Culture and the Neoconcervatives

...A name good or bad, according to sensitivities...

...WHEN IT COMES TO THE MODERNIST CANON, few neoconservatives show much interest in acting the part of defender—that role has been taken up among them so far mainly by the art critic Hilton Kramer...

...If there is an art today so acquiescent as to be described as a "component" of bourgeois culture, or what's left of it, it would surely be much of what goes by the name of postmodernism...

...Not in Matthew Arnold's sense—his philistines were members of a thriving, dynamic middle class who, if they did not yet fully rule their society, looked forward to the day when their hard work and ingenuity would allow them to take power...

...How else to explain his giving so much space to the Bruce Bawers or Andy Starks, who write in the glib sarcastic style of The American Spectator...

...The philistines are a thick-necked people...

...He accepts most of the strictures of Dwight Macdonald's famous attack on Cozzens, "By Cozzens Possessed," which appeared in the January 1958 Commentary, in those years a rather different kind of anticommunist publication...

...In their apparent anxiety to fasten onto authors of unquestionable rectitude, and in their condemnations of established writers whose virtue they feel is open to question, the neoconservatives recall the polemical procedures of the vulgar Marxist criticism of the 1930s as practiced by the American followers of Stalin...

...About the characters in Lawrence's beautiful The Rainbow Podhoretz writes that "there is no life in them because they are counters in the polemical play of his [Lawrence's] ideas...

...Podhoretz dissents from Leavis's high valuation of D. H. Lawrence, however...

...In this as in other respects, the neoconservative intellectuals follow in the footsteps of an earlier generation of Marxists...

...but to me it mainly suggests how in the little world of the neoconservatives, given over as it so often is to mutual admiration and promotion, someone like Podhoretz can always expect his friends to make generous allowance for his utterances, no matter how crude...

...THE NEOCONSERVA'FIVES, like some of their adversaries on the left, are people with little patience for all those who do not share their ideology...

...They are well funded by the corporations...

...Podhoretz writes as an out-and-out ideologue who has long relinquished any ambition he once had to communicate to others by means of a developed and subtle style...

...The word "philistine" today may have an uncertain application, but if to be small in mind and heart and coarse in argument is to be philistine, then the neoconservatives would seem to deserve to be called the philistines of our day...

...Modern Philistines EPSTEIN'S BEAU IDEAL APPEARS tO be the reactionary English man of letters, like G. K. Chesterton, whose always pointed, lapidary paradoxes, however, have graced his style as little as Chesterton's saving humanity has widened his outlook...

...Connoisseurship can be an honorable and necessary mode in criticism...

...And what of Norman Podhoretz, not these days best known for his literary criticism...

...But so long as these developments are new, as a composer friend of mine once remarked with respect to new music, they are likely to come in for attack...

...Indeed one suspects that it is precisely because Cozzens kept up such a "gunfire against the intellectuals" that Epstein can speak of him as "a serious literary mind, unencumbered by the clichés of the day, at work on serious matters...

...True, Epstein is not quite indiscriminate...

...Or his intolerant, obsessive campaign against Susan Sontag...

...A refuge from disorder and conflict, from anything dark and primitive and lurid, from the voices shrill in argument that serve as his imagination of politics...

...The dauntless Irving Kristol, it is only fair to report, has recently (in his contribution to the fiftieth-anniversary issue of Partisan Review) proclaimed as first among the conclusions he reached upon his conversion to neoconservatism the considered judgment that "Jane Austen is a greater novelist than Proust or Joyce...

...Another is an overemphasis on the unparalleled importance of the cherished art work, and above all on its seriousness...

...His polemical manner was once memorably described by a later critic as "a way of talking . . . with the air and spirit of a man bouncing up from table with his mouth full of bread and cheese and saying that he meant to stand no blasted nonsense...

...I think he has in mind an idea of art as a sacred place, a place of refuge...

...As it turns out, all this fag bashing is not entirely gratuitous...

...S. Eliot, the New Criterion, 1926 It is a characteristic of ideological groups—on the right as well as on the left—that they feel justified in taking "positions" on everything...

...They proclaim not only about politics, but also about morality and culture...

...No doubt...

...And they will also fail to win the respect of the intelligent and sensitive young, the next generation of serious writers, artists and intellectuals, who love great books and great art, the classic works of modernism among them...

...Kenneth S. Lynn, when he's not zealously trying Malcolm Cowley again and again for his past as a fellow-traveler, busies himself discrediting any American literature, starting with Emerson, that has a strongly adversarial character...

...I remain open to the prospects for a Cozzens revival...

...It is in the service of a larger point that Epstein is anxious to make about Forster: He "hated middle-class life...

...The way Epstein goes about exhuming Cozzens is instructive...

...Proust and Gide, who might also be thought to be vulnerable to an attack on sexual grounds, Epstein has so far left alone, and he has maintained silence on Joyce and Kafka—perhaps these figures are just too big for his hatchet...

...His racism and misogyny are still very au courant, and when has a wildly inflated prose style ever been an obstacle to acceptance by the American public...

...If they continue to dogmatize and carry everything to extremes, they will continue to fail in this...

...The propensity to make headlong assaults is quite absent from his considerations of, say, his favorite canvasses of the New York School...

...Perhaps this is because there is no widespread agreement on what might constitute a desirable civilized norm or mean from which philistinism would represent the defect...

...In a judicious review-essay on The Revenge of the Philistines published in the Village Voice, Morris Dickstein has suggested that despite his political excesses Hilton Kramer has a fundamentally apolitical mind...

...For some years he seems to have dedicated himself to the search for "positive" authors, like the now little-known James Gould Cozzens, conformable to his own confessedly middle-brow tastes...

...They have all made their peace with American capitalism and the "American way of life," including its crass acquisitiveness and unthinking patriotism and even its intolerant religiosity...

...Joseph Epstein, who has of late enjoyed considerable prominence in this little world, is another example of ill will toward the modernist enterprise...

...Probably he thinks of the enjoyment afforded by this refuge as a just reward for the service he has rendered to modern art in the course of a lifetime spent defending its purity from the revilers and hucksters...

...Serious art is serious...

...Actually, the English writer Epstein bears some faint resemblance to is Charles Kingsley, the nineteenth-century apostle of "manliness...

...Historically, modernist art and literature have tended to resist—at times from highly reactionary premises—stultifying bourgeois routine and the rule of money, representing these as intolerable constraints on individual selves...

...One is an annoyingly proprietary way with masterpieces...

...It really shouldn't be necessary to keep repeating the fact, like some mantra or litany...

...But I can't imagine that by now Podhoretz would much care either...

...Neoconservatives disapprove of many, many contemporary writers...

...As IS TRUMPETED BY THE TITLE OF of his recent book, The Revenge of the Philistines, Kramer claims to be just about the last nonphilistine around...

...In the field of culture the neoconservatives have on occasion posed as beleaguered defenders of the idea of the canon, that is, of an order of works of art and literature traditionally accepted as great...

...Epstein's trouble is that, apart from the making of assaults on established reputations, the attempted resuscitation of exploded ones, and the odd bit of heresy hunting (in Commentary he may be found arraigning writers like Robert Stone and E. L. Doctorow for their degrees of "anti-Americanness"), he has little to say...

...In practice, the neoconservative claim to be "for the canon" doesn't amount to much more than the old reviewer's trick of making flattening comparisons of contemporary writers of whom they disapprove with Tolstoy or some other tremendous name...

...Only complacency and narrowness of conviction, the unlovely qualities which even people sympathetic to their ideas remark in the neoconservatives, link them to Arnold's philistines...

...In his article Dickstein points out how oddly assorted Kramer's insistence on the serious is with the whole side of modernist expression which is comic and irreverent...

...In the five years since he first began to publish his magazine, however, he has seemed desirous enough of a conspicuous place among those I have been calling the new philistines...

...This is key...

...All great comedy is serious...

...Given that both Adams and Lawrence are recognized by literary historians to have had some part in defining—and defying— modernity, does this suggest a certain selectivity in Kramer's notions of what constitutes the modernist canon...

...Not only does Epstein accept the justice of Macdonald's principal charge, that Cozzens was hopelessly anti-intellectual, but I think at bottom he rather likes this in Cozzens...

...The usual neoconservative tone of unrelieved scorn, and even more the idea they entertain of themselves as a sort of saving remnant, surrounded by a howling mass of the culturally damned and abandoned, must arise from a growing sense that they have so far failed in their attempts to make much of an impact upon what in a better time one could have called the educated public...

...All the agony the abstract expressionists were willing to suffer for their art was not, after all, undergone for the sake of receiving the expert notice of The New Criterion...

...On the other, a tiny, embittered sect, with no real tradition to uphold, with no hope of real power beyond the crumbs of influence tossed to them by our cynical right-wing administration or the chance to play the jester in America's boardrooms...

...It explains the extraordinary animus, the hatred that is to be found, not in Forster's art, which is too 242 English to hate the bourgeoisie with the hatred of a Flaubert or a Rimbaud, but in the outraged breast of the author of this essay...

...Most of them seem far more inclined to attack than to uphold canonical works of modernism, and modernism in general...

...As Denis Donoghue has argued with sardonic cogency in a recent piece for the New York Times, "The Promiscuous Cool of Postmodernism," the refusal to conceive of the self as existing in any active or significant opposition to the world's malignancies, part of a larger refusal to cede to the idea of the self any of its former urgency, has resulted in an art which is conservative in its essential or final tendency, bereft of any impulse to challenge the late-capitalist society that gives it its freedom...

...One might expect the neoconservatives to find much to relish in postmodernist attitudes...

...In a 1982 essay on Leavis, Podhoretz argues oddly but revealingly that Leavis's dogmatism, which most people would agree was his major failing, was "on the contrary . . . one of his most valuable qualities and the essential ground of his greatness as a critic...

...His magazine does cover new developments in the New York 243 art world...

...Here they have been greatly aided by segments of the academic left...

...But to think of art as a reward, as so much precious treasure, diminishes one's readiness to make the discriminations that need to be made, to discern what is humanly objectionable along with what remains of worth in the legacy of modernism, or any art...

...But if they are, in some sense, among "the haves" in our increasingly polarized society, what is it that they do have, really...

...At least in his polemical pieces Lynn is clearly some kind of professional crank—they so often amount to little more than the ferreting out of what he regards as shameful little secrets behind everyone's accomplishment...

...When he was young Podhoretz won a fellowship to Cambridge, where he studied under the great English critic E R. Leavis...

...Towards these writers they love to adopt the sniffy, "This will never do" approach of Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review— the Jeffrey who is notorious in literary history for having said this of the poems of William Wordsworth...

...He has chosen to exercise his plentiful supply of rancor and contempt only on authors who if they have established reputations are still conventionally understood to be lesser figures, like Virginia Woolf or E. M. Forster, and who are also, according to Epstein's generous way of thinking, vulnerable on the grounds of their sexuality...

...Hilton Kramer's insistence on the need to mount a defense of modernism makes him, as I have indicated, something of a rarity among neoconservatives...

...As it is used today, the term "philistine" has lost some of its opprobrious definiteness...

...To call a man a "philistine" in this state of affairs is to call him a name...

...Partly this is because they have a "born again" mentality— most are ex-leftists...

...By contrast, Joseph Epstein takes enormous pride in sounding like somebody's idea—his?—of how clubby, familiar essayists of the literary past are supposed to sound...

...In the course of his Commentary essay on E. M. Forster it becomes apparent that Epstein believes the most interesting or significant fact about a homosexual artist is necessarily that artist's homosexuality (long a tiresome article of faith among some enthusiasts of gay liberation...

...Call Podhoretz one and it may well awaken memories in him of the time when his career as critic and editor brought him into contact with intellectual men and women who defined themselves in large measure through their sustained opposition to philistinism, whether this was to be found in debasing forms of massified popular entertainment or in the propaganda of the Stalinist cultural-bureaucratic apparatus...

...Edward Banfield's 1984 book The Democratic Muse places modern art under suspicion for its latent or actual "nihilism" and sighs after the days of honest craftsmanship...

...And he might also have pointed out that connoisseurship, in correcting vulgar errors of taste, lapses on occasion into errors of its own, in some ways no less vulgar...

...It is perhaps worth remembering that it was in part her quiet scorn for spiritual vulgarity in all its guises that made Austen a great novelist...

...Even a polite letter of protest from Gertrude Himmelfarb, herself a neoconservative luminary, failed to elicit the apology and retraction due Stone from Kramer and Cantor...

...He has called Forster a "homosexual utopian," neatly uniting two neocon anathemas...

...One could wish that Sontag's radicalism, at certain crucial junctures in our recent history, had been maintained with the intelligence she brings to literary matters, but to understand her writings as tantamount to the evil designs of the Republic's enemies seems unduly alarmist...

...Otherwise the contrast could not be more complete...

...Positive," that is, by comparison with so suspect a character as Hemingway, or other modern portraitists of American despair (Dreiser, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald...

...But Kramer, who has rejected much in his past, notably his own and everyone else's left-liberalism, has retained a love of the culture of high modernism which is both fiercely protective and rather routinely dismissive of later artistic effort...

...Podhoretz has himself clearly lived so long in the unremitting glare of the polemical play of ideas that all his dazzled eyes can see anymore is polemics, even in how Tom Brangwen married a Polish lady, or in the girlhood of Anna Brangwen, or in Ursula Brangwen's first love...

...In the June 1985 issue of The New Criterion Norman Cantor called Lawrence Stone—the distinguished social historian of Princeton University—a Marxist, and repeated and defended his charge, with Kramer's editorial support, despite the evidence to the contrary supplied by Stone's shocked colleagues...

...Kramer contemplating a Rothko is writing in a particular mode, that of the connoisseur...

...This is especially so when the connoisseur dares to attempt what Lionel Trilling once said was one of the hardest things to do in this world, to put yourself into "an antagonistic critical relationship to what claims to be new...

...Epstein was at one time to be found in these pages attacking the neoconservatives as "intellectuals in retreat," a retreat which he has since joined, contributing regularly to Commentary and editing the now solidly neoconservative American Scholar...

...And Leon Wieseltier has complained about the "talismanic" use of the terms "serious" and "seriousness" among the neoconservatives...

...The more unthinking followers of Derrida, of deconstructionism, of various forms of debased and sectarian Marxism and feminism, regard the idea of the canon as an oppression and seek its overthrow in the name of various critical absolutisms...

...Lynn accuses Emerson of being a hypocrite for supporting himself on the lecture circuit, Whitman for covering up his true sexual nature and for being an "intellectual's poet," whatever that means, and Hemingway for living by a "sham" code of honesty...

...And to turn art into a refuge has the effect of removing it from its sources in life, of canceling its existence as argument, which all great art also is, and sometimes is primarily...

...It was originally published in Hilton Kramer's the New Criterion, as was Podhoretz's essay belaboring Henry Adams for his anti-Americanism...

...The neoconservative polemicist needs no more excuse than this misguided vehemence for treating 1986 as if it were 1968...

...On the one hand, a great historic class, with tradition and a sense of mission and great expectations...

...After all, only Cozzens's anti-Semitism has shown signs of going out of fashion in American life...

...He appears to mean by them something quite other than what most people would understand the phrase to mean, or imply...

...Call Epstein a philistine and he may not much care—perhaps he thinks of himself as a "fighting" philistine, or something of the sort...

...But Kramer's view of modernism as "an essential component of bourgeois culture" won't get us very far...

...It is no longer possible to think of Forster as a writer who happens to be a homosexual," Epstein announces...

...He has also lately taken to the low tactic of red-baiting, long a favorite pastime of both old and new philistines...

...The "militancy that came out as rancor" and "indiscriminate contempt" that Alfred Kazin observes in the sorrowful, angry account of this period in his book On Native Grounds are not absent from either the tone or the practice of neoconservative criticism...

...The New Criterion, for example, is supported by grants from the wealthy right-wingers of the Olin Foundation...

...241 Podhoretz's dismissal of Lawrence occurs in an essay on Leavis included in his most recent collection, The Bloody Crossroads...

...I am not convinced that they have what they perhaps most want, genuine influence beyond the handful of intellectuals who can spare the time to pay often hostile attention to them and their magazines...

...In his youth an enthusiastic social reformer, Kingsley eventually became very reactionary and wrote essays attacking Shelley and Keats for "effeminacy...

...They have done so partly for political reasons— they conceive capitalism to be identical with democracy, and they further conceive the embrace of capitalism to be required by the logic of their 244 anticommunism—and partly for the many excellent and obvious, if less theoretical, reasons for making a happy conciliation with the American status quo...

...Reporting that the novelist's "social life was almost entirely homosexual," and squeamishly observing that his letters to an Arab lover, Mohammed el Adl, are "gushing," Epstein concludes direly that Forster "must be considered a writer for whom homosexuality was the central, the dominant fact in his life...

...But the words, "the seriousness of art" do seem to have rather a prayerful meaning for Kramer...

...But Trilling would have had little respect for Kramer's style of automatic antagonism to the new, as little patience indeed as he had for the "irritable mental gestures" passing for thought among American conservatives...