Wilson v. the U.S.

THE COLD WAR AND THE INCOME TAX by Edmund Wilson. 1 18 pages. Farrar, Sfraus. $2.95.

In 1848, drawing up a step-by-step program for what he called "the despotic inroads on the rights of property," Karl Marx put as No. 2 on his big agenda "a heavy progressive or graduated income tax."

Ninety-eight years later, Critic Edmund Wilson, the most gifted and eloquent expositor of Marxism the U.S. ever produced, failed to file an income tax return. He went on failing to file right up to 1955, when he got around to opening financial conversations with the U.S. Government. In the nature of things, these talks were painful. They provoked in Wilson second and even more painful thoughts about the nature of government, of bureaucracy, of the status of free men, of the rights of a private man against the huge man-chewing, electronically endowed apparatus of a modern state; and these form the basis of the most curious book of the current publishing season. Edmund Wilson's pamphlet against the income tax is invested with the wild eloquence that comes to a man who has been wounded in the pocketbook.

Particular to General. For its old-fashioned tone of measured argument and full-throated dithyrambic indignation, it should be one of the great political pamphlets of our time. The fact that it is not can probably be traced to its provenance. Burke on the cause of our present discontents, Tom Paine on the times that try men's souls, argued from the general to the particular. Wilson argues from the particular to the general. When he argues ultimate questions and the moral complicity of the taxpayer in the Government's research into germ warfare, or the "lunacy" of a $30 billion program to put an astronaut on the moon, the whole structure is somehow involved in the small fact that Wilson failed to file any return whatever for ten years and, when brought up short, pleaded ignorance of the law.

He apparently thinks that a self-righteous book will cure his guilt. He argues that, as a writer, he should not have been treated as just another businessman with a more or less predictable income. He had been poor (though during his lean years he paid for a divorce instead of taxes), and when for one year (on the royalties of his gamy novel, Memoirs of Hecate County) he had the income of a small businessman, he should not have been taxed as if his money were an annual affair.

Naive, Even Stupid. He also disarms criticism--up to a point--by asking the reader's question for him: Why should a man who voted Communist in 1932 now argue so passionately against "state control"? He was "naive enough," he answers, to take seriously Lenin's promise that the state would "wither away." He admits: "It may seem naive, and even stupid, on the part of one who had worked for years on a journal which specialized in public affairs [the New Republic] that he should have paid so little attention to recent changes in the income tax laws." He reports sheepishly that when he finally went to a lawyer friend with the report that he had not filed an income tax return for seven years, the stunned advocate advised him that the only thing to do was to leave the country. Wilson stayed, and finally settled with his tormentors on a payment of $25,000, with thousands more to be deducted from his earnings during the next four years.

Wilson is not impressed. He does his level best to prove that the state he gypped was vile anyway, and ends in a tone that can only be compared to that of a Christian martyr intent on proving that he can outroar the lion: "My original delinquency was due not to principle but to negligence; but now I grudge every penny of the imposition, and I intend to outmaneuver this agreement, as well as the basic taxes themselves, by making as little money as possible and so keeping below taxable levels. . . I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me."

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