Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Biotech, Society, and the Individual I read Malcolm Gladwell's "Risk, Regulation, and Biotechnology" (TAS, January 1989) with mixed reactions. I applaud the incisive reporting of a...
...however, that doesn't diminish the validity of the scene of suffering described in his letter to the Washington Post...
...Thus, the writer as literate philistine has become a part of England's mental landscape...
...Leininger for "talking the same language as the regulators...
...will be immediately proposed to...
...And to demonstrate my support of Mr...
...Kenner is entitled to his opinions, but, if he wants to air them publicly, he should back them withsomething more than sneering condescension...
...Let's consider Mr...
...Which means, if anything, that talent no longer gathers around the center Kenner has made his critical turf...
...I applaud the incisive reporting of a complex issue, particularly on various agency regulations that have an impact on scientific research...
...For despite its smugness, it does occasionally wander into good sense...
...But modernism is not Kenner's obsession, it is his subject...
...This obsession (or "high horse") blinds Kenner to the achievement of writers who are outside the modernist tradition...
...This simple statement of intentions can be found on page seven...
...Evelyn Waugh is a "literary genius of an unmistakable if minor order" who "plagiarized" Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End...
...5-6...
...The belief that our current situation can only improve with regard to restricting development of new science is contrary to the evidence...
...Of course poor Wellinghouse reached an absurd conclusion...
...Thank you for your help in what was becoming a genuine dilemma, i.e., the finding of a like-minded wife...
...Many good writers who simply did their job—Ivy Compton-Burnett comes to mind—are simply left unmentioned...
...And on and on, with almost never a pause to present evidence, argue a case, or otherwise do the work of criticism...
...McCartney provides us a list of those writers Kenner ignores in his book on "the modern English writers": "We look in vain for any discussion of Aldous Huxley, Ivy Compton-Burnett, George Orwell, Joyce Carey, Henry Greene, Iris Murdoch, to name only a few of the many omissions...
...By the way, I have read your mag for years, subscribe to it, in fact, and am a Republican through and through...
...In two previous books Kenner essayed the impact of international modernism on the literature of Ireland and America...
...Call it one of my clubbish eccentricities...
...Kenner is obviously annoyed at this situation...
...Notice the elitist aroma of "higher...
...Heer never mentions this...
...John's University so he probably is familiar with his subject...
...That Mr...
...He might start by re-reading Hugh Kenner...
...Pleasant Michigan Attention Single Women It is imperative that I acquire your T-shirt with haste as I plan to attract my future wife by wearing it...
...Heer notice that I had some good things to say about A Sinking Island...
...President Eisenhower's broad victory in 1952 was accompanied by only a narrow and brief Republican advantage in Congress...
...Remember when we conservatives symbolically adopted pigs to counter the verbal attacks of the hippies against the police...
...This, it seems, gives Kenner leave to hand down ex cathedra pronouncements: Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of those "good writers who simply did their job...
...In the past, Kenner has praised such nonmodernist texts as the letters of Shaw, the apologetics of Chesterton, and the detective novels of Ross Macdonald...
...Kurt Leininger Corvallis, Oregon Malcolm Gladwell replies: I apologize to Mr...
...Like his idols, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, Kenner can be exasperatingly wrong-headed, but he always redeems himself by making you rethink issues that once seemed settled...
...Prior to 1956, every American President who got a majority of the popular vote also got a Congress of his own party...
...Our political system has practically relegated the individual mind to a public resource...
...I find this a somewhat narrow view of what it takes to achieve literary excellence...
...Now, it says here that Mr...
...It seems clear to me that Kenner had something more in mind than "the fate of modernism in England," as Mr...
...Perhaps, as he apparently feels is the case with biotechnology, society has had too much of a say in the way in which my writing has developed...
...McCartney's thesis is that Hugh Kenner is a critic fixated on high modernism...
...However, several points were inadequately discussed...
...Individual minds, not society, discover new knowledge and develop new technology...
...The only justification he provides for treating them this way is that they've not prostrated themselves before his version of the modernist altar...
...A writer could be someone interestingly eccentric, but he had to share the tastes of his audience: in their own way, Woolf, Auden, and Larkin all satisfied this desire...
...I'm thinking about the saloon reviews, Ben Stein's front-line reports from the West Coast, Kent Owen's demented prose-poems celebrating life in Indiana (which would make a great book, by the way), and Bruce Bawer's consistently sensible movie reviews...
...The fact that EPA proposed extending federal oversight to "categories of commercial and industrial uses of micro-organisms that had not previously been covered by regulations" shows explicitly that government will control everything it can get away with, as an end in itself...
...And I think Dante and Milton would agree...
...The real lesson for the Democrats is to ponder what a greater blow-out the election would have been with a Bush running mate other than Quayle...
...Because Kenner's subject is the fate of modernism in England, he is under no obligation to discuss every good twentieth-century English writer...
...Virginia Woolf" s Mrs...
...The classic example is the writer from Barron's who was given four pages to bitch about the dearth of commodity brokers in the contemporary novel...
...The higher arts, though, are ignored by the magazine: dance, theatre, and poetry all exist in America, if not in The American Spectator...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989...
...Now let me see where to begin...
...Please include a daytime phone number with all correspondence for purposes of verification by our standing army of fact checkers...
...Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time is "leaden...
...Kenner, however, begins by telling us that "one theme this book addresses" is "how the mother-country of 'English' became a headquarters for articulate Philistia" (pp...
...A Sinking Island deals with a related but more complicated problem: the relative non-impact of modernism on English literature...
...Lt...
...Then how does he explain Kenner's disparaging remarks about Auden's "easy" poems or his facile argument that the difficult, "resistant" book had been the cultural norm until the rise of mass literacy made the "easy" book today's false standard...
...In addition Kenner slights the achievement of those nonmodernists he does mention: Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, Evelyn Waugh, and Philip Larkin...
...The Democrats had every issue—and I mean every—in the campaign except the two that mattered: peace and prosperity...
...Heer says that modernism is Kenner's subject in A Sinking Island and that I have no right to suggest otherwise...
...There's nothing like TAS to lift one's spirits here in the City, weltering about, as it were, in a storm of printed nonsense...
...If TAS is not going to cover culture accurately, maybe it shouldn't cover it at all...
...Finally, anyone familiar with Hugh Kenner's criticism should know that he doesn't esteem difficult books merely because they are difficult...
...By contrast, Joyce and Pound had far less accessible per(continued on page 48) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1989 9 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 9) sonae: they demanded that readers educate themselves to understand the new literature...
...McCartney wrote a book on Evelyn Waugh and now teaches at St...
...rather than Larkin's poetry (which Kenner praises...
...Since then, popular Republican Presidents have faced Democratic Congresses after the elections of 1968, 1972, 1980 (House only), 1984 (ditto), and 1988...
...mails, I enjoy taking a moment to respond...
...He doesn't mention that my piece also dealt with Kenner's 1987 book, The Mechanic Muse, a work which I found to be much more engaging precisely because in it he limits himself to what he does best: re-creating the historical contexts of his favorite modernist authors...
...Election Roundup I find Fred Barnes's analysis ("Lessons of Campaign '88," TAS, January 1989) missing the mark by a light year...
...In fact, Kenner gives the game away when he observes that, rather than a "strange newcomer" at this century's beginning, modernism was actually a reversion to "an old tradition, still just sufficiently alive in universities to furnish the nucleus of a readership...
...Further, Gladwell's view that "commercialization of animal research will simply go forward by other means" ignores the power of environmental groups, the animal rights movement, and such diverse government retaliation as insider trading enforcement...
...Finally, reference to the "allocation of public resources" in maximizing our health and welfare reveals that Gladwell is talking the same language as the regulators...
...Those were insurmountable by Dukakis...
...The unmistakable corollary of Kenner's position is that to establish itself in the first rank, a literary work must require a caste of priestly academics to explain its mysteries...
...Finally, he concludes that "it's time to announce explicitly the post-war news that . . . there's no longer an English literature" because there is no "center" around which talent can gather...
...Heer's admonishment to "cover culture accurately" or not "cover it at all...
...There's no mistaking that one of his primary objectives is to belittle everything that doesn't fit his definition of literary worth...
...Thanks to most of the media, subversion of the American political system by Democrats entrenched in the Congress receives little notice...
...Good books are supposed to be easy...
...He then spends the next 240 pages alternately patronizing and dismissing writers he thinks inferior to his canonical roster of modernists...
...If this isn't high-horse, I confess I don't know what is...
...After all, one decided to write in the vernacular and the other chose to retell an awfully well-known story...
...Then there's Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Swift, Dickens, Orwell, and . . . but the point's made, I think...
...When criticizing Philip Larkin, Kenner is clearly focusing on the average joe role that Larkin cultivated ("Who's Jorge Luis Borges...
...Or anybody else...
...He brings up, for example, the clubbishness of English society and the related desire of literate Englishmen for authors to have approachable personalities...
...And when these subjects are brought up they tend to be written about in a manner which suggests . . . um . . . unfamiliarity...
...Heer says that Kenner "doesn't esteem difficult books merely because they are difficult...
...While some might think this excessively stern, I couldn't agree more...
...Over the years, Kenner has provided us with important critical insights and I said as much very clearly in my review...
...As he sees it, important poets (Tomlinson, Bunting) are ignored because the English reading public has been told the proper response to modernism is laughter...
...Kenner offers several explanations for this phenomenon, some more convincing than others...
...That may become our society's epitaph...
...Heer has chosen to review my review so selectively suggests he lacks some of the precision he demands in others...
...Lopsided PAC contributions to incumbents, a frequent target of criticism, are actually much smaller than the advantages which incumbents take from the public treasury...
...I'd about given up hope...
...There he'll find ample warrant for my comments regarding A Sinking Island and The Mechanic Muse...
...In 1956, Democratic control of Congress survived the Eisenhower landslide...
...The most recent example of such ignorance in action (and the immediate provocation for this letter) is George McCartney's review of Hugh Kenner's A Sinking Island (TAS, February 1989...
...You couldn't tell from his review, though...
...McCartney must have missed it...
...The American Spectator welcomes letters to the editor, particularly those that do not threaten libel action...
...The first lithe and lovely girl who points with joyful surprise exclaiming, "You read TAS...
...Nor does Mr...
...Moreover, he is explicit on this point: "So intricate is our story that narration must be highly selective...
...For instance, since PACs appeared nearly two decades ago, Congress has appropriated for its own free mailings approximately twice as much money as all PACs contributed to congressional campaigns...
...Jiet Heer Toronto, Ontario George McCartney replies: Whenever I'm charged with provocation and ignorance through the U.S...
...Heer so delicately puts it...
...Marc-Ives 71.imin New York, New York PAC Animals RET ("Lifers on Capitol Hill," TAS, February 1989) has shed some welcome but inadequate light upon the ossification of our House of Representatives...
...He invokes Paradise Lost and The Divine Comedy as examples of resistant books that required scholarly mediation before the untutored could paw their pages...
...C. J. Check, USMC Oceanside, California Kenner Culture For a magazine that emulates Mencken's American Mercury, TAS is surprisingly weak in its cultural journalism...
...Thanks to TAS, the Wall Street Journal, and a few others, there is a slowly expanding public awareness of our problem...
...Furthermore, long congressional tenure has disrupted the traditional relationships between our separated branches of government...
...Ivan W Parkins Mt...
...But Mr...
...So tell me how to explain the aforesaid Current Wisdom to my children...
...Stanley J. Kavan Milford, Connecticut Save the Pigs I was dismayed by the cutting in February's Current Wisdom from the "budding New Age Orwell," but think you went too far...
...Truly, sir, I must have missed something, and respectfully hope that you will . . . explain why one should find a risible situation at hand amid the suffering of animals . . . not one of your best moments, n'est-ce-pas...
...Joyce," he chuckles, "was never in higher company than when he jested that he made no demands on a reader save a lifetime's attention...
...Dalloway suggests the "high-toned dither" found in the New Yorker...
...Heer's challenging severity, I'd like to point out how he himself might improve as a culture coverer...
...The idea that society should "have a say" in how science is developed, if in force 100 years ago, would have prevented such modern necessities as electricity, automobiles, telephones, and medicine...
...When discussing the earthier details of American life the magazine can be sprightly, amusing, and accurate...
Vol. 22 • April 1989 • No. 4
