NEW IMPRESSIONS XV

PAUL GILES
AXELS CASTLE, first published in book form in 1931, will be
seventy years old in 2011, by which time Edmund Wilson, born
in 1895, will have been dead for thirty-nine years. The passage
of Wilson and his work into history offers an opportunity to
re-read Axels Castle from a distance and thus to consider
ways in which, perhaps like Samuel Johnsons Lives of the
Poets or Joshua Reynoldss Discourses on Art, the book is
now less valuable to us as a source of aesthetic insight or philosophical truth than as an indication of ways in which important
writers were thinking at a particular point in the past. Such a retrospective light might also serve usefully to dispel some of the
aura which, as Stefan Collini noted recently, has continued to
linger around the fantasy image of Wilson as public intellectual, the critic-as-generalist who stood up heroically during
the middle years of the twentieth century to what John Wain
characteristically described as academic forms of narrow
specialization that blight every area of our intellectual life.1
It was this kind of sentimentalisation of Wilson that also led
journalists such as Clive James and Philip French to revere him
for what would now be called his public impact: in valorising
what James called Wilsons unconquerable impulse towards
community and French his capacity to resist the theoretical
methods of the academy while still remaining scholarly in
[his] cast of mind, both metropolitan critics were, of course,
seeking to annex Wilson as a distinguished precursor to their
own popular reviewing practices.2 Yet it is arguable, I think,
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that Wilsons position in American cultural history is more complicated and interesting than this, and that Axels Castle, in particular, should properly be understood as one of the formative
critical texts of American literary studies within the academy,
a book whose influence has long been obscured by the anomalous conditions of its production and reception. In his lecture
The Historical Interpretation of Literature, given at Princeton
in 1940, Wilson argued the case for interpreting books in
terms of their historical origins rather than, like T. S. Eliot,
installing the critic as God who calls the books to a Day of
Judgment, and if such historical relativism is applied reflexively
to Wilson himself a rather more ambiguous picture of the author
begins to emerge.3
As Louis Menand has observed, while Wilson is often associated with the New York intellectuals, in part because of his brief
marriage to Mary McCarthy in the 1940s, he did not in fact
have much in common with them, choosing consistently to
identify himself instead with an older generation.4 Wilson
spent his college years at Princeton between 1912 and 1916,
served (like John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway) in the
Ambulance Corps in France during the First World War, and
then wrote for various magazines in New York throughout
the 1920s. He worked for Vanity Fair, whose circulation
reached 80,000 in 1920; for the Dial, which first published, in
1922, T. S. Eliots The Waste Land along with an essay by
Wilson explicating the poem; and also for the New Republic,
where his review of James Joyces Ulysses in the July 1922
issue elicited from the grateful author a letter thanking Wilson
for his very appreciative and painstaking criticism.5 It is easy
to see how sharp would have been the distinction in Wilsons
mind between this vibrant cultural milieu and the supine
world of Princeton, which was, according to Morris Dickstein,
in many ways far from a serious university during the first
two decades of the twentieth century, an institution where the
gentlemans C was a way of life and there was a long tradition
behind it.6 Although Wilson remained indebted to his undergraduate teacher Christian Gauss, to whom Axels Castle is dedicated and whose special expertise on Aestheticism and French
Decadence exerts an influence all the way through the book,

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there is no doubt that Wilson considered New York the only

possible location for his literary career after his return from
wartime France. F. O. Matthiessen, born seven years after
Wilson, in 1902, subsequently struggled to carve out for
himself an academic career in the field of American literature:
he applied in 1925 to do a Ph.D. at Harvard on Walt
Whitman, but the authorities there told him that Whitman
was an exhausted topic and that he would be better advised to
concentrate his energies on Elizabethan translations of Greek,
Roman, and French classics. Matthiessen went on heroically in
1941 to subvert Harvards anglophile assumptions in
American Renaissance, a book that argued explicitly for
American nineteenth century writers as being on a par with
their seventeenth century English forebears; but for the slightly
older Wilson the world of academia was never a serious career
option. When Wilson graduated from Princeton there were
only two university professors of English in the entire United
States who specialised in American literature Fred Lewis
Pattee at Penn State and William B. Cairns at Wisconsin and
this neglect was compounded by the condescension of the Ivy
League establishment towards contemporary literature in all of
its forms.7 American literature in particular stood in the early
twentieth century in the same relation to canonical English literature as English itself had stood during the nineteenth
century to the study of the Greek and Roman classics: among
traditionalists, the new subject was always considered too soft,
too susceptible to merely impressionistic reactions, to be
worthy of serious intellectual pursuit. In 1928, Wilson complained with typical obstreperousness of how [s]ince the death
of Stuart P. Sherman, who was second-rate at best, there has
not been a single American critic who regularly occupied
himself in any authoritative way with contemporary literature.8
This long-standing academic hostility towards the vulgarities
of contemporary culture was given particular resonance in the
1920s by the increasing prominence of the New Humanists,
with whom Wilson and his New York contemporaries were in
rebarbative dialogue. Centred around Harvard professor Irving
Babbitt and Princeton guru Paul Elmer More, the New Humanists laid emphasis upon their own interpretation of classical

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civilisation and what Babbitt described as proportionateness

through a cultivation of the law of measure.9 In the critical
anthology Humanism and America (1930), editor Norman
Foerster defined humanism as involving a resolute distinction
between man and nature and between man and the divine,
and he declared humanists to be more academic in their orientation than workaday journalist critics since they were committed to exploring a wisdom deeper than that of the
market-place.10 Foerster was also one of the pioneers in the
academic professionalisation of American literature, having
edited in 1928 another anthology of essays, The Reinterpretation
of American Literature, in which he similarly expressed regret at
how the subject had so far been left to facile journalists and
ignorant dilettanti and called instead for a change in spirit
and method [which] will involve a reinterpretation of our
literary history.11 There was also an overlap between the contributors to these two volumes, with Harry Hayden Clark of the
University of Wisconsin declaring in 1928 that there was a
crying need for at least one learned journal devoted exclusively
to publishing material on American literature, and outlining
in 1930 the mythic conception of an American arcadia that
would be consonant with how great art has always been
organic with and supported by the life and vision of a whole
people. Such utopian designs led Clark in the latter essays to
evoke a spectre that was to haunt Americanist criticism over
the next half-century: When such scholar-critics have developed
such a social imagination, such a popular unanimity of hope, he
wrote, we shall be ready to receive the artist of genius who is to
write for us the great American novel.12
Wilsons essays on literature and culture in the 1920s are
taking issue both with the tenets of New Humanism and with
the reification of American literature, great American novel
and all, as a popular unanimity of hope. For Wilson, such hortatory exercises in popular pedagogy were associated in various
ways with what he took to be the desiccated world of higher education, and part of his self-definition as a writer during the 1920s
involved an escape from such strictures. Wilson himself had been
a contemporary (and competitor) of Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton, and his portrait was included, along with those of

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Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, John Peale Bishop, and Stephen Vincent

Benet, in a 1922 Vanity Fair tribute to The New Generation in
Literature. It is, then, abundantly clear that Wilsons early ambitions centred upon being recognised as a creative writer responding to changing times rather than merely as a critic expounding
the American heritage. As early as 1919, Fitzgerald had written
to Wilson telling him to write a novel and dont waste your time
editing collections, warning him that editorial work will get to
be a habit; it was only later that Wilson came ruefully to
acknowledge how his own attempts at fiction could never
match the vividness and excitement and the technical
accuracy of something like The Great Gatsby.13 Fitzgeralds
famous study of criminal obsession also takes issue explicitly
with the New Humanist emphasis on proportionateness
through Nick Carraways declaration in the novels first
chapter that the idea of a well-rounded man is the most
limited of all specialists and that life is much more successfully
looked at from a single window, after all. In his own critical
comments on Fitzgerald, Wilson was quick to identify how his
friends partly Irish ethnic provenance and links to the
Middle West of large cities and country clubs made the author
something of an outsider within the world of East Coast elites
that his books describe.14 At Fitzgeralds request, Wilson
offered detailed suggestions on the text of The Beautiful and
Damned, and he helped the author achieve in Gatsby the transition from a loose and subjective conception of the novel,
something Wilson had specifically critiqued in his comments
on the preposterous farrago of This Side of Paradise (1920),
to an organized impersonal one.15 Wilson would later credit
Gausss Princeton lectures on Dante and Flaubert with having
helped Fitzgerald achieve this kind of artistic discipline, but,
according to Lewis B. Dabney, it was Wilsons own editorial
commentaries that were the more important influence on
Fitzgerald.16 Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that
Wilson played the kind of mentoring role for Fitzgerald that
Ezra Pound played around the same time for T. S. Eliot, in his
clinical metamorphosis of The Waste Land from just a piece
of rhythmical grumbling, in Eliots self-deprecating phrase,
to a more austere neoclassical monument.17 After Fitzgeralds

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early death, Wilson also edited his unfinished novel The Last
Tycoon (1941) as well as his collection of essays The CrackUp (1945), both of which were profoundly to help shape
Fitzgeralds posthumous reputation.
At the same time, for all his iconoclasm and commitment to
contemporary culture, Wilson also had one foot in the traditionalists camp. His eulogistic tribute after Gausss death in 1951
suggests a love-hate relationship to his alma mater, with
Wilson celebrating his great teacher as part of that good
eighteenth-century Princeton. Gausss easy familiarity with a
vast range of subjects, said Wilson, indicated fidelity to a kind
of truth that is rendered by the discipline of aesthetic form, as
distinct from that of the professional moralist.18 In this way
Wilson sharply differentiated Gauss from his fellow Princetonian, Paul Elmer More, in whom, said Wilson in a 1937
obituary, the moralist triumphed over the poet: Gauss,
declared Wilson, was much subtler a mind than More, with
so much wider a range of imaginative sympathy, and correspondingly so much less fixed in his opinions.19 One revealing
dimension of this is the way Wilson takes Gausss aestheticism
the latter had known Oscar Wilde in Paris during the 1890s,
and kept a dog called Baudelaire to represent an escape
from the more constricting moral landscapes of America in the
1920s. But another significant aspect is the way Wilson clearly
looks back to the academic world as a source of intellectual perspective and integrity: he was always attracted, even as early as
1922, to the idea of a place whither I can retreat and derive
strength from contact with the classics, and one of the ironies
of Wilsons critical achievement is that it emerged from a paradoxical criss-cross between the worlds of urban immersion and
pastoral withdrawal. This was true all the way through his
career: when he was in the Soviet Union on a Guggenheim in
1935 researching To the Finland Station, he read Marx and
Engels during the day but Gibbon by night, saying later that
he liked the eighteenth century historians lofty, unperturbed
and perfectly cool point-of-view on human affairs, and that it
was really Gibbon who pulled me through.20
Such a sense of stylistic hybridity, oscillating between journalistic and academic vantage points, is developed in Wilsons early

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work to embrace a systematic aesthetic of contradiction, where it

is the interaction between street burlesque and classical form that
defines the tenor of his art. Wilson wrote several appreciative
essays on New York burlesque theatre in the 1920s his
acquaintances E. E. Cummings and Hart Crane were also
devotees of burlesque performance and in his essay collection
The Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and
Thirties, Wilsons piece on the Minsky Brothers Follies is
directly preceded by his illuminating 1927 essay A Preface to
Persius: Maudlin Meditations in a Speakeasy. Here Wilson
portrays himself alone in a New York diner reading an eighteenth century edition of Persius, the Roman author who lived
in the crime-ridden era of Nero and who consequently expressed
himself confusedly, inelegantly and obscenely. By drawing
attention to the inconsistencies between Persiuss inchoate style
and the tamer idiom of eighteenth century editor William
Drummond, who blandly criticises Persius for his lack of
elegance and urbanity, Wilson draws attention to the discrepancies between the actual stuff of classical history and the
way it has been domesticated by American neoclassical traditions.21 Through highlighting the similar confusions and
follies of his own day the provision of illegal wine and the boisterous presence of Cummings in the speakeasy, along with arguments over the impending execution of Italian American
anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti Wilson seeks to present the
chaotic scene of New York in the 1920s as a critique both of
New Humanist complacency and also of its unwarranted appropriation of classical history for narrow ideological purposes.
Wilson represents burlesque as something like an ontological
condition, where abstract ideals are brought low by the compulsive nature of material desire, but he simultaneously uses this
classical model of Persius to reposition the New York speakeasy
within an archetypal framework, thereby seeking intellectually
to authenticate a common language, as Joyce did in Ulysses,
through linking it analogically with mythological prototypes.
It is within this kind of polemical context that Wilsons essay
on Joyce and the other authors he treats in Axels Castle should
be situated. The Joyce chapter was first published in the New
Republic in December 1929, having been preceded in that

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journal by the Yeats, Valery, and Eliot chapters the previous

autumn, and by the general introduction on Symbolism in
March 1929; the complete book in its revised version was
brought out by Scribners in February 1931, and it has hardly
been out of print since. Wilsons most obvious contribution in
this work was to focus on modern writers two American,
two Irish, two French with the kind of critical intensity he
claimed had been sadly lacking in modern American letters.
Five of the six authors to whom he allocates an individual
chapter in Axels Castle (Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Joyce, Stein)
were still alive at the time of the books publication the exception was Proust, who had died in 1922 although Diana
Trilling, as if to indicate how obscure such writers still were at
this time, recalled that in 1927, two years out of Radcliffe
College, she had not so much as heard of Proust, Yeats, or
Eliot.22 In this sense, Wilson sought forcefully in this book to
map out a legitimate field of study, to justify contemporary literature against the reactionary impulses of New Humanists
such as More, who in a 1930 essay review of Foersters
Humanism in America had taken issue with many examples of
modern art the clever futilities of an Aldous Huxley, the
obscene rigmarole of a James Joyce, the intellectual defeat
and spiritual dismay of Proust which he saw as liable to
debase the moral conviction that human beings are endowed
with the potentiality of free will and answerable for our choice
of good or evil.23 After the Second World War, as Andreas
Huyssen has remarked, such was the tranquillising force of the
canonisation process, the translation of modernist icons into
epitomes of cultural prestige and value within the liberalconservative consensus of the 1950s, that it has subsequently
become all too easy to lose sight of how controversial and
incendiary such artists often seemed to the public when they
first appeared.24
One way in which Wilson in Axels Castle deflects attention
from received ethical precepts to the more creative confusions
of the aesthetic realm is by relating the emergence of contemporary literature to earlier conflicts between Romanticism and classicism. The book takes its title from Villiers de lIsle Adams long
dramatic poem Axel, published in 1890, whose protagonist

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hoards in his castle various precious jewels, and its dominant trajectory involves tracing parallels between what Wilson describes
as Symbolism, rooted in the aestheticism of the late nineteenth
century, and the Naturalism he regards as more characteristic
of twentieth century forms of literary realism. The literary
history of our time, he writes, is to a great extent that of the
development of Symbolism and of its fusion or conflict with Naturalism, and he goes on to say that Symbolism has already
rejoined Naturalism, in one great work of literature,
Ulysses.25 One corollary to Wilsons interpretation of Symbolism as a broad cultural movement was a scepticism about
the purist understanding, something attributed here to Paul
Valery, of poetry as an aesthetic world set apart; Wilson associates such fetishisation of form with Valerys pretentious and
snobbish side (AC, p. 69), while conversely he describes Joyce
as comparable to the great poets rather than to most of the
great novelists, indeed as the great poet of a new phase of
the human consciousness (AC, p. 176). Fitzgerald had evoked
the style of Aestheticism as a similarly amorphous phenomenon
in This Side of Paradise, but of course such broad-brush versions
of cultural history, along with the denial of any innate formal
specificity to poetry, did not endear Wilson to the New
Critics, who began to become more prominent in the 1930s:
Cleanth Brooks, for example, accused Axels Castle in 1939 of
trying always to reduce the complex organism of a poem to a
doctrine of communication that might readily be paraphrased.26 It is, however, part of Wilsons dialectical purpose,
in his argument with More and others, to show (for example)
how much Proust has in common with George Eliot
(AC, p. 129), so that twentieth century literature can be seen
to emerge through an intertextual process of continuity as well
as rupture. In this way, Wilson seeks to normalise the radical
nature of modern imaginative literature by linking it back to
its Victorian forebears. Whereas recent criticism has more
often been concerned to relate the genealogy of modernism synchronically to a general cultural condition of modernity, for
Wilson, crucially influenced as he was by Gauss and Princeton,
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Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us

To purify the dialect of the tribe
And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetimes effort.27
Eliot, who contributed an essay to Foersters 1930 anthology
Humanism and America, was acquainted personally with
Wilson even though they were not natural allies, but the
latters essay in Axels Castle astutely picks up the essentially
dramatic quality of [Eliots] imagination (AC, p. 90), and, at a
time well before the verse dramas, perceptively calls him
really a dramatic poet (AC, p. 91). Wilson has little time for
Eliots emphasis on pure and rare aesthetic essence, calling
the attempt to read poetry in a technocratic manner a` la
I. A. Richards absolutely unhistorical (AC, p. 96), and he
also rejects what he takes to be the pedantry of Eliots

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writing and its late nineteenth century ancestry the Paris of

Decadence, Yellow Book, and all were equally significant.
There are many local observations in Axels Castle testifying
to Wilsons critical acuity, notably the way he recognises how
W. B. Yeats has developed from merely . . . one of the best of
the English lyric poets of the nineties to the unmistakable
stature of a master (AC, p. 33), a judgement that is commonplace now but was remarkable then. While the originality of
such an assessment is compelling, its authority derives not so
much from any specific reading of Yeats, after the manner of
Cleanth Brooks, but rather from Wilsons capacity to compare
literary value across an extensive range of time and space.
There is, from this perspective, an inherently detached,
analytical aspect built into Wilsons account of modern
writing, and it may not be purely coincidental that his citation
of Mallarme in the opening essay Symbolism Donner un
sens plus pur, he had written in a sonnet on Poe, aux mots
de la tribu (AC, p. 16) anticipates Eliots line in Little
Gidding (1942), which similarly steps back retrospectively to
situate the modern movement within a longue duree of historical
consciousness:

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attempts formally to dissociate prose from the artificially

restricted field of verse (AC, p. 98); but he still salutes him as
a man passionately interested in literature (AC, p. 100) and
acknowledges how his powerful learning has had the effect of
discrediting the academic cliches of the text-books (AC,
p. 94). Matthiessen, who published an early book on
T. S. Eliot in 1935, described Wilsons chapter on Eliot in
Axels Castle as less satisfactorily rounded than those on
Joyce and Proust since he is seemingly not as sensitive to the
nature of poetry as to that of prose; nevertheless, Matthiessen
continued, as with everything Wilson writes, this essay has
the rare quality of persevering honesty, the determination to
state exactly what he has perceived, which makes him the
most valuable of contemporary critics in this country.28
Since Matthiessen was the pre-eminent academic critic of
American literature in the twentieth century, his endorsement
of Wilson here is particularly noteworthy and valuable.
Though he identifies potential flaws in Wilsons theoretical
approach, Matthiessen also admires his strenuous attempt to
figure out aspects of Eliots work that may not be obvious to
the common reader. Such recognition of Wilsons persevering
qualities is rather different in tone from the usual approbation
of Wilson as a purveyor of stout common sense, what Dickstein
called no-nonsense directness; Frank Kermode similarly
praised Wilson as a master of summary, something Kermode
associated with his commitment to public life, through book
reviewing and so on.29 But although poise and pithiness were
certainly one aspect of Wilsons critical charisma he described
Harry Morgan, hero of Hemingways To Have and Have Not,
as resembling Popeye the Sailor in the animated cartoon
without the plausible explanation that he does it all on
spinach there is also a more sombre and thoughtful side to
Wilsons work that seeks to get behind such journalistic
epigrams.30 The most obvious example is the brilliant essay on
Charles Dickens that opens The Wound and the Bow (1947),
where Wilson redeems Dickens from his domesticated situation
as a familiar joke, a favorite dish among the English middle
classes by elucidating instead the darker, more obsessive and
hysterical side to Dickenss writing.31 But this explicitly

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psychoanalytical approach, which indirectly influenced much

queer criticism later in the twentieth century, is anticipated in
Axels Castle, which consistently raises Freudian spectres in
order to interrogate flatter assumptions of a unitary subject.
Thus, Proust, with the perversity of his sadism (AC, p. 144),
is according to Wilson a perfect case for psychoanalysis (AC,
p. 146), with his researches . . . running curiously close to
Freud (AC, p. 151); Joyce in Ulysses shows a unique genius
for the representation of special psychological states (AC,
p. 179); Gertrude Steins work introduces us to the mysteries
of human psychology (AC, p. 200), and so on. There is, in
other words, a critical interest on Wilsons part in the enigmatic,
in what lies partially hidden, and this is commensurate also with
his interest during the 1920s in A. N. Whiteheads scientific
models of relativity, according to which nothing in the
material world was ever quite all that it seemed. According to
Ronald Berman, [t]here is perhaps no more important influence
on Wilson than Whiteheads idea that the varieties of experience
cannot be understood through any single scientific model, and
in this sense it is not difficult to understand how his views of aesthetic flux and historical relativism coalesce in his understanding
of modern culture as a form of perennial process, haunted by
what Berman calls the inability of language to state at any
given time that reality had been captured, formulated, and
pinned to a wall.32
This is another version of ontological burlesque, whose governing premise is that high abstract ideals necessarily falsify
reality in manifold ways. Wilson, that is to say, uses the
languages of psychoanalysis and science to project in Axels
Castle alternative versions of a cultural condition, the most
striking aspect of which lies in its very resistance to philosophical
closure. He is perceptive about Joyces attempts to write the
language of dreams (AC, p. 181) in the work that was later to
become Finnegans Wake, an experiment linked here to
Freuds researches into the principles which govern the
language actually spoken in dreams (AC, p. 182), and he
includes three versions of a passage from James Joyces new
novel as an appendix to Axels Castle (AC, p. 239). He also discusses as a queer special development of Symbolism the

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writings of Dadaists such as Lautreamont, to whose anarchic

temper Wilson generally gives short shrift, dismissing Dada generally as systematic comic nonsense (AC, p. 202). It is, however,
one of the particular virtues of Axels Castle that it gives discursive space even to ideas with which the author finds himself
unsympathetic, and another of his appendices here reprints
Tristan Tzaras Memories of Dadaism, as if deliberately to
allow within the book counternarratives to those proposed by
Wilson himself. This again suggests the accessibility of Axels
Castle to creative forms of fissuring, while the larger structural
contradiction in this work turns upon the relationship between
aesthetics and politics: having started out in his introductory
chapter with a cultural justification of the Symbolist
movement, the author finds himself pressed in the final
chapter by the question of whether it is possible to make a practical success of human society, and whether, if we continue to
fail, a few masterpieces, however profound or noble, will be
able to make life worth living even for the few people in a
position to enjoy them (AC, p. 232). This anticipates the
Marxist perspectives Wilson explored during the 1930s, culminating in To the Finland Station, but it also testifies to the
inherent capacity of Wilsons critical texts for internal selfcontradiction. Wilson drafted the first chapter of Axels Castle
at a sanatorium near Syracuse, New York, after suffering a
nervous breakdown in 1929, and, as with The Waste Land, a
residual strand of psychological fragmentation coexists in provocative ways with this books more public face of orotund
authority.
Michael North, in Reading 1922, wrote of how burlesque can
be seen as a key term at this distinct moment in the history of
literary modernism because it raises crucial questions about
the valence of both the obscene and social censorship, and
Wilsons critical treatise is particularly responsive to the multilayered aspects of the works he talks about, their capacity to
oscillate between the conventional and the transgressive.33 At
the end of the Proust chapter, for example, he relates Prousts
emotional idealism and its ultimate analysis and readjustment
(AC, p. 151) to explorations of how memorialisation operates
in recent American fiction: Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby,

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Hemingways The Sun Also Rises, Thornton Wilders The

Bridge of San Luis Rey, the sketches of Dorothy Parker.
Another of the strengths of Axels Castle is thus its comparative
reach, its capacity to forge links among the various literary traditions of America, England, and France, and consequently to
avoid the kind of parochialism that was, in the shadow of the
First World War, beginning to identify the subject of
American literature with a specifically patriotic spirit. Wilson
analyses Hemingways debt to the Parisian world of Gertrude
Stein and shows how the extravagantly abstruse dimensions of
linguistic experimentation find their way, in attenuated form,
into the more realistic channels of modern American fiction,
with Hemingway drawing on Steins stylistic rhythms in
certain passages of The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to
Arms, where he wants to catch the slow rhythm of time or the
ominous banality of human behavior in situations of emotional
strain (AC, p. 201). In this way, Wilson effectively democratises
the high art of Symbolism, releasing it from Axels enclosed castellated space by demonstrating how such forms work their way
into popular culture through a dynamic interaction with the
more naturalistic elements of the contemporary novel. Wilson
himself was no slouch when it came to dreaming up countercultural art forms, devising in 1926 a great super-ballet of
New York, to be called Chronkites Clocks, intended to
feature Charlie Chaplin, typewriters, alarm-clocks and all the
other sounds of the city, an idea that Chaplin himself just
laughed at. Nevertheless, true to his patrician background,
Wilson also remained sceptical about some of the more extravagant claims made on behalf of popular culture by New York
critics of this era: in a 1924 review of Gilbert Seldess The
Seven Lively Arts, for example, Wilson rebuked the editor of
The Dial for what he called his wildly inappropriate invocation
of Krazy Kat as, in Seldess provocative phrase, our most satisfactory work of art.34 Indeed, the title of Wilsons collection
The Shores of Light is taken from a phrase found in Virgil and
Lucretius about souls in the underworld yearning for a life lost
to them forever, implying again the authors desire to organise
his cultural responses to the 1920s within the discipline of a classical framework and so to bring highbrow and lowbrow together

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in what D. H. Lawrence, using a characteristically modernist

phrase in a different context, referred to as a trembling instability of the balance.35 Wilson, who met Lawrence at a party in
New York in 1923, called the English novelists Studies in
Classic American Literature one of the few first-rate books
that have ever been written on the subject, and he influentially
reprinted all of it in his anthology of American literature The
Shock of Recognition (1943), a decision that again suggests
how Wilsons aesthetic sensibility was attuned to expansive
and comparative rather than narrowly nationalistic viewpoints.36 In a 1927 entry in his notebook, Wilson declared
that only the works of art which, like the phagocytes, have
really ingested the hostile bacteria, the source of the inflammation, the disturbance of the systems equilibrium are important and valuable, and whereas academic Americanists such as
Clark were hankering at this time after the serenities of an
organic form that they associated with the national state itself,
Wilson, by contrast, was most responsive to the idea of literature
as what he called the result of continual stress and strain in the
universal organism.37 Far from simply reproducing a set of
moral values or cultural orthodoxies, Wilson saw it as his
critical responsibility to bring clashing forces America and
Europe, highbrow and lowbrow, Symbolism and Naturalism
into vibrant juxtaposition.
Wilson was working on his novel I Thought of Daisy (1929)
in the late 1920s, at the same time as he was writing Axels
Castle; the latter, he said, being literary criticism, is easier to
do, and in the nature of a relief, from Daisy.38 Wilsons
fiction is, in truth, a mixed bag, full of self-conscious theorising
about art and music, along with a barrage of sexual encounters;
Raymond Chandler complained that in Memoirs of Hecate
County (1946) Wilson made fornication as dull as a railroad
timetable, although John Updike was more partial to the
book, first reading it as a teenager and welcoming the realistic
representation of sex on actual worn furniture. But, as
Updike went on to observe, what was most productive about
Wilsons fiction was the way it greatly enriched his criticism,
and I Thought of Daisy incorporates a pronounced sense of
intellectual mobility, with the unnamed narrator directing

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irony back against himself in his pursuit of the heroine, a former

burlesque performer.39 At one point he tries to take a leaf out of
the New Humanists book by turning to Sophocles, but within
the mundane world of Coney Island he finds the ancient
Greeks wisdom unhelpful: I seemed to myself a figure from
the funny-papers: Mr Suburban America, at the seaside, with
packages and a straw hat.40 All of this illustrates again the selfsubverting idiom that distinguishes Axels Castle, since sex for
Wilson always involved an aspect of unpredictability, of experiential desire exceeding rigid preconceptions or philosophical categories. A similarly destabilising factor that ran through
Wilsons life and art was alcohol, and again this was something
he cherished for intellectual as much as sensual reasons. He was
a prolific drinker, someone who would order six martinis at a
time; but there was always method in such madness, and
indeed such proclivities were entirely characteristic of the
American Prohibition era of the 1920s, when alcohol was
used consistently by ambitious writers Fitzgerald, Crane,
Eugene ONeill, William Faulkner to induce altered states of
consciousness. Arguing that reactions to Prohibition were one
source of American literary modernism, Thomas B. Gilmore
drew a useful parallel between its willed disruption of commonplace reality and the opium experiments of De Quincey and
others during the Romantic period.41 Wilsons alcoholic tendencies were an enabling mechanism allowing him systematically to explore an idea of the loss of control, a crossing of
Enlightenment rationalism with the kind of strategic irrationalism that was, as we have seen, endemic to his burlesque consciousness. Wilson would characteristically turn alcohol itself
into a charade, and he once referred punningly to This Side of
Paralyzed by F. Scotch Fitzgerald.42
Prohibition in the United States ended in 1933, and Wilson
was feeling temperamentally displaced as soon as the late
1930s, confiding at this time to his journal of how he felt like
he was still a man of the twenties. I am still expecting something
exciting: drinks, animated conversation, gaiety, brilliant writing,
uninhibited exchange of ideas. This was a sentiment he repeated
verbatim in the last work published during his own lifetime,
Upstate (1971).43 In 1944, after the death of Fitzgerald, he

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similarly reflected in more analytic vein on how [t]here has

come a sort of break in the literary movement that was beginning
to feel its first strength in the years 1912-16, at the time I was in
college at Princeton: the movement on which I grew up and with
which I afterwards worked.44 Such retrospective categorisations
are prime examples of Wilson applying his own historicist
method to himself, and although he did valuable work in his
later years he never again felt quite as much at home as he
had in the New York of the 1920s. To the Finland Station
almost entirely ignores the ideology of Marxism, supposedly
its central theme, in the way it integrates revolutionary leaders
into a normative biographical framework referring to Lenin
as a great headmaster, and so on and it ends up with a
bizarre burlesque sketch first published in the Partisan Review
where, like something out of Tom Stoppards Travesties,
Wilsons pantomime version of Hegel voices his opinion to
Marx that We must all believe in the Dialectic on a lovely
summer morning like this!45 After the Second World War,
Wilson became increasingly uncomfortable with American
society in all its manifestations, refusing to contribute to
Robert E. Spillers Literary History of the United States (1948)
and vituperatively expressing his disdain for the bureaucracies
he believed were taking control of the countrys culture industries. Perhaps rather surprisingly for someone so sympathetic
to popular culture in the 1920s, he had nothing whatever of
interest to say about cinema, dismissing Hollywood as no
more than a corporate conspiracy. He did publish in 1962
Patriotic Gore, an account of literature from the American
Civil War handled again in a primarily biographical manner,
with a deliberately heterodox introduction that casts doubt on
all professed national war aims; clearly, he was seeking here
to draw an equation between Lincolns manipulation of public
opinion in the 1860s and what he took to be the Cold War
rhetoric of a hundred years later.46 Wilson also published in
1968, four years before his death, two diatribes in the
New York Review of Books against the bureaucracies of the
MLA, abetted by their allies in Washington, where he castigated
the academic pedantry he believed such monomaniac bibliographers to represent.47 These final essays have not stood

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well the test of time, in part because Wilsons particular targets

here the Northwestern University Press edition of Herman
Melvilles works, and Franklin R. Rogerss textual scholarship
on Mark Twain have proved invaluable to scholars over the
past forty years. In his fulminations on how no ordinary
reader knows or cares about such academic specialisation,
and in his lapse into the East Coast snobbery of finding it unfortunate that so many of these MLA volumes should be products
of the Middle West, we find Wilson at his curmudgeonly worst,
a beached whale of a critic trading off nostalgia for an earlier,
less professionalised era.48
The anomaly of Wilsons current marginal status within the
academy arises from the way his work has become associated
almost exclusively with the reactionary aspect of these later
years, with the result that he has accumulated admirers blind,
or even at times hostile in principle, to the originality and significance of his earlier work. Isaiah Berlin recalled a visit by Wilson
to Oxford in 1954, when Wilson drunkenly mistook John
Bayley for Humphry House and launched a sweeping attack
on academic life and academics in general as murderers of all
that was living and real in literature and art, a denunciation
that induced Berlin fervently to concur with him in denouncing
the modern tendency toward purely literary scholarship as
involving a deliberate ignoring of the texture of the writers
life and society.49 It was a similar kind of intellectual nostalgia
for older biographical modes that led Wilson, at a party given by
Harry Levin around the same time, to rage at poet and scholar
Donald Hall, who had told Wilson he was working on the
prosody of modernist poetry, only to be greeted with the
riposte: Never use that filthy disgusting word in my presence.
As Hall tells the story: For a moment I did not know but
what prosody was the offending word, but I soon discovered
that it was modernist.50 Wilson loathed the idea of writers
he had known personally being categorised by academic industries under the modernist label, and such visceral hostility
towards what he took to be dehumanising critical jargon led
him after the Second World War towards increasingly reactionary and at times eccentric literary judgements, as he expressed
great admiration for the likes of Max Beerbohm, Compton

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Mackenzie, and Evelyn Waugh: the early novels of Waugh,

Wilson pointedly remarked in 1944, are the only things
written in England that are comparable to Fitzgerald and
Hemingway, and in 1962 he bizarrely described Waughs
Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold as the greatest Protestant allegory
since Pilgrims Progress.51 After its own lights Patriotic Gore
was an impressive enough achievement, and the book clearly
has some analogies to Axels Castle in the way it seeks to map
out a neglected literary field by bringing Civil War writing
back within a more general purview. But while Wilson was
the first properly to identify the Symbolist trajectory of the
1920s, he was a belated entrant into the lists of Civil War
scholarship, with Harvard professor Perry Miller observing
sardonically that Wilson wrote about figures such as Sidney
Lanier and George W. Cable as if nobody had ever heard of
them before.52 Whereas Axels Castle had an immediate and formative influence on the construction of the early twentieth
century canon, with Wilson being a participant in this cultural
world as well as an observer of it, it would be fair to say that
Patriotic Gore, although valuable, constituted only a relatively
minor intervention within the more extensive domain of Civil
War historiography.
In many other critical aspects, however, Wilson was ahead of
the game. He had a great facility for mastering foreign languages
having studied Greek, Latin, and western European languages
at school, he added Russian and Hebrew in middle age and Hungarian in his later years and this helped him always to bring an
informed comparative perspective to literary study. In 1952,
when working on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wilson wrote that he
was trying to concentrate synoptically, as they say of the
Gospels, to bring into one system the literatures of several
cultures which have not always been in close communication,
which in some cases have been hardly aware of one another;
this anticipates the planetary turn in twenty-first century Americanist criticism, the move to relate American literature to world
literature rather than regarding it as contained narrowly within
its own nationalist orbit.53 As early as 1949, after a trip to
Haiti, Wilson predicted that the next flowering of French
poetry would be in the Caribbean, and this again foreshadows

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the hemispheric dimension that has since become commonplace in American studies.54 It was also Wilsons experience of
Russia in the 1930s that was instrumental in his important reappraisal of Dickens, since he displaced the English writer from his
Victorian context and re-read him within a less familiar transnational framework, as Dostoevskys master. This essay was
dedicated To the Students of English 354, University of
Chicago, Summer 1939, and Wilson also served in 1959-60
as Lowell Professor of English at Harvard, where he taught a
seminar in comparative literature as well as lecturing on Civil
War writing.55 Wilson, was, in other words, never quite so
hostile to the groves of academe as, in his more drunken
moods, he liked to convey the impression of being. Consequently, the familiar complaint sounded in his 2004 review of
a new edition of Axels Castle by American scholar Sven
Birkerts, about how since Wilsons day literature has been
annexed by academia and subdivided into dozens of districts,
little polities ruled over by professors and irradiated with one
or another kind of jargon with the generalist . . . stripped of
authority and banished to the far provinces, serves unhelpfully
to obscure crucial historical factors circumscribing the formation
of the larger intellectual projects to which Wilson was committed.56 Birkerts, like many other conservative commentators,
cherishes the image of the later, reactionary, Wilson, but of
course in the 1920s the latter was regarded by the New Humanists and others as a dangerous radical, a trailblazer for the new
styles of writing that were then thought to be upending all the
old moral pieties. What happened subsequently, however, was
that Foerster and his acolytes came to take control of the institutional formation of American literature, with the result that
mythic treatises on the American Adam and so on became
commonplace and the focus on material culture that had characterized Wilsons work of the 1920s became marginalized.57
Indeed, it is one of the oddities of American literary history
that so few of its home-based modernist writers wrote any substantial literary criticism: although of course Eliot and Pound in
London were prolific, one looks in vain for significant contributions from Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, or Crane. The
result of this is that the American artistic consciousness of the

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1920s has, in institutional terms, remained largely occluded and

has not played as significant a role in the formation of the subject
as one might have expected. This is an oddity of the way the field
of American literature has come historically to constitute itself,
but it is also one of the reasons the significance of Axels
Castle has tended to be underestimated. The books comparative
scope turned out to be antipathetic to the nationalist instincts of
American literary criticism in the 1930s, and its relativist
embrace of inner contradiction and what one might call a performative Freudianism turned out to be anathema to the moralising, uplifting rhetoric of American myth and symbol
scholarship in the Cold War era.
Wilsons quarrel, then, was not so much with the academy
itself, but with particular scholarly developments that had the
effect of displacing his own intellectual concerns. There are of
course other examples of major literary and cultural critics in
the mid-twentieth century whose work was, for various
reasons, undertaken mostly outside the academy: W. E. B. Du
Bois and Walter Benjamin come to mind. But Van Wyck
Brookss commendation of Wilson, when presenting him in
1955 with the gold medal for essays and criticism of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, as a vanishing type,
the free man of letters where the adjective free implies
freedom from the institutional matrix of universities, as well as
suggesting American political freedom appears sentimentally
misleading.58 Wilson was, in fact, no more an advocate of philosophical freedom than he was an apologist for American liberal
values. The biographer Leon Edel, a not untypical representative
of traditional American humanist criticism in the years after the
Second World War, described Wilson shortly after his death as
having always been aware that he carried within a subversive
persona, a kind of chronic presence, or call it a wound which
at times negated his highest impulses; but though Edel
regarded such debasement of Wilsons highest impulses as
negatively inducing guile and indirection along with subterranean distress, it was in fact part of the unusual power of
Wilsons criticism, as of Fitzgeralds novels or Cranes
mock-epic poetry, self-consciously to bring corruption and
idealism, alcoholic torment and what Gatsby calls the green

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University of Sydney
NOTES
1

Stefan Collini, Liquored-Up, London Review of Books, 17

Nov. 2005, 15; John Wain, preface to id. (ed.), Edmund
Wilson: The Man and his Work (New York, 1978), pp. viii-ix.
2
Clive James, The Poetry of Edmund Wilson, in Wain (ed.),
Edmund Wilson, p. 162; Philip French, Three Honest Men:
Edmund Wilson, F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling. A Critical
Mosaic (Manchester, 1980), p. 10.
3
Edmund Wilson, The Historical Interpretation of Literature,
in The Triple Thinkers: Twelve Essays on Literary Subjects
(New York, 1948), pp. 260, 257.
4
Louis Menand, Edmund Wilson in his Times, in Lewis M.
Dabney (ed.), Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections
(Princeton, 1997), p. 253.

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breast of the new world, into evocative if unstable alignment.59

Peter Wollen wrote in 1993 of how the history of modernism is
caught between visionary utopianism and sense of civic
purpose on the one hand and a fascination with the urban vernacular on the other, and if American criticism of modernist
writing has tended generally to place much more emphasis on
utopian abstraction, it is the genius of Axels Castle to bring
both sides of this equation into juxtaposition, to relate its
scoping of Symbolism to what Wollen describes as the
unplanned and chaotic nature of the modern environment.
Even while generally unsympathetic to Wilsons methods,
Stanley Edgar Hyman in 1948 appropriately compared Axels
Castle to Eliots The Sacred Wood (1920) as a volume of
critical essays that helped to shape the direction of modern literature.60 Like Eliots collection, Wilsons book may now appear to
be unduly idiosyncratic and partial, even though many of its
individual judgements of authors still appear strikingly sound;
but as a work of cultural history, whose author engaged
actively with the scenes that he described and so effectively
brought modern literature for the first time into the public
domain, Axels Castle remains indispensable.

297
Jeffrey Meyers, Edmund Wilson: A Biography (Boston, 1995),
p. 78.
6
Morris Dickstein, A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the
Real World (Princeton, 2005), pp. 77-8.
7
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the
1920s (New York, 1995), p. 160. On this topic, see also
Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy:
The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (Philadelphia,
1986), and Elizabeth Renker, The Origins of American Literature Studies (Cambridge, 2007).
8
Edmund Wilson, The Critic Who Does Not Exist, in The
Shores of Light: A Literary Chronicle of the Twenties and
Thirties (1952), pp. 370-1.
9
Irving Babbitt, Humanism: An Essay at Definition, in
Norman Foerster (ed.), Humanism and America: Essays on
the Outlook of Modern Civilisation (1930; repr. Port Washington, NY, 1967), p. 30.
10
Norman Foerster, preface to Humanism and America,
pp. vi, xi.
11
Norman Foerster, introduction to id. (ed.), The Reinterpretation of American Literature: Some Contributions Toward the
Understanding of its Historical Development (New York,
1928), p. viii.
12
Harry Hayden Clark, American Literary History and
American Literature, in Foerster (ed.), The Reinterpretation of
American Literature, p. 190; Harry Hayden Clark, Pandoras
Box in American Fiction, in Foerster (ed.), Humanism and
America, pp. 203-4.
13
Meyers, Edmund Wilson, p. 53; Lewis B. Dabney, Edmund
Wilson: A Life in Literature (New York, 2005), p. 123.
14
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; repr. New York,
2004), p. 4; Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Shores
of Light, pp. 30-1.
15
Edmund Wilson, Prologue, 1952: Christian Gauss as a
Teacher of Literature, in The Shores of Light, p. 15; Wilson,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, p. 29.
16
Dabney, Edmund Wilson, pp. 87, 123.
17
T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the
Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot (1971), p. 1.
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298
Wilson, Prologue, 1952, pp. 8, 5, 11.
19
Edmund Wilson, Mr. More and the Mithraic Bull, in The
Triple Thinkers, pp. 10-11, 6.
20
Dabney, Edmund Wilson, pp. 95, 215.
21
Edmund Wilson, A Preface to Persius: Maudlin Meditations
in a Speakeasy, in The Shores of Light, pp. 270, 267.
22
Meyers, Edmund Wilson, p. 141.
23
Paul Elmer More, A Revival of Humanism (1930), in On
Being Human (Princeton, 1936), pp. 15, 5, 7-8.
24
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass
Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), p. 190.
25
Edmund Wilson, Axels Castle: A Study of the Imaginative
Literature of 1870-1930 (1931; repr. New York, 2004),
pp. 21, 233. Subsequent page references to this new edition
from Farrar, Straus & Giroux are given in the text.
26
Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel
Hill, NC, 1939), p. 59.
27
T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (1969), p. 194.
28
F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay
on the Nature of Poetry, 2nd edn. (New York, 1947), pp. 123-4.
29
Dickstein, Mirror in the Roadway, p. 90; Frank Kermode,
Puzzles and Epiphanies: Essays and Reviews, 1958-1961
(1962), p. 58, and Edmund Wilsons Achievement, Encounter,
26/5 (May 1966), 65.
30
Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in
Literature (New York, 1947), pp. 229-30.
31
Ibid., pp. 1, 14.
32
Ronald Berman, FitzgeraldWilsonHemingway: Language
and Experience (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 2003), pp. 44-5, 71. On
this theme, see also Milton R. Stern, Literary Criticism, the
Twenties, and the New Historicism, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Review, 2 (2003), 189-208.
33
Michael North, Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the
Modern (Oxford, 1999), p. 152.
34
Dabney, Edmund Wilson, p. 105; Edmund Wilson, Gilbert
Seldes and the Popular Arts, in The Shores of Light, pp. 158-9.
35
D. H. Lawrence, Morality and the Novel (1925), in Selected
Literary Criticism, ed. Anthony Beal (1956), p. 110.
18

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299
For Wilsons view of Studies in Classic American Literature,
see Meyers, Edmund Wilson, p. 96. For his response to
Lawrence, see Edmund Wilson, The Twenties: From Notebooks
and Diaries of the Period, ed. Leon Edel (New York, 1975),
p. 120, and The Shock of Recognition: The Development of Literature in the United States Recorded by the Men Who Made It
(Garden City, NY, 1943).
37
Wilson, The Twenties, pp. 290, 421.
38
Dabney, Edmund Wilson, p. 113.
39
David Castronovo, Edmund Wilson Revisited (New York,
1998), p. 103; John Updike, Wilsons Fiction: A Personal
Account, in Wain (ed.), Edmund Wilson, pp. 164, 173.
40
Edmund Wilson, I Thought of Daisy (1929; repr. 1963),
p. 206.
41
Thomas B. Gilmore, Equivocal Spirits: Alcoholism and
Drinking in Twentieth-Century Literature (Chapel Hill, NC,
1987), p. 170.
42
Meyers, Edmund Wilson, p. 55.
43
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Patriotic Gore and the Introduction,
in Dabney (ed.), Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections,
p. 210; Edmund Wilson, Upstate: Records and Recollections
of Northern New York (1972), p. 218.
44
Louis Menand, Missionary, New Yorker, 8 and 15 Aug.
2005, 82-8.
45
Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the
Writing and Acting of History, rev. edn. (1972), pp. 436, 558.
This sketch, Karl Marx: A Prolet-Play, was first published in
Partisan Review in June 1938.
46
Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of
the American Civil War (1962; repr. Boston, 1984), p. xv.
47
Edmund Wilson, The Fruits of the MLA: II. Mark Twain,
New York Review of Books, 10 Oct. 1968, 12.
48
Edmund Wilson, The Fruits of the MLA: I. Their Wedding
Journey, New York Review of Books, 26 Sept. 1968, 9-10.
49
Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Wilson at Oxford, in Kai Erikson
(ed.), Encounters (New Haven, 1989), pp. 13, 22.
50
Dabney, Edmund Wilson, p. 159.
51
Edmund Wilson, Never Apologize, Never Explain: The
Art of Evelyn Waugh, in A Literary Chronicle: 1920-1950
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(Garden City, NY, 1956), p. 266; Dabney, Edmund Wilson,

p. 319.
52
Randall Kennedy, Toni Morrison, et al., Omissions in Patriotic Gore, in Dabney (ed.), Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections, p. 225.
53
Dabney, Edmund Wilson, p. 394. On the planetary turn, see
for example Wai Chee Dimock and Lawrence Buell (ed.), Shades
of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (Princeton, 2007).
54
Barbara Epstein, Wilsons Romanticism, in Dabney (ed.),
Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections, pp. 37-8. On the hemispheric turn, see for example Caroline F. Levander and Robert
S. Levine (eds.), Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick, NJ, 2008).
55
Wilson, The Wound and the Bow, p. 1.
56
Sven Birkerts, Modernism and Mastery, American Scholar,
73/4 (Autumn 2004), 164.
57
Characteristic of this scholarly genre is R. W. B. Lewis, The
American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the
Nineteenth Century (Chicago, 1955).
58
Sherman Paul, Edmund Wilson: A Study of Literary Vocation
in Our Time (Urbana, Ill., 1965), p. 1.
59
Leon Edel, A Portrait of Edmund Wilson, in Wilson, The
Twenties, p. xxxvi; Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 180.
60
Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on TwentiethCentury Culture (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), p. 104; Stanley
Edgar Hyman, The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of
Modern Literary Criticism (New York, 1948), p. 19.