Edmund Wilson: A Critic for Our Time.

AMERICAN CONSERVATIVES have never had much use for-or, for that matter, much interest in-the late American critic Edmund Wilson, who died in 1972 at the age of 77. The most obvious, and no doubt the most important, reason for their indifference is the fact of Wilson's having been a socialist for part of his life, an agnostic for the whole of it, and a cranky anti-imperialist in his later years. In his self-appointed role as "cross-fertilizer," operating between the European and American cultures, he was nearly as influential in making the ideas of Marx, Engels, and Freud palatable to the American general reader as he was in making the poetry of the Symbolists and the novels of Proust and Joyce comprehensible to the American reading public.

On the other hand, Wilson in his role of revolutionary and social

democrat was a highly ambivalent figure, Of patrician descent and education; unable all of his life, as he wrote of himself upon leaving college, really to "get on" with anyone, let alone the proletarian class (its female division excepted); a mandarin figure who, however much he allowed his relatively youthful infatuation with Marxism to cloud his political intuition, never permitted it to warp his critical judgment or, perhaps even more importantly, his aesthetic sensibility; and an outand-out-historicist, for whom historical events and products remained, throughout his life, the touchstone of his work and understanding, he was a typical figure neither of his own generation of Left intellectuals nor of succeeding ones. Two years before his death, he wrote, in the Prologue to Upstate:

My reaction to all the things that I disapprove and dislike is that of a member of a once-privileged class which is being eliminated all over the world and has very little means any longer of asserting its superior "values." In this, the situation in the United States is not now very different from that in other parts of the world-including the Soviet Union. . . . Our groups of well-to-do landowners and merchants and able profes

sional men who made the American Revolution have now largely been reduced to the Nixons and Agnews of the present administration, who are hardly superior to the mediocrities that preside over the Soviet Union. It was thought by Veblen and others that the technocrats would take over as a ruling class, and to some extent this has taken place. I cannot foresee the future, but can only go on with my old occupations.

If the voice behind those words strikes you as a surprisingly fresh one, I refer you to the reviews you have

probably been reading of George Kennan's new book, Sketches of a Life, and in particular to the embedded quotations from that work. For Kennan, as for Wilson, "the situation in the United States is. not now very much different from that in many other parts of the world . . . "; a Swedish ferry is loaded with tourists who are described as being "occupants, all of them, of the intellectual and spiritual vacuum which the European welfare state produces"; the present age, whether experienced within or without the U.S., is a nig"with all its noise, its overpopulation, and its mad wastage of energy," the "materialism, greed, and decadence of modern society," and the "ragged, dirty, and repulsive look" of young people everywhere. Describing his reaction to the New Leftists of the Sixties and early Seventies, Wilson confessed (also in Upstate), "I do not see how Marxism can help them much in dealing with our present problems. They talk about opposing 'capitalism,' but do not seem to understand what this means. They are up against an almost all-controlling government identified with the industrial and commercial interests. This in a sense is socialistic like that of the Soviet Union [sic], but like it [sic] a tyranny of bureaucrats." For many years John Lukacs-one of the truly important historians of our time-has been encouraging American conservatives to recognize in Kennan's voice the accents of a pedigreed alternative to

note today is accepted as conservatism in America: namely, what Ronald Steel (in his review of Sketches in The New York Review of Books, August 17) calls "the anarchic individualism and predatory market capitalism of the American Right." So far, however, the only constituency within American conservatism whose views appear to be consonant with that alternative are the intellectual descendants of the Southern Agrarian movement, who have managed to update the merchandise without giving away the family store. (Allen Tate, who in the 1920s told Wilson to his face that his involvement with Marxism and Freudianism was puerile and beneath his intellectual dignity, thought that Wilson's Patriotic Gore, a study of the literature of the Civil War era published early in the 1960s, was an excellent book.)

Finally, however, Edmund Wilson's

politics are irrelevant to the body of work he produceda corpus whose importance Janet Groth, in her interesting and useful book, invites us to reconsider. Edmund Wilson: A Critic for Our Time is

a halting, at times even a plodding, book to which too much of the rhetorical scaffolding of the explicator/ builder adheres, yet which ultimately succeeds in making a case for the importance of Edmund Wilson, not just to his own times, nor even to ours, but to the future of American letters in a post-literate age in which, as Robert Alter reminds us in his recently published book, The Pleasures of Reading, literary critics, as well as college graduates and Michael Jackson fans, have forsworn the printed page.

Throughout his career Wilson was assailed by charges that he was a journalist not a scholar, a writer rather than an academic, and therefore not really a critic at all. In his lifetime, his workwas attacked by the New Critics as naive, amateurish, and hopelessly unfashionable inasmuch as it refused to confine itself to textual criticism; while at the time of his death, or shortly thereafter, post-modernist criticism had become the recognized Moloch of post-literary idolators. Although even his admirers have long been aware of Wilson's relative weakness regarding consideration of artistic form (as opposed to literary content), Miss Groth argues that his insistence upon connecting literature with the individual

life, that life with the society that sustains and encompasses it, and society with history and the historical process is indeed what makes his work of enduring significance. "The prevailing tendency," she writes, "has been to trace the humanist critical tradition as coming to America from [Matthew] Arnold by way of the New Humanism of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. However, I intend to demonstrate that the more vital link is to be found in Edmund Wilson himself."

In the dedication to Axels Castle, a study of the Symbolist writers from 1870 to 1930, published in 1931, Wilson stated his idea of what literary criticism "ought to be-a history of man's ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them." As for the critic himself, Wilson belicved-according at least to Miss Groth's gloss of his re

telling of the Philoctetes story in "The Wound and the Bow"-that his was a double function: "one, to treat the artist with 'sympathetic imagination' . . . while holding him always to his highest

abilities; and, two, to become his champion and mediator with the rest of society." Thus, Janet Groth claims, Wilson is to be regarded as an exponent of "classical humanism," whose "historical-comparative" and "biographical-narrative" methods he developed from his study of Arnold and Taine and from the example of Sainte-Beuve as a literary critic. Wilson, Miss Groth tells us, "found a way . . . using every resource of the developing disciplines, and especially those based upon the work of Freud and Marx, to bring freshness to the great work of the past and to make the nineteenth-century critical tradition of which he was a part truly answerable to twentieth-century needs."

While Wilson's Marxism was-so long as he held to it, which was long enough-what we today would call Marxism with a human face, and his Freudianism, though pervasive, was undogmatic, it cannot be denied that Edmund Wilson failed to appreciate the central spiritual truth within the Western tradition of which he was otherwise an intellectual embodiment. In Miss Groth's words: "Both Arnold and Wilson regarded the Christian Church (and organized religion in general, in the West) as having perma

nently lost its usefulness as a cohesive force in society, and both were dedicated to the proposition that the only alternative was to be found in literature." Indeed, literature, for Wilson, was not a surrogate for religion only but, at last, for dialectical materialism itself: "He expected it to wield the kind of power to effect social change for which most people look, if they look at all, to government." It was this notion of the social efficacy of literature that gave Wilson his positivist aspect as a critic: as early as Axel's Castle he had written: "And who can say that, as art and science look more and more deeply into experience and achieve a wider and wider range, and as they come to apply themselves more and more directly and expertly to the needs of human life, they may not arrive at a way of thinking, a technique of dealing with our perceptions, which will make art and science one?" It was exactly this wide vein of old-fashioned optimism that led him, as Miss Groth remarks, into a reactionary impatience with the pessimism of Kafka and what she calls "certain forms of the absurd" in Nabokov.

To sum up: There was a large element of the traditionalist in Edmund Wilson-Wilson the man and Wilson the critic-much of it deriving, moreover, from the same nineteenth-century positivism from which contemporary American conservatism in its dominant form was drawn, to which it continues-albeit in bureaucratized Newspeak -to refer, and of which Steel's "anarchic individualism and predatory market capitalism" are the other side of the coin, as are also the "materialism, greed, and decadence" deplored by Kennan. Paradoxically, the maxim "Art for art's sake" which inspired the fin-de-siicle writers and after them the modernist ones-that declaration of contempt for the bourgeoisie, so much resented by them for decades to come -was no part of Wilson's credo: "Is not statesmanship," he asked in an article printed in The New Republic in 1932, "as important as literature?"

If conservative intellectuals continue to regard (as I believe that they do) Edmund Wilson as being beyond, tangential to, or simply irrelevant to all that is worth preserving in American letters, history, and culture, it is probably because their main interests have for quite a few generations now lain

elsewhere-in politics, in government, in economics, and in other such fetishes of the nineteenth-century positivistic mind.