LETTERS
Editors: Many younger writers and reviewers—my contemporaries— have not liked The Last Intellectuals. In my analysis of disappearing public intellectuals, they charge, I avoid the brilliant...
...Taxing him and me and the other critics of Jacoby's book with being "self-promoters" is a good way to respond to our criticisms...
...In my analysis of disappearing public intellectuals, they charge, I avoid the brilliant exceptions that demolish my argument: themselves (or their friends, spouses, or favorite periodical...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, Please do it quickly...
...He prefers to look at "the history of ideas in the sixties...
...But it is not the only possible view, or the only one that commands respect...
...It has been pointed out that the courses in Western Civilization whose status above politics is now proclaimed with such fervor by the right originated as propaganda courses in "War Issues" during World War I—attempts to shore up the unity of the West against Bolsheviks and other aliens...
...He offers some explanations, but Captain Berman himself is lost at sea...
...Although quite unconvinced by their arguments, I shall let them have the last word for the moment, with the hope of returning more fully to this theme in the future...
...Berman blathers about Marxism...
...In no time Berman, now Captain in the New Republic Coast Guard, radios that The Last Intellectuals is taking on water...
...So much for decades of work on the politics of culture, including work that Howe himself has made important contributions to...
...But is it the best way...
...Are postmodernists less public intellectuals than traditional moralists...
...WILLIAM H. PRICHARD Henry Clay Folger Prof...
...Whom is he referring to, aside from himself...
...IRVING HOWE Replies: I wish to thank the several correspondents who troubled to refute me on "canon bashing...
...His description seems to be recycled from a 1971 essay where he attacked the counterculture in identical terms ("Literary Criticism and Literary Radicals," American Scholar [Winter 1971-72...
...Berman's patented and much-feared totalitarian detector starts whirling...
...God save us from more intellectual models like Listen, Yankee...
...This view is certainly worthy of respect—it echoes Trotsky's forceful response to the Proletkult attack on bourgeois culture in the Soviet cultural debates of the twenties...
...What is at issue, finally, is not just a matter of fairness to certain critics but a conflict between different ways of thinking about the democratization of culture...
...If he is seeing things, how can we take Berman's review seriously...
...I am an unreliable cultural guide because I failed to consider the New Republic, "a very influential magazine" for which Berman writes...
...of English Amherst, Mass...
...288 • DISSENT...
...Inconveniently" for my argument, it is "written and edited" largely by younger writers, who are hardly missing but "visibly prolific...
...I suspect Howe is confusing recent poststructuralism with the crude political aesthetics of the sixties...
...The Captain judges my boat unseaworthy and promptly loses his compass...
...On this issue I stand with Walter Kendrick, my colleague at the weekly paper with which I am more accurately identified, the Village Voice...
...Berman cannot accept that some talented hard-working younger writers or several New Republic souls do not constitute an intellectual generation...
...I then threw out the names of various well-known members of the present canon: Marvell's "Horatian Ode," Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," Samuel Johnson, John Henry Newman, Bernard Shaw—I can't remember exactly which examples I brought up...
...rather it is the state of a generation, surely something more than a few individuals...
...q CORRECTION The letter to which Alan Howard replied in the Winter 1989 issue was written by Ronald Radosh...
...Yet I don't want to close on a sour note...
...It is in the name of these neglected forms of culture that the established canon is being challenged...
...He begins by indicting me for "hyperbology...
...What became clear, though, was that not just the majority but virtually this whole class of intelligent Amherst College students had absolutely no sense of or acquaintance with the unopened-up canon...
...I have been engaged in it ever since, and unless I'm mistaken neither I nor the students are bored...
...moreover I "actually praise" C. Wright Mills's "apology" for the "Cuban dictatorship," meaning I mention Mills's 1960 Listen, Yankee...
...Then Berman pilots around poststructuralism and deconstructionism...
...To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...This witticism hardly falls flat: there is no place to fall from...
...The New Republic came up in my essay because that magazine is thought by many people to have won, for better and for worse, an influence surpassing that of Telos, which to be sure has merits of its own...
...I have never said that he favors dictatorship...
...Nor is this really germane...
...Not quite...
...Was it Spock...
...To a man and woman they thought it was a fine idea...
...This from the senior editor of the VLS...
...he discovers an admiration for what he calls "the Fidelista writers," well-known and unnameable no-goodniks...
...There is another view that reminds us that while the classes Howe mentions were being deprived of access to high culture, they did not sit back and lament their deprivation but created their own forms of culture...
...Berman has seen through me!—I'm for dictatorship...
...Kendrickism assumes numerous guises and advances various lists, but in all its forms, it surrenders the real issue...
...A few pages later Berman declaims about intellectual rubble and pretentious dust...
...Paul Berman, who eschews sects, is an orthodox Kendrickist...
...I don't know what got into me...
...We will print more letters on this in the next issue...
...And it became clear to me (although not, I must admit, right there on the spot) in these days of film and gender studies, literary theory and pluralistic approaches to "the text" —that teaching the canon might be a rather surprising, even adventurous thing to do...
...And if deconstructionism beclouds young minds, can this really be fathomed without considering material circumstances, the university setting where it flourishes...
...I am grateful that Berman begins again...
...the very existence of the VLS (a public intellectual journal) proves that the situation isn't quite so bleak as Jacoby maintains...
...Therefore it's natural to wonder what he means by radicalism...
...Howe disputes my statement, as quoted by James Atlas, that there has never been a consensus on what the great books are...
...If you look at the way appeals to nationalism, racial pride, and Anglo-Saxon superiority figure in the early justifications for establishing "English" as a department, you see an example of how ideological and literary considerations can be hard to separate...
...and since nobody has flogged more lustily than Captain Jacoby, I applaud him...
...But I do think that a criticism of the younger intellectuals would profit from a reliable description of such intellectual life as exists...
...In place of a review Berman offers a grievance decked with the intrepid forays against totalitarianism and Fidelista writers we have come to expect from him...
...If the debate is to get beyond the name-calling stage, this challenge has to be taken seriously...
...I'm too determinist, so he "reverses" my question, which now reads, "Why didn't the older generation produce heirs...
...Didn't Mills mislead radical democrats about the libertarian possibilities to be found in repressive dictatorships...
...I would have expected Howe to agree with all this, because he was among those who championed the SPRING • 1989 • 287 Letters modernist literary taste that radically altered the academic canon after World War II and prepared the ground for the current challenges...
...It's not difficult to get a consensus if you start by excluding 98 percent of the population from your institution...
...I have a grudging respect for some New Republic contributors, but the list is short...
...That the same went for blacks, other immigrants, and women wasn't even worth pointing out...
...GERALD GRAFF Boston, Mass...
...Very short...
...No matter our differences, Berman exemplifies that endangered species, the non-academic intellectual, to which my book pays homage...
...I don't even take up "anything so relevant as dictatorship versus liberty," a famous issue I avoid because—oh no...
...Unfortunately I get things backward...
...now he decides that my remarks about the university are "modest," my thoughts about bohemia and free-lance intellectuals "not foolish...
...without damning it and the Cuban revolution...
...His attempt at comic relief is not much better...
...If Jacoby doesn't see this, how can we take his denunciations seriously...
...Canon I Editors: A tardy, brief response to the articles in your Fall 1988 issue about what we should be teaching in the university...
...Some of Berman's points about postmodern academic thought are worthwhile, but they barely address the issues...
...He invokes Mills on Cuba as a model for the younger intellectuals...
...the point is not the brilliance of some companions, which I willingly concede...
...But listen, Jacoby, we could do worse than having more conversation-starters like your Last Intellectuals — exasperating as it is...
...The question is at least worth seriously debating...
...He's right: There was a relative consensus on the canon in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colleges...
...The influence of academies on younger intellectuals and the consequent setback to the younger generation are issues that several of us have been flogging for years and will continue to flog...
...the boat is listing badly...
...This description poorly represents the complex, internally conflicted body of scholarship, analysis, and argument that underlies current critiques of the canon...
...I survey the changing shape of cities and suburbias, the conditions for independent writers, and the fattened universities of the sixties to explain how a younger intellectual generation shifted to campuses...
...On further consideration, I asked "the pertinent question" and offer answers that seem astonishingly true...
...Jacoby needles me on the issue of dictatorship versus liberty...
...They are the suns that light up the darkening American landscape...
...Berman ends his discourse on postmodemist academicism portentously: "Finally the whole enterprise caved in, and above the rubble hovered the dust of pretension that always hovers when earnest Americans try to imitate the French or the Germans...
...The prospects are poor...
...There is a connection between the aesthetics of the eighties and the sixties, but the one can't be reduced to the other...
...Canon II Editors: In their articles on what should be taught (Fall 1988) Irving Howe and David Bromwich seem to add to the misinformation that has been circulating about the current challenges to the literary canon in the academic humanities...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...Pondering why I or my friends cannot identify many 286 • DISSENT Letters younger public intellectuals, Berman allows himself a very tired joke: It is because we live in California...
...The book is "brave," perhaps "historic...
...Again, it seems strange that a critic who has done much to explode academic compartmentalizations and sensitize us to the relations between politics and literature now warns us not to venture outside our fields...
...PAUL BERMAN Replies: In my essay "Intellectuals After the Revolution" I made the error of fundamentally agreeing with Russell Jacoby's basic contention...
...Or I would applaud, if I weren't running for cover...
...I have a few responses to Howe's essay...
...End of review and issues...
...The first review by Walter Kendrick in the Village Voice Literary Supplement inaugurated a veritable storm of self-promoters...
...But Howe now says that questions of race, gender, and class are "better dealt with in courses in history and sociology," not literature...
...RUSSELL JACOBY Venice, Calif...
...This might be called blaming the parents, which is not exactly free of materialism or determinism...
...Berman throws in Finkielkraut, and Bloom's fears about relativism gutting judgments, and old-style intellectuals...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...Professor Kendrick informed the world "there's plenty of intellectual activity going on in America now...
...A few years ago, having read an article by Barbara Hermstein Smith in which the virtues of "opening up the canon" were rehearsed, I decided to ask a class of mine at Amherst College, mainly composed of English majors, what they thought about this idea...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...The derision Howe now directs at critics who would teach writers like Aphra Behn and Susan Warner is oddly reminiscent of the kind that was directed at the first attempts to introduce Joyce and Faulkner into the literature syllabus...
...Yet what does Berman's exercise in "the history of ideas" have to do with missing public intellectuals...
...Is this the same reviewer who began decrying hyperbole...
...Howe says that "a deeply objectionable aspect of class societies is that they deprive large segments of the population of proper access" to the high culture of the past...
...No bombast, he announced, no intellectual crises...
...The point of education for him, then, should be to restore this stolen heritage to the classes that have been deprived of it...
...Imagine his letter if I hadn't...
...It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that such ideological considerations have affected past and present judgments of what books are worth reading and being taught, though not necessarily in any simple way...
...Howe characterizes his targets as a group that wants "to disintegrate or at least damage the very idea of a classic and to replace it with a hodge-podge of currently fashionable items...
...But it can't be debated if we act as if merely to raise it is an affront to the values of civilization...
...All those compliments that you quote from my article are sincere...
...This is too crude, too determinist...
...The question of dictatorship and liberty appeared only fleetingly in my essay, and might seem to merit even less attention than that, except that Jacoby underlines radicalism as a prime duty of the intellectuals...
...As late as the 1930s it was still common doctrine in English departments that Jews were incapable of genuine appreciation of English literature...
...Berman is allergic not simply to Marxism but to materialism...
...Editors: Many younger writers and reviewers—my contemporaries— have not liked The Last Intellectuals...
...These metaphysics addled the brains of young intellectuals, who came to love obscurity and glitter...
...I deeply, deeply repent my animadversion on tens of millions of Californians...
...Sony, I don't see it...
...If you "factor in" the admiration for Gore Vidal and "the empty spot where the New Republic should be," my book "sinks with a fearsome glub...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
