Edmund Wilson-And Our Non-Wilsonian Age

...I think that, for a good number of people, the discovery arrived in the mid-1980s, and it came in the form of the argument about a rupture in American intellectual life...

...But the purpose of Patriotic Gore was to turn against it entirely...

...But the people who started out during the Vietnam War or in its aftermath, and who nonetheless took an interest in the kind of writing that Wilson produced, found themselves engaged in a slightly musty enterprise, drawn more to writers of an older generation than to writers of their own age...

...His Marxism was peculiar...

...In the early years of the Great Depression he was attracted to the Communist party, but he turned against the Communists soon enough—warned against them by Dos Passos, who advised him (in a letter from May 1932) to "introduce a more native lingo" into his radicalism...

...From Eastman (whom no one reads today—but he wrote wonderful things, with a wonderful lightness), he drew a pragmatist disdain for Marx's Hegelian logic, combined with an admiration for Lenin, the scientificminded man of practical action (as Eastman imagined...

...The first stage—the radicalism of theoretical systembuilding, with its antiliterary results—lasted quite a few years after the Vietnam era...

...The idea was to heal the rupture in American intellectual life by the act of recognizing it...

...But the term public intellectual, having escaped from the lab, has mutated horribly until by now it has come to mean a professor—who, unlike other professors, has succeeded in getting on television or in being celebrated in magazine puff pieces...

...But what kind of literary aspiration took root among the young intellectuals of a half century later...

...And from those long-ago seeds have subsequently blossomed ten thousand articles by as many authors, new articles all the time, embellishing the neverending theme of a break or rupture in American intellectual life...

...And for any young person who felt those impulses, the right kind of career might be to take up a guitar and join a rock band...

...A number of Wilson's friends died in that period, and a number of others—Dos Passos is an example—lost a part of their talent...

...There was an idea of giving priority to the imaginary over the real—a great principle of the postmodern style in philosophy and the arts...

...Reading him, you could almost imagine that he was arguing against Marxism itself...

...The whole point of Finland Station was to show mankind's gradual achievement of mastery over the laws of history—the rise of social science, leading to political action to create a better society, as undertaken by Lenin in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917...

...And there was the contradictory idea of giving priority to the real over the imaginary—therefore a turn to Marxism in a variety of novel applications...

...But his intention, entirely serious, in making those remarks in Patriotic Gore was to propose a counter-theory to the idea of history that he had presented in Finland Station...

...he was like Hemingway and Dos Passos in that respect...

...but it was Marxism...

...These ideas, his Marxism, can be a little difficult for readers to make sense of today— which makes it hard to understand what the collapse of those ideas meant to him...

...But the question of what is actually written no longer seems to merit discussion...

...He wanted nothing to do with dialectical philosophy or the legacy of Hegel, but he was adamant about historical progress, about the working class as the bearer of that progress, about the notion of a scientific understanding of society as the key to working-class action, and about the moral failure of capitalism...

...clever people from both generations was noticeably parallel, given a half century's worth of cultural evolution...

...He moved to Greenwich Village and took up a literary life working for the magazines, feeling that he was doing something very rebellious and radical...

...Instead of a devotion to serious literature there was a celebration of popular culture— partly in order to shock the older generation, partly out of a recognition that, by the 1960s, the cultural categories of high and low had been scrambled by life and not by critics...

...A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cun86 • DISSENT Edmund Wilson ning and violence breaks the chains—let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality...

...In developing this theme Wilson had the occasion to quote Trotsky on the topic of the American Civil War (from Trotsky's debate with John Dewey, Their Morals and Ours...

...Wilson never lost his young man's indignation against the shape of modern society and market economics...

...In the university, where ideas get frozen, that original stage will no doubt endure for as long as a handful of elderly professors cling to their tenure...

...He served in France during the Great War...

...But not so...

...To Taine, and to Wilson, too, cultural journalism was an art—and the king of commentaries...

...He wrote some of the essays in The Triple Thinkers (the pieces on Flaubert, John Jay Chapman, Shaw, and the not very successful essay on Marxism itself) and in The Wound and the Bow (especially the very moving essay on Dickens...

...He hoped that, from a union of literature and science, a new avant garde might emerge, something romantic and neoclassical, modernist and naturalist at once—a literature that might point to a new way of living...

...These attitudes scandalized Wilson's liberal friends at the time, and they scandalize us today, and the temptation is strong to dismiss Patriotic Gore's more obnoxious passages as simple mischief-making Wilson did like to toy with his readers...

...If you read his later writings in the light of his Marxism and its failure, it should be obvious that, during the years from 1940 until his death in 1972, he was offering a series of replies to what he had written previously: now arguing against the philosophical theories that had proved to be mistaken, now looking for alternatives to the Marxist future that had once been his hope...

...The conventional opinion about Wilson's later work—the notion that, after 1940, he scattered his energies on a variety of topics without a central theme—seems to me not entirely accurate...

...Instead of an ideal of cultural journalism there was an ideal of scientific-minded philosophy...

...It offered a way of countering those theories—not by constructing a new supertheory to replace the older ones, or by reverting to the preradical habits of the academy, or by taking up the dogmatism of the neoconservative table-thumpers...

...He worked in the medical corps...

...His idea was to mix together what he had learned from Taine with a few concepts that had been developed by Max Eastman, the old editor of the Masses...

...Wilson saw Lincoln as a tyrant, and for the slaves he summoned no great sympathy...

...For what did it mean to draw a distinction between then, the age of independent public intellectuals, and now, the age of the jargon-spouting professors...

...The people who started out in the era of the Vietnam War—some of them, not everybody— felt a noticeably similar desire to withdraw from the American mainstream...

...to take them as models...

...For no one could doubt that the real excitement of the moment lay in the enterprises that went under the name of theory, meaning Marxism, feminism, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and so forth...

...to hold ourselves to their standards...

...Jacoby introduced the term "public intellectual" to distinguish a writer like Wilson from the professors who address specialized, private audiences on narrow topics...

...Only in later years did Wilson reinterpret this career of his as an atavistic, conservative return to the archaic values of an older American era...

...To my mind, drawing that distinction offered a way to express a weary frustration with the systembuilding theories...

...Has something fundamental changed in American life, and is the age of critics-in-general (and readers-in-general) behind us...

...Wilson and several generations of writers who came after him could feel that, by devoting themselves to the art of the critical essay, they were engaging the spirit of their time...

...WINTER • 1997 • 87...

...Under its inspiration he produced his two books of 1930s social and political journalism, The American Jitters and Travels in Two Democracies...

...or, less daringly, to enter graduate school and become an avant garde professor of cultural theory...

...The expositions of this idea have taken many strange turns...

...But instead of looking for alternatives in a Marxist future he now began to look in back corners of the society that already existed, in minority cultures that had preserved some integrity of their own against the depredations of mass culture and the capitalist economy...

...To stop scorning the intellectuals from earlier generations...

...Theory became king of commentaries...

...Yet the reality of a cultural shift is hard to dispute—and the nature of that reality and some of its causes can be seen, I think, with a glance at Wilson and his generation, born around 1895, and at the generation of Atlas and Jacoby, the writers of my own age, who were born fifty or sixty years later...

...He wanted us to fear power, instead of seeking to harness it to projects that we think of as worthy...

...And each of these stages in his career was recapitulated in a 84 • DISSENT Edmund Wilson different form by a good number of the people who were young a half century later...

...The social and political journalism that he wrote in the 1930s constituted his search for the socialist future, but the journalism that he wrote after 1940—about ancient Hebrews, modern Zunis, Iroquois, French Canadians, Haitians, and the gentry of upstate NewYork—constituted a search for a living past...

...By the late 1920s, Wilson's dismay at American society, his faith in science and his more-than-literary hopes for literature led him to Marxism, too...

...The response was to turn with real revulsion away from the ordinary sensibilities and sentimentalities of middle-class American life, in favor of a European avant garde and radical leftism, always with the hope of giving the radical ideas a new, American twist...

...On the other hand, there's nothing like an intellectual collapse to stimulate a few new ideas...

...But the right kind of career no longer had much to do with writing the kind of critical essay that Wilson might have admired...

...He wrote To the Finland Station, which is not just about Marxism but breathes its spirit—if you take Marxism's spirit to be a dedication to human liberation and not dogmatic fanaticism...

...Taine, Eastman, positivism, pragmatism— these influences put Wilson at odds with entire aspects of conventional Marxism...

...Rebelliousness brought him to the writings of Mallarmé, Valéry, Proust, Eliot, and a few others...

...Wilson learned to write cultural journalism from the nineteenth-century French critic, Hippolyte TaMe (who was, by the way, a main founder of the idea of joining together science and literature...

...The later work was a criticism of the earlier, and was all the livelier for being so...

...The simple notion of an essayist in Wilson's style—someone who writes artfully and knowledgeably for the literaryminded reader on broad topics—has faded so far into the past that, for any number of writers and editors today, the old idea has become nearly impossible to understand...

...From Taine, Wilson drew something of a positivist idea about the advance of science and mankind...

...Wilson himself went through a difficult time...

...His old notion about an impending avantgarde breakthrough in literature was no longer sustainable...

...He saw in their work a high aestheticist devotion to the inner world of the imagination, but then again, he was attracted to the idea of science, too, and to the study of the outer world...

...This turn in Wilson's writing offers a last resemblance to the generation that came along half a century after his...

...The journalism of the 1930s corresponded to his Marxist idea of history, and the journalism from the years after 1940 corresponded to his anti-Marxist idea...

...These two generations have this in common: they each underwent, in their youth, the disillusioning experience of watching America march off to a pointless and devastating war—against Kaiser Germany or against Communist Vietnam...

...There may be one other similarity between Wilson's generation and the people who came of age during the Vietnam War...

...And Wilson set out to do just that, philosophically as well as rhetorically...

...or to dash off pop culture criticism in the antiliterary automatic-writing style of the countercultural weeklies...

...Wilson's Marxism was his own concoction...

...Or he looked into the remote past...

...In Wilson's case, you can see in his diaries from the 1910s and 1920s and some other early writings how passionately he felt those impulses...

...When was that discovery made...

...And when he got back home he was not the same man as before...

...The idea that some such downward development has taken place was proposed by Russell Jacoby in Dissent in 1983, then was elaborated by James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine and again by Jacoby in a slightly muddled book called The Last Intellectuals...

...That moment occurred around 1940...

...Still, the generation that came up during the Vietnam era has sooner or later had to discover that "theory" and the various isms may have certain virtues, and may continue to display those virtues in the future—but theory and the isms cannot go beyond the limits of the academy, in some respects cannot even achieve the limits of the academy...

...And so, the rupture is real enough, and ours is an age of the university department and the television set and the slick magazine, but it is not an age of the literary intellectual...

...The idea, instead, was to look over our shoulders—backward, to the age of then—and to recognize the virtue of certain work from the past and of writers older than ourselves...

...The withdrawal led, in their case, to the (mostly) French philosophers of postmodernism and to the idea of uniting literature with science (in the form of linguistics, whence semiotics and deconstruction...

...History has different yardsticks for the cruelty of the Northerners and the cruelty of the Southerners in the Civil War," Trotsky said...

...He wanted to argue that notions of progress, of world history advancing toward some superior endpoint, of scientific confidence in the forward motion of mankind, were merely a cover for the crimes committed by people like Lenin and Trotsky...

...Our equivalent of Wilson's 1940—when did it take place...

...Yet for all these parallels, the writing that resulted was completely different...

...And his ideas about Marxism fell apart entirely...

...now we have none, or almost none...

...Then we had thinkers and critics of independence and stature, the nonacademic essayists...

...or with political influence (dinners at the White House...

...The most ambitious of these later writings— his Patriotic Gore, about the literature of the Civil War—ought to be read, it seems to me, as a rejoinder to Finland Station...

...And the response of a certain number of very This essay is adapted from a presentation at the conference, "Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections," offered by the Program in American Studies at Princeton University in November, 1995...

...Already in writing Finland Station Wilson was uncomfortable with that kind of reasoning...

...Anyway, to give it a try...

...In the case of Wilson's contemporaries, the original impulses WINTER • 1997 • 85 Edmund Wilson that emerged from the Great War and the avant garde of the 1920s ran aground after awhile, and everybody who had been caught up in the excitement of the years after the war had to change, or go under...

...We, too, seem to be going through a two-stage development...

...The book on the Civil War really did hold the North and the South as equals in the court of morality...

...Marxism, in short, animated a big portion of his best work, and the collapse of his faith in it must have been a bitter experience...

...And if you want to see the consequence of these developments, you have only to look at the ten thousand articles that, coming after the original presentations by Jacoby and Atlas, have pointed to a rupture in American intellectual life...

...The term public intellectual has come to express a fascination with the size of the audience (is someone's name recognized by millions...