The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
Edmund Wilson at the Aspen Institute

On June 12, 1968, upon Wilson's receipt of his $30,000 award, he stood at the podium and said:

And I am immenseley gratified that not a penny of the money this institute is awarding me will have to be contributed to the $8-9 billion which are going for this disgraceful war.

Wilson's journal volume The Sixties reproduces a clipped-&-saved NYT article that reported the above.

His entry about the event contains a sour, deadpan and hilarious description of the awards ceremony:

Aspen Award. . . . black tie, Waldorf-astoria, eight o'clock. . . . The 'small dinner' turned out to consist of forty-eight people. . . . They were predominantly big executives and oil millionaires.

Stevenson's wife, on my right, was a stupid and aggressive bore. She began by saying, 'You wrote Finlandia, didn't you?'

I said, 'No: that was written by a Finn.'

TiR's (as always, pointless) research concludes that "Stevenson" here would have been then-president of the institute and former president of Oberlin. His wife was author Eleanor Bumstead Stevenson.

The quite interesting Project 1968 "blog docu-novel" provides a nice encapsulation of some of the world and war-related events in the days that preceded the awards ceremony. Wilson's journals make no bones about his physical deterioration during those years, which could not have helped his mood.



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The journal tome was TiR's goodbye purchase, several weeks ago, prior to the closing/relocation of a used bookstore, during a month that also saw the closings of a another great used bookstore branch in the same city and probably that city's most perfect newsstand. All in all there: an intensely crappy month for the printed word.

posted by TiR at 7:03 AM