The Memoirs of Hecate County [Paperback]

Edmund Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 1995

A favorite among his own books, Edmund Wilson's erotic and devestating portrait of the upper middle class still holds up today as a corrosive indictment of the adultery and intellectual posturing that lie at the heart of suburban America.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Collection of six loosely connected short stories by Edmund Wilson, first published in 1946. Because of the frankly sexual nature of the story "The Princess with the Golden Hair,"the book was suppressed on obscenity charges until 1959, at which time Wilson published a revised edition. Some of the stories are narrated by an upper-middle-class intellectual recollecting his past sexual relationships and friendships in Manhattan and in insular, suburban Hecate county. Each story portrays a different aspect of socially dysfunctional America, such as the vapid ritual of the cocktail hour, bogus artists, and the erosion of intellectual rigor by popular culture. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

Product Details

• Paperback: 411 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 30, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374524327
• ISBN-13: 978-0374524326
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,798,398 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Critic as Writer, January 21, 2004

By 

Drew Hunkins (Madison, WI United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Memoirs of Hecate County (Paperback)

"I took to walking in the evenings on Fourteenth Street, which had a certain animation and variety. I got to like the big-hipped cat-faced women of the photographs shown as lures out in front of the burlesque show; the announcements of moving picture palaces bejeweled with paste-bright lights; the little music shops that had radios blasted into the street." That of course is Wilson describing a slice of Manhattan during the Depression Era from his magnificent novel, Princess With the Golden Hair, which is two-hundred pages of brilliance. Vivid and stylized descriptions of 30s New York are sprinkled throughout what Wilson himself has remarked is his personal favorite of all his books. Memoirs of Hecate County consists of six completely separate stories, five of which are moderately good at best, it's Princess With the Golden Hair that carries the day.

The dialogue between him and Imogen (the upperclass woman he's having an affair with) and him and Anna (the poor woman he's simultaneously scheduling assignations) is fantastically written. At one point he remarks to Imogen that she's a beauty yet doesn't act like it. Beauties, he explains, expect to be admired and courted. She, the suburban philistine, at one point has enough honesty to remark that if he got to know her he wouldn't like her. Meanwhile, in another passage Anna concludes that poor people can't love their mothers the way other girls do because their mothers aren't able to look after them, and physically abuse them. It's this constant juxtaposition running the length of the book which makes for fascinating reading. He jumps back and forth from Imogen to Anna -- two starkly different worlds for which he somewhat uncomfortably has a foot ensconced in each. On another occasion he reflects to himself how Imogen's peers would react to the going-ons in Anna's life, the thought of their incredulous responses is almost comical.

With a deft hand Wilson incorporates into his novel such topics as class stratification and the unwritten and unseen barriers separating the well-to-do from the poor. Towards the end he finally ventures to Anna's Brooklyn 'hood and is slapped in the face with what it truly means to be poor. He later becomes convinced America's rich do indeed constitute a bourgeoisie, and that Anna's proletariat world is the base on which everything rests, including Imogen's superficial reality. He concludes on a somber note lamenting how he will never have Anna again.

Included in Memoirs is an afterword by Updike who makes two extremely pertinent points: 1.) It was Wilson's conscious intent to bring Euro sexual realism into American fiction for the first time, and 2.) Memoirs, specifically Princess With the Golden Hair, was at the time an intelligent attempt by an American male to dramatize sexual behavior as a function of personality. Also included in the afterword is a quite interesting Q&A with intellectual heavyweight, Lionel Trilling, which took place during Memoirs' obscenity hearing.

Princess With the Golden Hair works on a number of levels. The cornerstone being that it contrasts two completely different worlds in the eyes of an intelligent critic. Judging by Memoirs, Wilson's foray into literature is an easy success, and an insightful look into 1930's mores.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Ascerbic and Incisive, January 3, 2004

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frumiousb "frumiousb" (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Memoirs of Hecate County (Paperback)

I had recently read and loved _To the Finland Station_, Wilson's great non-fiction work treating the history of revolutionary thought in Europe. I had wanted to read something else of his and decided to read MoHC largely because of its infamous reputation.

(For those who don't know, MoHC was the subject of one of the pivotal battles over obscenity in literature. Although tame by today's standards, it was too frank about sexuality to get past the censors of the time. The Supreme Court upheld Doubleday's conviction for publishing the book.)

I really really liked Memoirs. It should be viewed as more of a collection of six loosely linked short stories than truly as a novel. ("The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles", "Ellen Terhune", "Glimpses of Wilbur Flick", "The Princess with the Golden Hair", "The Milhollands and Their Damned Soul", and "Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn at Home"). The narrator, a kind of educated everyman, uses his participation in the stories to paint portraits of the other characters he encounters.

True to the name of the book, a kind of magic realism swirls through the stories. Ellen Terhune may or may not be a ghost, and publishers may make a pact with the devil. But this is not an uplifting or gentle magic realism. The magic in this book is more of a feeling that people can step off the edge of the map more easily than they realize.

The book reminds me, in a way, of Fitzgerald. Some of the concerns and situations are largely the same. What strikes me the most, however, are how acerbic Wilson makes some of these portraits. I found myself actually wincing at times at how accurately he targeted common human weaknesses and behaviours. There is something rigorous and unforgiving about the narrator's look at life. It is very well-written. I particularly liked the view on relationships exposed in "The Princess With Golden Hair".

As noted, the digression into pages and pages written in French (although it only happens once) is really annoying. For me particularly it was frustrating because my French simply is not up to more than just getting the basic ideas. Still, it is worth putting up with the annoyance to read the book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Memoirs of Hecate County, September 17, 2009

By 

Dr. Damon Labarbera (Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Memoirs of Hecate County (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Wilson was the preeminent literary critic of his day, and advanced the careers of many of the names we associate with belles lettres the first part of the twentieth century. This foray into literature exposed a different talent. A left leaning intellectual, the protagonist explores his mythical Hecate county using modernist effects. The stories are written wryly, at times humorously, at times seriously, with an utter command of the language, in a latinate style. Leftist themes predominate--recall that at this time many intellectuals were enamoured with socialism. Stories involve him breaking class barriers in his romance, or writing about themes that were scandelous in their day. His parodies of the rich and franchised are funny, but nuanced and compassionate at the same time. His writes with gentle shades of grey, and, simply put, there are few nowadays who can write this well. He captures a world of independent intellectuals that does not exist today, moving between different social strata, and his depiction of females is based on a chivalric model, and stories possess, at the same time as displaying some of the novel ideas of the time, a nostolgic glance backward. Most interestingly, he writes of the days when an intellectual could live independently, if poorly, and explore the variegated social world around him. A book that should be part of everyone's literary education. Damon LaBarbera, Ph.D.