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Edmund Wilson’s to the Finland Station (1940)
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Owen Dudley Edwards
I Why and how commemorate the Russian Revolution of October 1917? The why and the how are inextricably linked, despite (and maybe because of) historians’ attempts to sunder them. It begins right in our faces with the fact that October was really November which was at last acknowledged the following March – a tolerably revolutionary way of asserting another revolution, Russia’s being brought into harmony with Pope Gregory XIII’s calendar of 1582. England had accepted it in 1751 thus losing eleven days and causing riots, partly owing to the Papal origin of the reform. Scotland under the intellectual James VI followed Gregory in declaring future years would begin on the First of January which they made a festival greater than any Pope might create, but did not lose other days until 1751. So the most durable of changes brought by the Russian Revolution of 1917 may have been its calendar Romanization. It will take more that Vladimir Putin to abolish that. Nevertheless since the participants in Russia thought they were revolting in October, it is properly so styled, as in the Aberdeen historian Paul Dukes’s October and the World (1979), invaluable on the theme of its title. We know 74
more about what the world said after we have read Professor Dukes, but over the century since ‘October’ how revolutionary has its impact been on ourselves, and why? We cannot presume that events in what became the USSR always impinged noticeably on ourselves. For instance, how many of us know that the Russians must have lost more people in defence of their country in 1941–44 than has any regime in human history? Over here, that event meant that the pressure on the UK from Blitzkrieg was visibly diminished, in the USA it meant better prospects should it enter the war (as it did in December 1941 half a year after Hitler’s attack on Russia) or, alternatively, that the USA could now leave it to Hitler and Stalin to enhance US security by killing one another off. But how deeply did October affect our still existing selves? Amongst historians it transformed Marxism from a remote, almost cranky, fad among unfashionable scholars into a vital part of historiographical development. In the words of the great English Socialist historian R. H. Tawney (author of Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)), we may be pro-Marx or anti-Marx, but we are all post-Marx. But there was little sign of that logic before October. George Peabody Gooch early in an exceedingly
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rich historiographical career spanning twothirds of a century produced a massive and masterly 600 pages on History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913) in which Michelet and Taine had roughly ten pages apiece, and Renan four. Marx (and Engels) got no mention. Today we write about class as we probably would not be doing had October never happened. Actual historical events as they might have happened had there been no October must be mere speculation. Would Winston Churchill have had a different career with no Russian revolution against which to intervene in 1918-20? Would Hitler have risen to power in 1933 without the Communist attempt at a proletarian revolution in Germany in 1918–19? The history of literature would have been very different without October. Anglophone literature would have lost Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949), Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) if written at all would have been a very different book, as would Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948). And while Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) might still have become the foremost popular American literary critic of his time, he would never have written To the Finland Station – A Study in the Writing and Acting of History and we would have lost a twentieth-century masterpiece. Wilson’s Axel’s Castle – A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (1931) included Joyce among its studies of symbolism, and chose as its epigraph the last lines of ‘Tilly’ the first item in Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach (1927): I bleed by the black stream For my torn bough… Originally drawn from Joyce’s Master, Dante Alighieri, in his Inferno XIII hearing lamentation from the suicide Pier della Vigna (1190?–1249) discredited and imprisoned by his adored employer Emperor Friedrich II Hohenstaufen, a metaphor for artistic self-destruction when one’s own writing is derided by one’s ideal object of devotion and creation. Wilson’s embarkation on To the Finland Station was also Joycean. In a covering note drafted long afterwards to introduce his 1932-33 notebooks and diaries (posthumously edited by the multi-volume biographer and editor of Henry James, Leon Edel, as The Thirties (1980) p. 299) Wilson wrote:
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[At some point during this rather sordid period, I formed the project of writing To the Finland Station. It was while I was walking in the streets in New York somewhere in those East Fifties, I think. It occurred to me that nobody had ever presented in intelligible human terms the development of Marxism and the other phases of the modern idea of history. I saw the possibilities of a narrative which would get quite away from the pedantic frame of theory. I knew that this would put me to the trouble of learning German and Russian and that would take me far afield of what I thought was my prime objective: a work of fiction made out of the materials I had been compiling in these notebooks; but I found myself excited by the challenge, and there rang through my head the words of Dedalus at the end of Joyce’s Portrait [of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)]: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand by me now and ever in good stead. The title came, I think at an early stage, and it did not occur to me tlll later that I was echoing it from [Virginia Woolf’s] To the Lighthouse [(1927)]. Whether in his stream of unconsciousness or elsewhere, Wilson certainly wasn’t afraid of Virginia Woolf. But just as James Ramsay in Woolf’s novel is allowed by his father to make the journey to the lighthouse taking some survivors of his family only after ten years and World War I have passed, Wilson’s Lenin was illuminated by Karl Marx to the end of a very long journey beginning two or three centuries earlier, and although the World War continued after Lenin reached the Finland Station in Petrograd (afterwards Leningrad), he ended it as far as his native land Russia was concerned. Lenin’s own personal political story, as Wilson would show, began with Russia’s execution of his brother, and the war kills James’s brother Andrew in To the Lighthouse before the ultimate landfall. The Finland Station became a lighthouse for the world but it was not until he had published his book in 1940 that Wilson could ask whether it would light the way to solution or shipwreck. 75
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In its own eyes the USSR regarded the revolution as the dictatorship of the proletariat, but Wilson was fascinated above all by one man, Lenin, fixing identity, economy and rhetoric on so enormous a land-mass. The Joyce quotation was secret: Wilson, however much of an egoist, could never rival Joyce in that respect. But he was silently proclaiming To the Finland Station’s intent to pursue the international ideological origins of Lenin’s Revolution in human minds and bodies, the uncreated conscience and the reality of experience as he, Wilson, understood and presented its individual precursors. He probably didn’t think of his soul as a smithy: the Irish in 1916 still looked up to horse ownership as the badge of gentility, the Americans of 1932 no longer did, the Russians of1917 certainly did. Historical time must prove as great a challenge to Wilson as literary style or linguistic obscurities.
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II As a Princeton undergraduate (like Joyce, a local college boy), Edmund Wilson made friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) whose posthumous editor he became. To the Finland Station was published by Harcourt Brace in September 1940, one of Fitzgerald’s last letters telling Wilson ‘It is a magnificent book’. The following year Wilson produced his edition of Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel The Last Tycoon, and his own The Wound and the Bow whose title came from its final essay, on Sophocles’s Philoctetes whose eponymous hero is Heracles’s friend, inheriting his infallible bow and arrows at Heracles’s death, stricken with so noxious and noisome a wound that nobody can stand his proximity, the Greek expedition against Troy leaving him marooned on the isle of Lemnos: but ten years later it is discovered Troy can only be taken with Heracles’s bow wielded by Philoctetes. For Wilson this symbolised the artist who can only succeed by revolting humankind in the creativity which declares his genius. The book’s other essays are on Dickens, Kipling, Casanova, Edith Wharton, Hemingway and Joyce. Wilson wrote The Wound and the Bow all too much aware of the wound he shared in common with Joyce and Fitzgerald: his alcoholism. (It was destroying his marriage to Mary McCarthy.) But the book’s essays unearthed the heroic bow as well as whatever wounds he diagnosed in the subjects whose genius he affirmed. To the Finland Station suffered its own wound from its research and subjects. Wilson never became a Communist, but probably voted Communist in the Presidential electiom of 1932 (suspecting the Democratic candidate Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York would be little better than the incumbent President Herbert Hoover). He admired the achievements of the USSR where he stayed for six months in 1935, becoming disillusioned by the vilification and obliteration of Leon Trotsky, by the Moscow trials, and by the disappearances of Russian friends notably the critic D. S. Mirsky quoted in To the Finland Station on Lenin (‘He is perhaps the only revolutionary writer who never said more than he meant.’). In political and historical emphases it differed greatly from Wilson’s other major books, although an obvious precursor for his Patriotic Gore (1962) which would study and 77
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in important critical respects rehabilitate books vital to the American Civil War, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (an origin of the conflict) to the memoirs of Generals Grant and Sherman, the wartime speeches of Lincoln, and the minimalist justification by Confederate Vice-President Alexander Hamilton Stephens – and major and minor creative writers from both perspectives. The major difference was that despite his disillusion with the USSR by the time of its publication, To the Finland Station had a highly sophisticated basic assumption that revolution might be both desirable and virtuous, while Patriotic Gore compared the two warring segments of the once United States to attempts of two giant sea-slugs to consume one another, and little virtue to be preferred from one over the other. This sounds like the usual trajectory of Leftists becoming Rightists often to the advantage of their incomes and sacrificing former friends, but it’s not true of him. His story is much more the maturing of a critic, which meant verdicts on his prey determined by reading voraciously and writing hot from The Shock of Recognition (as he entitled his entrancing anthology subtitled the Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It (1943)). The late, great BBC radio producer Philip French, himself master film critic (and historian), compiled Three Honest Men (1980) originally BBC broadcast from interviews with relevant voices about Wilson, Lionel Trilling and F. R. Leavis where Trilling illuminated Wilson’s ageing (p. 18):
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Wilson wasn’t intimidating then, as he later became, when everybody found him so; indeed my first memory of him is deeply at odds with later recollections. He came to look like a sort of nineteenth-century British ship captain, or like Henry James – a peremptory and commanding figure, very much in that style; but when I first went to see him at the New Republic, to ask him for some books to review, he was terribly shy and rather withdrawn and self-defensive, by no means as assertive and forceful as in later years. Wilson appeared to me then as very gentle and rather dim; in fact his new persona almost amounted to a transformation. Going to a literary editor of a great magazine to beg some reviewing carried its protagonist to what seemed an all too likely valley of humiliation: Wilson in his early thirties already held place and power in the American literary world without acting out the role. French (who once produced a Wilson broadcast) remembered his ‘strange, piping voice’ whence probably his rejection of many broadcast requests. To his intimates he was ‘Bunny’. So his writing had to advance him: he was no Dr Samuel Johnson putting first foot towards immortality as a physical legend in his own time. V. S. Pritchett, for many years the chief literary critic of the London New Statesman and Nation, thought ‘Wilson had something, which would seem to be common for all American writers at a certain stage in their lives, the reporting instinct’ (French, p. 20). That was one of his great strengths as critic: he reported as he assessed a new book or a literary career (literary whether the subject – be he Karl Marx or Ulysses Grant – knew it or not). You may see Prichett’s meaning the more easily if you watch Wimbledon tennis, grind your teeth at the English commentators’ priority of trying to sound like gentlemen, and contrast John McEnroe’s fanatical professional insistence on getting inside the athletic minds of the players he reviews.
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French editorialised (pp.10, 21): Wilson did a little teaching but deliberately avoided regular or permanent academic commitments, and he became a scathing critic of the increasing pedantry of those assigned to edit standard editions of classic literary texts. … I began reading Wilson’s work at more than a paragraph at a time in my last years at school when his collected essays from the twenties, thirties and forties were published in this country as The Shores of Light [(1952)] and Classics and Commercials [(1950)]. These two volumes were the first books by him I’d seen, and they opened my eyes to a range of literature and a way of looking at writers in society that were entirely new. I also liked the chunky format in which the books were published, setting them aside from other books on the library shelves – they seemed stocky, sturdy, individual, like the man himself…
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Through his journalism in its parent magazines and subsequent compilations Wilson was a marvellous teacher. He himself partly learned his trade from reading Shaw, Chesterton and Mencken (none of them university men). But the near-200 items in those two collections that charmed Philip French and our generation, had a confidence in their own existence that had taken years to acquire, being preceded by reworking of essays brought together in what Wilson hoped might prove unifying themes or connecting links. Ironically, the titles for the collections really did state principles of their own animating all the essays in each: The Shores of Light chronicled in its individual pieces his own youthful development as a critic recording his landfalls before claiming to penetrate the great unknown territories lying beyond, Classics and Commercials calendared contemporary US book publication. The earlier, cruder, collectionlabelling may have worked best with The Wound and the Bow. To the Finland Station would be unjustifiably censured as being a pretentious repository for reprints, but for all of the earlier publication of some individual chapters in draft form or in entirety, it is an admirable unity.
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III It’s hardly a self-explanatory title. Many a reader may have taken up the book with the assumption that it relates in some way to Finland, possibly even to Finnish Socialism. (Gus Hall, the US Communist leader 1959-2000, was the son of Finnish Communists.) American book-buyers in 1940 may naturally have assumed it to be about the Finnish winter war of 1939–40, Wilson himself remarking bitterly in October 1939 that the book was written to discuss attempts to liberate mankind culminating in the Russian revolution of 1917 and it was being finished amidst the Russian attempt to annex Finland. Many Americans may even have known Finland as the only country to repay the American war loan of 1917–18 despite pressure on the other debtors expressed by President Calvin Coolidge’s ‘They hired the money, didn’t they?’ in response to arguments for official cancellation in acknowledgment of wartime solidarity. Far from that, Wilson like most Americans by 1921, seems to have concluded the UK suckered the USA into its own Great War. What Wilson’s book-title signalled was the longstanding exile Lenin with his wife Krupskaya in April 1917 arriving at the railway station which linked mainland Russia with its Grand Duchy of Finland at St Petersburg (renamed Petrograd in 1913), making a speech asserting his leadership of the revolution, and culminating what Wilson saw as a continuous history of revolt for social justice from the French to the Russian Revolution. St Petersburg, built on serf and prisoner-of-war endless labour, was made capital of imperial Russia by Peter the Great in 1703. Its name was changed to Leningrad in 1924 but the Bolsheviks made Moscow the capital in 1918, believing the farther the government from foreign borders, the greater the national security (a little like future Brexiteers voting while forgetting Northern Ireland).
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To the Finland Station was subtitled A Study in the Writing and Acting of History. Its last words in that first edition quoted Krupskaya on the end of that first day remembered as requiring hardly any need to speak to her husband Lenin: ‘Everything was understood without words’. If the book was formally less concerned with symbolism than Axel’s Castle, it ended its study of the words of revolution with the revolution beyond words. John Le Carre’s immortal The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) illustrates Wilson’s subtitle: ‘You’ve got me wrong’, she said, ‘all wrong. I don’t believe in God.’ ‘Then what do you believe in?’ ‘History.’ He looked at her in astonishment, then laughed. ‘Oh, Liz … oh no. You’re not a bloody Communist.’ She nodded, blushing like a small girl at his laughter, angry and relieved that he didn’t care. To the Finland Station charts attempts to master the future by Socialist experiment or national self-realization to control by releasing the potential of the proletariat, making history the key to recruit and to reassure. As usual with Wilson, the method was biographical, integrating thinkers, activists and the times they sought to conquer. His choices of individual focus had to be selective about which he was self-critical in retrospect, in his 1971 introduction to the latest edition:
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It is all too easy to idealize a social upheaval which takes place in some other country than one’s own. …The remoteness of Russia from the West evidently made it even easier for American socialists and liberals to imagine that the Russian Revolution was to get rid of an oppressive past, to scrap a commercial civilisation and to found, as Trotsky prophesied, the first really human society. We were very naive about this. We did not foresee that the new Russia must contain a good deal of the old Russia: censorship, secret police, the entanglements of bureaucratic incompetence, an all-powerful and brutal autocracy. He was rebuking himself for making too little use of history in his book’s third part, on Lenin and Trotsky. In a way he made the same mistake they did, assuming their lives in exile sufficient preparation for ruling a Russian revolution: stay-at-home Stalin knew better. The one Russian character in the book’s nineteenthcentury parts was the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin whose demand for the immediate abolition of the state asked an unanswerable question of Marx and the Marxists: why allow the state to wither away thus giving it time and means of survival? Wilson’s Bakunin was (as he warmly acknowledged) thoroughly grounded in E. H. Carr’s biography which he had reviewed on December 7 1938 under the heading ‘Cold Water on Bakunin’. It concluded with a criticism valid for much of Carr’s work, notably the great histories of twentieth-century Russian Communism to be written after World War II: As Mr Carr does not show us the need which goaded the proletariat to go to Bakunin for leadership, so, though he calls Bakunin a ‘genius’ and ‘great’, he never gives us a sense of the power which he was able to devote to their service. … Even such imprudent bravery as that of Bakunin in the Dresden revolution [of May 1849], hopeless, inconsistent politically and paid for by long and terrible years in prison, has had a value for the human spirit in its struggle against the timid selfinterest perpetuated in human institutions. This exploit of Bakunin’s was the kind of mistake that Marx would never have made; but was prompted by a kind of exuberance, an irrepressible magnanimity; that gave Bakunin, 82
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in this one respect, a real superiority over Marx. Marx had defeated Bakunin in Socialist controversies all over Europe except Spain, and the anarchists came into their own in the Spanish Republic of the 1930s only to be treacherously annihilated by the Communists acting under Stalin’s orders in May 1937. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia denounced the allied Communist extirpation of the non-Stalinist Marxist POUM as he had a right to do since it had sought his own life. Wilson, albeit with growing unease about the USSR, knew that for him in the USA to denounce the Republic’s repression of the Anarchists would seem to sell out its cause while it still held out against Franco and his Nazi and Fascist allies, and thus give moral support to the many American friends of Hitler and Mussolini. In To the Finland Station Bakunin’s family background reminded Wilson of the fictions of Turgenev or Chekhov, and that Lenin loved Turgenev’s writing (although his martyred brother Sasha had preferred Dostoyevsky), and had virtually experienced a psychic crisis on reading Chekhov’s short story ‘Ward No. 6’, which Wilson called ‘one of his masterpieces, a fable of the whole situation of the frustrated intellectuals of the Russia of the eighties and nineties’. While still at work on To the Finland Station, Wilson produced ‘In Honor of Pushkin’ for the death-centenary of 29 January 1837. He must have been one of the few American critics who could have tackled Russian literature as origins of the Russian Revolution, and it was crying out for it. Several Chekhov plays painfully anticipate the Revolution, although he died in 1904. Wilson was so clear about the lines of descent from Marx and Engels to Lenin that he made Russian literature only incidental to making of its Revolution. The book’s critics found easier platforms whence to hurl brickbats as the train to the Finland Station picked up its initial steam: they questioned its choice of initial subjects. Why not Hegel for starters? Why Frenchmen? Critics could have pointed out that the French Revolution was unique in its repudiation of history while the Russian Revolution found its identity in history, and how Comrade Karl Marx had said it would work out. To the Finland Station’s third part
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devoted two chapters to Lenin, two more to Trotsky (thus damning itself automatically in the eyes of world Communism which had murdered Trotsky a couple of weeks before publication), and the last two back to Lenin; the second part gave eleven chapters to Marx and Engels preceded by four on the origins of Socialism – the French Revolution’s final Socialist martyr ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf, Saint Simon’s Utopian hierarchies, the communities fostered by Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, and American spiritual Eldorados, that last requiring very extensive research in Wilson’s own nineteenth-century USA – and (belatedly interrupting the adventures of Marx and Engels) individual chapters on their most dangerous rivals, Ferdinand Lassalle and Mikhail Bakunin; but the first part devoted five chapters to the French historian of French national history and revolution Jules Michelet (1798-1874), followed by three on the Decline of the Revolutionary Tradition as exemplified by Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, and Anatole France. It was true that Edmund Wilson had published drafts of his five chapters on Michelet in the New Republic in 1932 and 1934, two pieces there on Anatole France (1927 and 1932), four drafts on the origins of Socialism (1937) and at least three on Marx (1938), followed by a major book review on Bakunin (1938). Much of this simply arose from economics. For all of Wilson’s elite manner and vast literary learning he was often hard pressed financially, and his great works needed more harvests than one. In addition, his New Republic future grew increasingly gloomy with his revulsion from Stalin’s great purge and with owners in England whose heir Michael Straight had been secretly recruited for the Communists by his Cambridge bed-companion Anthony Blunt. But the fundamental reason for the book’s initial content and shape was that Michelet received his five brief chapters beginning the journey to the Finland Station in the way the Muse is asked by Virgil beginning the Aeneid why Juno persecuted Aeneas (rather more elaborately than Byron starting the third Canto of Don Juan ‘Hail Muse, et cetera’). The Muse at the commencement of a great work is probably a relative of the Good Fairy at great births. In his boyhood Edmund Wilson had read heavily in Michelet’s histories of France and of the French Revolution: French seems to have come easily to him, all the more after his war service as a medical orderly in France.
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Michelet was probably his first major landfall on the shores of light. But from that shore he glimpsed more remote as well as immediate light, or, alternatively, his Muse told him of another, mole distant, Muse. To the Finland Station begins with Michelet’s discovery of Vico. As the book nears its end, Lenin, almost within sight of the Finland Station, has just had a testy confrontation of Stalin and Kamenev over their pragmatism in Pravda still chauvinistically proclaiming that so long as the German soldiers obey the Kaiser, so long must the Russian soldier ‘firmly stand at his post and answer bullet with bullet and shell with shell’: somehow Kamenev seems to have sustained the worst of the rebuke, a suitable anticipation by twenty years of his torture, self-indictment and judicial murder by Stalin. Lenin certainly knew his business: bread and peace would win popular Russian support, making the Bolsheviks rare revolutionaries opposing patriotism, although Lenin himself had been sent through Europe in that sealed train by German orders in hope the occupants would indeed make Russia leave the war. Wilson paused here, for a return to his Muse’s Muse: Two hundred years before, Giambattista Vico, at his books in a far corner of Europe the whole width of the continent away, in asserting that ‘the social world’ was ‘certainly the work of man’, had refrained from going further and declaring … that the social institutions of men could be explained in terms of man alone. … At the end of the eighteenth century, Babeuf, who not only believed that human society had been made by man but who wanted to remake that society, had said in explaining his failure: ‘We have but to reflect for a moment on the multitude of passions in the ascendancy in this period of corruption we have come to, to convince ourselves that the chances against the possibility of realizing such a project are in the proportion of more than a hundred to one’. Lenin in 1917, with a remnant of Vico’s God still disguised in the Dialectic, but with no fear of Roman Pope or Protestant Synod, not so sure of the controls of society as the engineer was of the engine that was taking him to Petrograd, yet in a position to calculate the chances with closer accuracy than a hundred to one, stood
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on the eve of the moment when for the first time in the human exploit the key of a philosophy of history was to fit an historical lock. If the door that Lenin was to open did not give quite the prospect he hoped, we must remember that of all the great Marxists he was least in love with prophetic visions, most readily readjusted his prospects. ‌ We have watched the attempts of Michelet to relive the recorded events of the past as a coherent artistic creation, and we have seen how the material of history always broke out of the pattern of art. Lenin is now to attempt to impose on the events of the present a pattern of actual direction which will determine the history of the future. We must not wonder if later events are not always amenable to this pattern. The point is that western man at this moment can be seen to have made some definite progress in mastering the greeds and the fears, the bewilderments, in which he has lived.
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IV History has the last laugh, at Edmund Wilson’s expense as much as at ours, or so we might complacently think. But it ain’t necessarily so. What that fateful backward look may now tell us, from the disillusioned future, is where we get off. Because we know so much more now, we possess so much less. Wilson’s pause outside the Finland Station gives us a glimpse of minds before power eroded them. A station may imply an end as well as a beginning, and there is our heroic writing brought to fruition before the dream goes into nightmare. Michelet’s passionate involvement in his idea of patriotic France expressed itself in his heroic account of Jeanne d’Arc, with the English as the contemptible villains whether in the Hundred Years’ War or the French Revolution. The logical synthesis of Michelet and Edmund Wilson would seem Jean Anouilh’s L’Alouette (1952) in which Jeanne is condemned and sent to her death in flames but before it happens she is plucked back to her supreme triumph when she made France win back its soul by crowning her King Charles VII. The spirit was all the stronger because France had risen from defeat, occupation and humiliation by Nazi victory in 1940. Wilson in youth fed his romantic instincts on Michelet, and his growing detestation of English snobbery found food in World War I, renewed in his brief stay in England before embarking for the USSR in 1935. His five chapters on Michelet were brief little stimuli but culminated in a eulogy of almost Michelet-style glorification: The History of France stands unique, a great work of imagination and research of a kind perhaps never to occur again – the supreme effort in its time of a human being to enter into, to understand, to comprehend, the development of a modern nation. There is no book that makes us feel when we have finished it that we have lived through and known with such intimacy so many generations of men. And it makes us feel something more: that we ourselves are the last chapter of the story and that the next chapter is for us to create. But what and how? Michelet cannot tell us. The fierce light of his intellect flickered out in a rhetoric smoky and acrid.
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We could play the ironies beyond the Finland Station with the thought that Michelet was above all else endlessly researching triumphantly proclaiming French nationalism, and that its counterpart would be the Russian nationalist Stalin grinding himself into permanent power with the internationalist exiles Lenin and Trotsky left acting history as a couple of corpses, one preserved for intimate adoration, the other butchered thousands of miles away. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s dazzling defence of Michelet’s honesty on his own historiographical biases (‘Michelet Today’, in his Writers and Politics (1965)) happily reduces Russian Marxism in 1959 to ‘a healthy open-air game, in which all are invited to join’ in which indeed he may have seen high parallels with his and my contemporary Catholic Ireland, ideological conformity taken for granted and loudly – sometimes competitively – regurgitated to distant splashes as heretical political or social corpses are chucked into the nearby Volga or Liffey by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute or the Irish Censorship Board. Anglo-American academic cults of historiographical objectivity O’Brien in 1959 found self-deluding: ‘Class war, religious war, national war all rage in historiography as they have raged in history. With Michelet and Carlyle the war was in the open country.’ That gives us the natural stable-mate for Michelet, even if we promptly and inaccurately allege contrasts declaring Michelet for, Carlyle against the French Revolution. There are more obvious similarities from readiness to discover past heroes rebuking degenerate present, or frequently to write at the tops of their voices. Edmund Wilson’s prose seldom shouts, but he knew how to listen to prose which does, especially in French. George Steiner (French pp. 37-38) exhorted: If you look at the sources of Wilson’s work on literature and politics, on biography and poetry… you will find much that relates him to the French philosophes and the French Enlightenment.
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This conveys Professor Steiner’s understandable anxiety to let his hearers know he knew about the Enlightenment (he had not yet discovered the Enlightenment was alive and well in Scotland, at least according to the publicityhounds of Edinburgh’s Festival and University). It may be more seismographic than radiographic. What he had observed in Wilson was not a retarded eighteenth-century savant but a receptive nineteenth-century product: he witnessed Wilson’s encyclopaedism but it didn’t need frontiers. And the point was a sound one without trying to claim Wilson as another Voltaire (as Frederick the Great might have agreed, one Voltaire, however desirable, was quite sufficient). It was nineteenth-century France, less witty but more solid, under whose tutelage Wilson embraced a world with wider horizons than the Anglo-American gentlemen of letters found fashionable. He said it clearly enough in the Renan chapter of To the Finland Station:
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Tolstoy may be the most useful comparison for us to contemplate, partly because of Wilson’s’s final chapter on Michelet, ‘Michelet between Nationalism and Socialism’, and wonder if War and Peace does not arouse nationalist as well as humanitarian sympathies, or perhaps conclude that nationalism has to be humanitarian if it should exist at all. Wilson justified his chapterheading clearly enough: Though his organic conception of history enabled him to see humanity as a whole, he was in the habit of thinking of it and dealing with it in terms of its components: nations. He had, however, a special version of nationalism which enabled him, in the case of France, to identify the patrie exclusively with the revolutionary tradition. In the name of the Revolution she had been chosen to lead and enlighten the world.
The nineteenth century in France was a great literary period, and a period perhaps comparable, for fiction and history, to the Elizabethan period for poetry or the Italian Renaissance for painting. But this literature, for all the immense range in it of the social imagination, was no longer a revolutionary literature. The enthusiasm for science of the Enlightenment persisted without the political enthusiasm of the Enlightenment; and since the Romantic movement, the conception of the literary act was proving more elaborate and subtle than the mere eloquence, polish and skill which had distinguished the eighteenth century. And Michelet, for all his attempts to reaffirm, to keep always in the foreground of his activity, the original revolutionary principles, was turning out to be one of the chief ornaments of this highly developed literature. With his novelist’s sympathetic insight into different kinds of human beings, his sense of social and moral complexity and his artistic virtuosity, he was to live to be read with delight by people who did not share his opinions.
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V Gore Vidal in the New York Review of Books (25 September 1980) agreed that Wilson merited what Diderot said of Voltaire ‘He knows a great deal and our young poets are ignorant. The work of Voltaire is full of things; their work is empty.’ That was generous of Vidal who had been irritated by Wilson’s indifference to the work of young American writers such as himself when chief critic in the New Yorker in the later 1940s and 1950s. But he continued, quoting Wilson himself from his lecture ‘The Historical Interpretation of Literature’ at Princeton on 23 October 1940 (just after To the Finland Station publication day): No matter how thoroughly and searchingly we may have scrutinised works of literature from the historical and biographical point of view … We must be able to tell good from bad, the first-rate from the second-rate. We shall not otherwise write literary criticism at all, but merely social and political history as reflected in literary texts, or psychological case histories from past eras, or, to take the historical point of view in its simplest and most academic form, merely chronologies of books that have been published. And the literary critic’s brief must include classics (recognised or potential) of history and of political theory, findings from the battlefield or statements from the dock. Wilson began his Marx by looking at Marx’s teenage poems and summed up his Marx ‘poet of commodities’. His Engels was beautifully in love with Marx in what was surely the most productive Platonic homosexual romance since classical days. That is not how Wilson would have said it, being somewhat traditional in his liberation, but it is certainly how his psychological arithmetic adds up: and the grief of Engels introducing posthumous editions is as fervent as any elegiac poet could command. Future Marxism paid endless tribute to the great men as unreadably as possible: Wilson declared Marx ‘Prometheus and Lucifer’, thus inviting the reader to behold him through the eyes of Aeschylus and Milton, and was sure he wrote with Marx’s agreement on the classification. He evidently understood Marx better because of his previous chapter covering Utopian Socialism in the North Atlantic, much of 90
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it involving the invention and discovery of new religions, so that his research on the Marx antecedents brought him deep within communities preserving an old one. Marx was a natural critic of the neo-religious Utopians because his own ancestral Rabbis told him so much about their possibilities and limitations. Wilson continued to be fascinated by Jewish culture and beliefs, writing on Jews for the Jewish magazine Commentary before the neo-conservatives got it (reprinted in his A Piece of My Mind (1956), and a little earlier as recorded in his Red, Black, Blond and Olive (1956) visiting Israel before it had become primarily a warfare state. It was another of his excellent witness to dreams frozen but preserved by him while still in the ascendant. The commonplace conversation of wine-drinking knows enough to prefer certain years, hence ‘vintage’. Inevitably appraisers of thought will think if not speak in ‘vintage’ terms, although commentators may have very different theses as to what years are supreme, second, honourably mentionable, or whatever. The classic Scottish case would be Bonnie Prince Charles as he was in the ’45 itself, Scott perfectly lighting on the vintage epiphany for Waverley. A biographical essay must at least appear to do justice to the prioritisation of vintage performances, and in Wilson on Socialism and Revolution may pleasantly burke the issue when declaring his supreme conclusion at an ideal point for the leader, To the Finland Station itself sparing Lenin the lottery of moral judgment on his years of power. An assessment of a vintage, a determination on its chronology, may be turned by what we seek as opposed to what we may formerly have preferred. The term ‘defining moment’ conveys something of this, however crude or market-conscious its selection. Wilson’s Renan and Taine were unobtrusively dear to him for having played their part in his education, however minor compared to his debts to Michelet. Bringing them into this book compelled their measurement by possibly inappropriate standards. Renan’s most revolutionary achievement could be claimed as his biographical humanisation of Jesus Christ or alternatively his apotheosis of the Celt via his own Breton loyalties. And they carry with them the moot question, which way did the revolution happen? Wilson saw Renan as being ultimately led to esteem Marcus Aurelius above Jesus, but
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Wilde, in prison, found Renan led him back to Jesus (an thus forward to identification with the divine Christ in The Ballad of Reading Gaol) thus leaving Marcus Aurelius a vintage reliable but not sublime. But Wilson showed himself Renan’s pupil in biographical humanisation. Similarly Taine particularly in his History of English Literature (1872) developed the fascinating thesis that a nation is best understood historically by understanding its major historians through whose ideas and popularity in their own time a people may be understood. From this chemical analysis Taine produced assessments of ‘England’ understood by appreciating Macaulay and Carlyle. Whether Wilson knew it or not, this was his own perspective. Revolution and socialism were to be understood by confronting a choice of individual practitioners in theory and practice. Above all, To the Finland Station showed that the makers of the writings and actings of history were human beings, Marx and Engels most of all, despite disciples reverently consigning them to plaster sanctity.
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