Final Run on the Edmund Wilson Tour Bus : THE SIXTIES: The Last Journal, 1960-1972, <i> By Edmund Wilson / Edited and with an introduction by Lewis M. Dabney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $35; 882 pp.)</i>

“The moon has lost its personality,” Edmund Wilson wrote in the fifth and final volume of his journals, when he was in his ‘70s. He felt lonely and used up; travel, discovery and insight had lost their edge. He drank a pint of whiskey a day, suffered from angina and feared death. He recounts a dream in his customary detail; historian and critic of his sleep as well as his wakefulness. He was, he tells us, a corpse on an ironing-board. It was not the indignity that troubled him but: “Now that I was dead I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

The world was Wilson’s oyster. It was not that he possessed it; he was often irascibly ajar with his times, never more than in the present volume when he comes upon Elena, his wife, and his daughter, Helen, watching the Oscars on TV. He doesn’t make a point of it, but it is as if Martians had pitched a tent in his yard.

In any event, you don’t possess an oyster; you gobble it. His was an untamed voracity; he vacuumed up ideas, books, women, the events and personages of his era--with himself as a principal event and personage--and produced a range of writing that makes it impossible simply to call him a critic. He always was a critic, though, whether he wrote about literature, history or archeology, engaged in polemics or reportage, attempted poetry and fiction or filled his journals.

He tasted everything as it went down, and not only did he judge it, as critics do, but he fitted it into a sensible universe shaped just like Wilson himself. This is also what a few critics do; except that Wilson’s world was enormous. So was his ego; so were the holes in it, which is why we get his three-page dreams and why they are outrageously interesting. All this tended to intimidate the fiction and poetry, but it is the marrow of his journals.

“The Sixties” begin in 1961 after a gap of a year and a half, and they end in 1972, a week before Wilson died of a stroke in his house in Talcottville, N.Y. They cover the period when he finished “Patriotic Gore,” wrote “The Dead Sea Scrolls” and “Upstate” and a number of other works, taught at Harvard, and traveled to Canada, Europe and Jerusalem. They are edited by Lewis M. Dabney with useful footnotes, and biographical notes at the end for the more than 300 people mentioned. Dabney writes a cogent introduction setting out the context of Wilson’s last years; to judge by it, the biography he is working on should be a good one.

Two main currents emerge from the hundreds of entries. One is the gradual dulling of appetite. Wilson senses it and rages against it, providing some of the journals’ finest passages. “I sometimes lately had the impression that my appearance and personality have almost entirely disappeared, and that there is little but my books marching through me,” he writes. And later: “I tend to think that human works are futile because the people who create them must die. Why go to so much trouble, expend so much energy and thought and taste when we are so perishable ourselves and even the things we construct to outlast us may in the end be perishable, too.”

Often, though, the dulling of his passion to engage dulls the book. A long trip to Europe and another to Canada seem mostly dutiful. Wilson only catches fire when he writes about himself. For decades he incorporated the wide world into himself. Now he travels at a distance, a passenger behind a glass window on the Edmund Wilson Tour bus.

But for most of the time Wilson is at home, either in Upstate New York or on Cape Cod. And here, if the volcano is cooling, it is doing so very gradually. Over and over there are bursts of gleefully undampened fire.

He writes of an Auden poetry reading. The poet wore a hat, which he repeatedly doffed and replaced. Hat off signaled a stanza in italics; hat on, in regular type. There is an unflattering portrait of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. taking a little too much pleasure in his role as Kennedy’s link to the intelligentsia. At one presidential reception, Wilson writes, Schlesinger rather fatuously asked Igor Stravinsky, who had had a few drinks, how it felt to be in the White House. “It feels . . . droonk!” Stravinsky replied.

He records a conversation with a visiting Russian writer who came with a closely attached minder. Boorishly, Wilson challenged him about literary censorship. With grace and point, the Russian suggested that Wilson imagine himself visiting Russia with his wife, and being asked in her presence what he thought of Russian women. He has an ear for a distinctive phrase, even when it bests him. He also has an ear for the gloriously absurd. He overhears a Montreal playgoer remark at Richard II: “Shakespeare is admirable, particularly in French.”

He can, of course, deliver a stinging phrase himself. After Tom Wolfe wrote a celebrated attack on the New Yorker--it was a kind of club for Wilson--he called him “a smart-aleck jellybean.” Nothing subtle there, except that jellybean does seem to capture Wolfe’s sartorial turnout.

Reaching back to his 20s, he recalls Edna St. Vincent Millay, partner in his first full sexual encounter, telling him: “I know just how you feel. It was here, it was beautiful, and now it’s gone.” He makes friends with Mike Nichols--he calls him Michael--and asks Elaine May out to dinner. She reminds him of Mary McCarthy, his third wife, and he notes that “she seems likely to be rough going.”

There is the record of various sexual encounters, ranging from a smooching session with his Talcottville neighbor and helper, Mary Pcolar, to partly successful intercourse at the Princeton Club with someone who clearly must be better known, since he calls her “O.” His years and health cooled his performance, though not his preoccupation. Partly involved with his dentist’s wife, he has to wonder whether at his age a dentist is not more valuable than an affair. On the other hand, he writes of a physical passion for his wife that lasted well into his 70s, and of making love to her whenever his angina permitted.

The book’s richest portrait emerges from his entries about Elena. It was a stormy and loving relationship. He wanted it to be more loving; she did not want to be obliterated. She maintained a quiet distance along with her love; a manner that stemmed, perhaps, from her European background. He raged and made scenes. He was bitter that she wouldn’t see him out the door each morning when he taught at Harvard and make sure that he had the right books. Once he smashed her typewriter, yet he never went beyond a certain point. The point is wonderfully described.

After a long quarrel about her reluctance to come to Talcottville--they wintered in Wellfleet and she spent most of the summer there as well--and her failure to cosset him sufficiently, he threw a copy of “Scrutiny” at her. She stormed upstairs, and when she came down to say good night: “I threw at her another magazine, a longer and thinner one.” “This is the abyss,” she declared; packed, and left for Wellfleet. There was no question but that, with scenes and separations, they would always stay together. He missed her painfully when she was away and when he traveled alone, he kept quoting her to others. For a man of letters, it was a supreme fidelity.