Books: Memoirs from Wilson Country

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A PRELUDE: LANDSCAPES, CHARACTERS AND CONVERSATIONS FROM THE EARLIER YEARS OF MY LIFE by Edmund Wilson. 278 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.50.

GALAHAD and I THOUGHT OF DAISY by Edmund Wilson. 316 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.50.

When Edmund Wilson was starting out as a $15-a-week reporter on the old New York Evening Sun, an editor rejected his first attempt at an editorial by chiding him: "You don't want to write like Dr. Johnson." The editor was obviously no judge of future men of letters. Today, 51 years and 33 books later, Wilson has in fact become something of a 20th century Samuel Johnson.

Like Johnson, he is utterly professional, prolific and peripatetic. He is first of all a critic (Axel's Castle, Patriotic Gore) who transcends academic specialties with broad, humanistic learning and spirited eclecticism. He is also a journalist and essayist (The Bit Between My Teeth), an intellectual tourist (Europe Without Baedeker), a sociopolitical historian (To the Finland Station), and a fitfully effective poet, playwright and novelist (Memoirs of Hecate County). Through his weighty lucid sentences rumbles a Johnsonian authority whose trenchant insights are alloyed with grumpy good sense, and whose occasional wrongheadedness can be more interesting than many writers' pedestrian rightness.

At 72, Wilson says he has "got to the age now when people like to retell old jokes and anecdotes"—the perfect age, in other words, for his autobiography. A Prelude is the first installment. As readers of The New Yorker found when A Prelude ran this spring, Wilson's memoirs have no narrative line, consist mainly of a string of entries from a journal he began keeping in 1914 "to catch sur le vif things that struck me as significant or interesting." Epigrams, verbal preenings, a lexicon of slang, fugitive thoughts, reading lists, poems, stories—all are spread out like so many glinting shards of experience reclaimed from the time when both he and the century were young.

To help the reader sort these experiences, Wilson intersperses explanations, second thoughts, and pithy portraits of his family and friends. From these, the biographical outlines emerge: childhood in the enlightened Victorian household of a former New Jersey attorney general, a trip to Europe, education at the Hill Preparatory School in Pottstown, Pa., and at Princeton, Army service overseas in World War I.

But after annotating his early jottings, Wilson lets them stand, wisely refraining from trying to cover up their callowness. The medium—Wilson's younger, more romantic and hopeful self—is at least part of the message, which is that the cozy, cultivated world he grew up in "almost ceased to exist" after the war. Returning home from the service in 1919, he felt that "I had never quite believed in that world, that I had never, in fact, quite belonged to it. It now appeared to me too narrowly limited by its governing principles and prejudices." A Prelude is thus not only the scrapbook of a growing writer but also an American echo of Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That—the classic farewell to innocence and youth in the comfortable era before 1914.