No Refuge in Byzantium

...In this age of opposition—of antiwar, anti-Establishment, counterculture??everyone comes to think himself at odds with something, as Elliott's essay titles suggest "Against Pornography," " 'Not Me, My Stones,' " "Never Nothing " Chiefly, he is against the scientific attitude of the Enlightenment, because it leads to relativism in politics and lack of form and perspective in writing He believes scientism,' in its final, decadent phase of modernism, is leading its followers to nihilism, the most dread development of all And in his rejection of nihilism Elliott is willing to take up unfashionable opposition to much of today's advanced thinking and avant-garde writing Indeed, refusing to succumb to the lure of sex without love, m his view a product of nihilism, he somewhat startlingly declares "I would rather kill someone with my bare hands ". Elliott sees modernism as a temporary deviation from the mainstream of Western culture, in literature, he convincingly argues, it does not even represent the dominant tradition m its own time Against the modernism of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, and Beckett he sets the traditional virtues of Balzac, Dickens (though he uses him elsewhere as an example of bad writing), Hardy, Frost, and Lawrence (m his stones) Elliott himself battles the modernist deviation with values and reason, good taste and restraint Yet after spending his energy in painstaking dismissals of de Sade, Proust, Joyce, Genet, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Paul Goodman, Norman O Brown, and Marshall McLuhan, he is left with little to offer except modest praise for what one essay title calls, "Two Good Novels...

...Elliott is well aware of how style suffers when one becomes the perennial opposer "What goads me to say such obvious things'" he asks during his attack on revolutionism, and in the middle of his argument against pornography, he observes that his ideas "obviously are not very interesting" Still, the reader who joins the author in a pieference for being right to being trendy will find m these essays numerous examples of good sense, as well as much charm, honesty and wit "The message too is part of the message, " Elliott reminds McLuhan He readily admits that an anecdote about himself concerns "an experience out of the ordinary but by no means unique," and that "though I wish I could love Justice more than I hate injustices, in fact I don't " He laments the Metropolitan Museum's decision to retire the statue of the Etruscan warrior, even if it was proved a fake, he misses it...

...His mistaken notion of aristocracy aside, Elliott's opposition to the follies of the counterculture is creditable, and has brought him to a muscular, nonmystical version of Yeats' and T S Eliot's worship of tradition In arriving at this position, Elliott has had to submit himself to a single ideology, the same kind of surrender he so reasonably resists throughout most of his essays Just as the self-styled revolutionary intellectual Susan Sontag can support Left totalitarian regimes while admitting how unhappy she would be to live in one, Elliott says that he "would have hated to be prisoned m the rigidities of Byzantinism " Nevertheless, "I prefer that stone system which could be used against itself to the mud nonsystem which I feel to be the threat of Modern progress toward homogenization ". Elliott might be dismissed as merely another conservative filled with nostalgia for a past that never existed Experiencing the cultural crisis from the perspective of age, he is so much more affected by it than the young that, in a caricature of being over 30, he announces his retreat into the golden age of Byzantium But issue by issue and essay by essay, Elliott's own caricature does not describe him, he is not a hierarchist in spirit He suffers the agonies of a modern man as surely as the modernist and nihilist fanatics he abhors, even to admitting that he "yearn[s] to be an anarchist...

...No Refuge in Byzantium Conversions: Literature and the Modernist Deviation By George P Elliott Button 238 pp $7 95 Reviewed by Peter Shaw Associate Professor of English, State University of New Yoik at Stony Biook George P Elliott's first collection of essays, dating from the late '50s and early '60s, was subtitled, "Personal Essays on Books Beliefs, American Places and Growing Up in a Strange Country " For the present volume, comprising his essays since 1964 however, he has selected a title and subtitle suitable to this more tendentious period, which??though often as not the object of his critique??has infected him as surely as it has everyone else To a large degree, the interest Conversions lies in its illustration of how powerful an effect the last few years have had even on opponent...

...In all this, Elliott wryly terms himself "a proper liberal " But if he has remained one in his opinions, he has become something else in his manner The stance of opposition seems to bring out the ironic conservative in a man of letters (some such recognition may have led Nathan Glazer, while he has not become an ironist, to label himself a "mild conservative" though he has changed none of his views) In Elliott's case the infection takes the form of sophisticated versions of the Middle Western prejudices he grew up with He dislikes New York City, for instance, identifying it as the center of the modernist "cult" He prefers the values of Frost, who "liked to write about goofy country folk who hardly knew what century they were in "Unfortunately, these mild tics are not Elliott's only symptoms In one of his last essays he reaches the conclusion that Socialist and egalitarian societies have not and will not produce "supreme art" "Aristocracy,"' on the other hand, "was a fine dream and out of it came many if not most of the marvels of art" (Somewhat illogically, Elliott includes in this collection "In Search of the Dangs," his exploration of the artistic origins of his best-known story, "Among the Dangs " He does not complain in this essay of having been prevented from achieving excellence by egalitarian society ) The dream of the artist, however, was never about aristocracy but about art And it has been dreamt under both egalitarian-ism and totalitarian Socialism—by Henry James before he left America, and by Isaac Babel and Alek-sandr Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union, among others...

...of the cultural revolution My own theory is that the times have in fact made then greatest impact not on those who typify them but on those who have resisted them not so much on the young, the avant-garde and the radical as on cultural conservatives like Elliott, over 30, derriere-garde and liberal...