On Literary Politics

...New York literary politics, for the moment, is dominated by the little Triple Alliance: The New York Review of Books, Commentary and Partisan Review...

...it is the book review that begins the work of subverting all cultural establishments and outlines the foundations for the new establishmentarianism...

...In the United States, moreover, the bias against self-defined authority is compounded by a profound prejudice against New York on the part of the rest of the nation...

...Beginning as "an assertion of personality," a successful career as a critic will—on its own momentum, as it were—lead to a discussion of the ideas and possibilities which animates a culture...

...I mean no disrespect toward that kind of literary journalism which aims at performing the useful service of telling us what the book is about, who the author is, why he wrote the kind of book he did, in what respect the book may be particularly noteworthy, and what kinds of readers will find it worth their while to go out and buy it...

...I think the problem can be summed up in a question: When does an establishment become a clique...

...There is, for instance...

...We are instinctively suspicious of, and antagonistic to, establishments, seeing in them some kind of snobbish, elite conspiracy against the democratic principle and the democratic way of life...

...In this respect, the connection it has struck up with Esquire is particularly revealing...

...In my opinion, a good case can be made for the thesis that, whereas America could use an establishment, now it only possesses a clique which passes for an establishment...

...And more and more, New York chit-chat among intellectuals is a tedious—if seemingly flippant—commentary on Esquire's reports...

...The problem is not the establishment we have, but the establishment we haven't...

...In older civilizations, they have fewer inhibitions about recognizing the facts of literary life...

...it is the book review that clears the ground for eventual occupation by the novi homini...

...Miss Adler infers from these propositions that "the New Reviewers regard criticism less as a sympathetic response to literature than as an opportunity for an assertion of personality...

...She set out to score a hit on certain existing cultural strongpoints and to assert her own literary identity...

...Culturally, it is eclectic, unpredictable, desperately chic: No definable movement in the arts can claim its sponsorship...

...Renata Adler who, in a widely-discussed article in the New Yorker, has launched an assault against what she calls "the New Reviewers...

...she takes it to be selfevidently so...

...X's moral passion is adequate to the complexities of the modern situation...

...And the answer would have to run something like this: An establishment becomes a clique when it ceases to be responsible for a set of cultural values and becomes a self-conscious group whose main raison d'etre is the personal enjoyment of each other's company and of the perquisites of social recognition...

...Miss Adler, for example, takes particular offense at Podhoretz's essay on "Book Reviewing and Everyone I Know...

...I mean the quality of pseudo-snobbish vulgarity...

...Though I may have read things by Miss Adler before, I have no recollection of them...

...But is it...

...Scornful of "popular culture," the group is nevertheless on its way to becoming an adjunct of that culture...

...She doesn't even feel the need to categorize this inference as damning...

...Morally, it is on the side of "freedom" —though with no perceptible enthusiasm, and even a lurking distrust, for the inherent possibilities of any conceivable transvaluation of values...

...That this is harmful to the nation's cultural life is (or ought to be) self-evident...

...But if it is true, then Spanish culture—sickly as it is—may well have suffered a mortal blow...

...as does Senator Goldwater...

...Shawn of the New Yorker—is well aware of the fact that there is an intimate and important connection between book-reviewing and young men on the make...

...But provincial and populist stone-throwing is not an answer, either...

...She is appalled to discover, in Norman Podhoretz's collection of essays (Doings and Undoings), such statements as: "Among our most talented literary intellectuals (including just about everyone I know) reviewing is regarded as a job for young men on the make," and "A book for them is, quite simply, an occasion to do some writing of their own...

...If she is to consolidate her initial success, she will have to continue a while in the same vein: doing what she feels has to be done to remodel and repopulate our cultural landscape—and ruthlessly undoing whoever gets in her way...

...In short, a book review is not and ought not to be only a kind of Consumers' Union report...

...It is her review—written faithfully according to Podhoretz's prescription—that has made her, for me, a "literary personality...

...William Jennings Bryan appealed to it...

...Miss Adler did not sit down to compose a "sympathetic response" to the books she was discussing...

...but they are not nearly so profound or important...

...But book-reviewing has never been only this...

...She points out that the phrase, "everyone I know" occurs 14 times in the essay—while being seemingly unaware of the deliberate, embarrassed irony that is behind this repetition...

...The thesis that "New York is not America" evokes a popular—sometimes a hysterical—response that has no exact counterpart elsewhere...

...THINKING ALOUD On Literary Politics By Irving Kristol I have recently come across a news item to the effect that the Spanish Government has now made it a crime, punishable by two years in prison, for a reviewer to write about a book he has not read...

...as a common reader, I am continually in its debt...

...E.g., "One is doubtful that Mr...

...Every editor—including Mr...

...Though each of these publications has its individual merits, it is not easy to say—I find it impossible to say—what this combination "stands for...

...book-reviewing has never even been most significantly this...

...For Podhoretz himself, in good democratic style, finds it hard to admit candidly (what Miss Adler accuses him of and what is clearly a fact) that he is a member of an establishment that—for the moment at least— is at the center of New York's literary politics...

...as do a great many professors who lose no opportunity to sneer at "New York intellectuals...

...With no ideological center of gravity, the people who make up this group inevitably are attracted to the shadowland of cafe-society and the mass media...

...It is the book review that unsettles and intimidates the defenders of prevailing taste and doctrine...

...And it is a telling point...

...Politically, it gives expression to an inchoate and infinitely ambiguous "radicalism" that appears to have no connection with the political life of the nation as a whole—or, indeed, with any of the radical traditions one can enumerate...

...The net result is that, for the first time in one's memory, New York intellectual life is suffused with a quality that is truly and radically new...

...The point is that there are perfectly good grounds for rational dissatisfaction with the present state of literary politics in America—which, to all extent and purposes, means literary politics in New York...

...There are, of course, similar provincial antagonisms against Paris or London...

...Esquire has become in effect the official trade publication—comparable to Variety in the field of show business—of New York intellectual life, keeping tabs on who's "in" and who's "out," what's "in" and what's "out...

...Or young women on the make, for that matter...

...Having said all this, however, I must also go on to say that Miss Adler had a point—one which she never quite succeeds in making, but which is implicit in her argument...

...In this she has, quite intelligently, followed the paths of other recognized reviewers, including many of her best-known fellowcontributors to the New Yorker (Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Kenneth Tynan), and all of those she is busily attacking (Norman Podhoretz, Irving Howe, George Steiner, Lionel Abel, Alfred Chester, etc...

...I am more than a little dubious about the veracity of this report...

...Not everyone will agree with me, of course...

...I happen to think that Norman Podhoretz's statements are not only true but platitudinous...

...it is the book review which signals to the young that new styles of thought and imagination are not only possible but are now legitimate...

...As a publisher, I am aware that such literary journalism plays an essential role in the cultural market place...

...In France, they quite simply say tout le monde or "nous...

...Yet when Diana Trilling uses "we" as the generalized author of her opinions, she is immediately attacked (in George P. Elliott's new book of essays, for example) for aristocratic presumption and parochial arrogance...

...Americans are very bad at understanding establishments of any kind, and have therefore always had a faulty conception of the sociology of literary life...

...The British freely use the impersonal "one" as the rhetorical equivalent of "everyone I know...

...Already, the tone of New York intellectual life is that of an ancient regime, in which outward frivolity commingles with inward gloom...

...This thesis itself derives from the democratic populist tradition—a tradition that is so powerful because it is at the service of both Left-wing and Right-wing dissatisfaction with "the powers that be" (or, as they say nowadays, "the power structure...

...It is usually in a book review that literary movements and literary fashions are conceived...

...This will not last, of course...