Edmund Wilson: Our Neighbor from Tal-cottville, by Richard Hauer Costa (Syracuse University Press, 173 pp., $11.95). Comparatively few memoirs of Edmund Wilson have appeared in the nine years since his death—Alfred Kazin, Wilfrid Sheed, and Frederick Exley having weighed in with perhaps the most notable ones to appear between hard covers so far —and thus Richard Hauer Costa’s Edmund Wilson: Our Neighbor from Tal-cottville, despite certain glaring weaknesses, serves as a useful addition to a slender shelf. Costa, a newspaperman turned academic, taught English at Utica College while Wilson was summering in the nearby town of Talcottville, and was friendly with Wilson throughout the last decade of the critic’s life. The Wilson he pictures in this book was a far mellower individual than the Wilson of, say, Kazin’s New York Jew—not to mention the “Wilson” of Anais Nin’s diary or Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life—and must have been rather a prickly delight to have known. Such quotidian details as the grand panjandrum’s love of chocolate sundaes, Ravel’s “Boléro,” and new movies (he saw The French Connection the night before he died) add a humanizing touch to our knowledge of an admittedly difficult character. On the debit side, Costa’s prose is graceless, his approach is anything but self-effacing, and there is an air of pedantry about putting four afterwords and 11 pages of footnotes in a conversational memoir; evidently the gracious, artistic touch of a reminiscence like Behrman’s Portrait of Max is a lost art. Still, Edmund Wilson: Our Neighbor from Talcottville is interesting enough to outweigh its faults, and anyone wishing to know more about the later years of America’s greatest critic-journalist will want to read it. TERRY TEACHOUT
Unlikely Heroes, by Jack Bass (Simon and Schuster, 352 pp., $14.95). The dust-jacket calls this a “dramatic story,” and it is. It is an account by a seasoned Southern newsman of the indefatigable liberal judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals who implemented Brown v. Board of Education in the Deep South after the “deliberate speed” decree of 1955. Just what the impact of the Brown decision would have been in the South without judges like Richard T. Rives, Elbert Tuttle, and John Minor Wisdom is, of course, uncertain. But, as Bass points out, Judge John Parker of the Fourth Circuit had held in Briggs v. Elliot (1955) that Brown required only “freedom of choice,” not an end to a dual system of public education. Moreover, federal district judges like Harold Cox and Ben Cameron of Mississippi were so hostile to Brown that they simply refused to apply it, thus placing themselves at the service of those who called for “massive resistance” to the Court’s ruling. Judge Cameron, in fact, actually denounced both the Brown decision and the Fifth Circuit liberals in a white-hot footnote to a dissenting opinion in a 1963 school case, and Bass’s account of the attack and the ensuing crisis is perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book. There is, to be sure, much more: the extraordinary story of Skelly Wright’s confrontation with the sovereign state of Louisiana over the desegregation of New Orleans schools (Wright finally enjoined the state legislature); the long and tortuous course of the contempt case against Ross Barnett and Paul Johnson which grew out of the Ole Miss crisis; and the overthrow of “freedom of choice” with the Jefferson County case in 1966, the high-water mark of Fifth Circuit activism. All in all, Unlikely Heroes, though threadbare in spots, is timely and informative, a useful companion to The Transformation of Southern Politics, which Bass co-authored with Walter De Vries in 1976. JACK CHATFIELD
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