Staying Power

With the publication of The Sixties, the fifth consecutive compilation of Edmund Wilson’s journals, the author takes his place as one of the most thoroughly self-documented of American literary figures. This last volume, which begins in 1960 and ends with Wilson’s death in 1972, runs to over nine hundred pages. One might well ask: how much is too much? And one might fairly answer, without slighting the critic or his reputation: this much is enough.

To say this is to pay Wilson a backhanded compliment. It is to acknowledge that even at his most diaristic, his most ephemeral, he repays reading. For the Wilson we encounter is not Wilson the legendary reader and critic or Wilson the novelist and would-be playwright....