Some Lit Crit
I've so wearied of politics lately that I'm focusing most of my freelance efforts on books and poetry. Since this site has become -- for better or worse -- a dynamic resume, and yet I consistently fail to update my cataloged work on the right scroll box, I figured I'd offer reprinted teasers of two of the essays I've most enjoyed writing. Both were for Democratiya, about which I can't say enough good things. (My next piece for the magazine -- half done amid a flurry of blogorrhea -- will be on Victor Serge).
Edmund Wilson has been an object of saintly veneration and nostalgia to those old enough to remember when literary critics were arbiters of how people spent their time between meals and work. Who now, in the age of the hatchet job and the shrinking Books section, speaks of 'permanent criticism,' the criticism that endures because it ranks as literature itself? The Library of America has just published Wilson's collected works in an elegant two-volume set spanning the critic's most productive decades--the 20s, 30s and 40s. Coming a year after Lewis Dabney's definitive biography, the resurrection of such sorely missed volumes as The Shores of Light, Axel's Castle and The Wound and the Bow surely qualifies an 'event' publication. Now there's a term the owlish sage of Red Bank would have loathed to no end.
It's a shame, though, that Wilson's magnificent study of socialism, To the Finland Station, has been left out of this series because it represents not just the yield of seven years of hard study, for which he learned German and Russian, but also the culmination of one of the lesser examined leitmotifs of his interdisciplinary and breathtaking oeuvre: his political radicalism.
Wilson always preferred to think of himself as a journalist rather than a critic; writing for publications such as Vanity Fair, The New Republic and The New Yorker, he reported from the squalid underbelly of the Jazz Age as well the breadlines and courtrooms of the Great Depression, serving witness to many of the formative scandals and uprisings that impelled progressive opinion. Even his classic literary essays on the hierophants of the canon - Proust, Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce - were scarcely free from reference to Marxism, or the materialist conception of history, with which he had a longstanding and complicated relationship. Wilson began a tenuous fellow traveler of Communism and wound up an idiosyncratic left-libertarian, all the while never committing to any faction or party in either his struggle against current or historic injustices. His intellect was keen and rapacious enough prevent his lapse into any kind of ideological or critical dogma, and his slightly cultivated role as the aloof but opinionated observer of the major convulsions of his age, whether in art or revolution, made him one of the most perceptive chroniclers of it.
Dabney is quite right to locate Wilson's overarching sensibility as Hellenistic, and in deep sympathy with Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy. He always harbored a strong attraction to the Old Testament and Jewish morality. As a neoclassicist, he was an especial fan of the 'Athens-and-Jerusalem' tribal offshoot, which informed his later archaeological interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls and impelled him to study Hebrew. More than that, Dabney asserts, 'his evocation of the shaping of God's institutions from the things of this world marks the Hebraism that would be liberated when it appeared to him wrapped in the flag of Marx's scientific socialism.'
Wilson's sympathy for the underdog, not to say the working class, can be glimpsed in some of his early dispatches from the twenties. Very often his sense of the heroic molded his conception of the indignities and inequities of American society. For instance, in 1925, he extolled a promising young magician who was the son of a Wisconsin rabbi and went by the stage name Harry Houdini. The illusionist, nee Erich Weiss, had risen up, wrote Wilson--himself a lifelong practitioner of the parlor trick--from 'the East Side cabarets and dime museums' and personified 'the struggle of a superior man to emerge from the commonplaces, the ignominies and the pains of common life, to make for himself a position and a livelihood among his less able fellows at the same time that he learns to perfect himself in the pursuit of his chosen work.' Houdini was a great debunker of superstition and mysticism, so this Nietzschean panegyric to the hard-knock school of 20th century materialism was not wasted on a mere celebrity figure. It is also worth noting that Wilson was at one time the protégé of H.L. Mencken, of whom it is impossible to imagine a likeminded paean to the Yiddishkeit vaudeville circuits of lower Manhattan.
As the learned eminence of the New Republic's 'back of the book,' Wilson spent a good amount of the twenties doing what we'd today call advocacy journalism. One example was his deft prose sketch of the participants in the murder trial of Dorothy Perkins, a seventeen-year-old girl charged in New York with the Chicago-like crime of fatally shooting her male suitor. The presiding judge - viciously lampooned by Wilson, not usually thought of as a proto-feminist - had based his harsh sentence of the minor on the fact that 'women have done too much killing.' That might have stoked the fires of any progressive muckraker, but Wilson took to a fiery stanzaic indictment of the entire creative class, which he felt had not done enough to highlight Perkins' plight. In 'To a Young Girl Indicted for Murder,' he intoned: '[T]hose praisers of the past, accepters of defeat, / The ghosts of poets--violent against God / no longer in my day.' Well, it was one way of saying that poetry makes nothing happen.
Wilson's reporting on the more prominent capital murder trial of Sacco and Vanzetti was particularly fascinating, given that, unlike so many of his radical colleagues, he was skeptical of their innocence--a prescient judgment, given the new evidence unearthed about the twin martyrs of the American left. Nevertheless, he was angered by the tendentious state of their prosecution, which he blamed on the chauvinism of an Anglo-Saxon establishment abetted by the Boston Irish. Two immigrants couldn't get a fair trial in New England, and that was that. When his editor at the New Republic, the celebrated liberal Herbert Croly, author of Progressive Democracy and The Promise of American Life, thanked him for not filtering his indignation through the sieve of class warfare, Wilson regretted that he hadn't done so. Opposition, in other words, was in his blood.
Guilt over his sub-Marxian handling of Sacco and Vanzetti might have led him to draft his famous editorial in 1931, titled 'An Appeal to Progressives.' It came at a time when the flapper had given way to the ledge-jumper, and the gravamen of Wilson's argument was that liberals should 'take Communism away from the Communists, and without ambiguities.' How was this to be done? He advocated a policy that was a measure beyond the imminent redistributionism of the New Deal: state ownership of the means of production. (No wonder Freud conceived of the 'narcissism of the small difference' the same year the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia). It took Wilson a full decade to become thoroughly disillusioned of the desirability and feasibility of this model, but until then, he remained an enthusiast for the Soviet 'experiment.'
The Hidden Stranger: Alfred Kazin
In 1959, Alfred Kazin wrote 'The Alone Generation,' an incisive and brilliant essay about the failures of modern literature. The critic who would later describe himself as a 'cultural conservative' and, semi-seriously, a 'literary reactionary' uttered this cri de coeur:
I am tired of reading for compassion instead of pleasure. In novel after novel, I am presented with people who are so soft, so wheedling, so importunate, that the actions in which they are involved are too indecisive to be interesting or to develop those implications which are the life-blood of narrative. The age of 'psychological man,' of the herd of aloners, has finally proved the truth of Tocqueville's observation that in modern times the average man is absorbed in a very puny object, himself, to the point of satiety.
Not many people write like this anymore, with daring subjectivity. Rare today is the freelance reviewer who sees compassion as an insufficient measure of aptitude in fiction. Kazin avoided the Marxian gloss or the close reading of the New Critics, preferring instead a full-blooded, fist-pounding approach to telling good books from bad. He was demanding, irritable and shrewd; and for almost half a century, he was well sought after for his opinions.
In fact, it would be hard to mistake the author of the above passage for a man of any other generation or milieu. 'Herd of aloners' sounds suspiciously like Harold Rosenberg's famous epithet for the detractors and unwitting apologists of mass culture - the 'herd of independent minds' - which Rosenberg applied as cuttingly to the highbrow Partisan Review crowd as he did to the purveyors of passive entertainment, for whom the common denominator could never be low enough. Also, 'psychological man' had been around a while before Jack Kerouac and Herbert Gold laid their unsure pens to paper, so we glimpse at once the longing of a recovering radical for the literature of size and social engagement; the literature of the 1930's, in other words. Finally, alone - it is a word that stalks like a golem through his entire oeuvre, from his first, career-making work, On Native Grounds, to his mature series of sensitive and meditative memoirs. If Kazin deploys it here to underscore the undesirable aspects of the novel - solipsism, or the puny object of the self, is denigrated because it ignores an engagement with the way we live now - then we should applaud him for self-criticism, too. Alienation was a sentiment he mistrusted most in literature because he mistrusted it most in himself.
A major achievement of Richard Cook's fine biography is the reconciliation of two contradictions in Kazin's life. How did one of the most temperamentally and spiritually isolated writers of his time become such an astute chronicler of it? And how did a man who hated tidy schools of thought, artistic or ideological, maintain an abiding belief in the liberating social possibilities of literature? The answer to both lay in Kazin's Jewishness, a lodestone to which his intellectual pursuits and personal torments kept returning.
