Edmund Wilson and the Public Intellectuals
It is hard to think of a phrase whose revival in the language was as welcome, and whose subsequent history has proved quite so disappointing, as "public intellectual."
It is hard to think of a phrase whose revival in the language was as welcome, and whose subsequent history has proved quite so disappointing, as "public intellectual." In 1990, Russell Jacoby's Last Intellectuals gave a name and an appealingly scrappy history-the rise of the Partisan Review crowd in the 1940s and '50s-to the declining practice of literate criticism of politics, history, and the arts. What followed was a time of great if borrowed nostalgia, as restive academics and magazine editors celebrated the passions of the City College cafeteria and imagined themselves outdrinking the Rahvs in the heat of a vanished Greenwich Village.
In contrast to their mythic predecessors, however, the newest generation of public intellectuals exercise their talents not in the writing of poetry, fiction, history or essays but in the fabrication of up-to-the-minute opinions for the op-ed page of the New York Times, or-at best-in high-toned book reviews for the New Republic and the New York Review of Books. The most public of the new intellectuals--Cornel West, Stanley Fish, Camille Paglia, William Bennett, Dinesh D’Souza--appear less occupied by ideas and books than by the opportunity to haul ammunition and fire off the canons for their respective parties in the culture wars. If Russell Jacoby’s heroes were intellectuals whose ideas gained them some measure of public significance, the order now is abruptly reversed: the public intellectuals have become personalities, gifted with the talent of reducing ideas to sound-bites neatly packaged for the producers of Nightline and Charlie Rose.
Edmund Wilson, the centennial of whose birth was celebrated last year with a biography by the prolific Jeffrey Meyers, an ongoing lecture series at the New York Humanities Center, and a major conference at Princeton University, his alma mater, would have relished the moment, or at least been amused. If Wilson, whose literary criticism, histories, essays, and reporting shaped American literary culture from the early 1920s to his death in 1972, detested academics, he loved performers and performance. He loved the vaudeville acts of his youth, burlesque shows, the French chanteuse Yvette Guilbert. Most of all he admired Harry Houdini, "an audacious and independent being” who declared at an early age "I am Houdini!" and, as Wilson wrote in an admiring early essay, collected in The Shores of Light (1952), worked hard all his life to "perfect himself in the pursuit of his chosen work."
A photograph of Wilson, reproduced on the jacket of A Piece of My Mind (1956), alludes as well to his lifelong love of magic, and it is tempting to analyze the image as the critic Wilson might have done. It shows a heavyset man with appraising, melancholy eyes, his eyebrows slightly raised, suggesting a willingness to suspend for the moment his native state of disbelief. He is dressed in the three-piece suit of a lawyer or banker of his father's generation, a gesture toward his love for the past and the professional security which he attained only late in life. Between broad, workmanlike fingers he balances a deck of cards. The card facing us, the eight of hearts, reminds us of Wilson's reputation as a ladies’ man, despite a demeanor that suggests--in less flattering portraits—a boozy salesman being chased by a dog or an angry husband. Manuscript pages sprawl across his desk toward an unseen deadline, in counterpoint to the solemn march of bound volumes across his shelves. The author of more than 40 published books, Wilson worked all his life to transform his own sensibility--divided between his formal attentiveness as a critic and his feel for individual psychology and the grand movements of history--into prose that could be read with pleasure by a literate audience.
As a critic, Wilson was the founder of the vital modernist tradition in American literary criticism that began with his early essays and reviews-in Vanity Fair, the Dial, and the New Republic--and that attained its first mature expression in Axel's Castle (1931). Despite his formal acuity, Wilson was at heart a literary historian, whose love of good writing and of independent minds kept him from reducing the writers he loved--Eliot or Yeats, Proust or Joyce, Marx or Michelet-to textbook illustrations of historical forces. And though he inaugurated the psychological method that rules what remains of the practice of literary criticism outside academe, the breadth and humanity of his approach sets it far apart from the reductive trivialities of pathography.
Most of all, what distinguishes Edmund Wilson's writing is the voice, rich with the unresolved tensions of an adult personality, pulled between the opposite poles of literature and history, artistic form and lived experience. "The fiction writer in Wilson was real," writes John Updike-one of our few working critics who shares Wilson's need to present the strengths and the weaknesses of writers as individuals making moral choices, as craftsmen working their craft—“and his displacement was a real loss." Yet to see Edmund Wilson as a failed novelist, an unsuccessful Updike, is unjust. In the best of his writing, we can witness the transformation of critical skill and historical scholarship, the familiar provinces of the academic, into art.
Wilson was always tempted, if never overcome, by the alluring promise that literary art could somehow be explained by the patient accumulation of commonplace detail about the writer, his or her family, childhood, and later experiences. If Wilson lacked the attachment, or the patience, required to pursue this program in the form of a full-dress biography of any of the writers he admired, he was consistently, and extraordinarily, interested in himself. And so, from his early autobiographical essays to the thinly disguised erotic autobiography, Memoirs of Hecate County (1946), to his posthumously published diaries, he left us as complete a record of his life as we could require, seen through his own eyes, in retrospect, and set down as it happened, documentary style.
From Wilson's autobiographical writings, we know that the critic was born in Red Bank, New Jersey in 1895 to an erratically protective mother and a distant father, a former state attorney general and intimate of Woodrow Wilson who suffered greatly, as did his son, from depression. Educated at the Hill School and at Princeton, where he became a disciple of the bohemian professor Christian Gauss and a friend of John DOS Passes and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wilson served in Europe during World War I. Moving to New York, he worked as managing editor of Vanity Fair, later supporting himself--hard to imagine--as a free-lance literary critic and then as an editor of the New Republic. He married often and unhappily. His first marriage was to the actress Mary Blair, a great favorite of the playwright Eugene O’Neill; the most famous of Wilson's marriages was to Mary McCarthy, whose acid portraits of Wilson as brutish husband have unfairly if predictably overshadowed his literary reputation. Wilson's great and stormy friendship with Vladimir Nabokov has left us with a wonderful collected correspondence in which Nabokov's inventive genius shines through, though Wilson's own voice is strangely muted. During the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, he reached a broad audience as the literary critic of the New Yorker while writing some of the better reportage of his time. He married Elena Thornton in 1946, and lived happily with her, through middle age, and despite several affairs, until his death in 1972.
A more revealing self-portrait of Edmund Wilson can be found in his mature writing, which begins with Axel's Castle. In that book, his first as a critic, the 35-year-old Wilson used his formal knowledge as a poet, the skills he had sharpened at the New Republic, and his own inclination toward historical narrative to give a lucid and sweeping account of the "symbolist movement” in modern literature. Axel's Castle begins with the French poet Baudelaire’s reading of Edgar Allan Poe; individual chapters trace the development of symbolist art in the work of leading writers, including Yeats, Eliot, Valkry, Proust, and Joyce, whose books the critic had championed throughout the 1920s. Wilson illuminates symbolist art through the working out of an analogy between imagery in prose and the notes and chords of the leading art of the romantics: music. Proust's great novel was constructed as a symphonic structure rather than a narrative in the ordinary sense. The shifting images of the symbolist poets, Wilson explains, were transformed by Proust into "characters, situations, places, vivid moments, obsessive emotions, recurrent patterns of behavior." Joyce's Ulysses is also a symphony, whose themes are the minds of individual Dubliners.
What marks Axel's Castle as the beginning of Wilson's mature criticism, however, is the critic's insistence on the tensions and ambiguities contained within his elegantly appointed metaphor. The prose-music of the symbolists was not only an exercise in form, Wilson writes, "but an attempt by carefully studied means . . . to communicate unique personal feelings." Yet form and feeling were opposing and hostile pursuits. If the artist in Wilson identified with Eliot and Yeats, with Proust and Joyce, there was also something in him that recoiled. He took the title of his book from Villiers de 1'Isle-Adam's "Axel," a young man who inhabits a half-Gothic, half-Wagnerian castle in the Black Forest, where he gives himself up to the isolated study of alchemy and prepares to receive the mysteries of the Rosicrucian order. A beautiful assassin, Sara, is sent to kill Axel. They fall passionately in love, and, rejecting his bride's pleas for a night of wedded bliss, Axel persuades her instead to join him in suicide. At the heart of the symbolist art Wilson admired, inherent in the relentless pursuit of the self, was something pale and splintered, neurotic and deadly, that could be neither successfully embraced nor avoided. The pursuit of experience was no less sterile. The poet Arthur Rimbaud, who fled Paris for the life of a gunrunner in the African deserts, would die a meaningless death at 24.
Wilson's once-original conclusions have by now been thoroughly absorbed into the critical literature on modernism. But what gives Axel's Castle its enduring force is the critic's ability to project his own psychological tensions so directly and honestly onto the page. In response to the conflict within himself, Wilson saw modern literature as divided into two opposing camps. There is that of Rimbaud, whose influence can be felt in "D. H. Lawrence's mornings in Mexico and his explorations of Santa Fe," in "Blaise Cendrar's negro anthology," and in "the fascination for white New Yorkers of Harlem." Against Rimbaud's pursuit of raw experience, Wilson set the inward-looking spirit of Axel, which lives on "in Proust’s hypochondriac ailments and his fretting self-centered prolixities; in Yeats's astrology and spirit-tappings and in the 17th-century cadence which half puts to sleep his liveliest prose; in the meagerness of the poetic output of Paul Valkry and T. S. Eliot contrasted with their incessant speculations as to precisely what constitutes poetry." Neither will do. At a time when American writers and critics were alternately enthralled and appalled by the new literature, Wilson stood alone in his ability to see the strength of the modernist art and to feel its limitations with equal ferocity, as representative of a violent struggle within himself. The task Wilson set himself was to find a way out.
The social and economic chaos of the Great Depression impelled Wilson, and an entire generation of American intellectuals, away from modernism and toward a search for historical causes and explanations that led many to the work of Karl Marx. If Wilson was drawn to Marx, the path he chose did little to endear him to the Marxist faithful. What interested Wilson in To The Finland Station (1940)--"A Study in the Writing and Acting of History”--were not the scientific laws of Marxist history but the promise that modernist methods of introspection, in the hands of historians, could have a lasting impact on human lives. History was made not by abstract forces but by the combination of social circumstances with the inner lives of great historians as expressed through their art.
Wilson’s determined focus on his own inner life, rather than on the topical concerns of contemporary Marxist thinkers, allowed him to produce a history that transcends the period in which it was written and that prefigures the psychologically attuned scholarship of present-day historians such as Simon Schama and Jonathan Spence. The forces that animate To The Finland Station are not capital and labor but the historians Michelet and Marx, writers who--like Wilson--use their art to realize their own psychological tensions in the stories they tell. "The great rooms of Fountainebleau and Versailles seem to get colder and larger and the figures smaller and more alone," Wilson writes of Jules Michelet's Revolution (1852):