The Prometheus of American Criticism Michael Weiss Edmund Wilson has been an object of saintly veneration and nostalgia to those old enough to remember when literary critics were arbiters of how people spent their time between meals and work. Who now, in the age of the hatchet job and the shrinking Books section, speaks of ‘permanent criticism,’ the criticism that endures because it ranks as literature itself? The Library of America has just published Wilson’s collected works in an elegant two-volume set spanning the critic’s most productive decades – the 20s, 30s and 40s. Coming a year after Lewis Dabney’s definitive biography, the resurrection of such sorely missed volumes as The Shores of Light, Axel’s Castle and The Wound and the Bow surely qualifies an ‘event’ publication. Now there’s a term the owlish sage of Red Bank would have loathed to no end. It’s a shame, though, that Wilson’s magnificent survey of socialism, To the Finland Station, has been left out of this series because it represents not just the yield of seven years of hard study, for which he learned German and Russian, but also the culmination of one of the lesser examined leitmotifs of his interdisciplinary and breathtaking oeuvre: his political radicalism. Wilson always preferred to think of himself as a journalist rather than a critic; writing for publications such as Vanity Fair, The New Republicand The New Yorker, he reported from the squalid underbelly of the Jazz Age as well the breadlines and courtrooms of the Great Depression, serving witness to many of the formative scandals and uprisings that impelled progressive opinion. Even his classic literary essays on the hierophants of the canon – Proust, Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce – were scarcely free from reference to Marxism, or the materialist conception of history, with which he had a longstanding and complicated relationship. Wilson began a tenuous fellow traveller of Communism and wound up an idiosyncratic left- libertarian, all the while never committing to any faction or party in either his struggle against current or historic injustices. His intellect was keen and rapacious enough prevent his lapse into any kind of ideological or critical dogma, and his slightly cultivated role as the aloof but opinionated observer of the major convulsions of his age, whether in art or revolution, made him one of the most perceptive chroniclers of it. | 74 | WEISS | THE POLITICS OF EDMUND WILSON Dabney is quite right to locate Wilson’s overarching sensibility as Hellenistic, and in deep sympathy with Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy. He always harboured a strong attraction to the Old Testament and Jewish morality. As a neo- classicist, he was an especial fan of the ‘Athens-and-Jerusalem’ tribal offshoot, which informed his later archaeological interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls and impelled him to study Hebrew. More than that, Dabney asserts, ‘his evocation of the shaping of God’s institutions from the things of this world marks the Hebraism that would be liberated when it appeared to him wrapped in the flag of Marx’s scientific socialism.’ Wilson’s sympathy for the underdog, not to say the working class, can be glimpsed in some of his early dispatches from the twenties. Very often his sense of the heroic moulded his conception of the indignities and inequities of American society. For instance, in 1925, he extolled a promising young magician who was the son of a Wisconsin rabbi and went by the stage name Harry Houdini. The illusionist, nee Erich Weiss, had risen up, wrote Wilson – himself a lifelong practitioner of the parlour trick – from ‘the East Side cabarets and dime museums’ and personified ‘the struggle of a superior man to emerge from the commonplaces, the ignominies and the pains of common life, to make for himself a position and a livelihood among his less able fellows at the same time that he learns to perfect himself in the pursuit of his chosen work.’ Houdini was a great debunker of superstition and mysticism, so this Nietzschean panegyric to the hard-knock school of 20th century materialism was not wasted on a mere celebrity figure. It is also worth noting that Wilson was at one time the protégé of H.L. Mencken, of whom it is impossible to imagine a likeminded paean to the Yiddishkeit vaudeville circuits of lower Manhattan. As the learned eminence of the New Republic’s ‘back of the book,’ Wilson spent a good amount of the twenties doing what we’d today call advocacy journalism. One example was his deft prose sketch of the participants in the murder trial of Dorothy Perkins, a seventeen-year-old girl charged in New York with the Chicago-like crime of fatally shooting her male suitor. The presiding judge – viciously lampooned by Wilson, not usually thought of as a proto-feminist – had based his harsh sentence of the minor on the fact that ‘women have done too much killing.’ That might have stoked the fires of any progressive muckraker, but Wilson took to a fiery stanzaic indictment of the entire creative class, which he felt had not done enough to highlight Perkins’ plight. In ‘To a Young Girl Indicted for Murder,’ he intoned: ‘[T]hose praisers of the past, accepters of defeat, / The ghosts of poets – violent against God / no longer in my day.’ Well, it was one way of saying that poetry makes nothing happen. | 75 | Democratiya 12 | Spring 2008 Wilson’s reporting on the more prominent capital murder trial of Sacco and Vanzetti was particularly fascinating, given that, unlike so many of his radical colleagues, he was sceptical of their innocence – a prescient judgment, given the new evidence unearthed about the twin martyrs of the American left. Nevertheless, he was angered by the tendentious state of their prosecution, which he blamed on the chauvinism of an Anglo-Saxon establishment abetted by the Boston Irish. Two immigrants couldn’t get a fair trial in New England, and that was that. When his editor at the New Republic, the celebrated liberal Herbert Croly, author of Progressive Democracy and The Promise of American Life, thanked him for not filtering his indignation through the sieve of class warfare, Wilson regretted that he hadn’t done so. Opposition, in other words, was in his blood. Guilt over his sub-Marxian handling of Sacco and Vanzetti might have led him to draft his famous editorial in 1931, titled ‘An Appeal to Progressives.’ It came at a time when the flapper had given way to the ledge-jumper, and the gravamen of Wilson’s argument was that liberals should ‘take Communism away from the Communists, and without ambiguities.’ How was this to be done? He advocated a policy that was a measure beyond the imminent redistributionism of the New Deal: state ownership of the means of production. (No wonder Freud conceived of the ‘narcissism of the small difference’ the same year the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia). It took Wilson a full decade to become thoroughly disillusioned of the desirability and feasibility of this model, but until then, he remained an enthusiast for the Soviet ‘experiment.’ He had served as a hospital orderly in World War I, and so was well positioned to witness the collapse of parliamentary democracy and capitalism first-hand. It was Wilson’s appreciation of the seductiveness of the ideological alternatives that rose from the pyres of Europe – Fascism and Communism – that gave his literary criticism such exigency. He saw how modernism, of both the reactionary and revolutionary stripes, was the product of what Orwell later termed, in discussing T.S. Eliot’s late poetic decline, ‘the escape from the consciousness of futility.’ Yet Wilson saw through the escapes, too. Here is his critique of Eliot’s For Lancelot Andrewes: Most Americans of the type of Dos Passos and Eliot – that is, sensitive and widely read literary people – have some such agreeable fantasy in which they can allow their minds to take refuge from the perplexities and oppressions about them…With Dos Passos, it is an army of workers, disinterested, | 76 | WEISS | THE POLITICS OF EDMUND WILSON industrious and sturdy, but full of the good-fellowship and gaiety in which the Webster Hall balls nowadays are usually so dismally lacking – if only the American workers were not preoccupied with buying Ford cars and radios, instead of organizing themselves to overthrow the civilization of the bourgeoisie! And in T. S. Eliot’s case, it is a world of seventeenth-century churchmen, who combine the most scrupulous conscience with the ability to write good prose – if it were only not so difficult nowadays for men who are capable of becoming good writers to accept the Apostolic Succession! As it happens, Wilson was not immune from fashioning his own agreeable fantasy about his place in the Republic of Letters. Dos Passos was a close friend who bestowed on him the deserved epithet of ‘Anti-Christ,’ ostensibly to reflect the critic’s thoroughgoing distaste for Christianity – like Byron, whom he profiled repeatedly in the twenties, he had a hard ‘Calvinistic conscience’; like Byron, he fell hard from grace, satisfying appetites literary, intellectual and carnal. But the positive connotation of ‘devil’s advocate’ should also be kept in mind. Wilson’s natural style and sensibility was dry and Johnsonian, but he was self-aware enough to view himself as something of an oddity in the tempestuous epoch in which he lived. Consider this autobiographical verse he drafted in his youth to win the affections of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who went on to take his virginity: He could have been happy in the XVIIth century, Before the Romantic Revival… But now Byron has spoken And the damage has been done; He cannot rest quietly among his books For thirst of dramatizing himself.