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PARTISAN REVIEW
a key to individual temperament. He exerts this pressure on Marx's work,
including his early poetry and student writings, scrutinizing his imagery to
grasp the configurations of his mind. This was quite dramatic in the 1930s
when Marxism was usually debated as doctrine and ideology, not as the
written traces of any individual minds. Later Wilson would inspect General
Grant's letters and memoirs just as keenly, for he was interested not only
in style but in language as the basis for a social or psychological portrait, as
if he were shaping a character in fiction.
This brings me to Wilson's third major project,
Patriotic Gore,
his book
about the literature of the Civil War. This book emerged from his enor–
mous dissatisfaction with contemporary America after 1940, which led to
his withdrawal to the country, his turn towards autobiography, his fascina–
tion with his own family background, and his gradual disengagement from
the current critical scene.
Patriotic Gore
is preceded by a notorious intro–
duction that sees nations in biological terms, devouring each other like "sea
slugs." This is often seen as arbitrary and unconnected to the book--some
of Wilson's friends tried to convince him to remove it-but it's intrinsic
to the mood in which he wrote the work as a whole.
Patriotic Gore
demon–
strates not only his recoil into the American past but his attraction to those
qualities-essentially qualities of republican virtue-that he could not find
in the public world of the American present.
If
To
the Finland Station
is about personality, as revealed in the youth–
ful
passion to change the world, then
Patriotic Gore
is about character, as it
was reflected in traits like stoicism, persistence, fortitude, skepticism, and
clarity of mind. Wilson's new heroes are no longer intellectuals but aging
warriors like Grant, Lee, Sherman, and that staunch ex-warrior, Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes. The book begins with an unlikely revolutionary,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose extraordinarily
humane
exposure of the
Southern slave system derives from her faith in family values and her read–
ing of the character of its participants. But Wilson's book finds its center
in the unflappable figure of Grant-in battle utterly unconscious of dan–
ger, then, as a dying man, stoically completing his memoirs in the teeth of
great suffering, to provide for his family after his death. "In what Grant did
and in what he wrote," Wilson finds "something of the driving force, the
exalted moral certainty, of Lincoln and Mrs. Stowe." Wilson admires not
only Grant the man but also the plain stylist, expressing exactly what he
wanted to say with strength and simplicity "in the fewest well-chosen
words." His Grant was the writer whose prose intrigued both Matthew
Arnold and Gertrude Stein. "These literary qualities, so unobtrusive," says
Wilson, "are evidence of a natural fineness of character, mind, and taste."
So this, I think, is where Wilson himself came to rest, as an old man
no doubt identifying with Grant's infirmities as well as his temperament,
