Colette, a biography by Joanna Richardson

by

Anatole Broyard

Colette's grandfather on the maternal side was nicknamed ''The Gorilla.'' Her father was known in Burgundy, where she was born, as ''The Savage.'' Henry de Jouvenel, the grand passion of Colette's long amatory career, had already earned the title of ''The Tiger'' before she met him. It would seem that France's most famous female writer was born to be earthy and unconventional. As Jean Cocteau observed in assessing her tastes, ''she refused none of the fruitful putrefactions of life.''

In ''Colette,'' Joanna Richardson tells us everything about her scandalous subject, but without making a scandal of her biography. The author of books about Theophile Gautier, Paul Verlaine and Emile Zola, she approaches the author of ''Cheri'' with something like Colette's own cosmopolitanism. She is as tactful as she is thorough, giving us the facts dispassionately, usually in someone else's words. Because almost every writer in Paris seems to have commented on Colette before she died in 1954 at the age of 81, Miss Richardson's book is a ripe and witty anthology of contemporary French criticism.

When she was 20 years old, Colette married Henri Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy, a literary handyman in Paris, who locked her in a room and ordered her to write. He published the result, ''Claudine a l'Ecole,'' under his own name in 1900, and it was an immediate success. In the first flush of their prosperity, Willy moved Colette into an apartment on the Rue Jacob where the walls were papered with multicolored confetti. He gave her a bicycle without brakes or mud guards, and after two more successful Claudine books he provided her with a gymnasium, complete with a trapeze, rings, ladders and parallel bars.

In 1906, Colette left Willy and her ''squirrel cage'' to live with a lesbian marquise who dressed in mechanic's overalls. In his memoirs, Renaud de Jouvenel, the eldest son of Colette's second husband, offered an interesting explanation of her bisexuality. Her father had lost a leg in the army and, according to Renaud, Colette's sensibility was affected by the thought of her mother's making love with a one-legged man. Her own version of her liaisons with women was rather literary, evoking ''the melancholy, touching picture of two weaknesses, taking refuge perhaps in each other's arms to sleep there, weep there, to escape man who was often bad, and to enjoy, more than any pleasure, the bitter happiness of feeling themselves akin, and insignificant, and forgotten.'' Between 1906 and 1911, while she continued to turn out well-received books, Colette appeared on the stage as a dancer, actress and mime. As Miss Richardson unsentimentally puts it, she owed whatever success she had in the theater to ''her half- nakedness, to the crude charm of her gestures, the authority of her inviting eyes.''

In 1913, Henry (The Tiger) de Jouvenel became Colette's second husband. With a fine French elan, he said: ''I am the only man in Paris capable of marrying that woman.'' They were very happy for awhile, enjoying what Colette called in ''Cheri,'' her most famous book, ''The Tumultuous Brutality of Love.'' But it grew too brutal or tumultuous for The Tiger when he learned that Colette was also sleeping with Bertrand, his younger son, who was virtually a schoolboy. To her own daughter, who was born when Colette was 40, she was rather distant, advising her in a letter to ''struggle a little with yourself, it's the best form of gymnastics.''

With ''Cheri,'' a love story of a young man and an older woman that appeared in 1920, Colette offered the French an image of themselves as tragic sensualists that they found irresistible. Reviewing a second volume, ''La Fin de Cheri,'' a critic wrote that, though Colette was ''indifferent to the loftier preoccupations of humanity, here she attains the salvation of anxiety.'' Another critic said, ''We owe it to Madame Colette to lose all our illusions about love.'' The Times of London observed that, ''She enobled sensualism into grandeur.'' If Colette was sometimes overpraised, this may have been the greatest tribute of all in a notoriously parsimonious country.

During her later years, Colette became a national pet as literary honors were showered on her. In her apartment overlooking the gardens of the Palais Royal, she became cosy - the sensuality of old age - and wrote ''Paris de Ma Fen^etre'' and books about plants and animals. She was wonderfully looked after by her third husband, Maurice Goudeket, and all Paris sent her presents or came to see her. When she died in 1954, Jean Cocteau wrote, ''It was not a question of funeral rites, but rather of gardeners digging, of passing from one reign to another, of earth and flesh in collaboration.''

In ''Colette,'' Joanna Richardson has a great subject, and she has not wasted a single nuance. One can imagine Colette herself reading this book with her ''undeceivable eyes'' and saying, ''Oui, c'est moi. C'etait comme, ca.''

Note: A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 25, 1984, Section 1, Page 17 of the National edition with the headline: Books of The Times Colette, Life's Gymnast. 

Pool

by

Kathryn A. Kopple

IT HAPPENED a long time ago. So long ago that the details need to be hauled up from the deepest well of memory—one at a time. Who was older? Who was younger? Who led? Who followed? There were three of us in the pool. It was late and dark and there was no moon that night. We had scaled the fence between houses. We shed our clothes and slipped into the neighbor’s big round pool. Naked. Innocent. We didn’t think about our nakedness, our bodies. Our hands and legs became a tangle; an arm brushed against a breast, a foot found a buttock. We were free. The neighbor’s blue vinyl pool was our paradise, our octopus’s garden in the sea.

In those days, our house sat near the base of a long hill. All the houses in the neighborhood looked the same. One-story boxes, ranch houses. I never knew why they called them ranch houses since we didn’t live on a ranch. We didn’t even live on a farm. We lived in an old mill town. 

The first time I saw the Bakers I was out in the front yard picking dandelions.  They moved into the neighborhood about the same time we did.  I'd heard the Bakers had children but they were all grown up.  I couldn’t understand why the Bakers wanted to live in a place with so many little kids hollering and running around, cutting across their property, like it was some community playground—not that anyone paid the Bakers much attention. This was back when Wilma and Betty sported halter dresses and the Jetsons rocketed about in slick pantsuits. Samantha Stevens had that cute, wiggly nose and the pony-tailed Jeannie wore puffy harem pants. Even my mother bleached her hair, showed her knees. But then my parents were a lot younger than the Bakers. They were standoffish and plain, except that Mr. Baker owned a convertible. He took the best care of that car, washing it every Saturday and polishing it like a jewel. I guess I had conventional ideas about things and to my way of thinking a car like that was meant for a much younger person.

Then one day, like the wings of an exotic bird, the rear doors of the car flew open, and out of the convertible stepped two girls with honey-blond hair that fell to the waist and long skirts that swished about the ankles. The sight of them struck me as strange and marvelous, like how it must have been for the seafarers ages ago when they saw a mermaid and promptly crashed their ships upon the rocks.

I was feeling pretty much broken up in those days. Julie, my best friend, never seemed to have time for me anymore. It wasn’t her fault. Her parents were getting a divorce. She spent the weekends visiting her father and his new girlfriend, Mimi, in Long Point. Back then, divorce was fast on its way to becoming an epidemic. No one’s family was immune. Divorce just hit one day, out of the blue, and left behind nothing but debris and heartbreak.

Waving at the girls, I got a swift, ebullient response. Within seconds, we were face to face. The taller of the two introduced herself as Connie. “And this is my little sister, Gail.” But that was as far as we got before Mrs. Baker came over and hustled Connie and Gail back to her house. I went back to the dandelions, setting off explosions of white fluff into the air.  And then Mrs. Baker came out her front door and walked over to me.

“Violet Weinstein, is it?”

“Yes, it is,” I responded.

“Violet, huh?”

“Violet Elizabeth.”

Mrs. Baker looked me up and down. “My nieces wanted me to ask you over for ice cream.”

The Bakers' house smelled like detergent. My house smelled different, like rotting vegetables and the weird foodstuff my parents bought at the Coop. I was eager to get invited to anyone’s house for treats in those days because my mother had ideas about what we should eat, and it didn’t include normal things like Oreos and hotdogs. She fed us tofu, which she claimed tasted exactly like cottage cheese. “Only better.” 

Connie and Gail were in the kitchen. The windows were wide open and I could hear the kids next door splashing in the pool. Mrs. Baker scooped out the ice cream into four bowls. She handed them to the girls to place round the table. Mr. Baker asked if I liked ice cream.

“Everyone likes ice cream,” I said.

“They sure do,” Connie said.

The Bakers bowed their heads in silence. Connie and Gail also bowed their heads. My head went down too. Our heads were bowed for the longest time. I watched the vanilla ice cream melt into the chocolate. It was nearly soup when the heads went up again and I found myself looking at Mr. Baker.  He smiled, rubbed a hand across his flabby lips, and got to work on his ice cream. Connie exchanged glances with Gail and then burst into laughter.

“What’s so funny?” asked Mr. Baker.

Connie pulled herself together. “You know, Uncle John.”

“What’s that?”

She smiled sweetly and turned to me. “My uncle didn’t think you would eat with us.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because he says you're Hebrew,” Connie said.

“Like the hot dog,” Gail said.

It sounded odd—wrong somehow—hearing Connie and Gail talk about Hebrews and hotdogs. I tried to speak but I was at a loss for words, the same way I would have felt had if she had said I had blue eyes when my eyes were really green or that I spoke French instead of English.

“I’m not,” I said, managing to find my voice.

Mr. Baker put down his spoon. “Violet, you are just a child but you are old enough to know that lying is just plain wrong.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake, you most certainly are,” insisted Mrs. Baker.

Connie burst into laughter, and Gail too.

“That's enough,” said Mr. Baker, his voice dropping like stone into the pool of mirth created by the girls’ guffaws. “When I was a child and I lied, I was given a good beating for it. I learned pretty quick to tell the truth, no matter what.” 

Connie and Gail fell silent. I got the feeling that Mr. Baker meant business. The hurtful words dug into me, and yet hadn’t my mother tried her best to prepare me for moments like this by denying any suggestion that our father was a Hebrew. “Your father,” she would say, “is a New Yorker.” And that was the end of that discussion, the idea of New York being sufficiently grand and sophisticated to silence further inquiry. As for the Bakers, my mother acted as if they’d never been born.

The subject never came up again. Connie often came over to get me. We spent a lot of her time on the Baker's back porch. We played a lot of Hang Man and Twenty Questions. The Bakers kept a pretty tight leash on their nieces. They weren’t allowed to wander the neighborhood. They weren’t allowed to leave the property without permission.

“I can’t wait to go home,” Connie said to me one day. “I miss my dog.”

It killed me to hear the longing in her voice. I didn’t want her to go anywhere. I suspected that Connie was getting bored with me.

“You don’t like it here?”

“It’s okay. I just miss my dog.” She gathered up her long blond hair, coiling it in her hands, before letting it fall around her shoulders again.

“It must be really great to have a dog.”

“My dog is great.”

“What kind is it?”

“German Shepard.” She turned to me. “You want to sleep out in the backyard with me and Gail tonight?”

*

We swam in circles; the water was dark and cold. It was luscious to skinny-dip, daring too. I couldn’t imagine anything better until from the Bakers' back porch the floodlights came on, vehemently bright, like a comet or one of those flairs that explode off the sun. Before I knew what was happening, Mr. and Mrs. Baker, identical in terry-cloth robes of fire-engine red, were screeching at us to get out of the pool.

It wasn’t that easy—getting out of the pool—because between us and our clothes, which we’d left in a heap alongside our sleeping bags, stood the Bakers. The thought of them watching me as I climbed naked over the neighbor’s fence made me frantic. I would have run home, with or without my clothes, but Connie grabbed my arm. “Don’t go!”

“All right then,” said Mr. Baker, taking charge of the situation in a grim voice. “Come on, get over here.”

Connie tightened her grip on my arm. I could see the trapped, wild look in her eyes.  She begged me again not to leave her alone. So over the chain-link fence I went, dropping into a crouch on the Baker’s lawn before making my way like a panicked chimpanzee—hunched over, hands dangling at my sides—across the lawn.

“Go ahead,” said Mr. Baker, as I loped past him, “go sit down.”

Sit down! But then I realized that sitting was better than standing, that I could cover my chest more or less, although as far as that was concerned, I really was flat as a board. Being skinny and several years younger, Gail didn’t have to worry too much either. She had very little to hide, but not Connie. She had a woman’s body with breasts of lavish proportions, spilling out all over the place, like two gorgeous, wayward melons. 

Mrs. Baker just looked horrified. “Disgusting.” she said. She held up a pair of underpants made of white cotton and decorated with little violets. “Are these yours? Are they? Are they!” she screamed at Connie.

I never felt so sorry for anyone in my entire life. Connie couldn’t stop from shaking. She’s cold, I thought. She’s freezing cold.

“You could at least look at your aunt when she’s talking to you,” said Mr. Baker. He wasn’t nearly as furious as Mrs. Baker. His eyes weren’t rolling in his sockets but fixed intently on Connie, like he’d come upon a frightened animal and didn’t want to scare it off. He turned his head slightly. I felt his eyes run up and down my skin like a snake.

*

After that night, I never saw Connie or Gail again. The Bakers lectured us for a good hour, but finally gave me my clothes and sent me home. The next day, I told my parents what had happened. I figured that, if I didn’t, Mrs. Baker would tell them. It was best they heard about it from me.

“So you were skinny-dipping in the neighbor’s pool.” My father had that amused glean in his eye. Few things rattled him. My mother wasn’t happy about what I’d done, but really she couldn’t get herself too worked up.

“Just as long as she stays away from those people,” she said to my father, as if he was to blame for my transgressions.

*

Summer ended and school began before I told anyone else what went on that night. I had gone over to Julie’s house and we sitting under the mulberry tree in her backyard. We liked to crush the shriveled berries and then paint our hands purple with them. As I told her what happened, it occurred to me that Mr. Baker was the first man who had seen me naked. The thought of it made me sick. I wished I had kept my mouth shut because immediately she told her brothers.

“Not the old guy!” cried Mickey when he heard.

Bob spit a wad of phlegm into the grass. “There’s something strange about those people.”

Mickey and Bob were kind of wild, so I wasn’t surprised when they came up with a way to get back at the Bakers. Still, I got the feeling that there was something more than mischief in it for them; they were acting out of chivalry, a need to show the Bakers that they couldn’t treat their sister’s friend like that.

That Friday night we snuck out armed with cans of spray paint. Mr. Baker’s blue convertible was sitting in the driveway as usual. Mickey and Bob took one side of the car, Julie and I the other. The whole thing lasted five minutes, at most.

But morning told the whole story.  Huge splotches of red paint on the hood, the cars doors made obscene by black and silver curses, and the formerly pristine white leather interior utterly ruined. As I stood there in horror, looking at what I had done, Mr. Baker came out of his house. Seeing his precious baby, he stopped short and clutched at his hair, as stricken as if someone had died. Then he began to circle the car, round and round. Finally, he put his hands on the hood, motionless except for his head, which kept bobbing up and down.

*

Months passed before I realized that Mr. Baker wasn’t going to call the police. I’m not sure why. Weeks went by in which I fully expected the cops to show up on my doorstep. But they never did. One day, I came home from school to see a For Sale sign on the Bakers' lawn, and shortly after a young couple with a baby bought the house. The Bakers were never heard from again.

I was relieved to see them go. Why Mr. Baker didn’t call the police, try to have me arrested, I’ll never know.  But something tells me that, more than anything, he wished he'd been in that pool with us, and that all these many years later I still can’t get undressed in front of a man without thinking of him.

Credits:  This work originally appeared in a somewhat different version in Light and Dark Magazine.  It has since been edited by the author. 

Uncovering the Duality of Daphne du Maurier

 by

Karen Krizanovich

Daphne du Maurier’s novels are famous for their passion, tension and alarmingly candid psychological takes on men and women, often trapped in unhealthily obsessive relationships.

Her writing was noted as being so strongly cinematic that Alfred Hitchcock made three films based on her work: Jamaica Inn, The Birds and Rebecca, while Don’t Look Now, the classic horror film by Nicolas Roeg, was based on another of her works.

My Cousin Rachel, published in 1951, immediately became one of her most in-demand works, and was another that lent itself clearly to the silver screen – with its compelling, tension-packed story of an ambiguous woman who may or may not be guilty of murder, and yet who elicits a magnetic attraction on those around her.

An intriguing character, du Maurier once described herself as possessing two personas – one her female “self” and the other a male “lover” who she said did her writing.

Born in 1907 to a wealthy bohemian family, she grew up with an obviously unfaithful father and a mother who seemed indifferent to his infidelities. Before puberty, du Maurier thought she was a boy born in the wrong body, and some suggest this is why her fictive females don’t fare well. Taught at home by governesses, du Maurier and her three sisters were expected to make fine marriages, not fine careers. But in her teens, du Maurier began to write, even as her family tried to dissuade her from this unseemly métier.

Her first crush was on Carol Reed, the director of The Third Man. Around this time she often holidayed alone in Cornwall at the du Maurier holiday home – and this was also where she is alleged to have had her first same-sex affair around the age of 18.

After that, she married Frederick “Boy” Browning, an Army major, with whom she had three children. Reportedly their marriage dwindled after Browning returned from the Second World War. She also felt that her massive success as an author damaged her husband.

Writing to close friend Ellen Doubleday (who is said to have spurned du Maurier’s advances), the author wrote: “It’s people like me who have careers who really have bitched up the old relationship between men and women. Women ought to be soft and gentle and dependent. Disembodied spirits like myself are all wrong.”

The author struggled to come to terms with her bisexuality, and disliked lesbianism, saying: “By God and by Christ, if anyone should call that sort of love by that unattractive word that begins with ‘L’, I’d tear their guts out.”

Of du Maurier’s many loves, the biggest was for Cornwall itself and the house called Menabilly. Discovered by the writer in 1926 and purchased in 1943, it was the basis for Manderley, the famous mansion in Rebecca.

My Cousin Rachel, starring Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin, is also set in the area, where the privacy (before it became a tourist destination) the sea, the sky and the land provided du Maurier with the perfect backdrop for her noirish tales.

Who knows what du Maurier, if born today, would have done differently. Perhaps nothing. Indeed, as her only son, Kits Browning, has said: “A great story will do it every time. And that’s what Mum always wanted to be remembered as – a damn good storyteller.”

Credits:  This article was first published in 2017 in The Telegraph.  

The Night I Danced with Anaïs Nin

by

Anatole Broyard

MANY years ago I went to party at Anaïs Nin's house on 13th Street in Greenwich Village. I was very young and rather impressed by Miss Nin. Hers was my first full‐scale literary party, and its smallest details still stand out in my memory.

I was surprised therefore in reading Volume 4 of the paperback edition of her “Diary,” to find myself, on page 182, saying and doing things of which have no recollection. I am described, for example, as dancing with Miss Nin, a pleasure I distinctly remember denying myself out of diffidence.

After dancing with her, I am reported to have said to the girl who accompanied me to the party, “ Anaïs is sensual.” According to the diary, the girl answered, “No, Anaïs is mystic.” Countered with: “No, Anaïs is sensual. Or perhaps she's a harmony of both.”

While I was pathetically eager to cut a figure, it is difficult for me to imagine myself saying these things. I was too much in awe of Miss Nin to pronounce on her sensuality. In fact, sensuality was not one of the things I noticed about her. There were too many other aspects intervening.


Nor do I recognize the diction as mine. “Perhaps a harmony of both." That particular turn of phrase suggests someone who speaks several languages. Also, I don't believe I was aware at the time of the harmony between the sensual and the mystic.


Was Miss Nin being kind in her diary? She may have thought to protect me against the notorious absurdity of youth, the vulnerability of an untried boy who was out of his depth. 

My memory is not infallible, I might have said: “This is a nice apartment,” or “Were you troubled by rats when you lived with Henry Miller on a houseboat in the Seine?”

It is possible that Miss Nin was indulging in poetic license. If I had known that she wanted poetry, I would gladly have accommodated her. I was steeped in the works of Wallace Stevens in those days, and there were all sorts of serviceable things I could have brought into play.

I might have said: “Life is an old casino in a park,” or “These days of disinheritance, we feast /On human heads.”

While we were dancing, Miss Nin might have said, as she did somewhere in her diary: “Think of the ballet exercises. The hand reproduces resistance to water.” She might have said, “It is art which is ecstasy, which is Paradise, and water.”

I would have replied: “My titillations have no footnotes /And their memorials are the phrases /Of idiosyncratic music.”

I can hear her murmuring, as if to herself: “It is possible I have never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire.”

And I'd come right back with: “Canaries in the morning, orchestras / In the afternoon, balloons at night.”

I wish we had danced. I console myself with the thought that, while I do not recall it, we may have. I see us doing a tango. We draw ourselves up to our full height, stare profoundly into each other's eyes. Miss Nin's are black, impenetrable. Is she thinking of something else, of the tango as a metaphor?

Our knees are flexed. Her right hand is flattened against my left. It is small, white and dry. Her left hand grasps my shoulder in an astonishingly powerful grip. My right hand is splayed in the small of her back.

We step out sideways, like Egyptian frontalistic sculpture. We take long, swooping steps, snap our heads right, left, right, plunge into a peristaltic turn. Our deep, forward dip is a dying fall.

The tango is “Caminito.” A woman sings in a hoarse, desolate voice: “Que tiempo ha borrado /Que juntos, un día /Nos viste pasar.” Miss Nin's eyes glitter. They are sad, wise, bottomless.

The next record is a rhumba. Miss Nin's expression is intense, almost painful. Her slender hips swivel to the beat, one‐two, one‐two. I see that her lips are moving. She can't be counting? It appears to me that her feet are not quite synchronized with her hips. The rhumba is an extraordinarily complex harmony of the sensual and the mystic.

Ah, now she has it, everything meshes. She even shakes her shoulders. The effect, however, is not Latin, not rhumba‐like. Her movements strike me as intellectual, even doctrinaire. Someone on the record cries “Agua! “ With a gesture of impatience, Miss Nin breaks off the dance.

We march across the room in a fast one‐step, our bodies locked in rhythmic determination. Miss Nin pumps her elbows ever so slightly. She surges forward, forcing me back. An end‐table and a lamp crash to the floor. The other couples press themselves against the wall to make way for us.

We walk out on the terrace.

Miss Nin plies a Japanese fan. A man called Dick, who has been cruelly rejected by Pablo, makes an insincere attempt to throw himself from the terrace. It is just as the diary says. A man called Vincent seizes Dick around the waist. He looks inquiringly at Miss Nin, afraid of committing a faux pas.

The girl I came with appears on the terrace. She seizes me around the waist, as if I, too, were about to throw myself off. “Let's go, gigolo,” she says. She is drunk.

I am obliged to carry her down the stairs. While she is admired for her 17 inch waist, the girl weighs 116 pounds. I am used to carrying her up, rather than down stairs. She has a bad heart and has been warned by her cardiologist that climbing stairs can kill her. Whenever we go anywhere, I carry her up the stairs. I once carried her up the grand staircase in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Some months later the girl will confess to me that she does not have bad heart, that it amuses her to be carried. But as I don't know this yet, I walk to Seventh Avenue with her in my arms.

It is early in the morning. A taxi passes, and I try to flag it by raising the girl as high as I can. It doesn't stop. When another taxi ignores us quite awhile later, I drape the girl, whose eyes are closed, on the hood of a parked car.

She opens her eyes. She looks over her shoulder to see where she is. Stretching out her arms, palms down, she embraces the car.

 “Hey,” she says, “I'm sensual.”

“Nay,” I say, “you're mystic. Or perhaps a harmony of both."

Credits:  This article was originally published in The New York Times in 1979.  It has been slightly edited for the sake of coherency.

Kiss, Kiss

by

Charli Applesauce 

Hilma af Klint

I feel strange when you kiss me in front of your friends

I feel your lips subduct under my teeth, and

I feel like you want me around

I feel like i don’t have to hide

Kiss, kiss



Charli Applesauce is a writer from Pennsylvania.

Poem to Anactória by Sappho

 

Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it's what-
ever you love best.

And it's easy to make this understood by
everyone, for she who surpassed all human
kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her
husband--that best of

men--went sailing off to the shores of Troy and
never spent a thought on her child or loving
parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and
left her to wander,

she forgot them all, she could not remember
anything but longing, and lightly straying
aside, lost her way. But that reminds me
now: Anactória,

she's not here, and I'd rather see her lovely
step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on
all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
glittering armor.




Note: Translation by Jim Powell

The Historical Romance: Edmund Wilson's Adventure with Communism

by

Louis Menand

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.”

Soon afterward, Wilson went to Russia himself. He published his journal of the visit, along with material about travels in the United States, in a book pointedly entitled “Travels in Two Democracies.” In fact, he had had to censor his diaries in order to conceal evidence of the fear and oppression he had seen in the Soviet Union. By 1938, he had stopped pretending. “They haven’t even the beginnings of democratic institutions; but they are actually worse off in that respect than when they started,” he confessed to a friend. “They have totalitarian domination by a political machine.” He understood the implications for the book he was writing. In October, 1939, he sadly informed Louise Bogan, “I am about to try to wind up the Finland Station (now that the Soviets are about to annex Finland).”

“To the Finland Station” was published by Harcourt Brace in September, 1940. It was not the best moment for a book whose hero is Vladimir Lenin. A month earlier, in Mexico, Leon Trotsky had had his head split open with an ice axe. A year before that, the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, effectively allowing Hitler to invade Poland. For five years before that, Stalin had systematically liquidated political opposition within the Soviet Union. The purges were preceded by a program of collectivization that led to the death of more than five million people. By 1940, disillusionment with Communism was well established among intellectuals in the West. André Gide, George Orwell, and Dos Passos had written firsthand accounts of the brutality and hypocrisy of contemporary Communism—Gide and Dos Passos after visits to Russia, Orwell after fighting for the Loyalists in Spain. Partisan Review had already become the organ of the anti-Communist left.

By January, 1947, “To the Finland Station” had sold only 4,527 copies. Doubleday took over the rights and reprinted it that year, but sales continued to be slow. The book did not begin to attract readers until it came out in paperback, as one of the first Anchors, in 1953. It sold decently in the nineteen-sixties, and in 1972, the last year of Wilson’s life, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published a new edition with an introduction by Wilson reassessing his interpretation of Soviet Communism. “This book of mine,” he explains, “assumes throughout that an important step in progress has been made, that a fundamental ‘breakthrough’ had occurred, that nothing in our human history would ever be the same again. I had no premonition that the Soviet Union was to become one of the most hideous tyrannies that the world had ever known, and Stalin the most cruel and unscrupulous of the merciless Russian tsars. This book should therefore be read as a basically reliable account of what the revolutionists thought they were doing in the interests of ‘a better world.’ ”

This didn’t entirely meet the difficulty. Wilson did know what was going on in the Soviet Union in the nineteen-thirties, as his pages on Stalin in “To the Finland Station” make clear. The problem wasn’t with Stalin; the problem was with Lenin, the book’s ideal type of the intellectual as man of action. Wilson admitted that he had relied on publications controlled by the Party for his portrait of Lenin. (Critical accounts were available; for example, the English translation of the émigré Mark Landau-Aldanov’s “Lenin” was published, by Dutton, in 1922.) Lenin could create an impression of selfless humanitarianism; he was also a savage and ruthless politician—a “pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom,” as Vladimir Nabokov put it to Wilson in 1940, after reading “To the Finland Station.” In the introduction to the 1972 edition, Wilson provided a look at the rat. He did not go on to explain in that introduction that the most notorious features of Stalin’s regime—the use of terror, the show trials, and the concentration camps—had all been inaugurated by Lenin. “To the Finland Station” begins with Napoleon’s betrayal of the principles of the French Revolution; it should have ended with Lenin’s betrayal of European socialism. Wilson believed that he was writing about the success of ideas in action, about the translation (in the spirit of Stephen Dedalus) of the imagined into the real. But the story he chose was a story of failure.

And yet “To the Finland Station” is, if not a great book, a grand book. It brings a vanished world to life. When you undertake historical research, two truths that sounded banal come to seem profound. The first is that your knowledge of the past—apart from, occasionally, a limited visual record and the odd unreliable survivor—comes entirely from written documents. You are almost completely cut off, by a wall of print, from the life you have set out to represent. You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance—even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.

The second realization that strikes you is, in a way, the opposite of the first: the more material you dredge up, the more elusive the subject becomes. In the case of a historical figure, there is usually a standard biographical interpretation, constructed around a small number of details: diary entries, letters, anecdotes, passages in the published work that everyone has decided must be autobiographical. Out of these details a profile is constructed, which, in the circular process that characterizes most biographical enterprise, is then used to interpret the details. Yet it is almost always possible to find details that are inconsistent with the standard interpretation, or that seem to point to a different interpretation, or that don’t support any coherent interpretation. Usually, there’s a level of detail below that, and on and on. One instinct you need in doing historical research is knowing when to keep dredging stuff up; another is knowing when to stop.

You stop when you feel that you’ve got it. The test for a successful history is the same as the test for any successful narrative: integrity in motion. It’s not the facts, snapshots of the past, that make a history; it’s the story, the facts run by the eye at the correct speed. Novelists sometimes say that they invent a character, put the character into a situation, and then wait to see what the character will do. The historian’s character has to do what the real person has done, but there is an uncanny way in which this can seem to happen almost spontaneously. The “Marx” that the historian has imagined keeps behaving, in every new set of conditions, like Marx. This gives the description of the conditions a plausibility as well. The person fits the time; the world turns beneath the character’s marching feet. The past reveals itself to have a plot.

This may seem a fanciful account of the way history is written. It is not a fanciful account of the way history is read, though. Readers expect an illusion of continuity, and once the illusion locks in, they credit the historian with having brought the past to life. Nothing else matters as much, and it is hard to see how the reader could have this experience if the historian had not had it first. The intuition of the whole precedes the accumulation of the parts. There is no other way, really, for the mind to work.

This is why historical research is an empirical enterprise and history writing an imaginative one. We read histories for information, but what is it that we want the information for? The answer is a little paradoxical: we want the information in order to acquire the ability to understand the information. At some point, we need the shell of facts to burst, and to feel that we are inside the moment. “Tell me about yourself,” says a stranger at a party. You can recite your résumé, but what you really want to express, and what the stranger (assuming her interest is genuine) really wants to know, is what it is like to be you. You wish (assuming that your interest is genuine) that you could just open up your mind and let her look in. Information alone doesn’t do it. A single intuition of what it was like to be Marx, or Proust, or Gertrude Stein, or the ordinary man on the late-modern street, how they thought and how the world looked to them, is worth a thousand facts, for when we are equipped with the intuition every fact becomes sensible. A residual positivism makes fact and intuition seem to be antithetical terms: hard knowledge versus subjective empathy. This has the priorities backward. Intuitive knowledge—the sense of what life was like when we were not there to experience it—is precisely the knowledge we seek. It is the true positive of historical work.

Wilson had a gift for getting inside the writers he liked (though he had no gift at all for getting inside the writers he didn’t like). Getting inside a historical moment was more difficult. In “Axel’s Castle,” he attempted to create a narrative about modern literature; in “Patriotic Gore,” he attempted to create one about the United States during the Civil War and its aftermath. Neither book successfully transcends its parts. This was because Wilson had a journalist’s queasiness about big ideas. Abstraction is the reporter’s natural enemy, and Wilson favored nice, low-concept metaphors: the pendulum theory of literary history, in “Axel’s Castle” (realism swings to symbolism, and back); the wound theory of artistic creation, in “The Wound and the Bow” (art as compensation for psychic pain); the sea-slug theory of history, in “Patriotic Gore” (the Civil War as a case of the universal tendency of the larger entity to consume the smaller). These are premises that kill contexts; they reduce everything to a single-term explanation. Wilson could get inside Proust and Joyce, in “Axel’s Castle,” and inside Abraham Lincoln and Oliver Wendell Holmes, in “Patriotic Gore”; but those books read more like a series of portraits than like a narrative.

“To the Finland Station” is different. The structure is simple: the decline of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition after the French Revolution, as Wilson sees it reflected in the writings of Jules Michelet, Ernest Renan, Hippolyte Taine, and Anatole France; the emergence of revolutionary socialism, seen through the writings of Saint-Simon, the communitarians Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, and Marx and Engels; the triumph of Communism, illustrated by the careers of Lenin and Trotsky. There are things Wilson minimized that would have complicated this narrative: the persistence of a non-Communist socialist ideal in Western Europe; the liberal tradition in Russian politics (to which Nabokov’s father belonged); the success and failure of the Mensheviks, of whom Wilson did not make much. And, of course, if the book were being written now, the vicious side of Marxist and Leninist thought, mostly a subtext in Wilson’s account, would guide the narrative, and the story would touch down in Siberia or Berlin rather than at the Finland Station.

But we don’t read “To the Finland Station” as a book about the Russian Revolution anymore. What draws us now is the subtitle: “A Study in the Writing and Acting of History.” History is the true subject of Wilson’s book, and what he evokes is what it felt like to believe—as Vico and Michelet, Fourier and Saint-Simon, Hegel and Marx, Lenin and Trotsky all believed—that history holds the key to the meaning of life. The evocation is successful because when Wilson began writing “To the Finland Station” he believed in history, too. He thought that history had a design, and that the Depression was an event fully comprehensible within the context of that design: it was the long-predicted collapse of the capitalist order. “To the Finland Station” is valuable as a window on the nineteenth century, but it is also a poignant artifact of the nineteen-thirties, a time when many people thought that history was something you could get on the right side or the wrong side of. It was an idea indistinguishable from faith, and Marx was one of its prophets.

Marx was a man of the eighteen-forties—like Dostoyevsky, Herzen, Bakunin, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Wagner, and Mazzini. All of them were shaped by the promise and the collapse of the European revolutions of 1848. They had dreamed that the world was about to turn a corner, a corner it had tried to turn once before, at the time of the French Revolution, and that nothing would ever be the same; and when they awoke the old order was still there—in many ways more reactionary and more philistine than ever. This is the story that Flaubert told in “Sentimental Education,” and it is what Marx was referring to in the famous phrase in “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”: “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

In the decades that followed the failure of the 1848 revolutions, the North Atlantic states underwent an industrial and technological growth spurt that completed the process of modernization and established capitalism as a complete social and economic system. Capital became the great solvent in everyday life; change was the new constant. This was the world of which Marx aspired to be the champion analyst. “Uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation” was the way he described it. The words were written on the eve of the 1848 revolutions. They are, of course, from “The Communist Manifesto”: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Marxism was a consolation for this condition. It said that, wittingly or not, the individual performs a role in a drama that has a shape and a goal, a trajectory, and that modernity will turn out to be just one of the acts in that drama. Change is not arbitrary. It is produced by class conflict; it is faithful to an inner logic; it points toward an end, which is the establishment of the classless society. Marxism was founded on an appeal for social justice, but there were many forms that such an appeal might have taken. Its deeper attraction was the discovery of a meaning, in which human beings might participate, in history itself.

The thinker standing behind the Marxian idea of history was Hegel, and Hegel gave Wilson the most trouble in writing his book. “My great handicap, I find, in dealing with all this is my lack of grounding in German philosophy,” he confessed to his old Princeton teacher Christian Gauss in 1937. “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.” He never did get it figured out.

The dialectic was just the sort of high-theory concept that Wilson reflexively avoided. At the same time, he was not a man quick to concede his ignorance, and he devoted a chapter of his book to explaining that the dialectic is basically a religious myth (a characteristic exercise in journalistic debunking). Wilson had no idea what he was talking about. The two-paragraph explanation he gives of the term at the beginning of the chapter on “The Myth of the Dialectic”—the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model—is not the dialectic of Hegel. It is the dialectic of Fichte. And Marx and Engels did not name their method “dialectical materialism.” That was a term assigned to it by Georgi Plekhanov, the man who, after Marx’s death, introduced Marxism to Russia. Engels referred to the method as historical materialism.


Still, Hegel’s dialectic was part of Marx’s way of doing philosophy, and the use of the dialectic as a historical method is the strongest element in Marxist theory. In the broadest terms, it is a way of treating each aspect of a historical moment—its art, its industry, its politics—as being implicated in the whole, and of understanding that every dominant idea depends on, defines itself against, whatever it suppresses or excludes. Dialectical thinking is a brake on the tendency to assume that things will continue to be the way they are, only more so, because it reminds us that every paradigm contains the seed of its own undoing, the limit-case that, as it is approached, begins to unravel the whole construct. You don’t have to be an enemy of bourgeois capitalism, or believe in an iron law of history, to think this way. It’s just a fruitful method for historical criticism.

Wilson was not drawn to dialectical thinking—he mocks “the Dialectic” in nearly all his writings on Marxism—in part because thinking dialectically is something that American intellectuals don’t naturally do. John Dewey was one of the few who did, and Dewey was trained as a Hegelian. American critics tend to prefer a binary analysis: thumbs up or thumbs down, right or left, tonic or toxin. It is difficult for them to see that most cultural products work in several ways at once. It is even harder for them to see that each element in a cultural system depends for its value on all the others—so that to alter one element is to alter every element. Their overpowering impulse is, like Wilson’s, to isolate and to simplify. “To the Finland Station” stands out from the rest of Wilson’s work because it succeeds in representing history as a reciprocal interaction between individual agency and social force. And, whatever Wilson’s hopes and intentions, it does expose in Marxism the seeds of its own undoing.

What is most characteristic in American criticism is something that Wilson had plenty of. He was a literalist and a skeptic. He believed, when he started his book, that Marx and Engels were the philosophes of a second Enlightenment. The notion appealed to him because he himself was, in many respects, a man of the eighteenth century (and liked to say so in later life). The pose of seeing through other people’s fancy phrases was part of this persona. Empiricism and common sense—Hume and Johnson, the reporter and the critic—were all the philosophy that Wilson required. What he most admired about Marxism was the practical side: people were suffering under the conditions of industrial capitalism, and something needed to be done for them. He thought of the theory as simply an interesting example of the use of ideas as a spur to action.

By the time Wilson came to the end of his book, though, he had become wary of the idealization of history that he saw as endemic to Marxism. He describes this as the notion that history “is a being with a definite point of view in any given period. It has a morality which admits of no appeal. . . . Knowing this—knowing, that is, that we are right—we may allow ourselves to exaggerate and simplify.” After describing Trotsky’s speech to the Mensheviks following the Bolshevik seizure of power—“You are pitiful isolated individuals. . . . You are bankrupt; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on, the rubbish-can of history!”—Wilson observes, mildly:

There sometimes turn out to be valuable objects cast away in the rubbish-can of history—things that have to be retrieved later on. From the point of view of the Stalinist Soviet Union, that is where Trotsky himself is today; and he might well discard his earlier assumption that an isolated individual needs must be “pitiful” for the conviction of Dr. Stockman in Ibsen’s Enemy of the People that “the strongest man is he who stands most alone.”

This grim independence was something Wilson admired in Marx, and something he might have wished to feel true, with some justice, of himself.

The more one thinks about Wilson’s headstrong character and his antipathy to systematic thought, the more remarkable his devotion of so many years of his life to this book—which required him to learn both German and Russian. Possibly it can be explained by saying that, in the end, Wilson was a writer, and he thought he had found a good story. The stubbornness and independence also help to explain why, unlike most American intellectuals of his generation, Wilson did not rebel against the politics of his youth. He renounced Communism and the Soviet Union, but he did not become an anti-Communist crusader. One of his later books, “The Cold War and the Income Tax,” was an attack on anti-Communism and American foreign policy, and a book so intemperate that it was received as virtually anti-American. Around the same time Wilson published it, he set out to create an “American Pléiade”—the project that has now been realized as the Library of America. He chose to be a patriot on his own terms.

Among other surprising things, “The Cold War and the Income Tax” disclosed how little money Wilson had made from his writing. His sense of vocation was too urgent for him to calculate the impression he might be creating. In the last decades of his life, he shuttled between Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, and Talcottville, in upstate New York, indifferent to almost everything but his story of the moment: Russian writers, the literature of the Civil War, the Dead Sea Scrolls. He resembled the great isolatoes he had brought to life in the pages of “To the Finland Station,” Michelet, Babeuf, Saint-Simon—above all, Marx himself, writing ceaselessly, his books selling few copies, his wife ill, his children crawling all over him, the rent collector at the door, and his inner gaze fixed raptly on history, the courtesan of every ideology.

Credits:  This article was originally published in 2003 in The New Yorker.