January 3, 1960

In Earthquake Country

By ELIZABETH JANEWAY

MEMOIRS OF HECATE COUNTY By Edmund Wilson.

n March, 1946, Edmund Wilson's second book of fiction (aside from drama) was published, well reviewed, and bought by almost 60,000 people. It was called "Memoirs of Hecate County," and it contained, among many other things, several vivid scenes of sexual commerce between men and women, which in part may explain the sales figures. It certainly explains why the Society for the Suppression of Vice brought suit against Doubleday, the then publisher in July, 1946. In November of that year the Court of Special Sessions of New York found against Doubleday (there was a notable dissent by Justice Nathan D. Perlman), and this decision was upheld in two appeals.

The case came finally to the Supreme Court in 1948. Justice Felix Frankfurter disqualified himself (he had talked to the author about the book), and the remaining judges split 4-4, thus leaving the New York Court of Appeals decision in effect. Banned in New York, where its publisher was located, the book ceased to be sold throughout the United States.

In the decade since the case of "Hecate County" has taken on complications reminiscent of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. An English publisher, W. H. Allen, put out substantially the same text in 1951. A shipment here was seized by Customs officers, but eventually cleared, and enterprising bookshops have since that time been willing and able to import copies for sale to those who asked. Now that "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and "Lolita" (women and children first!) have appeared, and not without some small success, "Hecate County" has been reissued too in--all of places!--Boston, under the imprint of L. C. Page. Page, while a Boston corporation, is actually a subsidiary of Farrar, Strauss & Cudahy, who is, however, respecting the cordon sanitaire imposed by the Court in New York, and is printing the book in Pennsylvania and distributing it from Trenton, N.J.

So much for the book's adventures. They create a new context about it, but, of course, they do not change the book itself. A few revisions in face have been made, by Edmund Wilson's own choice, but they are neither extensive nor fundamental. This is basically the same work which appeared in 1946 and which the reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, Ralph Bates, called a good and distinguished book.

It remains one today, retaining its excitement, its style and its penetration. Hecate County is, as it always was, a suburb both of Hell and of New York. In its latter aspect most reviewers have tended to superimpose it on the map of either Westchester or Fairfield County but I have never been sure myself that it does not lie across the Sound, on Long Island, and include the house on West Egg where Jay Gatsby used to stand on summer nights and look at Daisy's light across the bay. But if Hecate County came to Edmund Wilson by inheritance, it doesn't matter. There could be no one better able to re-create F. Scott Fitzgerald's country, no one in whose hands it is safer, than in those of Fitzgerald's own literary executor. And if there are echoes and correspondences here from Gatsby they enrich and are enriched by the author's brooding and creative use of them.

There are other echoes, too, for this is a critic's book of fiction. This is anything but belittlement: Wilson's characters live for and as themselves. They live against a tapestried background of emotions and experiences aroused by other writers because, living, they move within the depths of our culture. The author has himself set a quotation from one of Gogol's ghost stories at the head of the book, intending that the grotesque demons invoke therein should at times peer out from behind one or another of his Hecate County neighbors, wearing them like a mask. Every reader will find other correspondences too. I found myself thinking of Asa M. Stryker, "The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles," in the opening section of the book, as some sort of cousin to Faulkner's Snopes family, and of Ellen Terhune in the second section as at least an acquaintance of ladies remembered from Henry James and Willa Cather. As for the milieu itself, it is earthquake country, given to sudden terrifying slippages into nightmare.

At the same time this is a book which can approach the documentary. What Wilson has done is really very daring (I suppose I must say that I mean this esthetically.) He has put together here, in one book, different kinds of reality--fictional, sociological, philosophic--and he does not hesitate to move back and forth between them. The resulting shift in tone and outlook has two effects. First, it extends the range of the book, which comes at the reader not only from the expected side but (rather like Cinerama) on his exposed flank, catching him into bewildered conviction. Then, once this conviction has been established, the shift to another kind of reality can be exploited to produce a sense of profound disturbance and unease until the reader, invaded by the book, begins to feel with its characters, and they with Dr. Faustus, that "this is Hell, nor am I out of it."

Again this is a critic's approach. Whether Wilson has quite written a novel I am not sure. It is probably both more than a novel--and less. Its noveldom, or novel-ness, depends upon the "I" who relates what seems at first only a collection of stories. Is this "I" sufficiently a character and not merely an observer? Does his represented experience show the development and crisis necessary to fiction? The answer is both Yes and No. It is most affirmative in the best and most moving section of the book, "The Princess With the Golden Hair." And paradoxically, this is also the section where the power of observation of the sociologist and the firm, virile, judgmatical mind of the critic are most apparent. For this is a story that could easily be sentimentalized, but is not.

It is about the hero's concurrent love affairs with two women. One is Imogen, the faraway princess whose world of make-believe is first enchanting, then deceptive and frustrating, then gruesome. The other is Anna, a true-hearted, true-feeling, loving, proletarian girl from Brooklyn. As the hero bumps down through successive stages of disillusionment with Imogen his first vision of Anna as a physical amusement and convenience deepens to a warmth of appreciation that is as close to love as anyone gets in the book. But denizens of Hecate County (where Imogen lives in a fake-Tudor house and Anna never sets foot) are inhibited, or prevented, from loving. Wilson's "I" leaves Anna to go back to a comfortable, undemanding because superficial, relationship with his old mistress, Jo, who is cheerful, amusing and at home wherever she is. This, one feels, is inevitable. But the wealth and weight of the factual observation and of symbolic fictional reality combine to deepen the inevitability to tragedy.

This is so although I do not believe that anyone who was first a writer of fiction would have written this story (or the whole book) quite as Wilson has done, underlining and overemphasizing the fictional symbols of event and character. Yet, in a little while, this heaviness begins not to matter. These are the right symbols. They do carry the weight of emotion which he hangs on them, as well as his philosophic argument. Beneath the trained mind and the technical accomplishment of the critic there exists a writer of fiction who is almost never misled by conscious logic into a misstatement of emotional truth.

There are times when Wilson's insistence on making his point (and his taste for rather Gothic trickery) cause his invention to creak a bit. But this invention is none the less the tool of an admirably clear and powerful mind, a mind that my uninformed judgment has always tended to put in a category with Dr. Johnson's. At any rate, this book was felt and thought and written by a deeply serious and astonishingly gifted man who has held little of himself back from the effort of creating it.

Mrs. Janeway, a novelist and critical essayist, wrote "Daisy Kenyon" and, more recently, "The Third Choice."

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