Notebook: Edmund Wilson and the Sea Slugs
Howe, Irving
There are ways in which Patriotic Gore* is a masterpiece. As an evocation of the literary and intellectual figures whose experience was shaped by the Civil War, the book is Plutarchian in its...
...I am not saying that the falseness of much Northern writing had no consequence: it had a great deal to do with allowing the former slaves to sink back into semi-serfdom...
...but he was caught up, as he had to be, in the moral shame of the South...
...it is a desire both understandable and necessary in a time of chaos...
...And despite his contempt for Southern apologetics, he finds himself expressing admiration for Alexander Stephens, the Confederate Vice President who saw the Southern cause as a crusade against federalist centralization and in behalf of that crusade repeatedly embarrassed Jefferson Davis...
...Yet are his discoveries here quite so novel as he seems to suppose...
...and the future doomed to a nightmare-repetition of the past...
...Though contemptuous of the conventional Southern apologists and by temperament and belief himself a man of the North, Wilson bears down hardest on the claims for Northern idealism...
...As an evocation of the literary and intellectual figures whose experience was shaped by the Civil War, the book is Plutarchian in its vividness...
...Claiming to encircle the whole of behavior, it fails to discriminate among the many kinds...
...veiled by moral phrases...
...One need not cling to theories of inevitable progress in history to find purpose and direction, morals and sentiments, ideas and ideals, all contributing to the outcome of events and all a good deal more than mere disguises for the urge to power...
...Each to his own wonderings...
...Yet he can write, astonishingly, that "there are moments when one may wonder today —as one's living becomes more and more hampered by the exactions of centralized bureaucracies—whether it may not be true, as Alexander Stephens said, that the cause of the South is the cause of us all...
...it vibrates with the passions of a supreme national crisis...
...What follows, then, is not a review of Patriotic Gore but a note about its introduction...
...But the comparison with the sea slug is too grandiose, too monolithic, too apocalyptic...
...We are, like the Russians, being spied upon by an extensive secret police, whose salaries we are required to pay, as we are required to pay, also, the salaries of another corps of secret agents who are infiltrating foreign countries...
...The sincerity or duplicity of Northern claims was not a decisive factor in regard to at least one major outcome of the Civil War: Northern politicians may have been hypocritical and Northern publicists self-righteous, but the slaves were freed...
...11 The complexity of human events, either in the American past or else where, can hardly be grasped by anyone seriously adhering to such notions...
...815 pp...
...After all, hasn't that repeatedly been the lesson of Edmund Wilson's own career...
...He is not of course pro-Southern...
...He fears the centralization of the bureaucratic state, and takes toward it an attitude of hostility such as, he implies, might have won the approval * Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War, by Edmund Wilson...
...He speaks of "the myth that [the North] was fighting to free the slaves," a myth that "supplied the militant Union North with the rabble-rousing moral issue which is necessary in every modern war to make the conflict appear as a melodrama...
...The Civil War did mark the victory of modern capitalism and let loose those tendencies toward a centralized state which Wilson deplores...
...He dislikes its cheap-jack commercialism, its frantic vulgarity, its ingrained deceit...
...Wilson's analogy with the sea slugs has great emotional force, releasing as it does a wish to be done with the whole bloody mess...
...III Once into the heart of his book, Wilson quite forgets the sea slugs and becomes embroiled with the ideological disputes of his protagonists...
...Now, it is from this perspective of disenchantment that Wilson approaches the Civil War...
...But my interest here is with more than his critical or historical method: for the kind of disgust that motivates Wilson's reflections upon American history is often shared by people who find themselves disenchanted with the Cold War and who turn therefore to a kind of absolutist emotional radicalism, a radicalism without or even against politics, a radicalism of nausea...
...that the Northern armies were often brutal...
...that important Southern figures were humane gentlemen fastidious about trading in black flesh...
...Whether the Civil War was inevitable is a problem to be avoided here, since it is so hard to formulate, let alone solve...
...and as a represents a major turning in the result, the war must be regarded as moral development of the United more than a mere struggle for power States...
...Wilson, in his revulsion from Northern cant and his disgust with the evolution of Northern society, leans over backward in writing about the South...
...Now, the wars fought by human beings are stimulated as a rule primarily by the same instincts as the voracity of the sea slug...
...There is more to Wilson's discounting of ideology...
...Alexander Stephens was obviously a man of probity and intellectual attainments...
...Oxford University Press...
...And while all this expenditure is going for the purpose of sustaining the United States as a more and more unpopular world power, as few funds as possible are being supplied to educate and civilize the Americans themselves...
...though I must confess that while recent years have led me to wonder about many things, identifying with the Confederacy has not been one of them...
...When discussing so complex an event as the Civil War—for that matter, the present-day Cold War as well —one must distinguish between a proper skepticism concerning announced political aims and an estimate of the probable consequences...
...his inclination is to dismiss both Northern and Southern statements as mere propaganda and self-delusion...
...of nineteenth-century American intellectuals like Oliver Wendell Holmes in the North and Alexander Stephens in the South, men who were their own masters and lived by standards of public service and stoic virtue...
...Meanwhile, it is an approach to human affairs which creates a special illusion of "realism": for what could seem more tough-minded than treating men as insatiable beasts whose thinking is little more than a cover for appetite...
...He compares the Civil War to other American wars, such as the one against Mexico, that were openly imperialist in character...
...There is a sense, of course, in which the Civil War was a disaster: the sense that all wars are...
...And that leaves little to say, since the problem of history has been not solved but dissolved...
...More usefully, the Civil War can be regarded as a crucial moment in a historical development which is extremely complex and ambiguous, containing elements that promote freedom and others that stifle it...
...He wrote with cogency about "the Demon of Centralization," but as Marius Bewley remarks in an excellent review of Patriotic Gore, he also could write that the Confederacy rested "upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery...
...There can be no evading this central fact...
...If Wilson were to push his reasoning a little further, he would have to go back in time and reject a good deal more of Western history—or, with whatever grimace, he would have to accept the two-sidedness of Western history, with the hope that through intelligence and will men may yet succeed in choosing freedom...
...and one reason Patriotic Gore is so fine a book is that Wilson's critical practice is superior to his theory...
...Wilson's sea slug theory of history implies an answer to the problem of evil and violence, an answer that lies forever ready as a biological constant, an answer that precedes the problem...
...That the North was driven by the pressures of an expanding capitalism and the South by the needs of a besieged slave economy...
...but also, the Civil War brought to an end the system by which one man could own another and therefore, deThe point needs to be added that while the victory of the North did help to speed the growth of the bureaucratic state, it was surely not the source of that growth...
...It is a nausea we all know...
...Isolating the beast-like element in history, it distracts attention from those forces which even as they cause men to act like beasts are nevertheless peculiar to men...
...confronted with another sea slug of an only slightly larger size, it ingurgitates that too...
...is his natural and normal condition . . . Most of us share Wilson's desire to find intellectual ancestors in order to confront American life in the midtwentieth century...
...and besides, he finds most Southern apologetics simply boring...
...I would say that the clash between the two systems in the Civil War could not have been mediated: one or the other side had to win, and rarely in history has this kind of clash been resolved peacefully...
...the idea of states rights which other politicians used as a handy slogan he took seriously...
...Whether the attitudes expressed by Wilson can be called radical is less important than that they convey a criticism of modern society with which many radicals sympathize...
...Nor does it follow that the issue of slavery was a mere propagandistic mirage...
...Yet the fact remains that between North and South there were fundamental differences in social system which vitally affected the destinies spite all the necessary discounts, it of enslaved human beings...
...He puts forth a view of history that might be described as a reductive biological determinism: In a recent Walt Disney film showing life at the bottom of the sea, a primitive organism called a sea slug is seen gobbling up smaller organisms through a large orifice at one end of its body...
...But despite this deflation of Northern war aims, Beard never showed any doubts as to the relative merits of North and South...
...Whoever doubts this need only read Patriotic Gore and follow Wilson's sensitive account of the way thinking men on both sides tried to cope with their experience during the Civil War...
...and who can deny that much of the past, as also the present creeping into the future, can be fitted into the scheme of ingurgitation...
...If men behave like sea slugs, the power of the comparison rests in the idea that they, like the sea slugs, cannot help doing what they do, for as Wilson remarks, they do it "by the same instinct...
...Wilson, however, in his distaste for what he regards as the consequences of Northern victory, will not consider seriously the professed Northern aims...
...the past is a mere horror of ingurgitating voracity...
...it moves from writer to writer, topic to topic, with an ease that is astonishing...
...If this be true, even "as a rule," then political ideas and moral sentiments can play only a trivial role in history...
...Human history can be regarded, easily enough, as a nightmare...
...Yet it does not follow, as Wilson so strongly implies, that the war was an utter disaster without , moral value which set loose that sequence of events leading to bureaucratic centralization...
...Memories of Charles Beard come to mind: the Beard who educated a generation into regarding the Civil War not merely or primarily as a holy crusade to abolish slavery and preserve the union but also as "the Second American Revolution" confirming the power of capitalist economy...
...8.50...
...that many Northern leaders were hostile to the Negroes and some indifferent to the horrors of slavery...
...He is con cerned not merely with the political meaning and cultural reverberations of the war, but also with the chain of causation which has transformed America from a country where republican virtues were once cherished by an austere minority to a country where We Americans whose public officials kept telling us we were living in "the Free World," discovered that we were expected to pay staggering taxes of which it has been estimated that 70 per cent has been going not only for nuclear weapons capable of depopulating whole countries but also for bacteriological and biological ones which made it possible for us to poison the enemy...
...Plunging into his rich materials, he ignores most of what he has said in his introduction...
...Borrowing perhaps from the Marxism to which he was once drawn and of which there remains a sediment in his writing—though a Marxism that in regard to historical (as distinct from literary) problems never achieved a sufficient flexibility in his hands—Wilson sees this monster state of our time, this "Demon of Centralization," as rooted in the triumph of the industrial North...
...he has too richly developed a sense of justice and too keen a sense of the ridiculous to fall into that trap...
...But since all this has already been said by reviewers elsewhere, let me simply join in the praise and proceed to glance at certain problematic assumptions behind Wilson's book...
...He accepts all too readily a good part of the Southern view of the Reconstruction period, even permitting himself a reference to "the premature enfranchisement of the Negroes...
...He was trying to describe an historical event in its full complexity, so that our awareness of the social transformation signalled by the Civil War would lead us to qualify but not eliminate both Northern and Southern claims to moral and ideological purposes...
...that a fundamental clash between two orders of society was often masked by the vocabulary of righteousness...
...Had the South won, they would not have been...
...And in that "realism" there lies, also, a justification for impatience with political nuance and analytic shading: for if men are indeed like sea slugs, then there is no need to discriminate and choose among contending forces, either in 1865 or 1963, and all can be dismissed as ingurgitating organisms, while we unhappy few fall back upon a trench of rectitude, the Holmes's and Stephens' of the twentieth century...
...The truth here is a double truth...
...that it is much too simple to see the Civil War as an unambiguous conflict between good and evil—all this was pressed upon the consciousness of anyone who grew up and read books twenty-five years ago...
...Edmund Wilson is not at home in the modern world...
...It displays to full advantage Wilson's gifts for historical narrative and critical description...
...he comes close to accepting the view that ideology, as Henry Ford once remarked about history, is "the bunk...
...But if we cannot do better than Alexander Stephens, then perhaps we ought to try making it on our own...
...He detests American chauvinism, and looks with a cold eye upon our claims to moral superiority in the Cold War...
Vol. 10 • January 1963 • No. 1
