BOOKS
WILSON AMONG THE RUINS
EUROPE WITHOUT BAEDEKER. Sketches Among the Ruins of ltoly,
Greece, ond Englond. By Edmund Wilson. Doubledoy. $4.00.
The main components of this book are: 1) an extremely
able report on what London, Rome, Milan, Athens were like in the
spring and summer of 1945, just after the end of the war. Mr. Wilson's
sense of the significant detail is quick and precise, sometimes (as in the
way he catches the Roman atmosphere with its peculiar mixture of
felicity and nastiness) amazing. The face he noticed, at a Labourite
meeting, of an elderly Englishwoman, "eyes intent yet staring, and with
a peculiar hungriness and gauntness ... as if she belonged to a quite
distinct human breed from even the poor people of peacetime commu–
nities, to a breed with ravenous eyes that . . . saw only with appetites
that were simple and stringent," is indeed symbolic of postwar Europe;
2) a determination to get back at the British which remains unabated
from the first page of the book to the very last. Mr. Wilson's pursuit of
the British character is so dogged that it can hardly denote real mal–
evolence. In fact, it is fundamentally good humored, a kind of cat-and–
mouse game which looks a bit unfair at times, since it is played mostly
against that ready-made caricature, the British Official; 3) a generous
impulse to take sides with downtrodden people, like the Italians and
the Greeks, against British and (less bitterly, on account of their supposed
innocence) American policies; 4) an utter disgust with humanity in its
present state. A theory of this disgust is sketched in the last chapter of
the book, where we are invited to face "the fact that man is himself
an animal." One should say that, in comparison with Mr. Wilson's
misanthropy, his anglophobia seems quite harmless, a mere irritation at ,
the fact that the British are so snobbish about the rest of us animals;
5) a number of considerations on the future of Western civilization,
most of them hard to discuss since they are carefully kept down to a
conversational level, so that one is made to feel that it might
be
petulant
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