Salad Days

By Christopher Porterfield

THE TWENTIES by EDMUND WILSON 557 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$10.

Posterity's revenge on writers who overshadow it is to turn them into monuments. In the case of Edmund Wilson, the process was well under way two years ago when he died at 77--already muffled in a banner bearing the legend "Distinguished Man of Letters." But here, in The Twenties, Wilson's ghost puts in a timely appearance that should forestall too much veneration--breaking out the gin, putting a record on the Victrola and eagerly looking over every pretty flapper in the room.

During the time chronicled in these notebooks (expertly edited by Leon Edel), Wilson was merely Bunny Wilson, a bright, pompous young writer among other writers in Greenwich Village. He supported himself with work at Vanity Fair, where the staff sometimes played a game with the secretaries called "The Rape of the Sabine Women," and later became an associate editor of the more staid New Republic. By day, he reviewed the best of his contemporaries. After hours, he saw them not quite at their best: E.E. Cummings lying in a bathtub maliciously imitating John Dos Passes' speech impediment; Dorothy Parker surrounded by "the vulgarity of her too much perfume." Even Wilson's Princeton friend Scott Fitzgerald was a "sloppy boor" who got drunk and knocked people unconscious in the lavatory.

Edna St. Vincent Millay aroused both Wilson's intellectual and physical passion to "a blaze of ecstasy." But Millay, who had the same effect on dozens of men, was soon off for Europe. Wilson had to share his farewell embrace on a day bed with another admirer, John Peale Bishop, "I [holding] her lower half and John her upper--with a polite exchange of pleasantries as to which had the better share."

Wilson was more at ease with women below his social and intellectual level. Determinedly throwing off a puritanical upbringing, he tirelessly pursued sexual conquests, grappling in the backs of taxis, making passes in tango palaces. His most satisfying affair was with a woman he later wrote about in Memoirs of Hecate County, a waitress from a Brooklyn slum who had a husband in Sing Sing.

As shown by Wilson's magazine pieces from these years (collected in 1952 in The Shores of Light), he had a tenacious curiosity about virtually everything. This is what makes The Twenties not only a memoir but the remarkable, jagged portrait of an era. Vaudeville, Charles Lindbergh, the significance of D.H. Lawrence's small head, lists of slang, the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, what it felt like to take a fast taxi ride through Manhattan while drunk, other people's family histories, the woman who kept a pet alligator in her bathtub and hypnotized it until it was limp --all are coolly, sometimes gravely considered.

Unglossed with second thoughts or self-justifications, Wilson's impressions sometimes recall the heartless mirth of an otherwise very dissimilar writer of the period, Evelyn Waugh. If friends got divorced, or somebody disappeared, or a girl slit her wrist with the top of a spaghetti can--well, the other revelers could not pause too long over the misfortune lest they lose their grip and go under too. Wilson himself almost did. In 1929 he suffered a nervous breakdown, probably from the cumulative strain of deadlines and tangled romances. While in the sanitorium he became addicted briefly to the drug paraldehyde.

Recovered, Wilson set about "accomplishing work which I had begun to feel was long overdue." The best early result was the superb study of the exquisite Symbolist movement that was to become his first major book, Axel's Castle. ("Living? We'll leave that to the servants," said decadent Count Axel.) This departure exacted its melancholy price. As the decade ended, Wilson was falling away from old companions, from the "outlaw" life of the Village, from youth. The mood was summed up by his favorite cousin Sandy Kimball, a schizophrenic whom Wilson visited in an institution: "Life's all right if you can

Stand it."

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