Among the Intellectualoids / Hot to Trot, So What?
Muggeridge, John
points that remain between the United States and the Third World. American talk about the virtues of the free market sounds a little too glib combined with American reluctance to open "trade...
...Her romantic hero is Edmund Richter, a blond-goateed, bisexual art historian of Russian parentage with a cat called Vico, an irritating habit of exclaiming bilingually, and a conversational style so self-indulgently pompous as to make even Bernard Shaw's seem terse and low-keyed by comparison...
...Come on, don't do that...
...But enough...
...Please allow 4 to 6 weeks for delivery...
...Not only did she enjoy "the roll of his tongue in the pink, avid cave of his mouth," but to her what had happened "signified the successful execution of her woman's duty...
...Like Goethe on his deathbed your reviewer can no more...
...Cheever, for example, brings in the pitter patter of tiny feet...
...dollars...
...Even Franny gets more than physical satisfaction from her tumble with Ira in the Cadillac...
...judges...
...Every bit as driveling and even more highly praised is Francine du Ples~ix Gray's new novel, World Without End.~ Gray specializes in fine arts prose...
...One would have liked clearer directions...
...Written in flat Redbook cover-story prose, it depicts scenes from the life and sexploitation of Franny Fuller (whose marriages--first to an amiable jock, and then to a Jewish New York playwright--make her an obvious preincarnation of Marilyn Monroe) interleaved with Marxist-feminist musings of the sort that Grumbach's school of journalists indulge in as reflexively as breathing...
...But perhaps the medium to which World Without End most properly belongs is public television...
...Her loyalties are complicated, even divided, but secure...
...Ladies and gentlemen, do you know that a judge was mugged this week...
...By I~zchard Muir An exploration of ancient monuments and landscape leatures as clues lo puzzling aspects of Britain's past...
...she forgives him, and they fall into each other's arms as the sun sets over the Western Isles and "one white horse walk[s] slowly across the silent landscape to the sea...
...At the same time, the Administration has made it clear that concern for Third World problems is not the same thing as the Carter Administration's itch to be "on the right side of history," or any other euphemism for promoting Marxist revolution...
...Then mug him again...
...People on the Left attack me," Koch told me last spring...
...Her book, in fact, reaches such a pitch of cultural exquisiteness that many critics refuse to believe that it was written at all, p r e f e r r i n g to think of it as having been painted ("her canvas is vast, her brushstroke sure"), cultivated (' 'a mandarin garden of a book' '), ~Simon & Schuster, $13.95...
...Little Nell got the same sort of pleasure out of tidying up the Old Curiosity Shop...
...of Photoplay than of Socialist Woman...
...Certainly it seems to have compelled Herbert Gold who asserts that in her latest novel, The Missing Person,~ a thinly drawn out docuromance about Hollywood in the thirties and forties, "she manages a sober interlocking of anecdote reminiscent of both Sherwood Anderson and Nathanael West, though her melancholy lyricism is her own...
...By Charles 0 Hucker $1750:511.95 2170 L o l l CountbPd Life...
...Koch, once a liberal purist, is proof that there really is a new liberalism...
...HOT TO TROT, SO WHAT...
...She may sometimes lack the sort of bottomless despair that we have come to expect from serious writers of contemporary fiction...
...Life, in other words, must have a moral framework...
...Indira Gandhi's annoyance at hearing all the successes of the Indian economy a t t r i b u t e d to the private sector in a very mixed congeries of public and private initiatives is understandable...
...He leant tovcards her, forcing her over onto her side on the grass...
...Establishing firmness where there was wobble and simultaneously reducing the guff content of international debate is a considerable achievement...
...i i ~ I,n Canada Mall to The H,story BOOk CIuO..Slamfo,,~d Conn 06904 , , j THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 27 to win...
...I am awfully fond of the sheer symmetry bisexuality presents," he tells his mistress in Florence, "though I much prefer women...
...A campaigner foe Llberty/ ss Llbert-yC/ass :s Teacher inAmerica By Jacques Barzun with a new Pr~:face by the Author A provocative analysis of the failures of the American teaching profession to produce truly educated students--by a famous scholar who taught for many years at Columbia University...
...A53 ianapolis, IN 46250 beauty in a world quickly going philistine, he writes against Pop Art, paints representationally, and above all believes in beautiful love-making...
...At eighteen he has already sufficiently mastered graduate school back-slang to be able thus to berate a roomful of summer vacationers: "Your contentment with well-being, to use William James's astute insight, protects you like a carapace from the t h i r s t for transcendence...
...Touch~ with a vengeance...
...He is convinced that education "comes from within...
...It w o n ' t make anything easy in Central America...
...exhibited ("an unapologetic display of l i t e r a r y opulence' '), or even, as Harrison Salisbury implies with his comment that "the evolution of its human relationships is like a manyfaceted stone," mined...
...As he wound up his speech, a black man in the audience shouted, "We want John Lindsay...
...It even f e a t u r e s an u p p e r - c r u s t New York Mr...
...By Albert Speer $15 95/511.95 SHAPING HISTORY: THE MEN AND THE ISSUES 3368 Custer and The U t i l e Big Horn...
...If you want the Editors' Choice do nothing the book will come aulomahcally If yOU want another book or no book at all return the card by the date specified (Book shipments will be charged to your account al low members prices, plus postageand-packing ) If you should get an unwanted book because you had less.than 10 days to deode, you may return it and pay nothing...
...The President's winning manner takes away some of the shock effect of his r e f u s a l to make decisions on the basis of other people's either/ors...
...We guarantee postage (with trial membership) (First price IS pubhsher's list IioIdflbce shows members price ) FAU.EN EMPIRES FLOURISHING LEGACIES 4143 Russia UnderTheOId Re411me...
...They are dovish on defense and foreign matters, but they generally back substantial cuts in governTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 19"@2 29...
...Come on, come on," he moaned...
...Here is her answer to the question, "What really became ofFranny...
...Prepayment is required on all orders not for resale...
...C a s t i n g a jaundiced eye on Cheever, Gray, and Grumbach, however, may be doing them an injustice More than banality of style and emptiness of thought prevents them from succeeding as novelists...
...Koch relishes an incident that occurred when he visited a senior citizens" center in the Bronx during his campaign for mayor in 1978...
...By Jonathan D Spence $19 95/$12.95 3640 Bad Blood: The 'l'uskegee Syphilis Experiment...
...Arthur M. Schlesinger, J r . , in his role as ideological policeman on the Left, has complained about both of them, Koch especially...
...It's different from the old liberalism, but not that different...
...This putting mirrors up to mirrors is an ideal way of projecting Spark's clear unembittered satire...
...Koch, who calls himself "a liberal with sanity," represents one wing of neoliberalism...
...But of course she cannot escape the twentieth century's moral disintegration...
...A Handsome Man is corner-store bookrack stuff spiced up with a spoonful or two of feminist Weltschmerz, neo-Gothic romance for the English Lit...
...She is a modern who somehow manages to avoid the artistic pitfalls of modernism...
...brewed mead $14 95/$9.90 3293 ~ I n l h e BHtish I.lltdlcipe...
...I want you and you want me...
...By John G#hngham $12 50/58.50 8938 The CmestJr Gospels...
...Neoliberals like Koch and Senator Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts are not on the brink of embracing Ronald Reagan conservatism, but on some fundamental issues they have drifted far afield from undUuted liberalism...
...Here, among "images from JamesJoyce and Yeats and O'Casey by John Muggeridge float[ing] past the car windows in the light rain," lust conquers all...
...She wanted it, too . . . . "Listen, Trav," she said, trying to control the hot breath which blurred her voice [sic?], "You know this isn't a good idea...
...The prosperity of Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea speak for it...
...The New York Times calls her a born writer, the Washington Star an inventive and graceful one with a wry style of her own, while the Chicago Tribune thinks of her prose as graceful and spare, "the kind . . . that sounds e f f o r t l e s s but is bonebreaking to write...
...She is, in other words, a universalist who finds herself tagged as a sectarian, a non-conformist conformist...
...am sparing no relevant f a c t s . " Then she adds most c h a r a c t e r i s t i c a l l y " . . . I treated the story of Warrender Chase with a light and heartless hand, as is * *Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, $12.95...
...By Christopher Hibbert $1295./59.95 7583 The Great Mutiny: India 18~7...
...The fact that she is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and author of a literary biography of Mary McCarthy as well as of Chamber Music, described hy John Leonard as "one of those rare novels written for adults who listen," makes Grumbach's claim to instant admiration a compelling one...
...It will not even let the U.S...
...The plot unfolds in mystic Ireland...
...With Reagan in the White House, and the center of political gravity shifted, they were instantly neoliberal...
...A damp-eyed whimsicality afflicts all but the sternest-souled writers on Hollywood, and Grumbach catches such a heavy dose of it that finally she is reduced to incoherence...
...The P r e s i d e n t and those who speak for him have gone far toward dispelling the myth that the Reagan Administration means to turn its back on the developing countries...
...Her voice sounded as surprised as she felt...
...It won't solve the last dilemma over textile imports or Cubans in Angola...
...The Missing Person k one of those frequent novels written for adults who block their ears...
...By Rtc/~ard Pipes The firsl thorough analys,s ol the growth of the Russ*an slate $1750 $1 O.05 4788 Chlna's Imperial Past: I n Intrecluction to Chinese History and Culture...
...Gray presses hard on the neoconservative pedal...
...In a world where adultery no longer adulterates and marriage is the tie that loosens, Anna Karenina's suicide becomes an act of pure insanity and Alex D'Urberville's murder the sort of senseless killing that Truman Capote might document...
...Non-alignment, the Administration makes clear, is a game any number can play...
...A fair example of what these three newspapers have in mind is the following dialogue which forms the climax of Cheever's latest novel, A Handsome Man, * and takes place in a ruined castle between the hero's mistress and his son...
...And a few hands went up...
...And there was more than cantankerousness in J u l i u s N y e r e r e ' s remarks about the e l a b o r a t e s t r u c t u r e of subsidization t h a t , in p r e s e n t - d a y real life, supports the sturdy, independent farmer of American tradition...
...undangerous liaisons are uninteresting...
...Lindsay, of course, is a former mayor of New York, one usually blamed by Koch and nearly everyone else for the city's firiancial troubles...
...Bone-breaking to read would be closer to the mark...
...Wisely, perhaps, Gold is less specific about what is actually being interlocked...
...She l i n g e r s i n t h e umbra between c e l l u l o i d e t e r n i t y and t h e a c c i d e n t of mortali{y c a u g h t and hung up like an escaping prisoner on the barbed wire of his enclosure In her, the intimations of i m m o r t a l i t y a r e s t r o n g . She moves towards them, and then retreats, perched precariously on the swing of the unbearable present, and destined, like everyone else, fi)r the final take on the shores of darkness...
...The plot of Loitering With Intent is as multi-layered as that of Don Quixote...
...Koch stopped his speech...
...A l l orders from outside the United States must be prepaid in U.S...
...ByM~chaelGrant $12 50/58.75 7765 Richawd the Uonheact...
...New-wave mawkishness closes over him...
...By Elaine Pagels $10 00.'$8.50 3228 Grant: & l l i o g r l l l ~ y . By Wdham S McFeeiy Treats both the m~l~tar~ and political careers $19 95~$12.95 CAB2B THE HISTORY BOOK CLUB Stamford, Corm 06904 "1 Please enroll me as a trial member and send me the four books whose rlumbers I have entered below Bill those on the left al 99r for all three and the fourth at the low member's price, plus bostage-and-packlng [ - I [--I r- t ] J I may return the books wlthm three weeks at your expense and owe nolhmg Or...
...the Club Works= As a Club member you', be able to choose from the 150-175 books fealured each month Our books are always equal to the pubhshers" edihons never "econorny reprints" and at savings of $3...
...In what sounds like one side of a telephone conversation with her c r e a t o r , Fteur Talbot recalls the events of 1949 when she was writing a novel called Warrender Chase in which she describes, sometimes ahead of time, the machinations of Sir Quentin Oliver for whose Autobiographic Association she was then acting as secretary...
...in Franny's view being a man meant being able to think things up for yourself and make them happen, all women were, like her, "waiting for the Great Something they dreamed about all their lives to happen to them...
...By Christopher Hlbbert $15 95/59.95 3871 'nteGateof Heavenly Peace: C h l n l l l And Their RevohP Uon, 1895-1980...
...Hardly a page goes by without an italicized reference to the quattrocento...
...She observes the world around her, but also h e r s e l f observing it...
...Only four lines 'earlier his hand on her shoulder had "sent tingling little electric shocks across her chest and down her legs...
...Her latest novel, Loitering With Intent,** is unabashedly autobiographical...
...She tried to pull away from him, but her resistance thawed in the hot force of his desire . . . . There was no ambivalence or doubt about Travis...
...Her Doctor Richter belongs to the Aesthetic Minority...
...it is a man's own doing, or rather it happens to him--sometimes because of the teaching he has had, sometimes in spite of it...
...The boys and girls lap it up...
...witty, fantastic stories about the people who pass by her in the ruins...
...Hardcover $9.00, Paperback $4.00...
...No wonder, then, that the two wholly sympathetic male characters in The Missing Person are Eddie Puritan, Franny's homosexual agent, the only person capable of making her feel complete, and Ira Rorie, a girlishly named new-class Negro forced by segregated housing to inhabit his Cadillac, with whom she exchanges life stories and enjoys her only reciprocally satisfying sexual encounter...
...She is, for example, as subjectivist as any of her contemporaries...
...What did I care...
...Koch responded...
...Even Franny, dumb, lost blonde that she is, identifies with the powder-puff proletariat...
...What do I care about ideas...
...The new morality has ruled out serious romantic fiction...
...We pay postage on prepaid orders...
...Or sentimental...
...One novelist, however, who does not go in for sentimental evasions is Muriel Spark...
...I want you," he said . . . . "I want you badly...
...One of the chief bones of contention between Travis and his family is the fact that he keeps dropping out of school.][ He was unbuttoning the top of her shirt now...
...By GerhardHerm $12 50/$8.50 AGGRESSION, CONFLICT &NO DIPLOMACY 2725 The Days of the French Revoluti~t...
...Tsongas calls himself a *Alfred A. Knopf, $12.95...
...Our grandfathers are often accused of having covered up the fact that sex is fun...
...Jane is loomed over by the irresistible Travis...
...The United States cordiality toward China will continue, but so will the time-honored American links with Taiwan...
...28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 my way when I give a perfectly serious account of things...
...says Fleur Talbot in defending h e r s e l f against the charge that one of .the characters in Warrender Chase was shocking...
...bond with Israel p r e v e n t strong ties with the Arab states...
...What are you doing about crime...
...Instead of bemoaning what has happened, however, or pretending that the bomb sites will facilitate urban renewal, she sits on a convenient pile of rubble and tells bright...
...Her fellow aspirants to stardom she calls " s i s t e r s i n passivity _9 . . who could never resolve anything for themselves because they had never been told it was possible...
...He called a press conference and said, 'This mugging will in no way affect my judgment in matters of this kind.'" And an elderly lady in the back of the room stood up and said...
...In the end, however, melancholy lyricism triumphs over ideology...
...After thirty years of getting in and out of bed with s t u d e n t s , family friends, and chance acquaintances (the poor man can't even drop in to a gay bar without becoming the immediate c e n t e r of a t t r a c t i o n ) , Richter marries his childhood sex partner and romantically retires to 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JANUARY 1982 Nantucket Island among whose sand dunes she first took off her tennis shorts for him...
...A FEW LIBERALS SOBER UP by F r e d Barnes Mayor Edward I. Koch of New York traveled to Brooklyn one day in 1980 for the dedication of a shopping center...
...He was looming over her now, cradling her head in his hands and looking at her with love "Simon & Schuster, $12.95...
...What Gray has produced is Masterpiece Soap Opera...
...The United States will not let its hope of good relations with India stand in the way of s t r a t e g i c a l l y necessary ties with Pakistan...
...It has a fancy name, neoliberalism, and a growing set of distinguishable ideas, but don't start applauding yet...
...or more off bookstore prices...
...A century and threequarters ago, Jane Austen could invest a chance meeting in an umbrella shop with extraordinary erotic tension...
...It takes more now than a random charge of imperialism to inhibit defense of American strategic interests...
...Everybody who wants Lindsay back, raise your h a n d , " he said...
...He has made his point about the superior viability of free .market approaches to development at a time when the conspicuous evidence is on his side...
...And this is what the t h r e e authors under review go in for...
...Koch's apostasy is most flagrant on the crime issue: He's for the death penalty and against lenient Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...To order, or for a copy of our catalogue, write: LibertyPress/Libert.yClassics 7440 North Shadeland, Dept...
...By Charles K Hofhng MD $'15 95/510.95 4648 The Twehm Ceneare...
...t o d a y ' s dirty little secret is that promiscuity is boring...
...They are contributing to a doomed genre...
...He was right...
...its fictional author, Fleur Talbot, goes "rejoicing on her way" through the twentieth century, meeting as she does so a typically twentieth-century bag of lovers, homosexuals, cunning old women, and secular and spiritual con artists together with their dupes...
...S t i l l , in less than a year, the Reagan Administration has changed its image in the Third World...
...Now that might be selling them a trifle short...
...The landscape that she passes rejoicing through is a devastated one...
...her wronged Rochester sheds t e a r s of remorse at his failure to "connect with people...
...They say, 'You cater to the middle class.' I say, 'You bet I do.' I tell middle-class people, 'We ought to be kissing your feet for not leaving the city...
...Professor Barzun says: "no limit can be set to the power of a teacher but no career can so nearly approach zero in its effects...
...It consists of traditional liberals of the "Kennedy Democrat" variety (that's John F. Kennedy), folks such as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and Rodney S. Quinn, the Maine secretary of state...
...You're the people who pay the taxes and create the jobs for others so that we can collect revenues that make it possible to provide services for the poor.'" When Jimmy Carter was President, Koch and Moynihan were often critical of him and thus earned the epithet neoconservative...
...Y/et there is a disengaged quality about her writing...
...you'll find that The H,story Book Club offers some of the finest selections being published today And no book club we know of offers greater sawngs--an average of 33% off publishers' list prices You can save even more now by taking advantage of our introductoq/offer Select any 3 books on this page all for just 99r (values up to $6750) when you take a fourth book at the low member's price Your total savings as a trdal member, including this =ntroductory offer, can be mole than 50...
...Koch paused, then bellowed, "DUMMIES...
...images from Barbara Cartland and Gloria Steinem float p a s t his car wigdows in the heavy drivel...
...Travis...
...His viewpoint is often shared by Senators Gary Hart of Colorado and Bill Bradley of New Jersey, and by a group of a dozen or so Democrats in the House of Representatives led by Congressman Leon Panetta of California...
...and intensity...
...But it will help...
...A third novelist in line for the Congreve treatment is surely Doris Grumbach...
...American talk about the virtues of the free market sounds a little too glib combined with American reluctance to open "trade doors when somebody at home might get hurt by competition from the underdeveloped countries...
...The joke in Washington is that the Democratic liberals in Congress vote for the same old programs, while the neoliberals sigh--and then vote for the same old programs...
...This weird mixture of detachment and commitment, of frivolity and seriousness may derive from the fact that Spark is an English Roman Catholic...
...Divorced, thirty, and childless, her heroine wants to get her man not just to enjoy his favors, but to make a .father of him...
...By James H Jones The shocking details of th~s experiment on 399 black men in the rural South $1495/51 0.95 3723 Infllb'atlen: Hew IHkdlmdch Hlmmler Schemed To Build An ES Industrial El~e...
...1795/$12.95 5462 The Celts: The People Who Came Out of the Dmtkness...
...I see no reason to keep silent about the enjoyment of the sound of my own voice as I work...
...Hypocrite...
...Getting rid of a mindset that equates progress with guerrilla warfare has freed the American government of many embarrassments...
...Rochester, complete with white Alfa-Romeo convertible and silverhandled shaving b r u s h e s , not to mention a healthily p l e b e i a n J a n e Eyre raised under "the big Illinois sky with the d i s t a n t glow from the lights of Chicago offbehind the water towers...
...So do the moves, open and covert, of countries as disparate as Peru and China to change directions away from socialist regulation and toward free market practices...
...There is in The Missing Person more :[:Pumarri, $11.95...
...new liberal," or a "revisionist liberal," and bills his ideology as ".compassionate realism...
...You need take only four more books in the next two years, after which you'll save even more through bonus books which you may choose from our entire hst Every four weeks (13 times a year) you will receive our Rewew and a dated reply card...
...I will buy four more selections wdhm the next lwo years (not counting my choices above ) MembersNp is cancellable anytime thereafter All Club purchases are at low members pnces, and a postage-and-packing fee ~s added to all shipments A S 2 Print Name Address J p t = City Slate ____ 7~p I...
...Spiritually, she enjoys robust good health and writes about the psychic ills of her characters from the point of view of a visitor to the cuckoo's nest rather than a patient there...
...But one thing is certain--Doctor Johnson would have read her, and most likely have praised her...
...Doctor Johnson said of Congreve's novel that he would rather praise it than read it...
...A similar preference is at work, one must charitably assume, among admirers of Susan Cheever's fiction...
...Tsongas represents the other-wing of neoliberalism...
...Her fellow English Catholic, Evelyn Waugh, chronicled the pillaging of it...
...It doesn't look like indifference if, when food stamps are being cut back in the United States, the P r e s i d e n t is willing to keep foreign aid at present levels and even to increase it in certain areas...
...By Dorothy Hartley How Enghsrl folk lived worked, threshed, thatched rolled fleece, milled corn...
...I wasn't writing poetry and prose so that the reader would think me a nice person, but in order that my sets of words should convey ideas of truth and wonder, as indeed they did to myself as I was composing them...
...Today, the only vibrations produced by the most brilliantly delineated explicit sex are pornographic...
...One way of diverting attention from this unpalatable truth is to sentimentalize sexual freedom...
...For sexual love to work as drama there must be rules to break, penalties to pay, and rewards SAVINGS THAT GO DOWN IN HISTORY TAKE ANY 3 ALL FOR 99 r NO matter what areas of h=story you enloy reading about most...
...he was asked...
...John Muggeridge is a free-lance writer who has appeared in the American Spectator, National Review, and the Human Life Review...
...He wanted her . . . . "You want it, too," he said, "You want it, too...
...They are hawkish on defense matters, favor a stiff anti-Communism in foreign affairs, support selective cutbacks in federal programs, are sometimes resistant to demands by labor leaders, and normally identify themselves with middle-class anxieties like crime...
...His book, The Road From Here: Liberalism and Realities in the 1980s," is the first neotiberal manifesto...
Vol. 15 • January 1982 • No. 1
