Have you ever passed by the old stone house where Edmund Wilson used to live up in Talcottville? The house sits there , solid and implacable — like Wilson's literary opinions — a stone monument to lives lived and a past that seems tangible and rich, but just out of reach ... unless you were to open one of Wilson's many books and especially if you were to open his memoir, "Upstate" , which is his homage to rural New York, wherein Wilson reveals a frustrated relationship with the countryside. It is a love/hate relationship - but mostly love ... much like Wilson's relationship with literature. For that relationship as it existed between 1950 and 1965, "The Bit Between My Teeth" reveals much.