Axel's Path: Artistic Isolation and Symbolism in Edmund Wilson's Early Work

Abstract

Edmund Wilson combined an aesthetic education with application and common sense to produce a distinctive criticism that made Irving Howe, a contemporary, recall having sufficient admiration for Wilson's blend of avant-garde culture and social radicalism [so as to think] of him as the kind of intellectual we too should like to become.1 Wilson's active career corresponded almost exactly with the renaissance of criticism that took place after World War I. It is helpful to think of Wilson and his development in relation to his publication of various significant books. In 1931, the appearance of Axel's Castle marked the conclusion of his experimental, Bohemian-oriented, post-college efforts. In 1940, To the Finland Station was a disillusioned termination to his serious flirtation with socialistic schemes. In 1956, Red Black Blond and Olive: Studies in Four Civilizations: Zuii, Haiti, Soviet Russia, Israel (then, in 1960, Apologies to the Iroquois) indicated his interest in cultural primitivism. In 1962, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War was a heroic presentation of an American crisis. Finally, in 1971, Upstate dealt with personal and family matters which go as far back in American culture as the Puritan Mathers. Wilson matured as a man of letters prior to the publication of Axel's Castle, and Axel's Castle, in the same way the Symbolist movement it treats represents the culmination of a tendency. The present study, in an attempt to suggest factors which were at work in giving a man of such varied interests and predispositions the peculiar shape that they did, focuses upon the pathway that Wilson took during the nineteen-twenties, while questing for the mysteries of Axel's castle. ALAN N. STONE is an English instructor at Syracuse University, Syracuse, New