558
PARTISAN REVIEW
were strongly defined personalities who always knew exactly who and
what they were. The later Edmund Wilson was more magisterial, but
the young critic was gifted with Keatsian negative capability that
opened him up to very different literary experiences. And the innova–
tive, devil-may-care spiri t of the 1920s was exactly the moment for such
a critic.
The twenties concluded for him with the publication of
Axel's
Castle
in 1931, which set the pattern for the later phases of his career. If the
reviews collected in
The Shores
oj
Light
show Wilson as the working crit–
ic, the writer in the trenches taking each new book as it comes, then
Axel's
Castle
is the synthesis that rounds off the period, the longer view with
which he took leave of each stage of his literary life. Wilson reached for
permanence in the same way with
To
the Finland Station
(1940), which pro–
vided a coda for his Marxist adventure in the 1930s, and
Patriotic Gore
(1962), the enduring result of his return to American culture and to his
own origins during the 1940s and 1950s.
It's characteristic of these longer, more ambitious projects that Wilson,
conscientious puritan that he was, persisted and carried through with them
long after he had outlived the original impulse to write them. He had
already converted to socialism by the time he completed his book on the
modernists, just as he'd grown disaffected with Marxism and the Soviet
Union when he put the finishing touches to his account of the revolution–
ary tradition from the 1790s to 1917. This is a tribute to Wilson's work
ethic-he started it and was damn well going to finish it-but it gives
these books a slightly odd character, even a certain incoherence. In
Axel's
Castle,
for example, the great chapters on Proust and Joyce portray them
not simply as formal innovators but as social observers deeply involved with
the life of their times. But by the end of the book he comes close
to
con–
demning them for retreating to a symbolist castle, an impenetrable fastness
of art for art's sake--exactly what he had already shown they did
not
do.
Wilson's own shifting views created a fissure within the book. They
also led to his active political commitments of those years: the unsigned
1931 manifesto in which he urged liberals, radicals and progressives to
"take Communism away from the Communists;" the Depression journal–
ism and travel writing collected in
The AmericanJitters
(1932) and
Travels in
Two Democracies
(1936); and finally to his masterpiece,
To
the Finland Station.
This book was the result of his conversion to radicalism, which led him
initially to take to the road for
The New Republic
to cover the local and
human effects of the Depression, doing real reporting, not simply literary
journalism. Wilson would always insist that the Depression had hit
America with the impact of a flood or earthquake, a vast cataclysm that
altered the whole landscape. Like many young intellectuals, he himself had
