Edmunds Wilson, To the Finland Station

Edmund Wilson's To The Finland Station is a minor classic, and having finally read it after it had spent years on my list, I can see why. The writing is extremely engaging and frequently quite beautiful. There were times when I found the book hard to put down. Because of this, I read without taking notes, so what follows is shorter and more shallow than it might have been otherwise.

...Station is an unusual book - it is the literary and ideological history of socialist revolutionary movements in Europe. Wilson starts with the earliest thinkers who left a significant body of work to which we can trace the Radical Left - Michelet, Renan and their immediate followers. The bulk of the book is dedicated to Marx and Engels and their written output. In the final section, which is somewhat less focused on written work, Wilson discusses the rise of Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.

One of the really remarkable things about ...Station, though, and the main reason why it is so engaging, is a very strong emphasis on biography. In particular, Wilson renders Marx, and his relationship with Engels, with such vividness and attention to detail that we get a very vibrant and complete portrait of both men. In fact, the middle section of the book would suffice as a biography of Marx for most readers. The portrait of Marx that emerges is that of an extremely unpleasant character. He was a mad genius, utterly incapable of functioning in society, unable to manage the simplest details of daily life without help, all the while driven inexorably to write. He was opinionated to the extreme, unable to suffer the slightest disagreement, disdainful of all interlocutors, even those who were largely supportive of his aims, and obsessed with always having full control of any movement that claimed him as its ideological foundation. He was doted on throughout his life by his long-suffering wife and financed by Engels, without whose handouts he would have probably perished, unable as he was to hold a job of any sort.

As to the substance of his subjects' work, Wilson is frustrating. He is an extremely keen critic of Marx & Co.'s work, and where their arguments, or methods, or both, don't hold water, which they don't in many places, Wilson deconstructs them with impressive subtlety and finesse until there is nothing left. He is unequivocal on the fact that for all the ink they have spilled on their theories of dialectical materialism, "the truth is that Marx and Engels never worked out their own point of view in any very elaborate way." (p. 213).

I am particularly grateful to Wilson for not ignoring the aspect most others do: their utter disdain for some of Europe's, and the world's, peoples that they felt were incapable of executing a revolution and should therefore be eliminated so they don't stand in the way. Engels in 1851: "The Poles have never done anything in history except commit courageous quarrelsome stupidities" (p. 270). And a little later: "Engels also approved when 'energetic Yankees' took California away from the 'lazy Mexicans' because... the former were better fitted to work the country..." (ibid.).

For all that, however, Wilson, who is well known to have been sympathetic to the political Left, turns right around and expresses an almost unbridled admiration for his subjects' achievements. It is true that technically he is admiring the writing - the persuasiveness of their arguments, the effective responses to their critics, etc. - but the terms he uses are tantamount to admiring the substance of the ideas the writing contains:

These writings of Marx are electrical. Nowhere perhaps in the history of thought is the reader so made to feel the excitement of a new intellectual discovery. Marx is here at his most vivid and his most vigorous - in the closeness and the exactitude of political observation... etc. (p. 237)

To The Finland Station was first published in 1940, when the West, and thus Wilson, could still be forgiven for not yet having understood the full implications of Stalin's most egregious crimes of a few years earlier. By the time he reissued the book with a new introduction in 1968, the full extent of the horror was well known, and in fairness, I must acknowledge that he does make an effort to repent: "I had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known..." (p. v). He also makes one of the most scathing character sketches of Lenin I have read. But he makes no effort to trace the beginnings of that tyranny to the work of Marx and his cohorts and followers that he so admired, so we are left with the deflating sense that the obviously brilliant Wilson is little more than another exponent of the fallacy that makes the continued appeal of the radical Left so frustratingly persistent: that Marxism was ruined by its implementation and at its core remains a good idea.