REVIEWING TRE REVIEW (NY)
Schroth, Raymond A.
dug is in fact used as a blind from which Kit can shoot them. Earlier, when Holly's father wanted to punish her for seeing Kit, he shot her dog and threw it into the river. In an atmosphere...
...Thus a review in NYR is not simply a report and a judgment on a book but an independent essay on the whole field---disarmament, witchcraft, psychohistory, sex and crumbling Catholicism --plus the reviewer's lofty or visceral vision of the question at hand...
...It makes him a recognized man in the community, as they say...
...rather he has patched it together, jumping back and forth with a chronicle, a narrative history, and a round of interviews in which the author plays Lincoln Steffens visiting Intelligentia, describing their living quarters, and hoping they will spill some gossip-the Truth why __'s review was turned down or how it happened that __ fell from favor after __'s famous piece implying that __ was It is very difficult to write a critical history of an institution--particularly a journal which, if it succeeds, ultimately transcends and outlasts the personalities and minor jealousies of the fallible people who put the package together each week...
...pay him good money and promise him all the space he wants...
...and not in the sense that the race issue was so "complex" that we needed years of patient talk rather than a radical confrontation with the exploitation of American blacks...
...On the contrary, it appears that just about everyone ("everyone" in the sense that everyone goes to the cocktail party after the National Book Awards) was interested...
...As we have come to understand, however, everything Kit has been up to until this moment is ordinary in these bad lands...
...By personalizing their endeavor Nobile has unintentionally trivialized what, to them, is sacred and above personality...
...Intellectual feuds are interesting stories, especially when they are focused on issues of real value: the political polarization of our campuses, the assassination of John Kennedy, or even the relative literary worth of Norman Mailer...
...He has cluttered his text with over 20 expressions left over from his theology courses at Louvain-like "hyperduliac"--that will make sense only to fellow ex-seminarians...
...Gay Talese's story of the New York Times, The Kingdom and the Power, was at least a popular success because he constructed his narrative around those key moments in the struggles of colorful and ambitious newspapermen when -- because of shrewd judgment, a warm word or a foolish prank--they either seized glory or saw their careers crumble to dust...
...In illustrating Tom Hayden's article on the Newark riots with a page-one diagram of a Molotov Cocktail and in lending its pages to Andrew Kopkind's put-down of Martin Luther King the editors may have momentarily slipped into the irrationality that characterized so much of the late 1960s debate...
...They see their institution as having a life of its own--it exists as a body of thought independent of the lives of the writers, in which we are not supposed to be "interested...
...and seldom before---even among good men mhad the temptation toward violence as a response to social ills been so strong...
...His capture provides him with the escape from anonymity he's been after...
...But ambiguous in that seldom before had the oppressive nature of some of our institutions-from universities to prisons--been so laid bare--as it was in Watts, Newark, Chicago 1968 and Kent State...
...No luck...
...and Nobile has entertained us a bit by stirring up those feuds again...
...It's The New York Review o! Books...
...NYR itself was interested enough to withdraw its own cooperation and threaten the publisher, Charterhouse, with lawsuits...
...BOOKS REVIEWING THE REVIEW (NY) RAYMOND A. SCHROTH Intellectual Skywriting PHILIP NOBILE Charterhouse, $7.95 When I casually mentioned to a fellowcorrespondent at the Democratic Convention, a writer for the New York Review o/ Books, that Philip Nobile was hard at work on a book about NYR she replied that she couldn't imagine how anyone would be interested...
...But the cloud images, as if Kit were going to heaven instead, are appropriate...
...It was born and thrived in one of the most morally ambiguous decades in our history: not in the sense that the moral horror of Vietnam remained forever I0 May 1974:240 "ambiguous" and thus made no inescapable demand on our consciences...
...Scorsese, than are dreamt of in your philosophy...
...Its formula was simple: collect a group of books on the same subject (which correspond with the editor's tastes and concerns...
...After all, NYR isn't like sex because it isn't like anything...
...Perhaps too this is why the editors of NYR have become antagonistic to a book which, on the surface, certainly means to treat them very favorably: because, on an emotional level, the editors and Nobile have a very different conception of what NYR is doing...
...NYR editors also sense that the best journalists are also moralists...
...and a number of critics were interested enough to strop their razors, ready for Nobile's throat...
...Nobile himself has heightened interest in his project by spilling the tale of what he injudiciously calls his own legal "Gethsemane" first to the journalism review (MORE) (April 1973), and then in New Times (April 5, 1974), where he drops a few of-course-Ican'ttell-you tidbits about the sex lives of the NYR crowd...
...and he evaluates the quarrel between NYR and Commentary in the light of their stands on the war, as well as on whether Norman Podhoretz set up Dennis Wrong to slay NYR in Commentary because NYR invited Edgar Z. Friedenberg to murder Podhoretz' autobiography, Making It, in NYR...
...and finally he attempts to review the Review, rating it intellectually "tops," but "not even trying" on literature, etc., concluding--in a meteaphor that he should regret as long as a certain priest-sociologist should regret comparing Yahweh's love to a halfnaked wife with a martini pitcher-that the NYR is like "sex" in that when it's bad it's "still pretty good...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...Philip Nobile has done a number of good things in his book...
...In this book--whose task, strangely, has not been previously undertaken-Mr...
...Once you read Talese the New York Times is no longer a gray mass of print but evangelical McCandlish Phillips hounding the Ku Klux Klan Nazi Jew to suicide and Father Reston coming through in the crunch for "his boys...
...At the end the camera is trained on sunlit layers of clouds outside the window of an airplane transporting Kit to stand trial...
...InI0 May 1974:242...
...and, by publishing Bernard Fall, Hans Morgenthan, I. F. Stone, Noam Chomsky, Henry Steele Commager and Mary McCarthy on Vietnam it both forced the intellectual community to get its conscience into gear and furnished thousands of professors and other journalists with documentation and hard questions of their own...
...Its response was not one of mere pragmatism but documented moral outrage...
...Paterson looks back at the classic line of modern fiction in the English language running from James to Mrs...
...He has not organized his story from a unified point of view...
...After he shoots that former friend, for instance, Kit opens a door for the man as he stumbles blindly toward his house...
...Over a hundred of its writers, friends and enemies were interested enough to tell their stories to the intrepid Nobile --apparently anxious to score more points for the record in decade-old debates, embarrass an editor who had treated them badly, or simply help a determined young man put together what could be a very important analysis of those ten painful years in which America's best critical minds were divided on what kind of a nation America was...
...And they will give space to stylists--Murray Kempton, Wilfrid Sheed, Gore Vidal and Garry Wills--men read not necessarily because we believe them (although I usually believe at least two) but because watching each word follow on the last is like watching those waves the surfers follow around the world--rolling, tumbling, crashing climactically in a foamy white spray...
...send them to the best authoritative writer you can think of (and whose views at least have the editor's respect...
...Thus, the oft-postponed appearance of Intellectual Skywriting became an "event" and "everybody" waited to see the reviews of the book that reviews the reviews of all the other books...
...If only we could seize the personality of Robert Silvers, he pants, as on the last page he scours the editor's office for some tell-tale photograph or toy that will betray his host the way the "Rosebud" sled broke the mystery of Charles Foster Kane...
...NYR was founded just over ten years ago during the New York newspaper strike by a half-dozen intellectuals and journalists who were convinced their community needed a publication that --unlike the Sunday New York Times, the Herald-Tribune and Saturday Review-took books seriously enough to talk about them at length and sometimes get angry at the trivial, the venal, the inflated and the fraudulent...
...Kit doesn't mind the sarcasm because an "individual" is just what he's been trying to become...
...He too is the journalist as moralist...
...Reading Kingdom inspired one of my students towrite a fantasy about Clifton Daniel running amok in Times Square because he had been demoted to driving a delivery truck...
...Woolf, and he seeks to define as systematically as possible the fundamental aesthetic of the novel by which its principal practitioners were guided...
...The moments of greatest violence become, peculiarly, the moments of greatest civility...
...You're a real individual," his guard remarks in disbelief at something he has said...
...In an atmosphere where moral authority takes such brutal, brutish form, Kit's actions begin to make grotesque sense to us...
...Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly (March 11, 1974) has printed a warm evaluation of N YR which both balances off and praises the Nobile version...
...Perhaps under the influence of Talese, on whose sex life he has written for Esquire, Nobile has taken the wrong approach to his subject: trying to probe the heart of America's most influential intellectual journal by poking around the personalities of the editors and contributors...
...From touches like this we begin to understand how Malick thinks Kit's violence gains him access to polite society...
...There are more things in this heaven and earth Malick has created for Kit, Mr...
...Which brings us to the things Nobile has not done well...
...He also offers his own guidelines on how books should be assigned to reviewers...
...Yet, more than most journals, NYR correctly perceived what the Vietnam war was doing both to the Vietnamese and to America...
...The Novel as Faith: The Gospel According to James, Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence and Virginia Wooif JOHN PATERSON Gambit, $10 NATllAN A. SCOTT, JR...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 10
