To the symbolist station
Rob James
Edmund Wilson traces the paths to socialism and literary modernism.
March 25, 2025
This “compensatory culture” post belatedly reacts to two books I have often seen cited but had not read. Both have been sitting on my shelf for decades, smirking at me. Well, smirk no more.
Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was a fixture in New York critical circles for decades at Vanity Fair, The New Republic and The New Yorker. A graduate of my friend Steve DeVine’s Hill prep school, he was a Princeton contemporary of F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was something of a fellow traveler of communism until the rise of Joseph Stalin and exile of Leon Trotsky. Wilson attacked American paranoia and infringement of civil liberties in the Cold and Vietnam wars. “Bunny” had many marriages (including to the critic Mary McCarthy) and more love affairs, and he enjoyed then lost a friendship with Vladimir Nabokov (he harshly criticized Lolita, as well as J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and even Robert Benchley). He had the idea to keep great works in print that became the beautiful-but-hard-to-read black volumes of the Library of America.
None of that is relevant here. I am interested in Wilson’s twin surveys of the roads to two movements that matter—twentieth-century socialism and literary High Modernism.
TO THE FINLAND STATION (1940, new introduction 1971)
The work is subtitled “A Study in the Writing and Acting of History”—how the socialist thinkers developed ideas that translated into action, culminating in the return to Russia of Vladimir Ilych Lenin at the Finland Station in Petrograd (the city’s name 1914-1923, later Leningrad 1924-1991, since reverting to its original 1703 name Saint Petersburg).
In college, I think I had an earlier edition that ended at that point in 1917. In the introduction to the 1971 version now on my shelf, Wilson late in his life seems embarrassed to report that something as high-minded and noble as socialism wound up in the death squads and gulags of Stalin.
Wilson begins not with Plato’s Republic or Thomas More’s Utopia, as one might think, but with Jules Michelet (1798-1874), of whom I had never heard. A “cyclist” in the mold of Giambattista Vico (1688-1744), he was comforted by the recurrence of historical patterns and the importance to history of ordinary people. He coined the term “Renaissance” and advocated overthrow in the failed 1848 revolutions. He wrote a fat history of France. Wilson also touches on Ernest Renan (1823-1892), Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), and Gracchus Babeuf (1760-1797), but I hadn’t heard much of them either. Wilson shows that collectively they criticized governmental and religious institutions, paving the way for something to replace them.
Then it’s off to Wilson’s appraisals of the positive programs of the socialists I had heard of: Anatole France (1844-1924, Nobel laureate and supporter with Emile Zola of Alfred Dreyfus; The Red Lily is the source of the famous quote “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread”); Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825, whose disciples included Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin (1796-1864) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857), and who developed a wholly unsaleable world government by smart people paid for by all other peoples); Charles Fourier (1772-1837, coiner of the term “feminism,” and inspirer of the utopian Brook Farm, Massachusetts; his “phalanstère” community was highly ordered); Robert Owen (1771-1858, industrialist with utopian company towns like New Lanark, Scotland and New Harmony, Indiana); and John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1866, founder of the utopian Oneida, New York). They combined radical individualism (including varieties of free love and the communal raising of children) with radical authoritarianism. Their communities largely fizzled, and Wilson admits as much.
Wilson now ascends the pinnacle of pre-Soviet communism, Karl Marx (1818-1883). A “young Hegelian” student (along with David Friedrich Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach) of Georg W.F. Hegel, he said he found the old man standing on his head (material world influenced by spirit) and turned him right side up (material world fundamental). In 1844 he met Friedrich Engels (whose survey of Manchester-mills capitalism of that era, summarized by Wilson, is devastating; had capitalism not evolved, who knows what revolts might have come?) and co-authored The Communist Manifesto in the leadup to the 1848 revolts. In London comfort (married to wealthy Jenny von Westphalen) he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (unfavorably comparing the latter’s 1851 putsch with Napoleon’s coup of November 9, 1799 (that’s 18 Brumaire Year VIII on the revolutionary calendar); here appears the great line “all great world-historic facts and personages appear … twice … the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”).
Then came Das Kapital (three volumes, 1867 followed decades later, published after his death, in 1885 and 1894). Volume I launches the critical project, with classical economic theory applied to Manchester-mills capitalism as a late stage in the world-historical struggle of classes. Robbing the surplus value of labor thanks to property law leads to inexorable crises and a proletarian revolution of the working classes in industrial society. (The often derided labor theory of value dates to Adam Smith and David Ricardo, well before Marx.) Volume II delves into the capitalist marketplace and its faults. Volume III (completed by Engels) states that capitalist profits will eventually be squeezed to zero.
You don’t need to buy Marxian economics to like the Marxian notion of alienation in late-stage capitalism. Marx, Emile Durkheim and Max Weber are considered fathers of social science. Whatever its merits or defects, Wilson notes that Marx’s work often features testable propositions!
What of Marx’s positive program? He foretold an end stage of a socialist mode of production; ultimately there would be a classless, communist society consisting of nothing but free producers. Getting there would take an intermediate step seemingly inconsistent with that utopian end state. In the realm of practical socialism and political programs, Wilson notes that Marx was opposed by the anarchist Mikhail Bakúnin. Whatever their revolutionary inclinations, Wilson notes that all of these activists expected the overthrow of capitalism to occur in the most developed industrial countries, far from Russia.
Finally Wilson gets to Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) and Leon Trotsky (1879-1940). Lenin left Russia in 1900 leading the exiled opposition that became the Bolshevik (majority) faction within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. After the czar Nicholas II was ousted in February 1917 putting the Menshevik (minority) faction in power, the German authorities allowed Lenin to pass in a sealed railcar from Switzerland to the Finland Station. With the Glorious October (November new style) 1917 revolution, his Bolsheviks came to power.
Trotsky was Lenin’s comrade and architect of the Red Army victory in the Russian Civil War (1917-1922). Trotsky criticized the totalitarianism of Stalin (though Trotsky was no opponent of terror in the right circumstances); persecuted, he eventually skedaddled, being sentenced to death in absentia at the 1936 first show trial and assassinated in Mexico City.
What was Wilson’s point in this whole survey? He is showing that one person can both write history and make history. Wilson disliked many aspects of capitalist economics and government, and was attracted to some ideal form of socialism or early communism, it seems. Wilson naïvely wrote in the 1971 introduction that at the time of the book’s original 1940 publication he had “no premonition” that the USSR would become so hideous and bloody (no premonition—really?). 1940 was a curious time in any event to sing Lenin’s praises (one reviewer alluded to Milton, for whom we know (from the film Animal House) Satan is the most interesting character). The book is called the “last great nineteenth-century novel” and is complimented on its style if not its accuracy or judgment. “It gets some important things wildly wrong,” one reviewer wrote—something that could be said of Marx himself, Marxism (Marx: if those guys [Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue] are “Marxists,” then “I myself am not a Marxist!”) and socialism more generally.
[RAJ: Capitalism has its faults, has had to be rescued from itself over many crises, and is in need of another rescue today. Inequality always stretches out in the presence of a great transformation in technology, but perhaps never as strongly as what we are experiencing today; any individual may say he would rather have his old factory job than learn how to prompt an AI platform. The defects of capitalism must be acknowledged and addressed. But any critic of capitalism should pay equally critical heed to the defects of socialism, including at the extreme the twentieth-century deaths under the banner of communism. No matter how much that same critic might protest that “ideal communism” has simply never been attempted, the weight of the evidence is that human nature is incompatible with the perverse incentives and totalitarian governance seen in each and every large-scale incarnation.]
AXEL’S CASTLE (1931)
Completely changing courses, have some sorbet and cleanse your palate!
Here Wilson surveys “the imaginative literature of 1870-1930,” tracing the origins of High Modernism from Romanticism though the medium of Symbolism. His individual appraisals seem better than any grand theory of the Symbolist movement, if it was ever a unitary movement.
1. Symbolism. Briefly, Wilson says Classicism treats society as a whole, objective and scientific, with the artist out of the picture; man stands apart from nature (citing Molière, Racine, Swift, Pope, Descartes, Newton). Romanticism treats the individual in society, subjective and anti-scientific, the artist not only in the picture but its star; man is embedded in nature (citing Blake, Byron, Wordsworth). Evolution bent this picture by making man just another critter inside nature, and was linked in literature to a Naturalism that reduced actions and motives to the ordinary business of living (citing Charles Darwin, Emile Zola, the later Henrik Ibsen (from trolls and fairies to failing urban marriages), and the later Gustave Flaubert (from ascetic hermitage to bourgeois adultery)).
Symbolism is fundamentally the use of one thing to suggest another—not the heavy-handed allegories of John Bunyan; rather, it is subtlety, vagueness and ambiguity that produce the desired spiritual effect. A common theme is the confusion of senses (“hearing approach of darkness,” “feeling the weight of night”). The Ur-source is Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire’s reading and translations of Poe; an early proponent is Stéphane Mallarmé (an English teacher!); fellow travelers are artists Richard Wagner, Eduard Degas, and James McNeil Whistler; others not profiled by Wilson for some reason include Jules Laforgue, Andre Gide, Oscar Wilde, and Joris-Karl Huysmans (À rebours (Against the Grain) and La-Bas (Down There)).
2. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939). He is not ordinarily thought of as a Symbolist, but Wilson says the Irish men of letters are more continental than English. His early writings cling to Irish fairies and folktales; the recurring coastal solitary Michael Robartes is visited by sprits. In mid-career, he folds in events of his life (“The Lake of Innisfree”) and of Irish public affairs (in relation to the Irish independence movement). Being proprietor of Abbey Theatre in Dublin gave him some experience in practical drama. Later in life he allowed his obscure, occult, and magical interests to come to the fore; in college, I puzzled over excerpts from A Vision with its gyres, which even find their way into what for me is still his greatest work, “The Second Coming.” Finally, with a day job as organization man supervising Irish schools, he becomes more plain and rooted, like Robartes himself, as in “The Tower.” Perhaps the career of Yeats is for Wilson a recapitulation of the Symbolist project itself.
3. Paul Valéry (1871-1945). He married Mallarmé’s daughter. Having never read his poetry and Wilson not translating any excerpts, I got nothing else out of this chapter. Maybe another time.
4. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). Eliot was born in St. Louis, but Wilson appropriately calls him a New Englander—and then he moves to London and becomes more English than the English. A great critic himself (read his Dante essay “The Sacred Wood”), Eliot proclaimed his own work combined Elizabethan drama with the symbolism of a Laforgue. Wilson demonstrates that the meter of the end of “Prufrock” is similar to that of Laforgue’s “Legénde” (I guess he shows that, since it is untranslated). Eliot’s main mode is nicely expressed by Wilson as “regret at situations unexplored”—compare to Hawthorne, Wharton (The Age of Innocence), and Henry James (The Beast in the Jungle). Lifeless landscape and banal urbanity are melded in “The Waste Land” (1922). Wilson unpacks “Hyacinth girl” by explaining that the hyacinth is the flower of the god that dies and rises fertilizing the crops. Wilson also covers “Sweeney,” “Gerontion,” “The Hollow Man,” and “Ash-Wednesday.”
5. Marcel Proust (1871-1922). A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) is a lifelong reverie, a “dream-novel.” The narrator is, in somewhat overlapping order, a child in the Combray countryside; a visitor at a grand estate; an adolescent with his aunt staying at a seaside hotel; a winter resident in a military barracks town; a Parisian; a Venetian; and perhaps other persona. For some reason, maybe just to show off or anticipating Monty Python, Wilson spends many pages summarizing the plot. I will react to Proust elsewhere. For now, I record that Wilson thinks the famous invalid created sort of a meta-book, a metaphysics for literature, a preface to any future fiction.
6. James Joyce (1882-1941). Dubliners was finished in 1904 but the Irish press, worried about its raciness and swipes at the UK, didn’t publish it until the English also published it, in 1914. Ulysses was originally a short story! One focus of the tale is Stephen Dedalus, who emigrated from Ireland at the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, picking his story up after his return from France upon the last illness of his mother. The other focus is Leopold Bloom, a Dublin Hungarian Jew, who has been married 16 years to unfaithful buxom singer Molly. Their daughter follows her path, while Bloom still grieves the early death of their son, Rudy. Wilson notes that at the end of the book, by rescuing Stephen, Bloom has somehow rejuvenated himself; he tells Molly tomorrow to fix HIS breakfast for a change. Ulysses for Wilson is a single social organism, meticulously (over-meticulously?) described and dissected.
At the time of this book in 1931, only excerpts from what became Finnegans Wake had been published. Wilson notes its complexity, with many parallels not one Homeric one. While Ulysses is day and conscious, this work is night and subconscious. It is probably not fair to judge Wilson trying to judge Joyce on a work that was then in progress.
7. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Three Lives (1909) offers realistic portraits of women: a servant with considerable agency, eventually the mistress of her home (Anna); a biracial woman with greater agency but coping with what we would call depression (Melanctha); and a servant who lives a quieter life (Lena). The coiner of the term “the Lost Generation,” Stein was a William James medical student. Wilson finds insights in her prose, which seems to me alternatively realistic and nonsensical; not my cup of tea.
8. Axel and Rimbaud. I admire that Wilson kept the reveal of the meaning of his book title until the very end, something like a Penn and Teller magic act.
A fellow with the name (take a deep breath) Jean Marie Mathias Philippe Auguste Villiers de l’Isle Adam (1838-1889) wrote Axel (1890) in the form of a play, or a “poem in prose.” It was performed once in 1892 and not again until 1962. This one deserves the excellent summary Wilson provides; I had opened this book and shut it, completely baffled, never getting anywhere close to the final “Passion” scene where all the fuss and furor reside.
Pale beautiful Count Axel of Auersperg lives a Rosicrucian hermitlike existence in his Gothic/Wagnerian Black Forest castle, on whose grounds where a national treasure from Frankfurt has been entrusted to his family’s care (he kills a Commander cousin who comes looking to seize it). Sara flees from a convent before taking the vows; she had learned from a nun who is an Axel relative about the Frankfurt trove. In an improbable scene, she and the Count desperately fight over it, then equally ecstatically fall in love.
Sara wants to live the rest of her life together with Axel. She rhapsodizes, “All the dreams to realize!” Axel has another idea; he wants to end their life together. “Why realize [those dreams]? They are so beautiful! … Our existence is full … we have just consumed the future.” They commit joint suicide, the message being that reality of life in this imperfect world could never match what they already have consummated in their imagination. The ending resembles Tristan und Isolde, but with King Marke arriving in time to bless the union of the lovers. THAT conclusion provides the basis for the Axel’s Castle title of Wilson’s book—the choice made at the castle is a symbol, if you will, of both the inherent power and the inherent limitation of Symbolism!
An anti-climactic coda to Wilson’s book covers Arthur Rimbaud, who as a youth was adored by the older Paul Verlaine. Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell) can be compared with one of the works at the genesis of Symbolism, Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs de Mal (Flowers of Evil).
Wilson suspects that by this date (1931), Symbolism has run its course. Its techniques are now in everyone’s toolkit. It will be absorbed and assimilated by general literature and thought. I think those judgments ring true.
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Thus I have at long last gathered the gist of Wilson’s works. To paraphrase Joyce, now I must forge afresh my impression of the underlying works (whether Marx/Lenin, or Proust/Yeats) “in the smithy of my [own] soul.”