Masks and Delays: Edmund Wilson as Critic

Author(s): Robert M. Adams

Source: The Sewanee Review , Spring, 1948, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Spring, 1948), pp. 272-286
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27537832

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 MASKS AND DELAYS:
EDMUND WILSON AS CRITIC

By ROBERT M. ADAMS

AT the moment when Prosperity and the New Humanism

were falling like twin meteors from portentous skies,
Edmund Wilson published AxePs Castle. To all who
could concern themselves with such matters, the arrival of a
major new critic and a major literary idea was at once apparent.
Neither critic nor idea was easily placed in terms of previous
literary criticism and controversy. Under the leadership of
Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, the New Humanists had
been maintaining a tight little fort of well-defended doubt
against the great American tide of good intentions, self-expres
sion, and democratic sentiment. Axel's Castle, though it evi
dently derived many of its formulations from these battles, stood
considerably apart from them. That Edmund Wilson was no
disciple of the watery Whitman scarcely needed proving; the
very conception of humanity en masse was alien to the queer
inward energy and obscure allusive style of the authors whom
he celebrated. But still less was he in Mr. More's rather hard
bitten Greek Tradition. Where he stood was in fact a matter
of some doubt.
An account of the Symbolist movement in France and Eng
land, AxePs Castle was devoted neither to polemic nor to apolo
getics. The author was often seriously critical of the Symbolist
writers whom he expounded; he struck not an overt blow at
Yale or Princeton, though some of his judgments glanced pretty
close to Mr. More and Professor Babbitt. But he evidently
stood before the world as the interpreter, if not the advocate,
of heresies. It might be surmised from his book that he be

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 ROBERT ADAMS 273

lieved in Progress and Change, in Individual Sensibility, Scie

Democracy, and Relative rather than Absolute Values. W
he criticized the Symbolists, it was not for deriving their v
from men, it was for failing to look beyond themselves to
actual life of men. But Mr. More had felt that life it
needed to be given meaning and shape from outside.
The conflicting attitudes came into sharpest contrast in dea
with a mixed figure like T. S. Eliot. Mr. More found him
much in sympathy with certain aspects of Eliot's criticism;
in a man who professed sympathy for Baudelaire and Rimb
he was convinced there must be elements of weakness.
strain of weakness, he considered, came out unmistakably in
poetry. To Mr. More and his colleagues The Waste L
seemed like a betrayal, a deliberate betrayal, of For Lanc
Andrewes. Edmund Wilson, on the other hand, thought E
criticism his least attractive writing. He found it pedanti
futile in content, priggish in tone, and unhistorical in i
proach. In the poetry, however, Mr. Wilson discovered a
pression of the modern temper both complex and cogent
pite a tendency to pose and a religious faith three quart
nostalgia, Eliot had evoked from new fields of human exper
a new literary meaning; and that was his highest praise
mund Wilson did not argue this point; he merely demonstra
it.
Without flinging a spear or skulling a Humanist, Edmund
Wilson thus became largely responsible, by the publication of
Axel's Castle alone, for the advent and widespread acceptance
in America of what had been almost entirely a foreign or ex
patriate movement. Symbolism and its associated techniques are
today firmly ensconced in our poetical repertory; an adulterate
Joycean inwardness is slowly filtering into our fiction; and the
"inner check," with all the other paraphernalia of Humanism,
has ceased to function in criticism.
The downfall of the New Humanism has been so disastrous,

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274 MASKS AND DELAYS

indeed, that its power to survive, even in the men who de

it, has been largely overlooked. The Symbolism and E
mentalism which overwhelmed Humanism were roma
their origins, sure enough; they were, perhaps, a secon
of the early romantic tide. But, as the example of El
gests, Symbolism was Romanticism with a difference,
difference that the poet could consider himself, or at lea
himself, a Classicist. One might draw, as Edmund Wils
a little dialectical diagram, showing Romanticism as t
tion of eighteenth-century Classicism, Naturalism-Re
the negation of the negation, and Symbolism as the nega
synthesis of both. Was it a genuine synthesis which em
however, or the synthesis of a worm with a robin, of
with a snake?

II
As Paul Elmer More spent his life defining and redefining
the relations between literature and religion, so Edmund Wil
son has been concerned with the relations between literature and
history. His problems have been many, of course; but under
lying them all has been the question whether literature pri
marily makes sense of life or life of literature. Mr. More had
had the answer to this question well in hand from the begin
ning. The eternal uniform standards of classical literature and
Greek philosophy, said he, provided life with form and mean
ing. Once possessed of these standards, the critic might judge
at leisure how different literary events measured up to them.
Value-standards and value-judgments were thus the essence of
the New Humanism.
For Edmund Wilson the problems of judgment and value
have been more complex. Literature gives meaning to history
and is valuable in proportion as it illuminates human experience
?so he seemed to feel. Yet literature is itself the product of
history, and so evidently is the meaning by which we are to

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 ROBERT ADAMS 275

judge literature. How, then, can we have values other than

purely relative ones? In point of fact, Axel's Castle tended to
substitute simple novelty for the elaborate austerities of Mr.
More's Greek Tradition. A literary insight was new, original,
and therefore good, almost as in Professor Babbitt's ferocious
parodies of Rousseauism.
But if literature were a mere follower after life, a fictitious
and transitory discipline, might men not transcend literature en
tirely by learning to control and subjugate history itself? So
apparently Edmund Wilson reflected; and in an essay on
"Marxism and Literature" (1937) he suggested that the hu
man imagination might soon emerge from the revolutionary
underground of art, to deal directly with the materials of actual
life.
This was the triumph of history over literature, with a ven
geance; it left of standards almost nothing but the naked weap
on, social utility, and not much of that. In controlling history,
a submachine gun is by most tests so much more useful than a
sonnet that to distinguish among sonnets is scarcely worth our
while. As for the prospect that men might learn to get along
without literature altogether, however idealistic its intent, surely
it manifested an extremely limited and vulgar conception of
literature and the human imagination. Obviously a mind as
subtle and various as Mr. Wilson's could not long repose in this
crude utilitarianism. Where to go was the problem; and Ed
mund Wilson solved it, in 1941, by the resort to snobbery.
Literary value, in "The Historical Interpretation of Literature,"
was identified with the judgment of a few elite spirits, who get
a common emotional reaction from a literary work. These critics
subscribe' to no public standards and are held to no logical
analyses. Their reaction to good literature is the same as the
vulgar majority's reaction to bad. How, then, shall we know
the competent critic from the incompetent? Why, Mr. Wilson
tells us, he is the man who knows what he is talking about, the

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276 MASKS AND DELAYS

man who creates his own conviction. Thus the critic is l

standing in the gassy vapor of his own self-esteem, while
public swims confusedly about, looking for a convincer. W
is evidently king in Mr. Wilson's literary state.
The position was hollow, the logic circular. If popula
ceptance were the only criterion of success, what need ha
for the critical elite at all? Yet the author of these watery l
brations was plainly a critic of remarkable quality, a gen
literary adept. With unusual freedom from dogmatism he c
bined real intellectual vigor and an insatiable curiosity about
social and personal experiences shaping works of literary
His mind was cool, flexible, and broadly sympathetic; it
average learned. One quality only it lacked, and that was uni
As Professor Babbitt and Mr. More might have prophesied
mund Wilson showed in his work no unifying concep
clearly formulated standards. He had, in fact, no philosop
The most sympathetic and painstaking analyst could not
what his philosophical position was, if he had one at all.
was interested in literature as a pageant, a parade of experie
but what it was all about he scarcely tried to say. Unden
he acquired freedom and flexibility thereby. He also lost
thing, in coherence and depth of insight. His basic philos
indecisions were reflected in the fact that he wrote littl
seemingly reflected less on the theoretical aspects of literat
and criticism. Indecision spoke in the rare and unrewar
generalizations sprinkled through his work;?no major c
has attempted fewer or achieved less insight in them. I
cision, finally, spoke with greatest eloquence through th
less wanderings of his intellectual history. Indecision wa
keynote of his thinking.
Edmund Wilson's elite and knowing critics are Paul El
More's priests of literature without a doctrine to preach,
cipline to enforce, or a tradition to justify them. They

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 ROBERT ADAMS 277

the frock coat, the manner, everything but the convictio

place of a point of view, they can offer only a tone of voice.

Ill
Axel's Castle ended with the double suggestion that Symbol
ism as a literary technique might some day be assimilated by the
general current of literary thought, and that science and art
might themselves arrive at a way of thinking, a technique of
dealing with perceptions, which would merge them into a single
discipline. The Triple Thinkers included observations that the
functions of verse were being merged into those of prose, and
that literature itself might in time be absorbed into the ma
chinery of social planning. This tendency to think, and in fact
to hope, that literature was about to become something else, was
common to much of Edmund Wilson's early writing, where it
served to delay or avoid the problem of literary value.
How small literary judgments bulked in these early writings
may be illustrated by a single example. Just on the threshold
of a promised discussion comparing the writings of Gertrude
Stein with the Courts Martial Manual, Edmund Wilson broke
off, consigning the questions raised perfunctorily to the philoso
phers, who, so he said, didn't have much idea of the answer
either. Questions of imagery and syntax might indeed be, as
the author suggested, the concern of history or philosophy; but
if so, what was the business of a literary critic? Clearly, Ed
mund Wilson was delaying the problem of a literary judgment
by passing it on to historians or philosophers?to students, in
other words, of larger unities of which literature was only a
part.
Meanwhile, in The Triple Thinkers, appeared some evidence
of how Edmund Wilson conceived the relations between history
and the writer. John Jay Chapman, Samuel Butler, and A. E.
Housman were evidently the victims of their social surround
ings, men variously wounded, defeated, or broken by life. Flau

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278 MASKS AND DELAYS

bert, James, and Shaw, in varying ways and to different

surmounted the obstacles and solved the problems pos
ciety. As usual, the analyses wrere acute, many-sided, an
related; but a tendency had already appeared to look u
tory as a set of arbitrary and hostile forces, distorting th
development, and rendering vain his creative spirit.
rarely offers opportunities to the triple thinkers; scarce
does it make positive demands on them. Even the rel
successful seem to be warped and narrowed by society
held the world and its people at arm's length, and his
was that of the spider's elaborate, interior art. Flaubert,
and despising society, was kept from understanding i
narrow bourgeois mentality. G. B. Shaw, frustrate and
a socialist, redeemed himself as an artist, to emerge t
triumphant figure of the book. But on the whole, th
thinkers, for all the clarity and cool intelligence with wh
were presented, lay before one ultimately like specimens
to a mat. The collector had gone to great pains to br
the beasts complete; their peculiarities and distortions w
there. What life had done to them was clear; but wh
had done with life could scarcely be surmised. Perhaps
true, as Edmund Wilson seemed to imply, that they h
little or nothing; but in that event the selection itself in
a certain timidity of judgment in the critic. If literar
consisted of giving meaning to human experience, what
ably was the point of examining men upon whom hist
imposed its own brutal and withering sense?
The trip To the Finland Station was therefore a journey
from literature in search of men who had imposed th
upon history and thus created values. It was an ex
complicated by many preconceptions and a diversity of at
Did Edmund Wilson ever believe that Marxian socialis
capable of deriving values from experience? He never
explicitly; yet the entire record of his search led up to t

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 ROBERT ADAMS 279

ment when Lenin fitted philosophy to circumstance, like a key

to a lock. Did the key fit? Edmund Wilson seemed, on the
whole, to think it did, though not very well. When one looked
at it, indeed, the key seemed rather ill-made. Of its two ele
ments, the Dialectic was a myth created to avoid the necessity
of answering awkward questions; and Materialism, with its les
sons of class conflict, was a narrow and inhumane dogma. Bern
stein's "clarification" of the moral aspects of Marxism, in terms
of a classless morality, greatly improved the philosophy; though
of course it also justified the voting of war credits by the Ger
man Social Democrats, and destroyed the key altogether. Was
revisionism then a Good or a Bad Thing? It looked Bad, its
moral and political results were Bad, but Edmund Wilson could
not decide that it was Bad, because he had put it forward him
self as his own solution in this very volume. He had said it
was "partly" valid in our day; but the "partly" was clearly a.
weasel-word, for he never indicated which part was more valid
than any other, or for whom. We must therefore conclude
that, so far as he considered any philosophy valid, it was that
expressed at the end of his chapter on the dialectic, the view of
social democracy and Bernstein revisionism. Historically, this
key has unlocked few doors.
Thus the train broke down on the way to Finland Station;
and instead of being a relentless progress to a destination, the.
story turned into a backward search for the spot at which the
locomotive left the tracks. Was politics itself a good idea? A
man who set out to bridle the great beast history might well be
tossed onto the rubbish heap. Perhaps the rubbish heap was the
best place to be, after all. Edmund Wilson did not know, but
he thought a man might keep his integrity there. Yet, given
the contest among social meanings and men trying to impose
them, where did figures like Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky get
the power they wielded? In some way, they seemed to satisfy
some aspiration of the people. Yet, looking over the com

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280 MASKS AND DELAYS

munity, Edmund Wilson could discover no widesprea

passion, no philosophical ardor capable of accounting f
devotion. The People, said he, were interested only
chine-made comforts, cheap amusements, free excursi
social services. These vulgar ambitions were evidently
of contempt to the author, who pointed out that any de
could satisfy them. Not only was the key a fraud, but t
itself apparently lay open to the hand of any clown capa
making cheap promises. What then was all the pother
Brilliant as a gallery of portraits, To the Finland Statio
thoroughly muddled political commentary. A logical man
not have undertaken to criticize the socialist tradition be
had decided a good many basic things about socialism?
it was practical or impractical, necessary or unnecessa
or invalid; and with relation to whom all these qualities
or did not exist. Logic, however, was the first casualt
search. Its conclusion was largely anticlimax. Lenin a
and is acclaimed by the stupid mujiks who want machine
comforts. He has momentary control over history an
historical forces which will shortly pass into the evil
hands of Comrade Stalin. But how Lenin has got in
gallery, what he is doing here, why things will shortly
wrong, and whether Bernstein-Wilson revisionism wo
him out?of all these matters Edmund Wilson says no
On this troubled and uncertain note the volume ends.
Since this derailment Mr. Wilson has returned to litera
still in search of a face to wear, but now obsessed wit
of overwhelming loneliness, futility, and incoherence. H
in literature, profoundly sincere as it is, really amounts
thing more than a faith that somewhere in literature a
view is to be found. But under the sensitive critic who b
hopes, and is patient has grown up an uglier fellow who
that a valid point of view can be found at all, anywh
mund Wilson's portraits of Dickens and Kipling in Th

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 ROBERT ADAMS 281

and the Bow mirror only incompleteness and frustration; and

the title essay suggests that sickness and morbidity are now being
viewed as marks of talent and signs of merit. Satire and bur
lesque represent another aspect of the rejection-pattern; and the
inward adventures of the satirist reveal him to be a thoroughly
spiteful and neurotic soul who believes only in his isolation.
Isolation now takes on its own glamor. The satirist, looking in
upon himself, discovers that he is of the lonely, sensitive aristo
crats, whose passion flowers only in darkness and solitude:

I know it?darling, darling?that I'm of the city, too!

And those women are all provincials, the full-bosomed,
the robust?
They are peasants beside you! ?
The slim pale body and the blue-veined wrists?
They will get rid of cities?
They will make themselves better bodies?
But they will never have a girl so pale and blue-veined
and quick and passionate as you?

Distaste for the healthy vulgar, hatred of the outside world,

romantic individualism, chaotic and incoherent philosophy?have
we not encountered all these elements before? Surely they are
qualities of the decadent Symbolists who dwelt in Axel's Castle.
Edmund Wilson has returned to an attitude which he began by
criticizing as a denial of life. Possibly he has been cutting de
liberate Viconian figure-eights for the past two decades; but on
the whole his progress seems to have been undirected and aim
less. He has discovered in modern existence neither pattern nor
direction nor uniformity of any sort. In poetry and fiction he
has put forth only concepts of helplessness and images of steril
ity. His criticism, as represented by contributions to The New
Yorker, has offered no more positive statements of knowledge
or insight, and it has occasionally confounded the confusion by
uttering a few words condemnatory of chaotic and frustrated
intellectuals.

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282 MASKS AND DELAYS

A contradiction has often been remarked between Wils

critic of sublety and insight and Wilson the aimlessly pe
fiction-writer. How, it has been asked, can the same m
cize so acutely in others the faults that he commits s
himself? The answer is that Wilson the critic and Wi
writer of fiction are two different people. But this is on
ginning. Wilson the critic is also a fellow of half-
separate characters. Caught between two disbeliefs o
romantic-anarchic individualism is either the result or th
he is free to imitate either point of view, or any combin
both, as circumstances require. His judgments are expr
adjectives, not in nouns or verbs, by image and imp
rather than explicitly, because he is not one coherent pe
but several incoherent ones, united chiefly by the comp
scepticism and self-confidence. Only a slight shift of em
separates such a man from that herd of clever young
brimming with the urge to say anything bright, who
daily polishing reputations in the literary journals.

IV
Like any bankruptcy, a critic's failure to "make sense" of
life and literature renders his entire career subject to review.
What would have been success for Edmund Wilson? He never
genuinely wanted or tried to get to the Finland Station, so much
seems clear. That is a long, hard, self-denying trip. Merely
by looking at Edmund Wilson's load of moral, intellectual, and
literary baggage, one could see he had no intention of traveling
so far. Yet he was dissatisfied with Axel's Castle, feeling it to
be a cramped, sunless, lifeless habitation for artists and critics
who were also human beings. Between the Station and the
Castle he undertook to create or discover a third structure. He
cate County's barren ground is the only dwelling place that Ed
mund Wilson has been able to find. Could he conceivably have
done better? I think it can be argued that he might have.

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 ROBERT ADAMS 283

For a man may either choose to make sense out of a doctr

and spend his life imposing its discipline on the barbarian
did Paul Elmer More; or he may make his sense out of pe
as they are, whom it then becomes his duty to examine, inv
gate, and explore. Now it is a curious fact that, thoug
formally rejected the doctrines of Mr. More and Profes
Babbitt, in all the writings of Edmund Wilson there is no h
that he ever considered seriously the possibility of learning
people. His critics, his historians, his political leaders, hi
ists never learn anything from people or history. They imp
their own views upon historical epochs, or they are crus
like helpless insects, under history's iron heel. On rare
vidual occasions a fortunate insight or a lucky circumstance
give them a glimpse of understanding and power. But es
ally they are without intellectual resources, whether in the
of tradition, reason, experience, or revelation.
Some of the reasons for Edmund Wilson's dim view o
man potentialities are no doubt personal; but some are also
osophical-literary. For the marriage of literary symbolism
social Toryism is, as Paul Elmer More early pointed out
unnatural one. What, after all, can Toryism provide for
bolism save a contempt for the very individual inspirati
which symbolism exists? No natural affinity links or has
linked the two movements. In some of the older Sym
ists there was implicit an attenuated sort of democratic-hu
tarian feeling. The motherly tolerance of Gertrude Stein
the gigantic egotism of Joyce were not perhaps vehicles of
profound popular conviction; but both centered upon h
beings with a kind of warmth utterly alien to the Yeats-Pou
Eliot tradition. The novel, traditionally oozing over wit
man nature and wet, warm sentiment, has always prove
happy hunting ground for the sharp, sterile scepticism of S
bolist authoritarians. But the search for authority in the
of a myth or a savior preoccupied the lyric poets and the cri

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284 MASKS AND DELAYS

leaving them without much use for people, save as sy

failure and frustration. The paths of Auden led but t
Catholicism; and Edmund Wilson, who was after all a
and popularizer, not a maker, of literary trends, had
follow through or to look for another road taking an
rection. So far he has been unwilling to do either; an
sult has been continued failure, in his own terms, to
any serious new "meaning" for life or literature.
What Edmund Wilson has called "meaning" is not in
very different from what the Humanists used to call
It is in effect knowledge, and no rare or special disciplin
quired to come by it. History grinds it into us all; a
by deliberately restricting our vision to a relatively f
bers of a relatively narrow class can we discover that st
distorted prospect which has become Edmund Wilson
in trade. Remembering what Europe was like less th
years ago, (at the time, say, of the Treaty of Vienna)
see that, though many historical eggs have been cracked
meanwhile, and most of them cracked in vain, yet today
omelets. The currents of history are elephantine, ponde
ticklish. But they move, and their movement, which
not impose but to which they may adapt themselve
tential source of value, meaning, or knowledge. Thi
of central importance to Edmund Wilson. Far in the
his mind it may be; but we must feel its presence some
implication, if our author is ever to write much more t
verted idylls and incoherent cleverness. For the m
history, which makes us potentially its masters, is mor
tant than Tristan Corbi?re's pig, or Proust's padded
all the romantical-tragical machinery in the Symbol
ment.
I do not mean that the story of Rudyard Kipling should end
on a note of specious triumph. I mean only that in a gallery
which includes Kipling, Dickens, and Samuel Butler there is

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 ROBERT ADAMS 285

more to be seen than traumatic experiences and parables of f

tration. There are also perceptions of opportunity, vision
what history's motion is, what it demands of us, how we
best adapt ourselves to it, and it to our desires. But t
these things, we will need other eyes, guided by other princ
than Edmund Wilson's.
It was, I think, a bitter-end Humanist who wrote tha
manitarianism led by an inevitable logic into Marxian com
ism. His argument was that by deriving our convictions
the history of men, we place ourselves at the service o
masses. But surely it takes no communist to look at life ent
to unravel the tangled threads of accident and design, to ex
the depths and sample the varieties of human experience, a
feel some community with the different campaigners agains
common condition. Actually, this work has been under
with most success by the great artistic conservatives. Me
Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, and Tolstoy (prior to 1876)
conservatively to the most broad, comprehensive, and lif
bracing philosophies of their day. The radicals and progress
adopted new philosophies which were generally narrow
matic, and undeveloped. Synthesis was far beyond the g
of the radicals; it was reserved for a more mature and d
oped cultural group. And if we fail to find in Edmund W
that highest achievement of the creative critic, a synthe
mind, the reason may well be, not that he has become conse
tive, but that he has never been conservative enough. Fo
fusion, after all, is only a kind of Ersatz conservatism
genuine article has both integrity and coherence and its
sort of humility.
Freedom is the hallmark of Edmund Wilson's criticism, bu
is a freedom created at the reader's expense. For what is it
arrogance which leads a man to assume that he can crit
others without assuming a position himself? What is it but
ing advantage of the reader when one uses value-connoti

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286 MASKS AND DELAYS

jectives based now on one and now on a contrary set of v

No sensitive reader can rise from Edmund Wilson's wo
out feeling that the author's faith in any specific value o
values is pale indeed alongside his conviction of perso
periority. For such a feeling of superiority there ar
legitimate grounds. Edmund Wilson has a genuine fee
the chthonic, the underground aspects of literature.
learned to hold his Freudianism like a gentleman. Dis
people, despair of life, the cultivation of private val
other trappings of romantic individualism are fashion
day; and Edmund Wilson has successfully kept two
ahead of the fashion. A technique which mingles the m
of fiction with those of criticism, and a willingness to s
nate inconvenient facts in the interest of an interpretat
helped in this project. The prose style of Edmund W
sensitive though sesquipedalian, his reporting is accur
perceptive, he has read more than most journalists, a
not afraid to use his reading. But there is, in all his
fuzziness of judgment, a constant overlapping of attitude
reminds us irritatingly that the author has no coherent
view. Like a pianist picking out an unfamiliar tune by ea
Wilson often guesses, dodges, or skips where he should b
right, and is satisfied with the ingenuities of verbal n
instead of solid intellectual consistency. The result h
that a critic who was once the best America could sh
fallen into decadence. He has hesitated too long witho
ing fundamental decisions; he has tried on too many fal
only for the purpose of saying something impressive
Castle, which once seemed to mark the gateway of a c
now seen to stand, portentous of nothing at all, on
ground.

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