Category: Web

Last summer, I read simultaneously Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, his autobiography up to the time of writing Werther, his collected travel diaries, and his life by Emil Ludwig. Of the three biographical works, my unhesitating judgment is that Ludwig’s book is the disappointment: it compares to Goethe’s own narrative of his youth as the description...

The following is the text of M. Ionesco’s address at the 198S Ingersoll Prizes Awards Banquet: I am extremely proud and honored to have been awarded the very prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize, which has been given to such persons as Jorge Luis Borges and the novelist Anthony Powell, artists who exemplify the prime values...

The amazing thing about the nuclear debate and the Catholic bishops’ participation in it is that the accumulated wisdom and experience of mankind, as well as the Church’s pronouncements on peace and war, are so completely ignored. This is quite a natural phenomenon on the part of so many lay debaters: it belongs also to...

“Give them hope, so they may fear.” —The Apocrypha There is no more Atlantis. “Where,” I was asked in prison, by a Yugoslav State Security agent, “is this Atlantis you would like to live in, Selic?” I didn’t tell him that I wanted to live in America, it being alive and well, and still above...

“The earth outside is covered with snow and I am covered with sweat. My younger brother calls me a killer and my daddy calls me a vet.” So the Vietnam veteran appears in a popular song recorded a few years back by Charlie Daniels (written by Dan Daley). The Vietnam War is over, but the...

It has long been self-evident that Henry James was thoroughly apolitical in any practical sense of the term. He did not involve himself in public affairs as such and hardly took more than passing notice of the Civil War, even though his two younger brothers, Wilkinson and Robertson James, served with distinguished records in the...

“Lasciate ogni speranza” —Inferno, by Dante Alighieri The history of gold mining in Russia—a record of the greatest abuses of human rights ever perpetrated—has seldom been told. The use of slave labor in state-owned Russian mines goes back to the 19th century, when Lithuanian, Polish, and Ukrainian patriots who rebelled against Russian occupation were put...

I was reading at the Periodicals Room of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library the other day. The magazine I happened to pick up was called Soviet Literature, subtitled “A Monthly Journal of the Writers’ Union of the U.S.S.R. published in English, French, German, Spanish, Hungarian, Polish, Czech, and Slovak.” The issue, for March 1985, “marked the...

Conservationists tend to be shy of using any arguments but the merely “economic,” partly in the odd belief that these are more “rational” than other and overtly “sentimental” ones, and partly because “economic” reasoning seems likely to appeal to a larger audience.Economic arguments are not bad ones: it is indeed incompatible with any sort of...

In recent years we have seen a growing phenomenon dubbed, not very surprisingly, the animal liberation movement. The main theoretician of animal rights is Professor Tom Regan, professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University. Other supporters from the theoretical side are Professor Peter Singer, of La Trobe University in Australia, although Singer speaks only...

The term counterrevolution was always used by Lenin and his associates in a pejorative sense. In the Marxist view, since “progress” is irreversible, any gains made by the left are to be considered permanent, while any gains made by the right are to be considered temporary setbacks. The contemporary treatment of revolution and counterrevolu tion in...

In any discussion of the Old Federalism—at least among that minority whose substantive knowledge of American principles and ideals precedes the beginning of the Kennedy dynasty—the name of John C. Calhoun and his idea of the concurrent majority is likely to come up. Calhoun’s reputation as a political thinker has had its ups and downs. Widely praised in his...

“Without the spiritual rebirth no political changes will make people free. But the spiritual rebirth, a Christian rebirth, is the ascent of a free man, and not of Russian  nationalism, the cult of homeland, fatherland, and one’s country.”         -Mihajlo Mihajlov in “Some Timely Thoughts” (written in 1974 in response to Letter to the Soviet...

I visited Western Europe recently to learn more about the critical attitudes of intellectuals and other opinion ­makers (primarily academics and journalists) toward the United States. I was especially interested in how such European critiques resembled those produced by American intellectuals. I also wanted lo learn something about the connections between animosity toward the U.S....

Popular journalists have begun writing off the sociobiology revolution. “Can Sociobiology Be Saved? and quote the learned opinions of Stephen J. Gould and Ashley Montagu (would they lie?). They indulge in vaguely worded smears: Konrad Lorenz was a nazi, E. O.  Wilson  is  a  Southerner, and sociobiology is a code word for racism among members...

In 1980 Czeslaw Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the time he had been living in Berke­ley, California, for just over 20 years. But it is safe to say that until Milosz became a Nobel laureate,very few readers of serious literature were on even the most casual terms with his poetry, or with...

“The head rules the belly through the chest,” C. S. Lewis writes. Reason cannot rule appetites directly; it needs what the Greeks called thy­mos, the soul’s “spirited element,” to rule the appetites so that reason can go free. Spiritedness cares for oneself and for those like oneself. Refined, it ani­mates patriotism, courage, honor; at its...

Thrice-rendered Enderby slenderly lives again. In the 1974  novel, The Clockwork Testament, Anthony Burgess dispatched to eternity his gross, grotty, gastric poet; New York City slaughtered the luckless English bard with a heart attack. But here he is again in Enderby’s Dark Lady. “I think we have to look at it this way,” Burgess says. “All fictional events...

W. B. Yeats: The Poems; Edited by Richard J. Finneran; Macmillan; New York     When Yeats died in 1939 his poetry had not been completely collected and there was some doubt over the right text. His widow was involved in the editing of his work and she had strong and sometimes wrong ideas about...

Denis Donoghue: The Arts Without Mystery; Little, Brown; Boston.   Jacques Derrida, maître of the critical school of deconstruction, writes of his Of Grammatology, “writing, the letter, the sensible inscription, has always been considered by Western tradition as the body and matter external to the spirit, to breath, to speech, and to the logos.” As...

Tom Schachtman: Decade of Shocks: Dallas to Watergate, 1963-1974; Poseidon Press; New York.   Allen J. Matusow: The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960’s; Harper & Row; New York.   Pity the lot of the American radical of recent vintage. Never does the opportunity arise for him to spill his blood...

Barbara W. Tuchman: The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam; Alfred A.K Knopf, New York.   William L. Shirer: 20th Century Journey: A Memoir of a Life and the Times. Volume II: The Nightmare Years, 1930-1940; Little, Brown & Company, Boston.   The world of nations, like the world of nature, is characterized by...

Jerome Bruner: In Search of Mind: Essays in Autobiography; Harper & Row; New York   The so-called cognitive revolution occurred during the career of Jerome Bruner, and his history is essentially its history. At the time Bruner entered the field of psychology it was almost totally dominated by various offshoots of Behaviorism. Behaviorism rests on...

Penn Kimball: The File; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego.   On the surface, Penn Kimball at 68 might seem to have enjoyed a successful, satisfying life. Born to well-to-do parents of liberal Republican persuasion, he grew up happily in New Britain, Connecticut. After graduating from Lawrenceville, he matriculated at Princeton, where he was editor of...

Luisa Valenzuela: The Lizard’s Tail; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York.   The Lizard’s Tail reflects two important tendencies in Latin American fiction. One is a sense of obligation to make social and political commentary. Few Latin American writers escape the pressures to be active participants in the solution of economic, political, and cultural problems. As...

A. J. P. Taylor: A Personal History; Atheneum; New York.   With the exception of Edward Gibbon, there have been few great historians who have written their autobiographies. The reason for this should be fairly clear. While some historians, such as Macaulay or Mommsen, led interesting lives, and some, such as Lewis Namier, are interesting...

Alice Walker: In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. by Brian Murray Alice Walker, not yet 40, has been publishing poetry and prose since the late 1960’s. But only in recent years has her work been accorded the sort of fervid critical praise that the American literary establishment prefers to bestow...

Bernard Malamud: The Stories of Bernard Malamud; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Penitent; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. Morality is religion’s province. Contemporary secularists do not see this, averting their eyes from the religious sources of their own moralities. Such aversion makes a kind of sense; deprived of any...

Joyce Carol Oates: The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews; E. P. Dutton; New York. Kenneth S. Lynn: The Air-Line to Seattle: Studies in Literary and Historical Writing about America; The University of Chicago Press; Chicago. Beyond any reasonable doubt, Matthew Arnold knew far more than did Samuel Johnson. Curiously, however, he was far less confident...

Lobbying for Freedom in the 1980’s: A Grass-Roots Guide to Protecting Your Rights; Edited by Kenneth P. Norwick; Wideview/Perigee; New York. Susan J. Tolchin and Martin Tolchin: Dismantling America: The Rush to Deregulate; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. What is freedom? To the ancient Greeks, freedom existed in the margins: it was that vacuum of authority between...

George W. S. Trow: The City in the Mist; Little Brown; Boston. What’s in a name? Fair Juliet’s answer notwithstanding, we insist that there is something to it. Take the case of a relatively young author who places two initials between his given title and his surname. There’s something to that in the closing years...

Richard Mayne: Postwar: The Dawn of Today’s Europe; Schocken Books; New York. It is common today to describe Western Europe as facing a crisis. Its physical problems are manifold: economic stagnation, high unemployment, political dissatisfaction, demo­ graphic decline, military flaccidity. It would appear, however, that these overt problems are surface manifestations of a deeper malaise-the...

Frustration Joyce Carol Oates: Mysteries of Winterthurn; E. P. Dutton; New York. When it’s literary gee-whiz time, people like Isaac Asimov — the man who produces books, stories, and essays the way that McDonald’s cranks out Big Macs, fries, and Cokes — are trotted out. In the face of Asimov, many literate persons, most of...

Caroline Bird: The Good Years: Yours Life in the Twenty-First Century; E. P. Dutton; New York. Richard Louv: America II; Jeremy Tarcher/Houghton Mifflin; Los Angeles. There are some serious people in the United States today attempting to ensure that the next generation of Americans has a decent place to live. Unfortunately, none of their work...

Keith Bradley and Alan Gelb: Worker Capitalism: The New Industrial Relations; Tue MIT Press; Cambridge, MA. Leonard M. Greene: Free Enterprise Without Poverty; W.W. Norton; New York. Wynne Godley and Francis Cripps: Macroeconomics; Oxford University Press; New York. As in almost any field, economics is dominated by a very few seminal works. Still there are...

Paul Johnson: Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Eighties; Harper & Row; New York. Impresario Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballet Russe rose to give his address. The year was 1905. “We are witnesses to the greatest moment of summing-up in history,” he declared: in the name of a new and unknown culture,...

Martin Seymour-Smith: Robert Graves: His Life and Work; Holt, Rinehart & Winston; New York. Douglas Archibald: Yeats; Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY. Although the era of “High Modernism” is well in the past, the pantheon of modern literature still seems to many a palace of confusions. The paradoxes and contradictions, the conflicting impulses that informed...

Joyce Carol Oates: The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews; E. P. Dutton; New York. Kenneth S. Lynn: The Air-Line to Seattle: Studies in Literary and Historical Writing about America; The University of Chicago Press; Chicago. Beyond any reasonable doubt, Matthew Arnold knew far more than did Samuel Johnson. Curiously, however, he was far less confident...

Françoise Sagan The Painted Lady; E.P. Dutton; New York. St. Cyril of Jerusalem is reported to have told his catechumens that “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.”...

The Literary Humor of the Urban Northeast, 1830-1890; Edited by David E. E. Sloane; Louisiana State University Press; Baton Rouge. Chicago’s Public Wits; Edited by Kenny J. Williams and Bernard Duffey; Louisiana State University Press; Baton Rouge. It is a commonplace that humor arises from the amused recognition of the dis­parity between the ideal and...