Fields for President
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Fields for President by W. C. Fields Dodd, Mead, $5.95 As a serious enterprise, book reviewing in the United States survives in about the same condition as organized religion- though its...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.mmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Now the Times is another matter...
...But their concerns are really religious rather than intellectual, and no one who matters takes them seriously anyway...
...And there are scattered essays on the life of the mind and other such exaggerations...
...After reading The New York Times Book Review regularly, one gets a view of the American intellectual preserve that is a vision of ghastliness and chaos...
...With book reviewing like this, it is little wonder that nothing but canards and balderdash pour forth from political and social analysts, and no one would know if a sound novel had been published in the last ten years, because there is no reviewer around who is fit to read one...
...Garry Wills would not understand it...
...And when cranks are not molesting serious books, or serious scholars are not being misused for the purposes of rendering significance to high-toned persiflage, the pages of The Review are turned over to ignoramuses...
...I take* it as illustrative of my observations that the book presently under consideration received not a nod from the major reviewing establishments, though such stuff as Women and Madness, A Bill of No Rights, The Coming of Age, St...
...Others are kept in the shadows...
...Serious journals which during the 1920s would never have opened their pages to the Babbits and the wowsers', are today lying spreadeagled before a host of faddish dandies...
...The premier book review in America continues to boom the latest twaddle about homosexuality, the Women's fever, organic foods, the American War Machine, and more...
...Perhaps he never saw the book...
...Fields' work is a towering masterpiece, a political treatise of the first water, a capital achievement in social analysis, the grand tour of a great mind through the byways and past the arcades of this supermarket republic...
...Certain acts are never allowed in the tent...
...Fields for President by W. C. Fields Dodd, Mead, $5.95 As a serious enterprise, book reviewing in the United States survives in about the same condition as organized religion- though its structures abound throughout the Republic, its substance is but a vestige of yesteryear's glories...
...Of course, how could he ever leave it with one of his faddists...
...Perhaps on the day the masterpiece arrived in his office he was exercising his arm down at a favored saloon...
...A few stercorous novels, the product of a jejune society of dwarves, attract ooohs...
...More probably he took one glance at its contents, locked his office doors, and furtively put it to the torch, confident that he had preserved the Nation's virtue...
...Leonard would have found space for Dr...
...When The Review is not morbid it is idiotic, and when it is neither of these it is dull...
...It should be the Nation's showcase of intellectual tastes...
...Consider Irving Kristol's On The Democratic Idea in America...
...It has been out for eleven months, and it is considered essential reading by members of the Nixon Administration...
...In recent years it has taken on a kind of carnival atmosphere where geeks and fat women disport with contortionists of every ideological fashion...
...If this is so, it does not speak well for the Republic...
...And one of the most important studies of urban problems to appear in years, Edward Banfield's The Unheavenly City, was ignored for months before it was finally turned over to a member of the tv intelligentsia...
...It has yet to be reviewed...
...That would be the kind of innovation of which civilized men might approve...
...Serious books are handed to ideological cheerleaders from one trendy cause or another...
...George Stade might find it convincing...
...Still one would have thought that Mr...
...All sorts of indignities and perversions are piled on the old art...
...Compared to all of these doodlings, Dr...
...Unlike works by Norman Mailer, Eldridge Cleaver, and other such buffoons, this book does not appear on any of the syllabi or bibliographies of those vulgarized college courses that are the rule rather than the exception during this booming age of higher education...
...But no, he snubbed the great man's bequest to the world of letters and social science as though it bore a pox...
...Despite its prevenient analysis of American society, it is not considered relevant to contemporary American problems...
...And so the carnival continues...
...And interspersed amongst all these curiosities, the editor, a Mr...
...Then there will be tony reviews of the year's best books on African dance or yogurt making or Japanese gardening...
...George and the Godfather, and A Theory of Rights have been treated handsomely...
...But it is a strictly patrolled carnival...
...Naturally The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and other such renowned forums of the book reviewing art passed it by...
...As a form it puffs and strains under the burden of innumerable idiotic innovations...
...Leonard off to some creative writing school in the Catskills and to hire...
...So there was nothing else to do but to pretend that W. C. Fields had never published a scholarly study of the American system...
...It is a delusory essay delivered from a soap box, albeit a discreetly camouflaged soap box...
...So The Review is a carnival...
...Unserious books are given to reputable scholars...
...The only solution for The Times is to send Mr...
...someone capable of doing justice to modern American publishing...
...The New York Times Book Review gave it the old heave-ho without even pausing to sprinkle it in the ritual of confetti and banality so often reserved for the senile effusions of Justice Douglas...
...John Leonard, will publish a special kind of review which someone has convinced him marks the creme de la creme of intellectuality...
...And naturally in our age of evangelizing enthusiasms, it has become the tool of the ideologue and the uplifter...
...What is more, Fields for President, unlike the books that set book reviewers to salivating these days, is logical and well-written- though the author's formal education waned around the fourth grade...
...Milton Friedman's new collection of essays is not likely to be hospitably treated, if it is acknowledged at all...
...Nevertheless this tome has been segregated from those other works of comedy which pass for political analysis today, and its sales have suffered...
...A typical issue will unveil reviews of books explicating the mysteries of anal intercourse, suicide amongst women, or mercy killing...
...Serious books are banished to back pages or to outright oblivion for reasons that are pedantically ideological, venal, and ignorant...
...Perhaps it is...
...It is brazenly usufructed by every species of scoundrel and charlatan...
...Now not only are these reviews misleading, but they are written by writers who invariably harbor bizarre little prejudices which they relentlessly and disingenuously advance on unsuspecting readers in such a way as either to hook the poor sucker (by convincing him that he, in his obtuseness, has missed a point here and there) or to persuade him that the reviewer is insane...
...The message of The New York Times Book Review is chaos...
...The most promising place to begin looking for such a fellow will probably be among the scriveners now sweating away over the obituary section...
...It is a genre that he reserves for those individuals beheld by him to be personages of enduring worth, say Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer...
Vol. 6 • March 1973 • No. 6
