The Last Empire Read Free

Hugo Guiler, is editing a film. “What about?” asks Wilson. “Me,” she replies. Then
    she leaned down and put her cheek against mine. She told me that she would send me the first volume of the diary—in which, I believe, I don’t appear. . . . I don’t know how much her reconciliation and the favorable picture of me may have been due to an eye to publicity on the publication of the diary. . . . She gave me a copy of her last book,
Collages
, and told me it was her first “funny” book. It is actually not much different from her others: stories about exquisite women told by an exquisite woman.
    Later Wilson reads her account of him: “she found me aggressive, arrogant, authoritative, like a Dutch burgher in a Dutch painting, and with shoes that were too big. She had become frightened of me and had had to escape. . . . I made her correct a few details about Mary [McCarthy] and a few characteristic inaccuracies. She had said that I had given her a set of Emily Brontë—as if there could be such a thing, actually it was Jane Austen—and she had been offended and sent it back—which was not true, she had kept it.”
    The relationship between Wilson and Elena, his wife, is occasionally stormy: she prefers her Wellfleet garden and Manhattan to rough Talcottville. Wilson’s description of a dinner at the Kennedy White House shows him at his journalistic best and Elena, his handsome German-Russian fourth wife, at her most grand. Wilson’s cold eye analyzes her, too. “I had never before been with her anywhere remotely resembling a court, and wasn’t prepared for her stiffening attitude. The first sign of this was her ‘squeamishness,’ as she calls it—this Russian groping for
brezglivost
. . . in the presence of Tennessee Williams—after all he had been in our house at Wellfleet,” but, as they stood in line behind Williams, Elena tells Wilson in Russian that she “feels such physical repulsion that she . . . cannot stand to be near him.” One would like to think that this was due to his drunkenness.
    James Baldwin, as writer and as a black, appeals to both of them. He makes a successful visit to Talcottville. Wilson thought him “one of the best writers that we have,” though “when Elena left the table to go into the kitchen, he turned on his adjectival ‘fucking’ like the people in his novel. . . . I have been wondering whether ordinary people really talked to one another in that way now. I reflected, after seeing later in New York Albee’s play
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
, whether most of the dirty language in fiction and on stage didn’t occur in the work of homosexuals? Albee, Tennessee Williams, Isherwood, Baldwin, Genet, and the beatniks Ginsberg and Burroughs.” Actually, this is off-the-wall. A degree of candor about same-sexuality is the most that these writers have in common. Four-letter words seldom occur in Tennessee’s “poetic” dialogue, nor do they in Isherwood or even in Genet except when he is rendering underworld
argot where such words are a normal part of speech. Actually “fuck” entered the general language as ubiquitous epithet thanks to World War II, in which 13 million Americans served. If Wilson had bothered to read
The Naked and the Dead
or
From Here to Eternity
he would have noted the sea-change in language from Hemingway and Dos Passos to our time. But then he liked to say that he himself was a man of the nineteenth century.
    Wilson writes apropos Elena’s “theory that Jews are bitterly jealous of the attention that Baldwin and others are directing towards the Negroes”:
    I did not take this seriously at first, but I now think there’s something in it: Podhoretz’s article in
Commentary
about his having been persecuted in his childhood by the Negroes, Lillian Hellman’s play with its white boy who champions the Negroes, then is robbed by the Negro to whom he has been making an impassioned speech. Elena’s conversation . . . with the