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toward culture and toward the individual. Some years ago we still
spoke of revising the Leninist system of ideas; perhaps such notions
are already out of order. Still, there can be no re-integr.ation of the
socialist consciousness if it merely recoils from the evils of Bolshevism
without thoroughly analysing and evaluating the epos of its encounter
with history.
PHILIP RAHV
LE MISANTHROPE
MEMOIRS oF HECATE CouNTY.
By Edmund Wilson. Doubleday.
$2.50.
I
N ITS mordant analysis of our middle-class culture, in its pessimism
and in the symbolic attempt of its hero to find his true class, this book
resembles
The Education of Henry Adams.
But its real counterpart
in
American writing is a dark and distorted parable by Melville called
The
Confidence Man.
I
have never thought the latter a good novel, though
I
respect the force with which Melville described the moral bareness and
deceptions of his time; and though Mr. Wilson's book is better, it is not
very good either. Unfortunately, perishable books get praised, poor books
are genially tolerated; we are always kind to books that do not simply
annoy us.
Memoirs of Hecate County
has enough
in
it to make the for–
tunes of a dozen writers; but it
is
not a good book. The judgment is
proportionate to Edmund Wilson's gifts, which are extraordinary and
sometimes unpleasant, and to his peers, who are very few in this country.
Mr. Wilson's books have always come to us dangling an historical
key
with
which to open them; with it we can open them-just that. His
mind takes wings from references, historical associations, the personal
details behind a career. The elaborate symbolism of this book, for which
we are prepared by the myth of Hecate, the epigraph from a horror
story by Gogol that prefaces it, and the excessive tension with which the
settings are given, is another example of Mr. Wilson's mind working
in
,the historical underbrush. The architectural and domestic references in
it-houses, gardens, manners, costume, furniture-even weigh his pages
down. Yet it is a
sign
of the deeper claim& of his imagination that these
"keys"-the Finland Station, Axel's Castle, Hecate, the artists who are
triple thinkers, the wound of the artist and the bow of
his
art-are only
overtures to the conflict between the superior individual and society
that
is
his main subject. Very few people in the large audience that has
profited from
Axel's Castle
reached the castle itself, the workshop of sym–
bolism; no one can forget Proust locked up in the "Heartbreak House
of capitalist culture." The Finland Station in Petrograd, 1917, was a
