MORRIS DICKSTEIN
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already been skeptical of the booming business civilization of the 1920s; for
them, as he later wrote in "The Li terary Consequences of the Crash,"
"these years were not depressing but stimulating. One couldn't help being
exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud.
It gave us a new sense of freedom."
Down in the trenches, Wilson's work in the early thirties was not
reviewing but interviewing. Like so many other newly radicalized writers,
he set out to report on how ordinary Americans were coping with hard
times. But gradually he conceived the project of writing a biographical
history of the whole revolutionary tradition-an unlikely enterprise for
someone with little economic or political background.
To
the Finland
Station
holds up today, I think, as his greatest book, not so much as intel–
lectual history-he always remained dubious about the intricacies of
Marxist dialectics-but as sheer human drama, with an immense sweep
that carries us along even in these post-utopian times. Putting aside the sec–
tarian polemics and scholastic debates so often fatal to radical intellectuals,
he was able to bring something unique to bear on Marxism-the same
critical sensibility he had brought to modernism. He examined Saint–
Simon and Marx with all the restless curiosity he had just trained on T.S.
Eliot and Gertrude Stein.
Many years later, VS. Pritchett described it as "perhaps the only book
on the grand scale to come out of the thirties-in either England or
America. It contains, to a novel degree, the human history of an argument."
To
a novel degree:
this is a finely phrased remark. It's ironic, in the light of
Wilson's own limitations as a novelist, which he acknowledged when he com–
pared himself to Fitzgerald, that
To
the Finland Station
has many of the qualities
of great fiction--a bold narrative thrust, striking larger-than-life characters–
inflected with a mixture of irony and empathy toward the eccentric figures
who made up the Marxist tradition. Above all they are intellectuals, caught up,
as Wilson then was, in a passion for changing the world, for actually altering
and affecting history. In a review for
Partisan Review
in 1940, Meyer Schapiro
described how Wilson's portraits "impose themselves by their concreteness,
finesse, and sympathy. . .like the great fictional characters of literature." But he
also showed the connection to Wilson himselfby noting that
in
this book "the
conditions of intellectual work become as concrete, as unforgettable, as the
moments of action." Wilson put flesh and blood on the revolutionary tradi–
tion without silencing his own critical voice.
Denis Donoghue has suggested that Wilson was not really a critic
because he didn't exert pressure on a writer's language, but there are dif–
ferent ways to take note of language, as there are different kinds of critics.
Always the portraitist, the historian of motive and behavior, in books like
To
the Finland Station
and
Patriotic Gore
Wilson bears down on language as
