Fiction and Conservatives
Fish, Lazy Joe
The Eliot of Our Fathers Fiction and Conservatives Lazy Joe Fish Among the seventeen novels I have thought about writing but have never written, one is a particular favorite of mine. It concerns...
...There, listening to old Benny Goodman, Charley Parker and Art Tatum records and drinking beer, he waits for the Crazies...
...the man was a conservative and a great writer and there isn't a literary critic worth his salt who will -or can-deny the fact...
...you know, it can happen here and all that...
...Faulkner...
...There are two possibilities: 1. They don't read the books and the assistant - assistant - assistant professors who "teach" the course don't give a damn whether or not the students read...
...Reality is hell on would-be novelists these days...
...If a liberal had tried to write that book, it would have turned into an anti-slavery tract or a sermon on why we should help drunken unemployed fathers of disadvantaged kids...
...Go back a century...
...Now comes the big point of all of this...
...In prose, Thomas Wolfe, Scott Fitzgerald...even the great Dos Passos - who admittedly, wrote his great work during a period when by no means could he be called a conservative...even the great Dos Passos has in USA a tragic vision that is incompatible with the sugar-cake fantasies of liberal thought...
...You probably will get an argument about Waugh...but who are the contenders...
...When I did so I discovered that the stock answer from professors involed pseudo-sociological and psychoanalytical examinations of the political leanings of Eliot and Pound and the rest, culminating in the pronouncements that after all, they were all reactionary pigs...
...Melville's Moby Dick, with its mystical, deep-in-the-marrow bone, half-holy, half-mad vision of man's fate can be read with understanding only by those who know, with Melville, that there is more to our lives than Social Security experts dream of even in their wildest philosophies...
...Some of my best friends are conservatives, but many of them think fiction is something you read when there is nothing else to do...
...Lazy Joe is the wangdoodlest poet in Slippery Bear Shoot, Indiana...
...All of this is by way of introducing the not particularly new, but always important idea of the role of literature in the conservative or alternative or anti-crazy or whatever-you-want-to-call-it movement...
...You'll get no argument from anyone, not even the most depraved leftist professor of English who thinks, say, Carl Sandburg is a poet, when you mention Eliot...
...The fact of the matter is that the great fiction and poetry of the twentieth century is anti-collectivist because, like all great literature, it speaks for the human spirit, a spirit that finds in the cotton candy of liberal thought food for a season in the sun but nothing to warm the bones during this long, long winter of discontent that has chilled the soul of Western man since 1914...
...It is no secret that the ranks of the campus Crazies and looters and arsonists are filled with what used to be called "students of thehumanities"-English majors, the sort who can't find anything else to do (I was an English major...
...Yet, despite Leslie Fielder's vision of Huck Finn and Jim as proto-gay film stars, Huckleberry Finn could not have been written by a man infected with nineteenth century progressive liberalism...
...Three - Hawthorne, Melville and Twain...
...He puts one last record on the phonograph (Parker's Koko) and, rifle in hand, waits for them...
...It concerns the breakdown of the United States of America (from problems too complicated to go into here), and, in the last chapter, the hero - a fortyish, conservative professor who has been operating as the clandestine leader of a conservative resistance - seeks refuge from revolution at his home on the Jersey Shore...
...Eliot in poetry and Evelyn Waugh in prose...
...Twain...is Twain...
...At the center of their art were principles utterly opposed to the major directions of liberal thought for the past two hundred years...
...Hemingway...
...The students soon get the idea that fiction isn't worth reading because it can be twisted any way the graduate student teaching the class wants to twist it...
...English literature during the twentieth century, then, has been, if not conservative in the sense that Robert Taf t was conservative, at its center deeply anti-liberal...
...2. They do read the books, find the truth in them and then come to class and discover that the assistant - assistant-assistant professor, with all the wisdom of his twenty-three years and the accumulated insight of the New York Review of Books behind him, interprets all of these great works from a leftist, Marxist, any-kind-of-radical-but-right point of view...
...They finally appear, coming down the beach, thousands of them, young, idealistic, mad, screaming, blood-crazed, intent on destroying everything...
...You would think that a student who has been steeped in the literary tradition of the West or who has had even a smattering of the best of the literature of his own century would not - could not - fall for the radical line...
...What he should have said is: "There is always a certain superiority in the argument of conservatism, joined with an absolute excellence in its fiction...
...Emerson once wrote: "There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact...
...When I conceived that scene a few years ago, I thought it was the ultimate in anti-utopian horror...
...Young conservatives or alternatives or whatever we call them should hammer home the idea of the overwhelmingly anti-liberal biases of the twentieth century literary giants...
...How, then, can students of literature spend their time studying authors whose philosophies are diametrically opposed to the irrational, savage, infantilism of the New Left...
...As I write this, there are professors, not all conservatives, who have, in one way or another, waited for the Crazies - without a rifle - and watched as the self-hatred and despair that is the source of the demonic energy of the leftist radicals was turned upon their files and papers and scholarly research...
...To begin, name the two great literary geniuses in English in the twentieth century - T.S...
...or (b) dismissing Waugh's genius as an aberration, something quite amusing indeed, but not, say, in the same league as Soul On Ice...
...There just isn't anybody else...
...Surely he must see that the Utopian nightmares of the left simply are incompatible with reality...reality as seen dearly in fiction...
...I am convinced that there aren't a half-dozen liberally-oriented teachers of English who can teach the novels of Evelyn Waugh without either (a) committing suicide because Waugh has so successfully, hilariously demolished the libs entire world-view...
...Who are the heavy-hitters in American fiction...
...Four years spent reading Eliot and Frost and Hemingway and Hawthprne and Waugh must have some effect on the mind of a sensitive young person...
...He is himself...
...I won't try to play games with him...
...And then, in poetry, there is Yeats...and Pound...and Frost - not a liberal line ever written by any of them...
...About Hawthorne, there is simply no argument...
...My point is that fiction - fiction embracing poetry for my purposes here - is and has been a great source of conservative strength during this cruel and wonderful century...
Vol. 4 • April 1971 • No. 5
