Steve Reads

Speaking of my difficulty giving authors a second chance after a bad first impression, I really hated Edmund Wilson’s To The Finland Station. But here’s a dude from The Nation declaring that

just as [Art] Tatum’s multivolume The Complete Pablo Solo Masterpieces is one of the summits of piano jazz, the Library of America’s new two-volume issue of Wilson’s essays and reviews from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s is one of the summits of twentieth-century literary criticism.

(via Cosma Shalizi’s del.icio.us feed; hyperlinks mine)

P.S.: The whole series of which The The Finland Station is a part is designed beautifully. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was the design more than the subject that initially drew me to To The Finland Station. The cover is beautiful, but it doesn’t begin to suggest the deliciousness of holding the book in your hand and turning the pages. Sometimes book designers just get it right (like those who redid Jan Tschichold’s Penguin Classics).

Thank Christ I just finished reading To The Finland Station. There was a short time during which the book was actually doing good things to me, but I think I just had the optimal quantity of coffee within me then. 99% of the time Wilson seemed to have been paid by the word.

I don’t know where this man’s reputation for brilliance comes from. For one thing, it’s pretty clear that all his sources came directly from the Soviet government (a fact confirmed by Louis Menand in his introduction). For another, he doesn’t seem to know what to write about. We get vacuous little psychological profiles of each actor in revolutionary socialism, which explain virtually nothing about the actors’ motivations but seem pretty convinced that they explain everything. So why have each of these actors done what they did? It’s not at all clear. But Wilson has no problem telling us cutesy little details about Lenin’s youth: how one Ulyanov brother emulated the other, always putting butter on his cereal whenever the other one did. At first these seem like charming sidenotes, until we realize that they constitute the full substance (such as it is) of the book.

The reader struggles to latch onto some principles. Clearly socialism is a force to be reckoned with, so despite Wilson’s leaden and contentless approach we have to treat it seriously. Wilson devotes perhaps a single sentence in the entire book to the underlying force that seems to have driven all these revolutionaries: namely, that socialism aims to bring man dignity, while the capitalist system wipes it out. We can be quite sure that this is why people fought and died for the well-being of others, but nothing in Wilson’s tome will explain what brought them around to thinking that socialism was the quickest route to this dignity.

The reader will find a decent explanation of socialism-as-literature: we want desperately, by the end of the first chapter, to read Jules Michelet’s work mapping out the unmoved movers behind society. He’ll pretty quickly move on to Marx, and will find only the slimmest of connections to the preceding chapters. Could Marx have existed without Michelet? It’s hard to say, and Wilson’s fawning over Marx and Lenin doesn’t help. Marx apparently read most everyone who came before him, so we can be reasonably sure he read Michelet. But Wilson himself seems unsure why he included Michelet in the first place.

This book tries to do so much, and fails abysmally on every task. As a portrait of people, it never rises above details that explain nothing. It is no portrait of philosophy, because Wilson is no philosopher. (And the introduction explains the book’s vacuity there: Wilson writes to his former Princeton teacher Christian Gauss, “Dialectical materialism, which was in revolt against the German idealistic tradition, really comes right out of it; and you would have to know everybody from Kant down to give a really sound account of it. I have never done anything with German philosophy, and can’t bear it, and am having a hard time now propping that part of my story up.”)

As a serious work of biography, we’re lucky there’s a modern introduction, in which Louis Menand quotes a letter from Wilson’s friend Vladimir Nabokov to Wilson upon reading To The Finland Station: Lenin was “a pail of the milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom.” As the book went to press in 1940, reports Menand, Leon Trotsky had just “had his head split open with an ice axe” in Mexico City. Wilson will never tell us any of this — because he’s too enamoured of socialism, and consequently because he’s only read the official Soviet biographies of Lenin, Bakunin and others. There’s no intellectual honesty here, but neither is there enough to count as a lie. It is as though this book passed through a typewriter and emerged with just enough substance to generate royalties.

There is near-literally nothing here. Even as a work of prose, To The Finland Station is like a bad dream in which we can only run damnably slowly: the only thing to recommend it is that we can be pretty sure it’ll eventually end.

I’m in the middle of Edmund Wilson’s history of revolutionary socialism, entitled To The Finland Station (apparently after Lenin’s rallying cry, though I’m not there yet). It’s a really tough slog: when it’s not giving me unmotivated descriptions of a man’s genius (somehow suddenly Marx and Engels were prophets, without having stopped over into the realm of mere mortals), it’s dropping references to late-18th century French commentators and events during the French Revolution that I’m supposed to know about. And while the book jacket advertises a familiarity with the book’s subjects that will strike me as intensely personal and attention-grabbing, I find that Wilson is taking only a perfunctory look at his characters’ histories — only long enough so that we can be convinced he’s done his due diligence, after which he dives directly into the characters’ major works, on the assumption that we already know what those major works are. The coverage of each work is spotty, and each chapter is only a few pages long; just when you’ve focused your attention, Wilson takes away its object. The man seems to lack some basic knowledge of dramatic pacing. Not that I’m a dramatist, but I know what I like.

So that’s disappointing, and I hope I get through the slog quickly. (It physically pains me to stop reading a book midway through. That’s how I ended the torture that was Cryptonomicon, and while I’m glad I left it — I had been asking my roommate at regular intervals to explain to me why I was reading it — it took a lot of effort. It felt fantastic to sell it back to the used book store; that painful part of my life was over.)

In better news, I saw Good Bye, Lenin! tonight. Premise: an East German boy’s mother falls into a coma just before the Wall comes down, and stays comatose for eight months. When she regains consciousness, the doctor warns her family that she must not get excited or she might die of a heart attack. So while she’s recuperating in bed, her son constructs a replica of East Germany within her bedroom: he gets German youth to sing patriotic songs from the old regime, he resurrects the family’s old and tired East German furniture, and suchlike. Whenever the real world creeps in on the fiction he’s created, he invents elaborate ruses to make the real world fit the fantasy. It goes on from there, and I won’t spoil it for you by revealing any more. Quite a good movie. I tend to get all choked up when I see images of the Wall coming down (or Reagan famously intoning, “Mr. Gorbachev: tear down this wall”), so it’s interesting to see the world around that event. Definitely a must-see; thanks to my East German friend Britta for recommending it.