Truthfulness and rationality are essential priorities in the discussion of public issues. Only by renouncing the strait jacket of ideology can we begin to see the world and man.
The Victory of Unvanquished Losers
The Passionate War: The Narrative History of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 by Peter Wyden; Simon and Schuster; New York. History has not been kind to the radical left, not because modern revolutions have invariably failed, but because they have frequently succeeded. So deplorable has been the record of revolutions in power that those who continue to proclaim the necessity...
The Remnants of Realism
Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. Louis Auchincloss: Exit Lady Masham; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. In the opinion of Tom Wolfe, “the introduction of realism into literature…was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology. It was not just another device. It raised the state of the art to a new magnitude.” If Wolfe is correct, then what...
The Reel World & the Real One
Robots: Facts Behind the Fiction by Michael Chester; Macmillan; New York. An associate, a PR representative for a leading manufacturer of industrial robots, did what fathers are want to do when their children come home from school with projects, in this case for a science fair: he gave his daughter some assistance. Given his vocational interest, he suggested that they...
Past & Presence
Rumble Fish; Directed by Francis Ford Coppola; Written by Francis Ford Coppola and S. E. Hinton; Based on a novel by S. E. Hinton; Universal. An individual is the sum of his memories and his dreams. That, of course, is no great revelation; the Greeks were scripting plays about it thousands of years ago. Nowadays, however, the past is often...
Maturing (& Remembering) in Print
Sam Holman by James T. Farrell Prometheus Books; Buffalo, NY. Achieving self-definition through self-division is a truly impossible mission, but the cordless ego of contemporary liberalism continues to try to repopulate the world with its own image. That the result would be a universe of images reflecting a totalitarian state does not disturb the liberal gestapo. Without history, they cannot...
Demo Liberal Chutzpa
Once again, President Reagan has spoken out about the collapse of the American educational system (and correctly so) and stated facts that will hit anyone who has an average IQ, and one that is uncontaminated by liberal orthodoxy, with a force of a brick: Classrooms across the country are not temples of learning, teaching the lessons of goodwill, civility and...
Initiate Abroad
A Little Tour in France by Henry James; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York Mark Twain was so disgusted by the superficial and sentimental nonsense in most American travel books that he said he wanted to eat “a tourist for breakfast.” But instead of devouring American tourists he delightfully caricatured their bungling stupidity, their romantic misconceptions, and their boorish provincialism...
Rara Avis in Terris
The Prevalence of Humbug and Other Essays by Max Black; Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY. One of the moderately interesting—and ultimately most annoying—things that one can do with a home computer is to put it into a GOTO loop. That is, a program is a series of steps. To make a loop, the final instruction is to go back to...
Onwords and Backwords
Worstword Ho by Samuel Beckett; Grove Press; New York. The Twofold Vibration by Raymond Federman; Indiana University Press; Boomington. Beckett continues. While there has been a sense of ending from the beginning, the pauses, as he nears 80, seem . . . felt, not studied. Genuine. The words emerge, repeat, proliferate, press onward, enjamb, stall, renew, yet . . ....
Of Communists and Convicts
House of Slammers by Nathan Heard; Macmillan; New York. “It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good.” So wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in “The Soul and Barbed Wire” about his experience in the Soviet Gulag. Like most inmates in the communist penal system, he was guilty of no...
Prolitkrit
Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton; University of Minnesota Press; Minneapolis. To put Mr. Eagleton in the proper light, one might borrow a quotation from his own Walter Benjamin; or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (1981): Let us review some of the names of the major Marxist aestheticians of the century to date: Lukacs, Goldmann, Sartre, Caudwell, Adorno, Marcuse, Della...
Scuttling Ship
Gods of Riverworld by Philip Jose Farmer; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York. In 1971 Philip Jose Farmer published To Your Scattered Bodies Go. With it, Farmer launched, figuratively speaking, what has become known to science fiction devotees as the “Riverworld series.” There were four novels to landfall. Back in that general period of time, Kurt Vonnegut had become a...
The Washington Post’s Weekend Guide
In the Weekend At The Movies section, the Post, that invincible bastion of D.C. journalism, reports on a movie which is: a decadent, daring film, filthy and full of hard core porn and hard core punks…. The WP’s movie “critic’s” final evaluation: this film is a shocker. Besides sodomy, there’s oral sex and necrophilia. It’s a film that means to...
Spiteful Babble
The Grenada episode has shown, with crystal-clear unambiguity, that the press in America is not only held in contempt and deeply distrusted, but hated-pure and simply. Why is it so? Perhaps the ubiquitous blab—broadcast and printed—that is churned out with a monotonous regularity evokes a loathing of the producers, the liberal media. A case in point is the copy of...
Who’s Number One?
In a recent editorial attacking the Reagan Administration’s Central American policies, The Nation demonstrated once again how pro-Soviet attitudes so warp the mind that even such simple mental tasks as counting and adding and subtracting are no longer possible. Opined The Nation’s casuists: If the State Department was seriously interested in reducing the daily body count, it could begin in...
Cock Fight
Last full, a holier-than-thou exercise in breast-beating was sponsored by The Nation and The New Republic; it was designated “Were the Rosenbergs Framed?” As expected, the one-up manship lasted long after the programs were littering the floor of Town Hall. Andrew Kopkind, associate editor of The Nation, wrote up the event for his employer, which provoked a great deal of...
The Crisis of Controlled Thinking
A General’s Life by Omar N. Bradley and Clay Blair; Simon and Schuster; New York. General of the Army Omar N. Bradley’s military career spanned a half-century of dramatic change for the United States. When he entered West Point in 1911, the United States had few military interests beyond its borders; when he retired in 1953, American military commitments stretched around...
Video Clones
Television created a subgenre of music a few years ago that can be designated as “artificial, nonexistent, techno-pop,” which must be differentiated from the succeeding, garden variety of techno-pop aired today by the human/machine combinations known as the Eurythmics, Flock of Seagulls, etc. The original includes the music of The Monkees, that group of well-scrubbed faces that was put together...
Old & Old as New
Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans, LA; Volume II. Preservation Hall Jazz Band of New Orleans, LA; Volume III Linda Ronstadt and the Nelson Riddle Orchestra; What’s New; Electra/Asylum Records. On the back cover of Volume Ill, the entire Preservation Hall crew is grouped around a table on which is mounted a feast of classic Creole New Orleans food....
Images, images, ima…
The Work of Atget: The Ancient Re gime; The Museum of Modern Art; New York. Bill Harris: New York at Night; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Robert Freson: The Taste of France; Stewart, Tabori & Chang; New York. Ansel Adams: Examples; New York Graphic Society/Little, Brown; Boston. William Manchester: One Brief Shining Moment: Remembering Kennedy; Little, Brown; Boston. Photography...
The Ring and the Brush
Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze by Norman Bryson; Yale University Press; New Haven, CT. Western painting—at least that which was produced before the advent, or onslaught, of photography in the 19th century—shares a characteristic with a trinket that could once be found in cereal boxes and gum ball machines: the flicker ring. The surface of this ring...
Factualism
Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film by Erik Barnouw; Oxford University Press; New York. Cinema in our society serves, for the most part, to entertain. This is not to deny the existence of training films—educational tools, which are served by a sizable industry—but to take note of the fact that the cinema is almost wholly a popular commercial enterprise....
Constructive Criticism — Sometimes
Sidney Hook: Marxism and Beyond; Rowman and Littlefield; Totowa, NJ. Sidney Hook’s latest book is largely a collection of previously printed articles and reviews; but it is nevertheless another interesting contribution to American intellectual life and a worthy companion to such works as Political Power and Personal Freedom. Hook remains an astute observer and an unrepentant democratic socialist — with...
Horrors & Hope
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, which will be created by...
Liberal Worship and Conservative Judgment
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 about turning his knowledge into...
Myths, Visions, Passions
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 the art and shaped the...
Solipsism, Genius & Madness
Edward Albee: An Interview and Essay; Edited by Julian N. Wasserman; University of St. Thomas; Houston, TX. Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Don Quixote; Edited by Fredson Bowers; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. We often hear that language is under siege in America today, that it is being assailed on all sides by people who, either unwilling or unable to use...
Small is Significant
Walter Walker: A Dime to Dance By; Harper & Row; New York. Geoffrey Norman: Midnight Water; E.P. Dutton; New York. Existence — which is all there is, to answer Peggy Lee — consists of little things: there was only one Big Bang, and should there be another, none will be around to record it. Toe charge of the writer (or...
Before the Borscht Belt — and Beyond
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 the real. Inherent in this...
Traveling in Spiraling Circles
Harrison E. Salisbury: A Journey for Our Times: A Memoir; Harper & Row; New York. A Journey for Our Times is a frustrating, almost schizophrenic book. One approaches it with anticipation if only because the author is an experienced journalist with a unique fund of knowledge about the Soviet Union. But ultimately, Salisbury manages to defeat and dispirit the most...
Transcendence of Mere Opinion
Thomas Mann: Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man; Frederick Ungar; New York. The true artist living in a time dominated by politics finds himself traversing a path that is both arduous and dangerous. He begins with a search that is committed to life rather than to just the intellect; that search is replete with ambiguity and doubt and is hostile to...
Letter from Canada: Legislating Oppression
The appointment of a Parliamentary Task Force on Participation of Visible Minorities in Canadian Society was the latest in a series of attempts to persuade Canadians that their country must be come a miniature United Nations in order to substantiate a political theory. The theorist is Pierre Elliott Trudeau; his theory is that “nations belong to a transitional period in...
Comment
Webster’s defines culture as a variation of the verb cultivate. It is time, therefore, for us to look at what, as a nation, we are cultivating. In our government schools, which we persist in calling “public,” students are taught that virtually any loose community can be called a society, and that the world is driven by “progress.” But Émile Durkheim,...
Beyond the Public View
Tadeusz Konwicki: A Minor Apocalypse; Translated by Richard Lourie; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; New York. Contemporary Poland, for many reasons, disquiets the West. To those who nurture visions of a painless and peaceful accord between the Soviets and the United States against the supposed “common enemy” of nuclear weapons, the squashing of Solidarity to placate Moscow forms an unwelcome reminder...
Fiction for a Flat Earth
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.” In addition to such spiritual...
Eviscerating the Heartland
Gore Vidal; Duluth; Random House; New York. Gore Vidal has spawned another repulsive novel. Having experimented with historical travesty (Burr, Julian, 1876) and fag chic (Myra Breckinridge), Vidal has turned his fictional abilities to the world of soap operas and drugstore gothic novels. He has not risen above his material. Even the publishers do not seem to know what to...
American Proscenium
The Ingersoll Prizes On December 8, 1983, in Chicago’s Ritz-Carlton hotel, The Ingersoll Prizes were awarded for the first time. Mr. Jorge Luis Borges was the recipient of the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing, and Mr. James Burnham received the Richard M. Weaver Award for Scholarly Letters. The Reverend Richard John Neuhaus, theologian and director of The Rockford Institute/New...
Andropov Mystery
It was not a letter to the editor, for which a tolerant journal needs not be responsible, but an article, something featured as information, so that its laudable attitude is more than a mere expression of opinion. There we read: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called communists….Is it not to the everlasting shame of the Ameri can...
Art
Léger Peter de Francia: Fernand Léger; Yale University Press; New Haven, CT. During the fabulous, legendary, supreme outburst of artistic creativity that occurred during the first three decades of this century, concentrated in Europe between Vitebsk and Pyrenees and called “avant-garde” (or the School of Paris, modern abstraction, fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, constructionism, suprematism, surrealism, etc., etc., etc.), Paris became...
Music
Recycling Jim Morrison is dead and buried and thriving in Paris. That is a fact, not the name of a new bit for the dinner theater circuit. Morrison — the rock singer who had his loins between his ears and pretentions of being a filmmaker (Pauline Kael admired him) and a poet (a sort of Gordon Lightfoot in leather pants)...
Commendables
Original Thought & Triplicate Forms George Roche: America by the Throat: the Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy; Devin-Adair; Old Grennwich, CT. Edwin J. Feulner, Jr: Conservatives Stalk the House: the Republican Study Committee 1970-1982; Green Hill; Ottawa, IL. Conservatives come in at least two types: those who wish to conserve principles and those who wish to conserve things. Deeply committed to...
In Focus
Simpering for the Soviets Derek Lambert: The Red Dove; Stein and Day; New York. Anthony Olcott: May Day in Magadan; Bantam Books; New York. At a recent professional conference I had an informal discussion about world affairs with an editor of a metalworking trade journal. A constant concern in that industry, as in automotive, is foreign competition, especially Japanese. The...
Perceptibles
Hugh Bayless: The Best Towns in America; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. A semanticist would have a field day with the title affixed to Mr. Bayless’s efforts. The word “best” is one of the most subjective in the English language. And “town”: What, exactly, are the definitive differences between town, village, municipality, city? (Hint: It isn’t size; Chicago, the “Second City” is...
Waste of Money
An Empty Shell Game A.P. Foulkes: Literature and Propaganda; Methuen; New York. The cover of Literature and Propaganda, the proverbial warning notwithstanding is very telling about the book’s contents and about how perverse the image of America is in the offices of Methuen. Indeed, the cover makes an impression with such a magnitude of force that it is difficult to...
Fleeting truths
A gentleman with impeccable leftist credentials, Mr. Todd Gitlin: Journalism is; memory hole. In the perpetual present of the press, nothing is older than old news. We agree. What’s even worse is that both American liberals and conservatives have a pernicious tendency to confuse history (life’s teacher) with old news (most often valueless trivia).
Liberal Culture
CBS versus Law & People A little doubt likely invades anyone who listened to a recent CBS Evening News story about the U.S. government’s war on drugs. The network’s “legal” correspondent, one Fred Graham, informed his audience (people’s right to know) that the government was singling out so-called celebrities for investigation. At a certain point in his narrative, however, the...
Screen – Once Upon a Time in the West Coast
A cultural paradigm should be a positive one, an object that, through its very being, encourages emulation. If that model is a man or woman, a hero or a heroine, then that person should, at all visible times and in all apparent ways (i.e., let’s acknowledge privacy as a personal need, People and National Enquirer to the contrary), be the type...
Commendables – A Man Apart
Jorge Luis Borges once observed that ideally–given an omniscient observer–”an indefinite, and almost infinite” number of biographies could be written about a man, including “the genealogical biography, the economic biography, the psychiatric biography, the surgical biography, the topographical biography.” These and other types ( e.g., the sexual biography) depicting insignificant personalities roll from the presses at an in exorable rate, multiplying...
Commendables – Subtlety vs. Six-Guns
In 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner created a landmark in American historiography by articulating his thesis that the frontier experience had produced “the forces dominating American character.” Especially during the last 20 years, many historians have challenged the validity of Turner’s views, arguing that European culture remained the primary influence upon American government and society. Nonetheless, movies,...