Now There’s a Fourth

Peter Heinegg’s perceptive review of Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (1/2) reminded me of an incident almost a half-century ago. I grew up a few miles from Talcottville, the upstate New York village where Wilson spent part of each year. As a Princeton undergraduate, I had learned about Wilson and wrote a review of his memoir, A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty for the local daily in Watertown. In the course of the review I referred to his prolific and catholic mind (lowercase c’), but the editor at the paper changed this to Catholic mind (capital C’)a major distortion, to say the least.

When the review appeared, I was off in Army basic training at Fort Dix, N.J. My mother wrote to say that Edmund Wilson called and wants to have dinner with you. I followed up on the invitation instantly on my first furlough home. The two of us Princetonians had a long, convivialvery convivialevening solving the world’s problems: the c problems, not the C ones.

It was for me an extraordinary encounter that ended with Wilson’s jocular pontification: You know, Duffy, there are only three people from upstate New York who’ve ever amounted to anythingyou, me and John Foster Dulles, and I have grave doubts about him. It was nice of Peter Heinegg to bring back this memory.

James H. Duffy