Books: Evil in Our Time

MEMOIRS OF HECATE COUNTY—Edmund Wilson—Doubleday ($2.50).

Critic Edmund Wilson’s first book of fiction since I Thought of Daisy (1929) is the first event of the year which can be described as “literary.” For it is more & more unusual for U.S. writers to try to produce literature which is serious without solemnity, entertaining without shallowness, intelligent without owlishness, socially observant without being dogmatically vindictive, morally acute without being mealymouthed.

Among the six stories in this book are a study of the dead hand of the past on a living person; a study of the Manichaean heresy (the notion that the Devil is as powerful as God and that they struggle for supremacy); the galloping putrefaction of American letters; the galloping putrefaction of moral and political values. Author Wilson has also chosen to write literally (and incidentally) about sexual intercourse. As a result, Memoirs of Hecate* County will probably be hailed as an event in gaminess.

Housebroken Suburbanites. Wilson’s chronicle of his mythical county is a series of portraits of the demi-suburbanites who live amphibiously between heavily housebroken country and a U.S. metropolis (New York City). Unlike pudgy Author Wilson, the nameless narrator is a tall, slim analyst of the influence of social and economic conditions on painting. His neighbors and their doings are also imaginary, despite unmistakable glints and graftings of a well-known U.S. critic, a well-known radio commentator, an up & coming publishing house, a famed literary magazine and book club.

One neighbor, an ex-professor of chemistry, egged on by a boozily mischievous advertising man, acts out a cruel, funny little fable of Good & Evil when he banishes the ducks he loves and sublimates the duck-killing turtles he abominates into a best-selling soup. “Turtle soup,” chortles the adman, captioning a pallid portrait of a lady in crinolines, “saved the sweethearts and mothers of a proud and gallant race.” Another neighbor, variously known as Blackburn, Malatesta and Swarzkopf, turns out to be the Devil, and delivers some of Author Wilson’s most envenomed and heartfelt opinions (notably on Stalinism) in a monologue written entirely in French.

All-Fours Romp. The high points in the Memoirs are Mr. Wilson’s soon-to-be-notorious love story, The Princess with the Golden Hair, and The Milhollands and Their Damned Soul. The Milhollands is an uproarious allfours romp through the whole world of U.S. writing, publishing and book-promotion. There is the eager young Yaleman who, after feeling that his “generation” has been “betrayed,” first by T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, then by the Marxists, winds up ballyhooing bellywash on national hookups. There is the Purity League’s investigation of the Booklover when its personal columns sprout a rash of “advertisements by ‘gentlemen of robust constitution’ in search of ‘non-prudish ladies responsive to the new dance rhythms.’ ”

There is the honest, talented writer who has never published a serious book, but priggishly signs his detective stories with a nom de plume. He winds up cadging drinks, clowning out parody first lines of poems, and warming up bedroom scenes in a hack-written best-seller about two U.S. families who take part in every war since the Revolution. (“After all, I was the person who suggested the whole idea of having Nancy Gaylord be the mother of Walt Whitman’s illegitimate child—it’s terrific. He meets her at the Mardi Gras and lays her on a cotton bale—she realizes for the first time that the Yankees are not all as bad as she’d thought.”) The satire is not intended to cut deep, but it is an enlightening and timely tract on current U.S. literature’s peculiar disorders and needs.

Marriage of Heaven & Hell. The Princess with the Golden Hair is a quiet but ambitious attempt to anatomize, through the narrator’s contrasted affairs with two women, the U.S. middle class and the U.S. proletariat. The bourgeois wife, Imogen, is a convincing redigestion, in contemporary terms, of the kind of paralytic romanticism which Flaubert raged at (and suffered from). The proletarian taxi-dancer, Anna, is more vivid and engaging, and the glimpses into her world—a world of incidents like the Polish boarder’s “doing his business and wrapping it up in paper” for Anna to pick up—are the most detached that any writer, left or right, has yet furnished on behalf of the U.S. working class and of its well-wishers. Psychologically, the story is weak in its failure to convince the reader that a man of the narrator’s intelligence could pursue Imogen for two years without suspecting her obvious neurosis. Censors and eager beavers will be satisfied by certain passages which cannot be quoted in a magazine; adult readers may not be. It is possible to respect Edmund Wilson’s intention and attempt without feeling that he has succeeded in what he tried.

Critic Wilson’s purpose is to develop a subtle and ambitious theme of Evil in our times. His observations are not always adequate to his ultrasophisticated posture; hence the posture; sometimes looks a little self-deceived. But such civilized writing and observation are rare in the U.S. nowadays, and on its merits Memoirs of Hecate County is pretty certainly the best contemporary chronicle, so far, of its place and period. Evil is as vivid through the book as a bushful of snakes.

* Pronounced heck-it; the goddess of witchcraft.