Victor by Default
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
Victor by Default Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics and the 'New York Review of Books' By Philip Nobile Charterhouse. 312 pp., $7.95. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman This ill-organized...
...Because it is well in these delicate literary matters, as the English advise, to declare one's interest, I should mention that I have had one essay published in the NYR and a second rejected but generously paid for...
...Major items included C. Vann Woodward's discussion of Time on the Cross, an important reinterpretation of the economics of American slavery...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman This ill-organized anthology of gossip about American and English intellectual movers and shakers favored or excluded by the editors of the New York Review of Books is a really dreadful book...
...Nobile, whose prose matches the vulgarity of his conception of serious journalism, bravely argues that intellectuals are not invariably nice people...
...Accordingly, I shall devote the remainder of this space to some reflections stimulated by the May 2 issue...
...Robert Craft on, guess who?, Stravinsky...
...V. S. Pritchett's evaluation of a Browning biography...
...Although the New York Times Book Review has gotten livelier and the NYR duller, the gap between the two continues to be substantial...
...Consequently, he promises (or threatens) to review the book in the next installment...
...Finally, what is the alternative...
...All the same, there is a line between editorial leadership and editorial self-indulgence...
...a long assessment of Karl Popper...
...But the book appeared in October and the review eight months later...
...These undeniably challenging theses cried for critical evaluation by a writer equipped to judge the mathematical apparatus...
...It is hard not to wonder whether the members of the NYR club ever think about the folks whose experiences do not include sojourns in Oxbridge or the Ivy League...
...Nonetheless, it would be pleasant to have the NYR's venerable cast of characters more frequently amplified by youngsters of, say, 40 or 50...
...Since what Clark is reviewing happens to be 1,153 pages of these letters in two volumes at $15 each, one may indeed question why the editors commissioned the piece to begin with...
...The May 2 number struck me as representative of the New York Review's current phase...
...Granted...
...Enough of Nobile...
...Sheldon Wolin's severe put-down of Richard Goodwin's The American Condition...
...Worst of all, Fry's "letters lack the wit, the sharpness of impression, and the sudden flashes of insight that delight one in his conversation...
...Several of the pieces run on far too long, as though contributors were being paid by the word...
...Strong editors shape successful journals of opinion...
...Periodicals as austere as the London Times Literary Supplement manage considerably better in printing notices that bear a reasonable chronological relation to publication dates...
...Woodward, at once a distinguished historian of the South, a sensitive stylist and a partisan of the traditional alliance between history and literature, freely admits his inability to fairly evaluate Fogel and Engerman's conclusions because he neither commands nor comprehends their techniques...
...He leaps from this platitude to the conclusion that if only one succeeds, as unfortunately he did, in interviewing Bob, Norman, Jason, Noam, Hannah, Mary, Barbara, and an Irving or two at sufficiently tiresome length, one can then triumphantly explain why Commentary turned left, then right, and the New York Review right, left, right...
...Kenneth Clark on Roger Fry...
...The NYR reviewed at some length one of my books...
...Yet I can't resist adding comments on two other essays...
...As for Barnet's sympathetic review of Paradise Lost, I also liked Emma Rothschild's book, enough in fact to gladly supply a jacket blurb...
...Or, ponder Woodward's account of Fogel and Engerman's labors on the mathematics of slavery...
...What should be made of this assortment...
...But who really cares about the feuds, friendships and personal habits of men and women whose impact, for good or ill, derives from what they write...
...If no club member was available, the editors should have hunted up a fresh face-perhaps a young radical economist, well-trained in the mysteries of econometrics, like Bennett Harrison of MIT or Samuel Bowles lately of Harvard...
...Surely the time has come for the NYR to end its sponsorship of Robert Craft's cottage industry-the wit and wisdom of Igor Stravinsky...
...The New York Review, as an intellectual phenomenon, does start one thinking, especially if by coincidence it arrives simultaneously with Nobile's volume...
...The notice was unfavorable and, therefore, unfair, as any author will agree...
...It must be that the NYR does, after all, run the best intellectual club in town...
...and Richard Bar-net's consideration of Emma Rothschild's study of the auto industry...
...When the blessed end of his argument nears, Wills cheerfully allows that "the judgment of a major work by a great scholar like Malone should not be concentrated on a single error, no matter how important the error might be to current disputes...
...I perceive that I have neglected to answer one question: Why read the New York Review, as I seldom fail to do, if I take my own criticisms seriously...
...I should refrain from going on as tediously as some of the NYR marathons...
...Wills' interminable quibble over "The Strange Case of Jefferson's Subpoena" has, as Wills ultimately concedes, much more to do with Richard Nixon's impeachment than with Malone's Jefferson the President: Second Term 1805-1809...
...The two authors are leading proponents of that new movement in scholarship which, in Woodward's words, has "married the muse of history to the science of mathematics...
...Still, the reviewer's credentials were impeccable and her critique inflicted no lasting injury...
...As a result, though iis distaste for the new methodology trembles on the printed page, he cannot as an honest man say whether the two historical barbarians are right in maintaining on the basis of their statistics and equations that slavery was a viable enterprise, that black family life was seldom disrupted by forcible separation, that slavery gradually diminished in harshness, and that the gap between white and black life expectancies and health was narrow or nonexistent...
...Kenneth Clark's affectionate personal memories of Roger Fry scarcely soften his judgment that Fry had no talent as a painter and failed to achieve distinction as an art historian and critic...
...Pritchett, Annan, Clark, and the rest of the English contingent do turn out neat essays that are often fun to read even when they are about esoteric topics and unimportant people...
...Of the Americans, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, I. F. Stone, Murray Kempton, among others, do arouse excitement and command one's attention, if not agreement...
...a prologue to a review by Garry Wills of Dumas Malone's latest volume in his monumental examination of Thomas Jefferson...
Vol. 57 • June 1974 • No. 12
