New Yorker Magazine, 03/24/2003 THE HISTORICAL ROMANCE by LOUIS MENAND Edmund Wilson’s adventure with Communism. The idea for "To the Finland Station" came to Edmund Wilson while he was walking down a street in the East Fifties one day, in the depths of the Great Depression. Wilson was in his late thirties. He had established himself as a critic and reporter with the publication of "Axel’s Castle," a study of modernist writers, in 1931, and "The American Jitters," a collection of pieces based on visits he made to mines and factories, in 1932. His ambition, though, was to write a novel. (An early effort, "I Thought of Daisy," had appeared in 1929; it was not a success.) So he was a little surprised to find himself contemplating an ambitious history of socialist and communist thought, from the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution. But he plainly saw something novelistic in the subject. "I found myself excited by the challenge," he said later, "and there rang through my head the words of Dedalus at the end of Joyce’s 'Portrait'"—"I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." He took the title from a novel, Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse." Wilson had been witness to the condition of workers in Appalachia and Detroit—after bringing relief supplies to striking miners in Pineville, Kentucky, he was run out of town by the local authorities—and although he was suspicious of the Communist Party, he welcomed the Crash as a portent of the death of capitalism, and he embraced Marxism. He voted for the Communist candidate, William Z. Foster, in the 1932 presidential election; the same year, he signed a manifesto calling for "a temporary dictatorship of the class-conscious workers." He was never a Communist, but he did believe that only the Communists were genuinely trying to help the working class. In 1935, after he began work on "To the Finland Station," he tried to persuade his friend John Dos Passos, whose radicalism had begun to cool, that Stalin was a true Marxist, "working for socialism in Russia." full: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?030324crat_atlarge ________________________________________________________________ Sign Up for Juno Platinum Internet Access Today Only $9.95 per month! Visit www.juno.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
