Edmund Wilson - The Twenties

When the life of the mind meets the life of the groin plenty of laughs can be counted on all round.

front page review,

The New York Times Book Review

EDMUND WILSON
THE TWENTIES

The passionate and imaginative record of a tumultuous young manhood

Edited with an introduction by LEON EDEL

From Notebooks and Diaries of the Period

Edited with an Introduction by

Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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Edmund Wilson was working on The Twenties at the time of his death in 1972. He had assembled the greater part out of old notebooks of the time and inserted certain passages of memory which gave the book an autobiographical cast, like his Prelude of 1967 and his Upstate of 1971. These volumes, also derived from old notebooks and diaries, had covered early and late experiences. He now wished to fill in the intervening decades.

Since he did not live to complete the book, it lacks the full personal gloss of his earlier volumes. His instructions were that he should be edited with a light hand. I have filled in such historical information as might be useful, and Edmunds correspondence has thrown light on specific passages. The notes speak for themselves, in their fragmented yet often piercing glimpses of the decade in which they were written; they provide perhaps the largest authentic document of the time, the observations of one of the principal actors in the American twenties. Edmund gives a good deal of the grim side, the rawness of America with its increasing industrialization and its laying waste of national treasures, the mad side of Hollywood, the literary in-fighting in New York, the gossip and anecdotes of his peers; we meet Scott Fitzgerald, Edna Millay and John Peale Bishop; there are vignettes of Mencken and Dorothy Parker; we hear the voices of E. E. Cummings and Dos Passos and encounter Eugene ONeill and the earlier artist life of Cape Cod. Nowhere have we had a picture less varnished and so rich in focused detail. Some of the material was used by Edmund in various booksfor these were Edmunds working notebooks. Readers may recognize passages which served in I Thought of Daisy and Memoirs of Hecate County. Where possible I give brief indication of this, but Edmund used and reused his materials in so many cunning ways, always revising, that the full study may be left to future textual scholars.

In a letter to his publisher, Roger Straus, Edmund wrote long ago that he wanted his editor to correct and clean up his text. If I dont live to edit the whole thing myself, it will have to be done by my literary executor, and here I want to put it on record that if he is dealing with the handwritten volumes that I shouldnt have got around to having typed, I dont want him to have them published in the strictly scholarly way that is getting to be the academic fashion. That is, I dont want him to reproduce my contractions and ampersands, misspellings and faulty punctuations. If words have been dropped out, they should be supplied in brackets. They ought, from this point of view, to be made as readable as possible. In reviewing Hemingways Islands in the Sun, he also spoke of this problem. The author is not to be charged with the defects of manuscripts which he did not choose to publish and for which he can now take no responsibility, nor his editors with making those works more coherent, if the editing has been done with good judgment.

I take as my principal guide the injunction to make the notebooks as readable as possible. I have been aided by the memory of certain conversations with Edmund even before I knew he intended me to be the editor of his posthumous papers.

Wilsons notebooks, deposited in the Beinecke Library at Yale, comprise 2,125 manuscript pages, in forty-one stout ledger-type copybooks. There are also miscellaneous pages. Edmund wrote indiscriminately in pencil and ink. He is at times almost illegible; but he also often writes the neat careful hand which most of his correspondents know. When he is very legible, we may assume that he is transcribing from rough notes taken sur le vif. His note-taking habit may explain the minutiae of his descriptions; he was remarkably visual, he saw much more than most persons, and he did not like to rely only on memory.

In the notebooks we meet for the first time the distinctively personal Edmund Wilson. There is the sentience behind the curious critical eye, the passion behind cool statementa passion packed into hard intelligence. We discover how much Edmund used his eyes, his nose, his ears, his sense of smell, and he reveals always the tone of his mind. Wilsons interest in notebook-keeping was an artists interest in himself and his world; the notebooks are often the equivalent of a painters sketchbook and as such are the intermittent record of a constant onlooker and an adventurous mind. He grasps at evanescent bits of life; he wants to hold on to them before they disappear. He picks up anecdotes and jokes; he deals both with profundities and inanities; there are uncanny phonetic renderings of the slidings and elisions of American speech. He has a faultless ear. He is attentive to the dress of women, their jewels, their undergarmentsthere is quite a bit of beddingand the self is portrayed in undress with the same care as when the slight young man in Greenwich Village sallied forth to parties in matching ties and socks.

Edmund had drafted a prefatory note to The Twenties. I give it in its entirety, for it suggests his awareness of the personal way in which he looked at people and events, his sense of his fallibility, and his doubts about publishing obsolete or redundant passages because they had meaning for him, if not for his potential readers. I dont want to cut any corners, he once explained to me, and when I replied, Theyre your own corners, he still demurred. Drastic reviser of his earlier published work, he came at times, in old age, to feel some diffidence about letting go of the past embodied in his old notes. Here is the prefatory note:

This volume has been compiled from my notebooks and diaries of the period. I have had, in connection with it, a special kind of problem. On the one hand, I have wanted to supply documentation on myself by including material relevant to my emotions and ideas in my youth; and, on the other, not to let myself down by publishing inferior material. My poetry comes under the latter head. My only advice to the reader is to skip any verse that he sees coming. Another warning that I ought to give the reader is that my reports are probably to some extent unfair, because it is always easier to tell about the ineptitudes and absurdities of other people than it is about similar occurrences on the part of oneself. The reader should make allowances for this and not allow me to give the impression that everyone else was gauche or ridiculous. It is difficulteven in a novel that is told in the first personto put oneself in the wrong. The proper names are sometimes substitutions. The book will be more easily understood if one has read