The Memoirs of Hecate County

by Edmund Wilson

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.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Classics, American, Banned Books, The United States Of America, Literary Fiction

411 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1942

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database. See also physicist Edmund Wilson.

Edmund Wilson Jr. was a towering figure in 20th-century American literary criticism, known for his expansive intellect, stylistic clarity, and commitment to serious literary and political engagement. Over a prolific career, Wilson wrote for Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, shaping the critical conversation on literature, politics, and culture. His major critical works—such as Axel's Castle and Patriotic Gore—combined literary analysis with historical insight, and he ventured boldly into subjects typically reserved for academic specialists, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, Native American cultures, and the American Civil War.
Wilson was also the author of fiction, memoirs, and plays, though his influence rested most strongly on his literary essays and political writing. He was instrumental in promoting the reputations of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, and many others. Despite his friendships with several of these authors, his criticism could be unflinching, even scathing—as seen in his public dismissal of H. P. Lovecraft and J. R. R. Tolkien. His combative literary style often drew attention, and his exacting standards for writing, along with his distaste for popular or commercial literature, placed him in a tradition of high-minded literary seriousness.
Beyond the realm of letters, Wilson was politically active, aligning himself at times with socialist ideals and vocally opposing Cold War policies and the Vietnam War. His principled refusal to pay income tax in protest of U.S. militarization led to a legal battle and a widely read protest book.
Wilson was married four times and had several significant personal and intellectual relationships, including with Fitzgerald and Nabokov. He also advocated for the preservation and celebration of American literary heritage, a vision realized in the creation of the Library of America after his death. For his contributions to American letters, Wilson received multiple honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His legacy endures through his extensive body of work, which remains a touchstone for literary scholars and general readers alike.

Reviews

[Tony]

There is a 200-page story - The Princess with the Golden Hair - which dominates this collection. The first-person narrator writes books about Art, and seems to do well enough at it to not feel the hardships of the Great Depression. At least, he can seemingly buy all the bootlegged liquor he wants, which is a lot. He talks of Love, but it is Sex he seeks. He meets Imogen - the eponymous golden-haired Princess - and becomes consumed with getting her in bed. She seems unopposed to that, but puts him off because she is uncommonly busy being a rich wife. In the meantime, the narrator finds a dance-hall girl, Anna, and beds her instead, even though she too is married and even after she gives him what used to be called a social disease. The author does little to disguise that he is really talking about Capitalism and the Proletariat. But it is the Sex which got this book deemed obscene and banned for decades. Such were the quaint 50's.

The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles was more fun and maybe more pointless but the other stories are already disappearing like a regretful Etch-a-Sketch drawing.

I didn't read the last story - Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn at Home - because eleven pages were in solid French. Which is just another reason this book wasn't for me.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought a copy as it had been a banned book to see what all the fuss was about, but guess you had to be there back then to find it at all risqué.

First couple of stories were worthy of entry in anthologies. Third one was okay-but-not-great (novella came next, which I'll get to). Last two stories were a satire on the publishing world at that time and what I inferred was a satire on "educated" society; both seemed narrowly focused and condescending to me - what editor thought several abrupt pages in French was a great idea?

The novella was interesting for its secondary characters and author's sense of place; when it focused on the main character and his (married) love interest things took a turn to the yawn: what he saw in her, I didn't. The other girlfriend (there were actually three) was a far more interesting character with her convoluted working-class background. Unfortunately, I did feel as though he were engaging in a bit of voyeurism into her world (slumming).

One thing I only realized later is that Hecate County was not as far upstate as I'd assumed, but what might now be considered exurbs of NYC.

Verdict: Wilson was a good writer, but doesn't stand the test of time well.

[Tim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had been looking forward to reading this book, mostly because Frederick Exley had sung its praises in his writing, and because it is Wilson's favorite among his works. And his works are no minor achievement, including among them some truly brilliant essays and nonfiction. He was perhaps the leading American critic of his time, and a well-known personality. So given that, I have to see this mixed bag of fiction (and possibly fictionalized memoir) as something of a disappointment.

This book contains 5 short stories - some of them fairly long ones, and a short novel. The stories wander thru a range of situations and are quite different from one another. There are a few threads that keep them together, although they don't really seem to be enough. There is the author's cool, refined, intelligent voice, which hints at hidden reserves of passion and humor. There is his tendency, at least from today's perspective, to go on long-windedly after the point has been made. There is also the setting - among the well-to-do of a fictional upstate New York region. But there is so much variation here that the gambit seems unnecessary.

"The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles" is funny and entertaining, and had me wondering if this book was going to be full of this kind of enjoyable stuff - but this was not to be. The most interesting story in the bunch followed: "Ellen Terhune", about a man who goes to visit a female friend, and each time he visits her house, the clock has moved back another decade, and that decade's family situation is then presented to him. This was a terrific literary Twilight Zonesque piece, and made me look forward to more in this vein - but this too was not forthcoming. "Glimpses of Wilbur Flick" is a cross between social criticism and absurd humor, about a rich man whose useless life becomes ever more strange until he becomes an alcoholic magician. "The Milhollands and Their Damned Soul" seems focused on gossip and criticism about the publishing world, and could be of great interest to those who are fascinated with the publishing business of the 1930s and 1940s. "Mr. And Mrs. at Home" is another surreal piece, and at times it is quite mysterious. But it does not have the benefit of a coherent plot and the divergences into French and other languages had me skipping pages to get to the end.

The novella is entitled "The Princess with the Golden Hair". Despite its length, it somehow reads like a very long short story and does not really develop into a novelistic work. This concerns a well-heeled but callow 30ish intellectual who becomes involved with two women. One, the beauty of the title, is the wife of a friend, and the protagonist pursues her with great fervency and slyness for a long, and seemingly hopeless, period. He also becomes involved with a lower class, part-Ukrainian girl. The narrator marvels at the exotic horrors of her rough and tumble life, and tries to help her and love her as much as he can, but the boundaries of class and taste seem to prohibit him from really going for her.

In summary, this is a grab bag of pieces that does contain some interesting writing but did not hold my interest throughout.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 stars for "The Princess With the Golden Hair," a cruelly realistic novella about the "doomed" relationship between a working-class woman and the upper-middle-class man who claims to love her and yet can't conceive of marrying her. (I put the word "doomed" in quotation marks because this decidedly is not a story about fate or star-crossedness; rather, it's a story about socioeconomic pressures and the people who lack the means or the moral courage to stand up to them.) Despite the explicit descriptions of female anatomy that once made this book infamous, "The Princess With the Golden Hair" ultimately has less to do with sexuality than with the flint-hard realities of modern American economics.

3-4 stars each for "The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles" and "Ellen Terhune," two stomach-droppingly effective tales of the supernatural. 1-2 stars each for the remaining short stories in this collection, which consist largely of rather self-indulgent ramblings about cocktail parties frequented by the literati.

[Gu Kun · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read two of the stories in this book, then had enough. The main and longest story, "The princess with the golden hair", is a lot of lenghthy intellectualistic high-brow prattle which does not rise above the level of the cheapest three-penny novel. Mr. Wilson here reveals himself as a man very much in love with himself and a paragon of the pseudo-intellectual "chattering class" that is a product of Old-World classical education. Left me with a feeling of intense gratitude towards those scientists/technicians/engineers/entrepreneurs/businessmen who have rendered true contributions to our quality of life and understanding of everything around us. Edmund Wilson considers this his favorite book...well, no more Edmund Wilson for me.

[Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

This may have been Wilson's favorite among his own books, but it wouldn't be mine. Sometimes I think I'm a bit too trusting of what NYReview Books brings out.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

"But now I even found myself seeing Imogen as the splendid embodiment of a type that I had not supposed I cared for but for which an undeveloped desire must always have been buried in the subsoil of my mind: the type of the American beauty. This ideal, which had figured in my childhood, in the pictures in magazines, as challenging and piquant but chaste, had bloomed later into something more sensual, with arched eyebrows and kiss-provoking lips, with deep eyes which, though still eyes of good fellowship, could be imagined as eyes of passion, and when I returned to my solitary house, so obviously the house of a bachelor, my somber Cezannes and Grecos, my papers and books on the couch, I returned to a projection of Imogen, in that tan jersey that swelled with her breasts and those brown shoes that laced over her ankles--a current style of clothes for the country which in reality she never quite wore, and with those marvelous hypnotic brown eyes that would have glowed for me always at home as they had glowed for me an hour that afternoon at somebody's cocktail party."

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fairly enjoyable, interesting read. The book consists of a series of six inter-related stories, having to do with the goings-on in the life of the central character. First published in 1946, it is one of those rather intriguing works that deal with literature, art, politics, and sexual mores in a manner where all of these things influence each other. This is a book where characters talk about Marxism, and the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and the reading of the Daily Worker, where the central character tries to determine which woman he most desires, based on socioeconomics rather than actual love. My feeling is that there are not many books written about this type of thing anymore, so I was glad to have found a copy of this. It provided interesting insights into the intellectual world of the mid-to-late 1940's.
When initially published, the book was taken to court and deemed "obscene". Those passages which prompted this action and verdict are, in comparison to much of what is published today, not salacious enough to merit the raising of an eyebrow.

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

The main issue with this book is that there is a perfectly terrific novella stuffed in the middle of several increasingly insane short stories. I sort of wish the book was just the novella and his shorter works had been put somewhere else. The narrator is 'unknowable' and thus the short stories could all be narrated by him or by different people; either way they're all douche lords. Generally the book left me feeling that I had to read a whole lot of not-so-terrific drivel to get to the good part (the novella).

Also did this chap hang out with Ayn Rand? The "damned soul" story was like a cliff notes to the Fountainhead with publishing instead of architecture.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this to get some Edmund Wilson under my belt, and because I understood this was his favorite work. In this series of almost unlinked novelettes, I know it was "The Princess with the Golden Hair" that got all the attention at the time and led to a court ruling that the work was obscene, but I hardly remember that piece at all. The one that stuck with me was the drawing-room tension of "The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles." Wilson's stories may be classics, but they're also very pessimistic and misanthropic much of the time.

[nickautomatic · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nabokov loved this book apparently but I ran out of steam about 100 pages from the end. It's a lot of well-to-do Americans from the 1920s having affairs and struggling with creative endeavours and it got a bit same-y after a while. Part of the problem was that the middle story is more-or-less a novel in its own right and when I finished that one it felt like I was done with the book. Deciding to give up was a weight off my shoulders. Despite that it's not a bad book: I just wasn't interested enough to read the last story.

[John Everett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bogged down a bit towards the end with six or so pages of solid French (a fine language, but a bit pretentious as a literary device); a bit like running into Tolstoy's 25-page essay on the motive force of history at the end of War and Peace. Otherwise, pretty darn good.

[Dan Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it, even the eleven-page philosophical cocktail-party monologue in French that was not only too difficult for me to read in French, but which I probably would not have understood had it been in English.

[Paul Jellinek · Rating 3 out of 5]

A risque classic from the 1930's that, despite some bright spots here and there, did not live up to its billing. Overheated and over-rated.

[Bárbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,75.

[Harald · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Princess with the Golden Hair.
The male protagonist has a knack for starting relationships with married women. The reader can speculate why: Do they pose greater challenges or are they rather affairs that are easier to end? In any case, the development of the narrator's long-term relationships with the bourgeois Imogen and the proletarian Anna is depicted with empathy and erotic realism. The action is set in Depression-era New York, including Brooklyn, in the early 1930s.

The story becomes stranger when the relationship with Imogen is interpreted in light of motifs in Renaissance art (the narrator is an art historian), while Anna's situation becomes the subject of Marxist class analysis. This approach becomes more understandable when one learns that this short novel has autobiographical features. Edmund Wilson was a well-known cultural writer and wrote a book about the communist revolution in Russia in 1917. (This review is based on the Norwegian translation of 1973).

[Michael Joe Armijo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Literary FIND that won't be for everyone...

On Christmas Day 2001 I was in San Francisco when I began reading this literary collection of six interrelated novelettes. I learned of the book while reading 'THE SCARLET PROFESSOR--Arvin Newton'. I was anxious to read it because the book was banned in 1947 because of its heatedly debated subject matter of descriptive sex, adultery, venereal disease and a mixture of the upper and lower class values of the time. My dear friend, Gloria Weiner-Freiman-Cohen, would surprise me with the gift of this book. While I was pleasantly surprised the author, Edmund Wilson, has encouraged me to write in my journal again as he did nightly in his 'Wilson's Night Thoughts'--(everyone has NIGHT THOUGHTS, right?). I'm sure that is an interesting book as well. This book is written in a very 'twenties style' of literary competence that I truly love. It just sweeps me back to the beauty of words that are often not used in this manner today. I liked the following lines from the book:
-Right is right and wrong is wrong and you have to choose between them!
-...it's the dead...that give life its price, its importance. You feel them under the ground just lying there and never moving.
-Every work of art is a trick by which the artist manipulates appearances so as to put over the illusion that experience has some sort of harmony and order and to make us forget that it's impossible to pluck billard-balls out of the air. ...he had been spurred by no need to make money.
-The only things that were fresh in the streets were the headlines--new words--on the newsstands, and most of these announced dismal events.
-They didn't worry about their social position because the life that an artist leads is outside all the social positions. The artist makes his own position, which is about the nearest thing you can get to being above the classes.
-He really needs somebody to hold his hand!
-...it was all on the kindergarten level.

[Adobe · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of short stories dusted with ghosts, devils, and the stultifying ambience of 1930s upstate New York. Most of the stories in Memoirs of Hecate County are arranged along the same design: a banal situation is touched by the supernatural, dread begins to seep through the story, and an eerie climax recapitulates the protagonist's central banal dilemma. A woman begins receding through time to justify her birth; a demon leaps in and out of unsuspecting heads; the devil strikes a bargain with a book publisher. Once you've read one of these stories, you know how the rest will go; the central mainspring is always the same. The main exception to this mechanical system is the best story in the collection, "The Princess with the Golden Hair," which follows the narrator's self-absorbed efforts to simultaneously pursue two women. He ultimately attains neither of them, but the experience suffices to liberate him from his arrogance and callousness.

[Panagiotis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Το βιβλίο είναι η μεγαλύτερη και πιο διάσημη νουβέλα μιας συλλογής που λέγεται ''Memoirs of Hecate County''. Αν και είναι μέρος συλλογης μπορει να διαβαστεί αυτόνομα, αν και εμένα ο χαρακτήρας μου κίνησε τη περιέργεια να ψάξω να βρω όλη τη συλλογή. Το βιβλίο μοιάζει με Φιτζέραλντ σαν θεματολογία αλλά στο τρόπο γραφής και στο υφός μου θυμιζε Ντίκενς. Δε θα κρίνω τους ήρωες του βιβλίου, έχουν μια ελαφράδα να λένε τα πιο τρομερά πράγματα αλλά αυτό είναι ο τρόπος της εποχής.Το '20 και το '30 οι άνθρωποι επειδή είχαν βιώσει ήδη ένα πόλεμο που όμοιό του δεν είχαν ξαναδεί ήταν αποφασισμένοι να πεθάνουν διασκεδάζοντας ή αφίπνηση του ήρωα ως προς τη κοινωνική δικαιοσύνη εμάς μπορεί να μας φαίνεται υπερφίαλη αλλά για αυτόν μάλλον παρότι είχε συνείδηση της καταστάσεως και του εαυτού του και της τάξης του ήταν μια αποκάλυψη.

[Diane Secchiaroli · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just finished The Princess with the Golden Hair. Weird ending. At present I will be glad to finish the book.
Finished the book finally. Guess i missed something because I hated the book. Only thing that made sense was Updike's review which did make me think I HAD missed something. Guess I should have looked at the book during the time it was written and not by today's standards.

[Bob Peru · Rating 2 out of 5]

whatever wilson is (and i agree he is probably the foremost ‘man of letters’ of the twentieth century) he is not a novelist.

cheever, updike and o’hara scratch this particular itch way more satisfactorily. and with humor.

[Riley · Rating 2 out of 5]

An author who was allowed to use too many words. Ugh

[Lukas Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this would be a lot dirtier. Disappointing.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

#10 for Back to the Classics Challenge 2016: A classic which has been banned or censored.

I first became aware that this was a "banned book" when I came across the following advertisement in the back of the 1964 Signet paperback of The Group:

MEMOIRS OF HECATE COUNTY by Edmund Wilson
Six stories present the manners and morals of U.S. suburban life in unsparingly satirical prose by one of America's foremost critics. (Not for sale in New York State.) (#T2004 - 75¢)

The story of its banning is told at the beginning of this 1960 New York Times review, published when the book became generally available in the US, though still, at that time, not in New York State.

I'm putting the rest of this review under a spoiler alert. To grapple with its meaning I need to discuss certain plot points which may be considered too revealing for some readers. Note that this section also contains an extended excerpt with explicit sexual content.

The Narrator All the stories are told in the first person; Louis Menand in his introduction claims that the same narrator is common to all. The narrators in 4, 5, and 6 are certainly identical, as they share significant acquaintances and biographical details. The narration of the first 3 stories is detached enough that the narrator could be the same or different in each. There is a certain warping of time in "Ellen Terhune"(2) that makes it seem to exist in a universe with different physical laws than the other stories. However, on the book's penultimate page, the narrator says,

In those days, what with revery and alcohol and art, I carried so much of dreaming into real life and so much of my real life into dreams - as I have sometimes done in telling these stories - that I was not always quite sure which was which.

So we may assume that Hecate County exists as part of "the fields we know" and events that seem inconsistent with that assumption may be chalked up to poetic license, dream, or delusion on the part of the narrator.

The Stories

1. The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles - Set in the 1930s. This story starts out like it's going to be about a man's misguided attempts to control nature, but goes through a surprising number of changes in its 18 pages.

2. Ellen Terhune - Set in the 1920s with flashbacks, which are portrayed as actual time travel, to the late 19th century, 1880s-1890s. The title character is an American composer, in her 40s and recently separated from her conductor husband. In a series of visits to her house, the narrator sees her life and that of her mother in a series of scenes in reverse chronological order; these visits to the past are introduced with the utmost subtlety, and the reader realizes what is happening before the narrator does.

3. Glimpses of Wilbur Flick - Set from the early 1910s, when Wilbur and the narrator are college freshmen, through the late 1930s, when Wilbur and his third wife hold a fund-raiser for Spanish Loyalists. A somewhat satiric look at the life of one of the idle rich. Comic scenes and funny lines such as “Wilbur’s little first wife, who did not seem to be married at the moment and who had evidently got somewhat queerer in whatever way it was she was queer” and “Wilbur’s latest wife, a wiry and fierce little woman, indestructible and inexpugnable as a caraway seed caught in the teeth”. Towards the end of the story, Wilson makes a few comments to underline the connection of Flick's collegiate behavior with events of his later life, a passage which seemed like the literary critic encroaching on the territory of the author of fiction.

With the first three stories, we seemed to be in a collection of tales linked by location, like Dubliners or Winesburg, Ohio. However, with the next story, long enough to constitute a novel, we enter upon a different kind of collection, one in which the narrator becomes a more active participant and his character the lens through which we must interpret events.

4. The Princess with Golden Hair - Set in 1929-31, much of it takes place in New York City rather than Hecate County. A tale of sacred (idealized) and profane love, the former embodied in Imogen Loomis, a married woman with whom the narrator engages in a sort of modern day re-creation of medieval courtly love. Evocations of Guinevere and Isolde, Giorgione and Rossetti, create a romantic atmosphere of past ages reborn. Profane love is embodied in Anna, a working class Ukrainian-American who the narrator meets in a dance hall, also married but separated from her abusive husband. The story is of a kind of moral education, as the narrator learns the shallowness and lack of real depth of the well-traveled Imogen, and the resourcefulness and human warmth of Anna. Nevertheless, he ends remaining with neither one, taking up with, but apparently not marrying Jo, an old flame we are aware of from the beginning, but who has been out of the picture on the West coast for most of the narrative.
The frank portrayal of sex in this story is no doubt the cause of the book being banned. The descriptions are detailed and sensual, but not blatantly erotic, and certainly not pornographic. Here is an extended example, no doubt one of the reasons if not the reason the book was banned. Imogen has come to the narrator's NYC apartment for their first sexual encounter, which has been prearranged (note that Imogen had earlier confessed to the narrator that she sometimes needs to wear an elaborate brace for a recurring back problem due to a childhood injury):

She picked up a small overnight suitcase. “You let me go in here,” she said, and disappeared into the bedroom. When I heard her close the bathroom door, I slipped in and snatched my bathrobe and got into it and hovered in the other room. I waited a long time until I feared I had waited too long; then I softly called out, “Hello!” and she answered from the bedroom, “Hello.” I went in and found her under the covers in a dressing gown of dull rose-red. I put my arms around her and kissed her, and then told her how pretty the dressing gown was. “I just got it – it’s new,” she said. I found to my surprise that she was nude underneath, and I did not at that moment remember that there had ever been a question of a brace. I wondered at her breast. It was perfect; round and white, with a small pink nipple; and it inspired me almost with awe, like an object of luxury and ornament, after Anna’s meager little breasts that seemed scarcely more than cute spots for kisses. “I’m afraid they’re not pretty,” she said. “Oh, yes they are: they’re marvelous – incredibly so!” “That one was spoiled when it was held in too tight at the time I was having a baby. The other one is better.” “But you didn’t have a baby?” “No: the doctor thought I oughtn’t to have one.” “They’re both perfectly lovely!” – I kissed them. It seemed to be true that she doubted her beauty; but this somehow made it harder to praise it. I was actually baffled and embarrassed by a body which surpassed in its symmetry anything I had ever expected. I suppose that, though I had not imagined it, I had been fearing some deformity or at least defect; but, even if I had not, I should hardly have been prepared for a woman who – alone in my experience – did really resemble a Venus. She seemed perfectly developed and proportioned, with no blight from her spinal disease: she was quite straight and had the right kind of roundness. I found that I was expressing admiration of her points as if she were some kind of museum piece, and that she seemed to enjoy being posed in the setting of the fresh rose sheath, as if some frank and unashamed self-complacency coexisted with her morbid self-doubt. “I have too much flesh on my stomach,” she said; and, “I know you don’t approve of stained toenails – but I like them”: she had colored them red. But what struck and astonished me most was that not only were her thighs perfect columns but that all that lay between then was impressively beautiful, too, with an ideal aesthetic value that I had never found there before. The mount was of a classical femininity: round and smooth and plump; the fleece, if not quite golden, was blond and curly and soft; and the portals were a deep tender rose, like the petals of some fleshly flower. And they were doing their feminine work by making things easy for the entrant with a honeysweet sleek profusion that showed I had quite misjudged her in suspecting as I had sometimes done that she was really unresponsive to caresses. She became, in fact, so smooth and open that after a moment I could hardly feel her. Her little bud was so deeply embedded that it was hardly involved in the play, and she made me arrest my movement while she did something special and gentle that did not, however, press on this point, rubbing herself somehow against me – and then consummated, with a self-excited tremor that appeared to me curiously mild for a woman of her positive energy. I went on and had a certain disappointment, for, with the brimming of female fluid, I felt even less sensation; but – gently enough – I came, too.

Perhaps that "honeysweet" is a bit overwritten. For the prudes of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, that whole passage was no doubt too much, but even for the conventionally open-minded, it's possible the narrator's refusal to look away or draw the curtain when contemplating "the mount" went too far. I suppose that some may find the passage erotic, but the banal talk, the narrator's self-consciousness, and the rather unspectacular climax seem to me as meant to undercut readers seeking arousal; there is also that sort of reverse-Pygmalion effect in the middle of the passage where the flesh-and-blood woman seems temporarily transformed into a statue.
I should add that this story also provides a strong evocation of New York City in the 1930s; for the most part with its crowded streets, dance halls, enticing movie palaces, and window shoppers, it is the bustling overpopulated city of Reginald Marsh rather than the empty urban world of loneliness painted by Edward Hopper.

The last two stories deal with the contemporary state of American publishing and its domination by middlebrow tastes. I'm sure not everyone will agree with my understanding of the last story as a kind of pendant to the fifth tale.

5. The Milhollands and Their Damned Soul - Set from the post-Prohibition '30s through the post-war '40s, almost up to the book's original publication date, again set in NYC as much as Hecate County. A tale of literary men, the Milholland brothers who manage a middlebrow literary magazine, The Booklover, and a subscription book club, and Flagler Haynes, their "damned soul" who seems to bear both his own and the Milhollands' failures, a struggling publisher whose few successful ventures the brothers snatch up for their book club and magazine. The subject matter might have served Max Beerbohm in Seven Men. The idea that the Milhollands have a Faustian bargain to maintain their success is played with throughout the story, but seemed to me rather tenuous by the end. The story serves as a sort of cynical history of American publishing during the period it covers, and ends with a comically bungled speech by a radio book critic, the third Milholland brother, on live coast-to-coast TV.
At one point the middle Milholland brother, Jim, becomes the subject of a scandal involving the thinly disguised solicitations for sexual partners which run as classified ads in the back pages of The Booklover. Jim is not only the publisher of the magazine, but is also revealed to be a patron of some of the advertisers. At one point the publication's office is broken into and its files raided by the "Purity League". Wilson did some re-writing of the book before its 1959 republication, so I can't say whether this episode or some of its details were added after Memoirs of Hecate County itself fell afoul of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, or the passage was prophetically present in the original book. Either way, the incident adds a metafictional layer to the narrative.
Translation of the Latin on pg. 333:

Some people produce at will without any stench such rhythmical sounds from their fundament that they appear to be making music even from that quarter.

-Augustine, City of God against the Pagans Loeb Classical Library

6. Mr. and Mrs. Blackburn at Home - Starts in 1934, but the narrative takes some sudden shifts of time and location which may be flash-forwards to the narrator's future, or may equally well be hallucinations or drunken fantasies.
This story seems deliberately constructed to discourage the middlebrow reader. First there is a 12 page monologue in untranslated French, where Mr. Blackburn, an émigré from an undetermined European country, or perhaps the Devil himself on an extended visit to Hecate County, expounds on (I think) the European situation and American history. Then there are those unexplained shifts in time and place: the narrator seems to be speaking to Mrs. Blackburn in her home in Hecate county, but with no transition he then is speaking to his partner (or wife?) Jo at their unbelievably spacious house in California. Several other shifts back-and-forth in time and place occur which may or may not be imaginary, but I am fairly certain that the narrator actually does visit the Southwestern US with Jo on the book's final page.
With these formidable obstacles to the reader's progress to the end of the book, Wilson seems to be saying: Did you think those Philistines I excoriated in the previous story were someone in another state, or perhaps your neighbors who have the collection of garden gnomes? Ah no, I was talking about you, hypocrite lecteur! If you are confused and annoyed by this tale, please leave it unfinished and return to your book-of-the-month or your detective story; your tastes contain too much dross to pass through this refiner's fire.

There are several five star reviews here, so I assume some readers found themselves well suited to meet Wilson's demands. For me, I largely enjoyed the book, but feel I failed the test of this last story. My French is far too inadequate to meet Wilson's demands here, and I did keep wondering "What's really going on?", and "Did that really happen?" I give it four stars for the first five well-made and thought-provoking stories, and, as for the last story, I am pleased to have made it as far as Wilson's aesthetic semi-finals.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this, I had to remind myself that it was first published in 1947 and serves as a sort of ur-Updike collection of stories. Naturally, Updike provided the afterword (originally an essay he wrote in 1980) for the FSG edition published in the mid-'90s.

Edmund Wilson is one of those pioneer hetero white male fiction writers of the twentieth century, though arguably less talented than Updike, Cheever, Roth, et al. Memoirs appears to have been literally that: a lightly fictionalized version of Wilson's diaries from the 1920s and '30s. Or at least the central story, also the most notorious story, "The Princess with the Golden Hair," is. But anyway, going in order:

"The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles" is the least of the bunch. A man has a pond, and loves the wild ducks that live there. But the snapping turtles that also live in the pond keep attacking and eating the ducks, so the man launches a losing crusade against the turtles--until an acquaintance convinces him to farm the turtles to sell turtle soup in a can. He gets rich doing so, and the man who convinced him to do so kills him in the end. No doubt a shocking turn of events to readers in the mid-twentieth century, but just a head scratcher from my point of view.

In "Ellen Terhune" our narrator visits the eponymous woman on several occasions, and it eventually becomes evident that the narrator is traveling farther backwards in time with each visit, eventually meeting Ellen's mother when she is pregnant with Ellen. Though the plot turns out to be rather uncanny, the emphasis is on Ellen's character, so as a story it's not too bad.

"Glimpses of Wilbur Flick" is another character study, this one of a man the narrator knew in college and later. Wilbur is painted as a bit of a weirdo who eventually becomes a magician during his search for meaning in life. Also, not too bad.

"The Princess with the Golden Hair" is the longest story at over 200 pages, and details the narrator's love of three or four women, depending on how you count. The first, eponymous woman with the golden hair is Imogen, a married socialite whom the narrator spends much of the story attempting to seduce. While he's doing that, mostly unsuccessfully, he meets Anna (also married, though unhappily), a working girl at a dance hall, and starts spending time with her. There's also the narrator's six-months-a-year girlfriend who spends half her time out in California, and a woman he meets through an obnoxious friend. Anna is the most interesting character of the four of them. She lives in Brooklyn and has a rough home life. This particular story is notorious because Wilson describes having sex with these women, though the descriptions are hardly pornographic. Again, this is ur-Updike, not Updike-prime. But this story describes a different way of living and interacting with people, and I found it hard to empathize with the narrator's plight.

"The Milhollands and Their Damned Soul" is a cynical take on the publishing industry, primarily book clubs and trade publications. I found this one interesting primarily because it contrasts so starkly with my own experience in the publishing industry.

"Mr and Mrs Blackburn at Home" is a kind of "meet the devil" story, similarly uncanny to "Ellen Terhune," more subtle but less focused and therefore less successful than that one, in my opinion.

Overall, this collection is interesting but not groundbreaking. As the stories are taken, no doubt with a liberal dose of fictionalization in many cases, from the author's diaries, I find that my primary takeaway is that Wilson must have been rather intolerable to spend time with. The pontificating while in the company of other men is the kind of thing one enjoys in college but not when speaking with actual adults--at least not in the twenty-first century. I suppose times have changed in the last 80 years.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was a lot of fun notes in this book. Some of the sentences were as long as pages, but were so beautiful written that I couldn't help but read them out loud. The perceptive nature of the narrator was both pretentious and insightful, both describing his subject and himself. Glimpses of Wilbur Flick was a particularly good example, and is a great description of the far-right in the mid 1900s (Impotence and the Desire for Action fueling politics).

There were clear themes about class structure, divided not just between wealth and education, but also social status, gender, and geography. But in a way as if to say that the structures aren't good, and the nature of the structure affects the ability of members to communicate between them. The narrator is kinda Marxist, but has a hard time talking about class to the actual working class for example, because he remains part of the upper class, and people in the West Coast versus the East Coast of the US have different sensibilities and style affecting relationships.

There is a bit of racism and a lot of sexism in the book. It is so blatant and direct that it will make you pause in your reading. It really hurts the stories. I hesitate between whether the writer is sexist or the character is sexist, but I do think the narrator is a bit of stand in for the the writer because they both are about art criticism and Marxism. So that sexism may not just be a character flaw, but a world view.

I still recommend the book for its flowing lyricism, but just be aware that there will be moments when you'll have to put the book down and stare out the window.

[Howard · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a novella + five short stories written around 1942 (pre-war) published 1946. The novella is the centre of set being the reason for the NY banning the book until 1959. The five short stories are interesting, confused and self-indulgent intellectually motivated in my view being linked by a publisher/museum first person narrator (see wiki I can't be bothered to detail them).

The novella 'Princess with the Golden hair" has the narrator fall for the beautiful but married Imogen Loomis but later he gets involved with Ukrainian immigrant, waitress/clubber but also married Anna Lenihan. The ups and downs of the three way desire can get slightly explicit but exposes the underlying human desires and relationships. I found the overall effect rather similar to Henry Miller (also banned of course) both in setting, frank hedonistic style and narration.

As an aside finding an interesting Ukrainian prominent female character (with friends and mother etc) showing east European desires, prejudices, hopes and outlook was quite topical and informative.

In 1945 I wonder why a partner holding her boyfriend's penis to go to sleep was so radical? John Updike's postscript gives some ideas of readers at the time. Other explicit interactions, passages happen but overall today's signs of affection, bannable writing 50 years ago!: truly "the past is a foreign country".

[zunggg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A set of six tales with a common narrator and all situated in New England and New York. I liked the use of fantasy, restrained to the extent that it becomes realistic, mirrors those few moments of genuine oddness that we all seem to experience in our lives. There is magic here, but it's momentary, and leaves the characters guessing and second guessing long after we leave them. "Ellen Terhune" is I guess the most avowedly supernatural story, but its time-shifting spookery is handled so adroitly as to take the reader entirely unawares. I'd locate it between Henry and M.R. James's ghost stories - perhaps closer to Henry. The central piece, "The Princess with the Golden Hair", is quite objectionable in the chauvinism of its narrator and its predictability, but it's soaked in a weird sexual fever (it was banned for a while) that makes you keep reading. My favourite was "Mr. And Mrs. Blackburn at Home", but that's because I can't resist a good literary Satan, and here he speaks excellent French and much good sense. He is as good an Old Nick as I've read.

On the other hand, there is not much depth to these stories. If you don't care for the milieu, or Wilson's or the narrator's style, you will probably detest them. There's nothing groundbreaking about "Memoirs of Hecate County", but I found it surprisingly good. I must read some of his non-fiction.

[— · Rating 3 out of 5]

The original jacket of Hecate County describes it as “the adventures of an egoist among the bedeviled.” And I think that's a good description, but it fails to capture how much of an egoists memoir this is. There are a solid 12 pages in French. The author name drops literary figures like he'd rather be delivering a lecture on modernist storytelling then retelling these stories. And we have to talk about the stories in relation to eachother because they're clearly meant to establish some sort of cohesive character portrait of the narrator, but what that is never really seems clear or distinct. I could go on and on about each story, but honestly they're all just...fine. They neither develop the narrator into a compelling enough individual to want to follow or make the characters in the stories memorable enough to want to revisit. I guess I'd say check it out if you want some mildly funny stories of the exploits of the bourgeoisie, or one or two pensive and thoughtful short reads.

6/10.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars, for the novella-length "Princess with the Golden Hair," a finely etched, affecting account of two ill-fated romantic relationships the narrator pursues over a period of years, one with a psychosomatically disabled socialite and the other with a taxi dancer burdened by her dysfunctional family; "Glimpses of Wilbur Flick," in which the title character squanders his family fortune, then finds his true calling (but no escape from his lousy personality) as a stage magician; and "The Milhollands and Their Damned Soul," about a publishing family whose possibly literal deals with the devil give the narrator (and Wilson) opportunities to air at length various literary grudges and bêtes noires. Don't know what I was expecting from this collection, exactly, but I was for the most part pleasantly surprised.