Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World by Jonathan Kwitny; Congdon & Weed, New York. During the formative years of the American republic, Alexander Hamilton proposed that a national debt would be beneficial since it would tie the wealthy, the lenders, to the fledgling government, the debtor. Hamilton doubtless would regard a trillion-dollar national debt as too much of...
Putting Down Uncle Pat
The Persistent Prejudice: Anti-Catholicism in the U.S. by Michael Schwartz; Our Sunday Visitor Press, Huntington, IN. Catholicism is so pervasive in America that it is taken for granted as somehow normal. Schwartz traces hostility to Catholicism from its Reformation roots in England, where it was identified with “foreigners” and political conspiracy. Transplanted to the New World, Anti-Catholicism played an important...
Required Reading
Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 by Philip Larkin; Farrar Strauss Giroux, New York. Philip Larkin is a rare thing among literary journalists—his own man. When he edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century Verse, he filled it with his own eccentric choices, many of them rhymed and often by uncelebrated poets. His own verse, as recent as it is, owes...
Out of the Closet, Into the Street
For years the editors of Christianity and Crisis have done their best to make friends with the international left, even to the point of adjusting or ignoring inconvenient doctrines. Despite these efforts, The Nation recently took aim at all (not just conservative) religionists and fired a broadside entitled “Political Opium.” C&C’s soul-searching response: What’s the point? On many issues and...
Scandalizing Uncle Ez
The Roots of Treason: Ezra Pound and the Secret of St. Elizabeths by W. Fuller Torrey, McGraw-Hill; New York. Without doubt, Ezra Pound was a remarkable poet. His best verse is beautifully cadenced, delicately chiseled. Herbert Read described him as “an alchemist who transmuted the debased counters of our language into pure poetic metal.” Deferentially, T. S. Eliot called him il miglior fabbro, the better craftsman....
Neutered Conservatism
Reading the September comment, “The Conservative Humanitarian, “brought to mind the old quip about “the bland leading the bland.” A pastiche of unexceptional platitudes, felicitous quotes, and pious laments, Professor Steensma’s essay depicts a “conservatism” that will offend no one—and help just as many. This is lap-dog conservatism: pet it and it wags its tail. Steensma tells us society must...
Beyond the Norm and Back
Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert; G.P. Putman’s Sons, New York. While waiting for the cinematic spectacle of Dune, we decided that a bit of exploratory work was in order, so we attended to Frank Herbert’s world –– nay, universes –– of Dune. That was no small feat, as it is a trek into Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune,...
De-Filed
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 the Daily Princetonian. He went...
Wrangling with Words
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 Derrida notes, Plato, in Phaedrus,...
The Radical Virus
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 on the barricades and to...
Yeats: A Second Coming
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 its form and content. The...
Reality by the Tail
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 the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas...
Screen
Seeing Red Red Dawn; Directed by John Milius; Written by John Milius and Kevin Reynolds; MGM-UA Entertainment. by C. P. Dragash There is a common daydream among men who grew up in the years between the Berlin blockade and the Cuban missile crisis: the Russians have invaded the American heartland, and a dedicated band of teenage boys...
The American Proscenium
Politics and Prayer One of the high points of this fall’s campaign season was the vigorous debate over the place of religion in America’s public life. In retrospect, it may some day be regarded as the most meaningful public discussion of the question in this century. The exchange began early in the campaign when President Reagan asserted in a...
Comment
The recipients of the 1984 Ingersoll Prizes are Anthony Powell and Russell Kirk The T. S. Eliot prize goes to Mr. Powell and the Richard Weaver prize goes to Dr. Kirk. Anthony Powell The serious novel has undergone a radical transformation in the 20th century. The old narrative forms that had given pleasure to a large reading...
Confluences
From Dewey to Huey To a superficial observer, philosophers seem like people who inconsequentially spin their idle theories in their ivory towers while the real world blithely goes its own way. The truth is otherwise. Aristotelian thought refurbished and re shaped by medieval Thomists, for centuries governed life in Western Europe far more pervasively than did any of the...
Perceptibles
Howard Thurman: For the Inward Journey; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. During his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, Jesse Jackson was widely praised for using the language of black evangelism. Wiser observers recognized that Jackson had actually degraded his inherited religious vocabulary by cutting it loose from its spiritual roots and putting it into the service of the...
Waste of Money
Media MIA’s Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War;Edited by Harrison E. Salisbury; Harper & Row; New York. James Dunkerley: The Long War, Dictatorship and Revou1tion in El Salvador;Junction; London. It has been a decade since America withdrew its troops from Vietnam. Unfortunately, scores of servicemen remain officially unaccounted for, their fate shrouded in the jungle mists of...
Notables
Pure Drivel The feminist movement has fallen on hard times. Many of the intellectual leaders of the movement are abandoning the battlefield and withdrawing to the snug fastnesses of fantasy and self-gratification. Some dream of once and future Amazonian kingdoms ruled by women. Others plan to engineer their androgynous land of heart’s desire with the nightmare technology of in...
Commendables
A Dangerous Classic Richard M. Weaver: Ideas Have Consequences; University of Chicago; Chicago and London. Richard Weaver was among the rarest of rare birds: an American political philosopher. His intellectual roots reach back through the Nashville Agrarians (Donald Davidson, especially) to Calhoun and ultimately to Thomas and Aristotle. A professed enemy of the Whig liberal tradition, Weaver saw...
In Focus
Journey to Nowhere Lesley Blanch: Pierre Loti: The Legendary Romantic; Helen and Kurt Wolff Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. In the end, nothing is more boring than adventure. Once the newness has worn off, foreign landscapes, forbidden loves, and bizarre rituals prove less stimulating than familiar settings, ordinary people, and well-worn traditions. This is why the greatest writers...
Liberal Culture
… And Now Something Completely Different Husbands, who of late have been invaded by an indomitable feeling of limitless partnership with their wives, have become a routine fixture in the delivery rooms across the country. Some Lamaze instructors regularly speak of “the pregnant couple. “This unnatural exaggeration of equal participation must have resulted from an exalted exercise of illogical...
Journalism
From Russia with Love During the 1920’s and 30’s, restless American progressives — “political pilgrims” in Paul Hollander’s phrase — returned from their obligatory hajj to Moscow lauding the Soviet regime and indicting the hopelessly inferior American order. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the Berlin Wall, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Solzhenitsyn, Afghanistan, and KAL 007, almost no one is heedless enough to...
These Foolish Things
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 an unremitting struggle for existence....
Curious Behavior
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 the paradoxical notion that psychology...
Confluences – From Boring to Bootless
One of the best things about most of America’s past Presidential elections is that they have really decided so little. A remarkably centrist cultural and social consensus has dictated that, despite all of the vehement campaign rhetoric, both major parties have usually agreed on a wide range of fundamental issues. This national consensus has often made for dull elections, as...
Commendables – Of Devotion and Democracy
Richard John Neuhaus: The Naked Piblic Square: Religion and Democracy; William B. Eerdmans; Grand Rapids, MI. The worst thing about the wonderful but secondary and nonsalvific blessings of Christianity is that once those who enjoy the divine bestowals have forgotten their source, these blessings are set up as objects of new and destructive forms of worship. The Scientific Revolution, for...
Commendables – Of Bullets & Ballots
Morris Janowitz: The Reconstruction of Patriotism: Education for Civic Conscoiusness; University of Chicago Press; Chicago. In some ways nothing seems more un-American than military life. The hierarchic authority, the strict discipline, the regimentation of appearance and manner all appear antithetical to the modern American notion of individual rights. However, in Tbe Reconstruction of Patriotism Morris Janowitz reminds us that democracy,...
In Focus – In Focus
Ronald Blythe: Characters and Their Landscapes; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. Central though it is to any sound system of economics, the traditional notion of private property is wholly inadequate in the world of literature. As Henry David Thoreau once observed: I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty...
In Focus – Courting Catastrophe
Scott Donaldson: Fool for Love, F. Scott Fitzgerald; Congdon & Weed; New York. Love, popular culture endlessly reminds us, makes the world go round. But since the cultural sphere now seems to be wobbling erratically in its orbit, a sensible observer might suspect that something is amiss in this rotary force. As citations in the Oxford English Dictionary well illustrate, love...
Liking Ike
Stephen E. Ambrose: Eisenhower, Volume One: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect, 1890-1952; Simon & Schuster; New York. Great athletes, it is said, all are so good that they make their feats look easy. The same was true of Dwight David Eisenhower, first as a career soldier, then as Supreme Allied Commander, and finally as politician and President. Stephen Ambrose...
Missing Pieces
George W. Hunt: John Cheever: The Hobgoblin Comapny of Love; Wm. B. Eerdmans; Grand Rapids, MI. The Rev. George W. Hunt, S J., literary editor of America, has written a valuable study of the fiction of John Cheever, one that will remain a source of lasting value for future critics and scholars to consult. However, I have reservations about Hunt’s study, all having to do...
Comment
Democracy, its failures, weaknesses, and sins not withstanding, is the only political system in which the entire social body is to decide on who should conduct its affairs in its name. By the electoral process the majority’s opinion is consecrated as a source of legitimate political power. Annals record many variations of democratic societies in which the fate of minorities...
Errant Idealism
John Milton Cooper, Jr.: The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt; Harvard University Press; Boston. Lloyd Gardner: A Convenant with Power: America and World Order from Wilson to Reagan; Oxford University Press; New York. There have been many interpretations of Woodrow Wilson done from widely divergent perspectives. Fortunately for Wilson’s reputation, his most prominent biographers–Arthur S. Link,...
The Liberal Smoke Screen
William E, Leuchtenburg: In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan; Cornell University Press; Ithaca, NY. John Kenneth Galbraith: The Anatomy of Power; Houghton Mifflin Company; Boston. When Ronald Reagan assumed the Presidency, he was assailed by liberals for wanting both too much power and too little. Mr. Reagan had made it clear that he intended to restore...
Notables – Of Socialism and Sentimentality
“Socialism,” wrote Dostoevsky in The Possessed, “spreads among us chiefly because of sentimentality.” He was, of course, writing about upper-middle class, 19th-century Russian society, but a reading of Tmubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan (Hill and Wang; New York) by Frederick Siegel suggests that the rise of the American New left during the 1960’s was also made possibleby the spread of...
Screen – Burn Out
Streets of Fire; Directed by Walter Hill; Written by Walter Hill and Larry Gross; Universal. Streets of Fire has what is either a subtitle or a disclaimer: A Rock & Roll Fable. Moreover, as the movie opens, a title on the screen advises the viewer that he’s viewing “Another Time, Another Place … ,” which, of course, provides the director, Walter Hill, with an...
Screen – Firecracker
Moscow on the Hudson; Directed by Paul Mazursky; Written by Paul Mazursky and Leon Capetanos; Columbia Pictures. Is Bloomingdale’s quintessentially American, the paradigm of of this country in the late 20th century. Hollywood leads us to believe that it is so. First there was Madison (named after the avenue) the mermaid in Splash learning how to dress and even speak...
Screen – Groveling to Glory
Roman Polanski: Roman; William Morrow; New York. Roman Polanski on his favorite subject: “My friends and family … came to regard me as a buffoon. Ever eager to amuse and entertain, I assumed the role with good grace. I never minded. Polanski could use the same words to describe his career as film director. Despite his obvious talents, Poalnski has...
Social Placebos & Cures
Martin Carnoy, Derek Shearer, and Russell Rumberger: A New Social Contract: The Economy and Government After Reagan; Harper & Row; New York. Richard Cornuelle: Healing American: What Can Be Done About the Continuing Economic Crisis; G. P. Putnam’s Sons; New York. Each of these books purports to discuss economics, hence the direct reference to “the economy” and “economic crisis” in...
American Proscenium – Non-Sentimental Education
The magnitude of mental confusion in which this society exists–actually, considered normal and permanent by historians endowed with a sense of humor–overwhelms us on occasion. In August, three months before the election, a Gallup poll found that Walter Mondale and his ultra-liberal Democratic Party are believed by the majority of Americans to be better suited “to improve the qualityof public...
The American Proscenium – Peace Mongers
We received a piece of direct mail sent to us from an outfit in San Francisco entitled U.S. Out of Central America. There we could read: We are not from the left or the right, we are not from the same political organization, and we probably have different opinions on many things. As the very name of the organization and...
Perceptibles (Part 1)
Zbigniew Lewicki: The Bang and the Whimper: Apocalypse and Entropy in American Literature; Greenwood Press; Westport, CT. Every instant, each of us moves closer to the End. It may be a result of “the big one,”or it could simply be that our biological software program has run its functions. Every instant there is more disorder. In such a universe of...
Notables – Bathos
In a full page ad in The New York Tinzes Book Review for Sex & Destiny: Tbe Politics of Human Fertility by Germaine Greer (Harper & Row; New York) a certain Fay Weldon’s words from a piece in the London Times are quoted in type that’s 1/2-inch high: “One of the most important books to be written this century.” Now, what...
Perceptibles (Part 3)
Malcolm Bradbury: The Modern American Novel; Oxford University Press; New York. Serviceable handbooks to literature are always handy to have around the house or office; those that are pithy rather than prolix are even superior. Malcolm Bradbury, himself no mean novelist, examines, in a mere 186 pages (excluding back-of-the-book materials), American fiction from the 1890’s on to our day. Works...
Waste of Money – Canonized for Confusion
Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader; Edited by Alix Kates Shulman; Schocken Books; New York. In science fields, creating a false paradigm is a sure way to gain disrepute among posterity. The modern reputations, for instance, of Ptolemy as an astronomer, or of Tycho Brahe as a cosmologist are not high. In politics, however, the authors of spurious theories...
Waste of Money – Liberal Neuroses
John S. Saloma III: Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth; Hill and Wang; New York. Because Goliath laughed when David came against him with a sling shot and five smooth stones, we may safely assume that the giant was neither a leftist nor a liberal. For as Ominous Politics by John S. Saloma III makes clear, liberals and leftists do...
Journalism – Neo-Chastity & Neo-Intelligence
In a curiously schizophrenic article in Ms. entitled “The Uses of Chastity and Other Paths to Sexual Pleasures,” GermaineGreer, long time radical feminist, agonized over how young women are “jeopardizing their health and fertility with potent medications and mischievous gadgetry” in the sterile sexual frenzy she helped initiate a decade ago. Unable to admit that she might have been wrong...
Journalism – Highbrow Prattle
Let us praise famous men for their unique ability to talk foolishness and be admired for what they say. Here is Prof. Arthur Schlesinger, lui même, in the Wall Street Journal: Where Washington seems to regard the East European satellites as faithful creatures of the Kremlin, West Europeans see them as restless, discontented and, from the Soviet viewpoint, quite unreliable. Where the...
Journalism – Minds Warped or Twisted?
The New York Times Sunday Magazine has produced in print a sentence that unmistakably attests to one of two possibilities: either its editors do not know the meaning of conjunctions, a serious grammatical disability, or their liberalism automatically turns their minds into Tibetan prayer wheels. Here is the sample from a piece on General Vessey, our current Chairman of the...