Edmund Wilson, by general consensus, was a great man of letters, indeed of many letters. In the first chapter of Starting Out in the Thirties (1965), Alfred Kazin recalls how he was in 1934:
I felt myself to be a radical, not an ideologue; I was proud of the revolutionary yet wholly literary tradition in American writing to which I knew that I belonged, and would say over to myself, from Axel’s Castle, the last, woven sentence of Edmund Wilson’s chapter on Proust: “Proust is perhaps the last great historian of the loves, the society, the intelligence, the diplomacy, the literature and the art of the Heartbreak House of capitalist culture; and the little man with the sad appealing voice, the metaphysician’s mind, the Saracen’s beak, the ill-fitting dress-shirt and the great eyes that seem to see all about him like the many-faceted eyes of a fly, dominates the scene and plays host in the mansion where he is not long to be master.”
“I lived in the Heartbreak House of capitalist culture,” Kazin reports, “waiting for it to stand accused by all writers worthy of the name.” Wilson was already an accuser, subject to his interest in the production of memorably woven sentences. In “An Appeal to Progressives” (January 1931), he wrote of “the monstrosities of capitalism” and said that radicals and progressives must “take Communism away from the Communists, and take it without ambiguities, asserting that their ultimate goal is the ownership by the
