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...