Goodbye to All That

By Charles Elliot

UPSTATE: RECORDS AND RECOLLECTIONS OF NORTHERN NEW YORK by Edmund Wilson. 386 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $8.95.

On the evidence of his 46th book, America's most famous-and cosmopolitan-man of letters has turned into a local character.

In some ways, this is not surprising. Wilson has always been cantankerous, picking fights with his cultural neighbors (Vladimir Nabokov, for example, over obscure points of Russian prosody) and the Government (a $69,000 misunderstanding with the Internal Revenue Service, after his failure to file tax returns for nine years, erupted into a book-length tirade). When he chooses to talk on any subject, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Iroquois ritual, listeners must simply sit patiently until he stops. Gossip delights him. In recent years he seems to have spent much of his time whittling on 19th century regional fiction and the learning of Hungarian-his sixth language.

The final step in a slow metamorphosis, made clear by Upstate, is Wilson's more or less contented rejection of the great world for a small village-the New York hamlet of Talcottville (pop. 100), north of Utica. His ancestors lived there, he summered there as a boy, and he now owns a handsome old stone house there.

Wilson inherited the house from his mother in 1951. It had been empty for years, but in an excess of ancestral pride, he promptly set about making repairs. He also tried to restore the building's function as a family center, but without much luck: his children preferred Cape Cod. "The croquet set I hoped would occupy [the children]--we always used to play croquet-is still standing by the front door, with nobody ready to set it up."

Despite such disappointments, living in a small town offers some special Wilsonian satisfactions. It is pleasant, he notes among other things, to have the cemetery so close, "where I can look up family dates." Yet his memory of Talcottville as "a clean and trim settlement" soon proves out of date. Some of its houses are "tumbledown" and "squalid," its citizens "ambitionless." Highways are closer and larger. Birch Society posters recommend impeaching Earl Warren. Teen-age motorcyclists ride across the lawn and drink on Wilson's porch, forcing him to scare them away "with a roar and the ancient gun that a Civil War collector in Boonville had offered to buy as a relic."

Wilson devotes a few short chapters to local and family history, which make the reader wish he had gone on to write not a personal chronicle but a full-dress report on upstate New York. There are a few rewarding anecdotes ("This great-aunt, when she found some uncomplimentary entries in her husband's commonplace book, had her marriage bed sawed in half and the two halves made into Empire couches"). There is also an account of the strange religions that flowered in the region 150 years ago. "The common features of several of these religions," he writes, "were the attempts to come to terms with the coexistence of Red Indians; with the second coming of Christ; and with the problem of regulating sex." But like an old man whose sight is going, the great critic prefers to peer close round himself, to take an avuncular interest in pretty Mary Pcolar, the housewife who teaches him Hungarian, to listen to old Albert Grubel tot up local car-crash victims. The brain is still inquisitive, the descriptive skill sure as ever, but the time for exploring seems to be past. #183; Charles Elliot

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.