Because of his pre-eminence as a critic in America, any work of fiction produced by Edmund Wilson claims serious consideration. "Memoirs of Hecate County" forms a sequel to his "I Thought of Daisy," published in 1929. Just as that volume was a chronicle of Wilson's generation in the twenties, a generation epitomized by his Princeton classmate, F. Scott Fitzgerald, bohemian, leftist, self-consciously intellectual, what Gertrude Stein was to term "a last generation," so "Memoirs of Hecate County" is a continuing study of that generation in the thirties and early forties.

The "sad young man" is now an "egotist among the bedeviled." The furious, intense talk of the Greenwich Village days has been replaced by the caterwauling of women and their sycophantic male companions at Westchester County cocktail parties. One's college friends are now discovered to be boobs and morons. The great dream of the Revolution, the Russian experiment which above everything else gave life a meaning and a significance, is ever, and in the morning after one can get rid of the hangover only by beginning to drink just a little earlier every day.

So much for the surface. Beneath the welter of detail of Hecate County life, beneath the venomous satire, Wilson has contrived a tight little allegory, set up against an inflexibly, moral Puritan standard that is reminiscent of Hawthorne. Although unlike Hawthorne Wilson has kept his story contemporaneous, the forces which compelled both men to allegorize are the same. Cut off from his Puritan heritage by the Romantic amoralism of the Transcendental movement which he distrusted and did not understand, Hawthorne dipped back into the seventeenth century. To Wilson, convinced that Western society is breaking up, appalled by Stalinism, the tensions of his times are intolerable. finding that the times are out of joint, Wilson has, like Hawthorne, discovered in the Puritan method of allegory, with its abstract concept of Evil, the only possible vehicle for his story.

In every one of the six stories which make up the book, Evil is the dominant theme. Wilbur Flick, the poor little rich boy, after running through a couple of wives and a great deal of money, finally sops his conscience by becoming the angel of a minuscule Communist front organization. Ellen Terhune's entire life is oppressed by her guilty sense of the past. The Manichean heresy that God and the Devil are each in control of half the world, a heresy which the New England ministers of the seventeenth century all unwittingly dramatized into the permanent fabric of American thought, captures the soul of Asa Stryker eventually to destroy him.

But again like Hawthorne, Wilson is unable to relate his story to experience. In an already notorious passage in the section entitled "The Princess With the Golden Hair," Wilson describes in fulsome detail the events of an afternoon which his hero spends in bed with a woman. For all its daring detail the episode is lifeless. It is too clinical, too intellectualized-as the protagonist says-"I found that I was expressing admiration of her points as if she were some kind of museum piece." And for Wilson, all the residents of Hecate County are museum pieces, the bedeviled as well as the Devils. The hero's relations with both of the women in his life, Imogene and Anna, remain on a detached level that is cold and heartless. Nowhere does he reveal any pity or sympathy, even for his closest friends. For all its brilliant condemnation of the bewildered inhabitants of twentieth century America, the book damns no one more thoroughly than it does Edmund Wilson. K.S.L.