fact (as he said) that he did little journal-keeping during his third marriage, which culminated in divorce.

As before, I have edited the texts with a light hand, in accordance with Wilsons instructions, correcting slips, deleting repetitions, and touching up the punctuationall that he would have done were he preparing the book for his publisher. He did not want to be edited in the academic manner, as if he were a classical text, but insisted that his journalswritten often in haste, and rough at bestshould be treated as any manuscript is treated in a publishers office: tidied up and made ready for the printer. We know that Wilson kept these notebook-journals originally for his own use. They were written hurriedly and he had no intention of checking names or historical facts as he wrote. The result is that we encounter in the manuscript at certain points a question mark in parenthesesWilsons interrogations of himself. The reader must recognize these as part of the tentativeness of the journal; everything was to be set right and verified later, if he should need to use the passage. Readers must take these queries as meaning Was it di or de in that name? or Have I got my spelling right? There are some passages which were clear enough to Wilson, for he would set down some word to jog his memory, but which are a mystery to us. I have left these occasional little mysteries: only Wilson could have explained them, but they suggest the nature of this kind of journal-keeping. Wilson was never afraid to correct his errors: he pretended to none of the omniscience which he saw and deplored in academe. Certain books which he autographed for me contain, beyond the inscription, references to pages where he corrects his own and the printers errors and sometimes writes in an explanatory footnote.

The Forties has benefited from an earlier grant given me by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The death of Edmunds widow, Elena Wilson, occurred just as I was beginning work on this volume and deprived me of a valuable source of information and help. But I am grateful for the continued assistance of EWs older daughter, Rosalind, and his younger, Helen Miranda. Phyllis Stenger, a lecturer at the University of Hawaii, helped with identifications and footnotes, Ella Wiswell with the Russian allusions, Kathleen Falvey with the Italian, and Ines Kinnell checked the typescript against the holograph text. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Marjorie, for reading the entire manuscript when it was completed.

L.E.