376
PARTISAN REVIEW
symbol of the struggle of man to reach an appointed destiny in his
modem determination to change the world. But if Lenin arrives at the
·station on time, it is without the emotion of the Revolution. Half-way
through the book Mr. Wilson went sour on Marxism, and it is the
romance of Marx that we remember, not his theory or the way millions
of lives have been changed by it.
Mr. Wilson's subject is history, and in history the personal careers
shape its meaning for him. His masterly study of Dickens in
The
W'ound and the Bow,
a far better short story than any in this book, was
yet only a way of showing Dickens's fate in the social structure of Eng–
land. In this book, too, his interest is in careers, not in lives. A career is a
complete cycle, seen from the outside, which can present to a mind like
Mr. Wilson's the dramatic episodes of a life. But a life is built up induc–
tively, from the universal
noun~
of human experience; it is slow work,
it is threadbare, it is fiction. Mr. Wilson is not really interested in fiction;
only in using it to put a floor of imaginary detail under his historical
commentary. The fact that he can employ the apparatus of fiction with
technical brilliance does not contradict this point; it only makes it a
sadder one. For Mr. Wilson is too imaginative a writer and too complex
a personality, driven by too insistent a personal ache, as artists must be,
to analyze events in their "objective" appearance merely. He is too in–
volved in the cross-stimulation of man and his outward culture to escape
the library; or rather, the cultural dream which so often is life for
him.
He has been an example of a kind of transverse talent which is common
in France, where ideas become conscious forces. I have the greatest ad–
miration for this talent, which is so much like Henry Adams's, and like
Adams's, driven by a longing for excellence, true aristocracy, and a
social home. But it is a talent whose roots have got a little twisted in
Hecate County. For Mr. Wilson's view of history is now merely mor–
dant. Lives are still closed to him; that is, he is still more interested in
careers than in character. The historian prods the novelist; the novelist
wants to break through the mask of history, but has long ago forgotten
its exchange-value back into particular human terms. All experience
is
devaluated into symbols. Meanwhile, the man wants to tell us something
direct about himself, and has made sure that he will not. The result
is to reduce the book to a curiously covert kind of commentary.
Hecate is very congenial to Mr. Wilson's mind at present. "Where
three roads meet, there is she standing." Tri-formed, bearing torches, a
snake, a club, a key, etc., she represents the cross-roads and the phases
of the moon. Light and darkness alternate through her. So that we see
her and yet do not see her, as a man will struggle to see a figure in his
dreams. "Hecate County" is clearly meant to be the landscape of a type
of middle-class mind in this country. We see it in the acute period of
the American crisis, between Hoover and Hitler. Around this region Mr.
