Books: Proust of Sheridan Square

I THOUGHT OF DAISY—Edmund Wilson —Scribners ($2.50).

The "I" of this novel enmeshed himself in the Bohemian bedlam of Greenwich Village. There he met two women. Rita was a poetess, incandescent, fitful, tender. They read poetry in Rita's squalid little room until many dawns. But she did not return his love, and when she left the city he sought out Daisy.

A volatile creature whose morals, unlike her golden slippers, were tarnished, she successively made him want to write an ironic short story, a romantic sonnet, an essay damning all literature, a bitter moralistic satire. But at length, with the cooling of his fevers, came wisdom. He realized that it was he, not Daisy, who changed —"my successive conceptions of Daisy had been merely the reflections'in another." Then, demanding only that she be her picturesque, wanton self, he wanted to write little sketches of her—attitudes, intonations, phrases—like the vignettes of Degas.

Author Edmund Wilson admires Marcel Proust, shows it in this, his first novel. The theme that the outward world is shaped by the needs and predilections of the inward mind is Proustian. So is Author Wilson's style, in which emotional complexities are explored in complex sentences. As the sensitive, completely sincere attempt of a metropolitan to wrest form from his muddled environment, the novel is valuable.

Author Wilson, 34, went to Princeton, to France. He has been managing editor of the smartchart Vanity Fair, writes poetry and essays for the New Republic, liberal weekly. Several of his characters are supposedly derived from real people: Rita—Poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay; Daisy—Florence Murray, onetime chorus girl. Others said to be represented: Novelist John Dos Passos; Princeton's genial, erudite Dean Christian Gauss.