The Last Empire Read Free Page A

young Jewish Greek teacher from Brandeis—when Elena asked this young man if he had heard Baldwin’s lecture at Brandeis, he had answered certainly not: he had been to school with Baldwin. The Negroes were inferior, they had never produced anything. Why associate with them, or bother about them? They were making capital out of their sufferings, but the Jews had suffered much more. One does get the impression that the Jews regard themselves as having a monopoly on suffering, and do not want the Negroes to muscle in.
    Wilson’s eye is not only on the great of the world but on those who attract him as well, like Mary Pcolar, who lives in the Talcottville region; she is married with two children and holds various jobs that he describes with Balzacian precision. He is sexually drawn to her but notes his debility in these matters; nothing much happens but then, unlike in the early journals with their sexual graphicness, Wilson seems unable to perform the act to which he had devoted so much time in the past—not to mention so many words; yet, every now and then, oddly there will be a description of a sudden lust for Elena which ends in a successful coupling despite “half-mast” erections.
    I suspect that future literary chronicles will find it odd that the generation of Wilson and Miller and Williams and McCarthy—names more or less taken at random—should have felt duty-bound to tell us at length exactly what they did or tried to do in bed. The effect is sometimes bracing, like reading a good description of applied physics, say, but it is never erotic. The thought of Wilson in the act is profoundly depressing. D. H. Lawrence—first in this field?—is not much better in his fictive renderings. On the other hand James Boswell delights us with his drunken swoops on complaisant chambermaids, and his poxy member takes on a plangent life of its own: one responds to its rises and falls as one never does to the clinical Wilson’s plumbing.
    Wilson enjoys Auden’s company; Auden’s unremitting pedantry matches his own. When they met it was to exchange lectures until, with alcohol, Wilson would start barking and Auden mumbling and wheezing.
    Wystan tends nowadays to plug with me that we both belong to the professional middle class, who are the pillars of civilization. There was, he thought, no distinction [in the United States] between professional people and those in trade. . . . I said that when I was in college, there
had
been a marked distinction and this surprised him. He asked me whether it wasn’t true that I never felt myself inferior to anybody. I told him that in my youth I had rather resented the millionaires. I think that he himself had actually resented being looked down upon as a doctor’s son. . . . He said that he
had
regretted not having been sent to Eton.
    Auden complains to Wilson that critics never note his mastery of the technicalities of verse.
    For example, nobody had mentioned in writing about his last book that it contained a poem in stanzas. I said that I thought William Carlos Williams had ruined American poetry by leading most of the poets to give up verse altogether and lapse into “shredded prose.” He said he didn’t care about the early Williams but that he had learned something from the later Williams. I said I couldn’t see any influence. “It’s there.” “What do you mean?” “Technically.” “How?” “Length of lines.” I still don’t know what he meant.
    Glumly Wilson notes, “The last lusts gutter out.” He concludes man-woman sex is nothing to fuss about. “Yet homosexuals don’t seem to have flowered and borne fruit, don’t seem to have fully matured. Auden with his appetite for Tolkien.” Surely, Auden’s poetry is . . . well, one of the fine mature fruits of this century while a liking for Tolkien can be philological as well as infantile.
    What Wilson maintains to the end is a clear eye for what is in front of him, whether a text or a person. Great