Edmund Wilson states in the first sentence of Axel’s Castle: “It is my purpose in this book to trace the origins of certain tendencies in contemporary literature and to show their development in the work of six contemporary writers.” ¹ Wilson is concerned with “origins”; that is, he views literature from an historical perspective. He also regards literature as a tool of civilization, and not just its product. Good writing can not only reflect currents of thought and social trends, but, indeed, it can influence and clarify and generally aid understanding.
In his essay, “The Historical Interpretation of Literature,” ² he says that by tracing “certain tendencies” he feels he can find a certain order among disordered facts of life. By examining the “attitudes, the compulsions, the emotional ‘patterns’ that recur in the work of a writer,” he believes he can discern the meaning “embedded in the community and the historical moment,” and that they “may indicate its ideals and its diseases.” ³ In the same piece, Wilson sums up the value of literature: “In my view, all our intellectual activity, in whatever field it takes place, is an attempt to give a meaning to our experience—that is, to make life more practicable; for by understanding things we make it easier to survive and get around among them.” ⁴ Wilson is a practical man.
For him, the writer is many useful things. Wilson says of the author of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu: “Proust is perhaps the last great historian of the loves, the society, the intelligence, the diplomacy, the literature and the art of the Heartbreak House of capitalist culture. . .” ⁵ Proust, in the roles of psychologist, social critic, humorist, satirist, and “host in the mansion where he is not long to be master,” chronicles his time; and that, for Wilson, is an important (indeed indispensable) function of the artist. The writer, particularly the great one, gives us a detailed portrait of his time, (as it is) filtered through his special consciousness. Often, he writes to us through very personal pain. He always explains his world to himself in his work as he conveys that world to us. Speaking of Charles Dickens’ boyhood hardships as a bootblack and the neglected child of imprisoned debtors, Wilson sees that “. . . the work of Dickens’ whole career was an attempt to digest these early shocks and hardships, to explain them to himself, to justify himself in relation to them, to give an intelligible and tolerable picture of a world in which such things could occur.” ⁶ Part of Wilson’s function as a critic is to analyze. Partly, he analyzes not only the psychology of a book, but the psychology of its writer, too. A writer’s body of work is himself, which he gives to his readers. “To understand it, we must go back to his life,” ⁷ Wilson insists.
Besides being an historian, a writer ought to be a social critic. Dickens meant to communicate injustices in certain social institutions. It is important to Wilson that Hemingway’s work was more than the emotional outpourings of a disillusioned and alienated man. In the 1930’s, Wilson wrote: “Going back over Hemingway’s books today, we can see clearly what an error of the politicos it was to accuse him of an indifference to society. His whole work is a criticism of society: he has responded to every pressure of the moral atmosphere of the time, as it is felt at the roots of human relations, with a sensitivity almost unrivaled.” ⁸ By facing the problems, the emotions and the questions of his age, every writer enriches not only his private experience, but his artistic production. In order to know what is really going on “out there,” he must participate.
Wilson appreciates the active aesthete more than the (essentially) private envisioner. He doesn’t insist that the writer (has to) be a political activist like Anatole France, or a participating patriot like Hemingway in the Spanish revolution, or a preaching patron of the theater like Yeats. But he asks the serious artist at least to face reality in his writing, and not to flee (instead) into a world of pure imagination. Wilson compares Paul Valéry’s introspection with Anatole France’s rationalism and social involvement, and his preference is for the active man: “And in general it may be said that the strength of Anatole France’s generation was the strength to be derived from a wide knowledge of human affairs, a sympathetic interest in human beings, direct contact with public opinion and participation in public life through literature.” ⁹ Social involvement, not merely art, should be the artist’s (serious) concern. It was Yeats’ strength, says Wilson, that he returned always, throughout his development, to the material world, to grapple with its pressures, no matter how visionary he had become at any step along the way. Because of that, Yeats remained a particular hero to Wilson.
The Symbolist movement of the last part of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of this one is, for Wilson, the most significant literary force for our time. Its representative writers—among them Yeats, Valéry, Eliot, Proust, and Joyce—have given us “works of literature which, for intensity, brilliance and boldness as well as for an architectural genius, an intellectual mastery of their materials, rare among their Romantic predecessors, are probably comparable to the work of any time.” ¹⁰ Wilson is obviously not rigid in his view, nor is he ungenerous in his praise. But while he appreciates the strengths of these writers, he must make clear his objections. They fit snugly into his recurring theme of integration of the individual into society: “…it is true that they have tended to overemphasize the importance of the individual, that they have been preoccupied with introspection sometimes almost to the point of insanity, that they have endeavored to discourage their readers, not only with politics, but with action of any kind.” But Wilson prizes free expression, and points out, on the other hand, that these writers “have disintegrated the old materialism, and they have revealed to the imagination a new flexibility and freedom.” Best of all, ultimately they “…break down the walls of the present and wake us to the hope and exaltation of the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art.” ¹¹
And that is what good writing is, the fusion of thought and art, expressed freely and flexibly. One Wilson biographer, Sherman Paul, in Edmund Wilson, A Study of Literary Vocation in Our Time, puts it this way: “The essential issue for him was that of art and politics, of an art become increasingly private and privileged at the expense of its responsibility to the public and larger world of thought and action for which politics was the covering term.” ¹² Wilson balks at the suggestion, for example, that poetry can be “some sort of pure and rare aesthetic essence with no relation to any of the practical human uses for which, for some reason never explained, only the technique of prose is appropriate.” ¹³ In fact, Wilson would eliminate entirely such artificial designations as “prose” and “poetry,” along with the notion that it “is possible or desirable” to have such a pure distillation, and “that distillation has nothing in common with anything possible to obtain though prose…”¹⁴ Though Wilson admires Eliot’s poetry extravagantly, and even praises his “infinitely sensitive apparatus for aesthetic appreciation” ¹⁵ in his criticism, he has to object to Eliot’s separation of thought from art.
“Who will agree with Eliot, for example, that a poet cannot be an original thinker and that it is not possible for a poet to be a completely successful artist and yet persuade us to accept his ideas at the same time?” ¹⁶ Wilson points out that it is impossible to distinguish Dante’s philosophy, for example, from his “pure” poetry; just as foolish to try to discriminate between Plato the poet and Plato the scientist or metaphysician. Is poetry really only “superior amusement,” ¹⁷ as Eliot puts it? And is poetry really different from prose in its effect and usefulness? For Wilson, the answer to both questions is no. Eliot’s is “…an impossible attempt to make aesthetic values independent of all other values.” ¹⁸ Characteristically, Wilson refutes Eliot’s argument by turning it against the poet’s own works, lauding Eliot’s serious thought. Verse is not a rarefied, exalted literary form that has as its object only pleasure.
Separate analysis, the New Criticism approach of close scrutiny of a work apart from historical, political, and psychological considerations, of a work as and of itself alone, is enough for Wilson. It “does not lead to anything beyond itself,” ¹⁹ and such critical evaluations, like some of Eliot’s, lead “finally,” regrets Wilson, “into pedantry and into a futile aestheticism.” ²⁰ Both poetry and prose should serve man and society, while of course preserving their artistic effect; both do that in virtually the same way. “Has not such a great modern novel as Madame Bovary, for example, at least as much in common with Virgil and Dante as with Balzac and Dickens? It is not comparable from the point of view of intensity, music, and perfection of the parts, with the best verse of any period?” ²¹
It is part of the critic’s function to ask such questions, and to form at least understandable answers. What Wilson hopes to see every writer doing by way of improving his powers of communication is exemplified by his excited reaction to the change in Eliot, as expressed in a 1930’s essay: “But if Eliot, in spite of the meagerness of his production, has become for his generation a leader, it is also because his career has been a progress, because he has evidently been on his way somewhere when many of his contemporaries, more prolific and equally gifted, have been fixed in their hedonism or despair.” ²² Eliot, Wilson rejoices, has been growing. Eliot is seeing more clearly and realizing better all the time that art, besides being entertaining can elevate. Eliot still regards poetry as “superior amusement,” remarks Wilson, but he is delighted to note that Eliot reports, in The Sacred Wood, “an expansion or development of interests.” ²³ Eliot’s comments about his own progress please Wilson: “Poetry is now perceived to have ‘something to do with morals, and with religion, and even with politics perhaps, though we cannot say what.’”²⁴ Wilson is anxious, always, to see the writer grow more aware, of himself certainly, but even more importantly, of his world. Eliot the writer was doing that to Wilson’s satisfaction, in the 1930’s, as Yeats had been doing all along; and the result, Wilson believed, would be that Eliot the writer and Eliot the critic would see at last as clearly as he, Wilson, saw, that Bovary and Balzac, Dickens and Dante, were at one in their effect.
What is the effect? What does Wilson believe a piece of creative writing can do? Generally, it orders. Specifically: “A lyric gives us. . . a pattern imposed on the expression of a feeling. . . and. . . has the thing orderly, symmetrical, and pleasing; at it also relates this feeling to the more impressive scheme, works it into the larger texture, of the body of poetic art.” ²⁵ First of all, literature is an activity of the mind. It tries to give meaning to our experience by ordering normally fragmented or confused emotions or conditions. That ordering helps us understand better, and that understanding makes it easier for us to live otherwise emotionally chaotic lives. As a critic, Wilson in turn orders literature for us, according to principles he learned from his teacher and friend, Christian Gauss.
From Sherman Paul’s biography, we learn that Wilson acquired from Gauss “’the 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.’” ²⁶ The effect of literature on its audience is implicit in all of the above, but in addition, Wilson felt that his best criticism was art. Paul observes: “In his best criticism one most often finds the ‘distinctive individual quality’ which he says in I Thought of Daisy is the precious stuff of art. . .” ²⁷ In other words, Wilson, too, artistically helps us to understand. His foreward to The Shock of Recognition states that effort clearly: He gives us in that volume “a collection of literary documents. It is an attempt to present a chronicle of the progress of literature in the United States as one finds it recorded by those who had some part in creating that literature.” ²⁸ Each piece of writing in the anthology is a document, which “can be used to furnish evidence or information,” ²⁸ which is Wilson’s precise intention. He goes on to clarify that of two kinds of criticism, “of literary principles and tendencies,” and that which deals “with particular writers,” he has space there to cover only the one, concrete examples. But that concentration, he knows, will by extension give “a fairly complete view of the larger backgrounds and movements.” ²⁹ So, he means to inform, to have us informed, of the “American genius,” and to help us understand a particular period of literary production by ordering its pieces for us. Ultimately, like the writer of a lyric, Wilson works specific essays, poems, letters and dialogues, etc., “into the larger body of. . . art.”
In The Wound and the Bow, Wilson examines writers he felt weren’t appreciated enough by 1929. He titles one essay “Justice to Edith Warton.” Why did she deserve more attention? Wilson sums it up: “As the light of Edith Wharton’s art grows dim and at last goes out, she leaves us. . . in the large dark eyes of. . . the serious and attentive governess, who trades in worldly values but manages to rebuff these values;. . .and who, child of a political movement played out, yet passes on something of its impetus to the emergence of the society of the future.” ³⁰ She has informed us of the past through her art, and propels her information into the future. That’s important to Wilson, that progression and continuity of politics and ideals passed on through the generations. The creative writer is a herald, and his work can be crucially edifying. “Hemingway has expressed with genius the terrors of the modern man at the danger of losing control of the world, and he has also, within this scope, provided his own kind of antidote.”³¹ Hemingway meant to do just that, and his worth, in Wilson’s view, is that he achieved that effect. Besides Dickens’ storytelling powers, his character delineation, and his technical skills, Wilson appreciates his power as a “social critic” ³² and seeks “to give him his proper rank as the poet of that portiered and upholstered world who saw clearest through the coverings and the curtains.” ³³
Gauss once wrote Wilson: “’If I started a philosophy of my own, . . . I would call it integralism, which involves the fundamental concept that man and his historical and ethical environment are one and that to a certain degree he may make himself master of it.’” ³⁴ That is the critical point of view with which Wilson began in the twenties. All good literature orders and elevates. It originates and grows; it develops and improves. It informs and clarifies and increases both intellectual and emotional understanding. The writer shares himself with us, and the critic helps us share in the writer’s experience, all of which effort ought to tend toward integration of man with his environment and other men. As biographer Paul puts it: “Axel’sCastle ends with the hope that are and science may someday constitute one system.” ³⁵ Wilson himself says it this way: “The most, apparently, we can say of language is that it indicates relations, and a Symbolist poem does this just as much as a mathematical formula: both suggest imaginary worlds made up of elements abstracted from our experience of the real world and revealing relations which we acknowledge to be valid within those fields of experience.” ³⁶ The creative writer and the critic, himself an artist, are thoughtful and useful beings.
Ironically Wilson, the promoter of involvement and a participator, retired from the world by age sixty; “I do not want any more to be bothered with the kind of contemporary conflicts that I used to go out to explore. I make no attempt to keep up with the younger American writers; and I only hope to have the time to get through some of the classics I have never read. Old fogeyism is comfortably setting in.” ³⁷ No matter, Wilson’s influence is true and strong. He says that he feels “more or less in the eighteenth century.” ³⁸ But he still cares to communicate, and concludes his brief reminiscence with a question and an answer pertinent to and true for the writers he wrote about, as well as for himself: “Am I, then, in a pocket of the past? I do not necessarily believe it. I may find myself here at the center of things—since the center can be only in one’s head—and my feelings and thoughts may be shared by many.” ³⁹ It has been a pleasure to share both.