There is no conflict, M.E. Bradford insists, “between preserving the language and securing a civil polity,” a credo which, embedded in “What We Can Know For Certain: Frank Owsley and the Recovery of Southern History,” provides the subtext for the work as a whole. Not only does a relationship between language and polity exist, it is an essential for whose absence there is no satisfactory substitute. “[T]he fundamental shortcoming of American conservatives,” Bradford believes, “[is] our indifference to the art of rhetoric, our inability to deal with the ostensibly benevolent simplicities of the adversary, who hopes to win with language what he lost at the polls.” An important caveat follows, however: “Our first priority . . . is intellectual, not topical. The analysis of assumptions in social, political and cultural theory is our primary task, now as before: analysis and then commentary with reference to the world around us. And to perform it we must leave only so much of our schedule for narrowly political considerations.” The Reactionary Imperative may be read as a record of Professor Bradford’s determined attempt over the past two decades at following his own prescription. Though himself a veteran of what Lionel Trilling called “the bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet,” he has never dis played any confusion between those roads, always reading the signs along them correctly and never in doubt as to which road leads where. Yet with his skills as rhetor, he has proved himself capable of traversing each one to the remote and lonely end without risk of fatal molestation.

Like Martin Luther, Bradford knows the Devil when he sees him, and like him too he has a mean arm with an ink pot: much of the pleasure of reading The Reactionary Imperative derives from watching the splashes appear, suddenly and often without warning, on formerly pristine walls. Still, he cautions, his voice is “not just another echo of Eliot. For I am a whig and republican and argue in the at tempt to. recover the tradition of civic humanism as it has gathered on these shores under those American banners.” In fact, T.S. Eliot, in disguise as an English banker, would have blanched at the apparition of Mel Bradford of Dallas, Texas, with his sideways sheriff’s squint beneath the shadowing brim of his Stetson hat.

Bradford’s frank opinion of Abraham Lincoln cost him his appointment to the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, when it caused sore offense to the moral and democratic sensibilities of Paul Simon, Irving Kristol, George Will, and similar keepers of the national conscience. His reply to his critics, delivered in person in 1981, is printed here as “Against Lincoln: A Speech at Gettys burg,” in which he succeeds in setting straight the record. “In the pattern of his utterance and the relation of his words to his life I have found reason to consider Lincoln as primarily a rhetor and to treat his speeches and other writings, in all of the opportunistic variety, not as expressions of a political philosophy, but as exercises in management and manipulation. . . . By his remark that the government should ‘do for a community of people, [that] which they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves,’ Lincoln drew a blank check on the bank of political necessity.” Finally, Lincoln did not preserve the Union as it had been; rather, “he played the central role in transforming it forever into a unitary structure based on a claim to power in its own right, a teleocratic instrument which, in the name of any cause that attracts a following, might easily threaten the liberties of those for whose sake it existed.” So much then for Honest Abe and Father Abraham—and so much, by the way, for Candidate Brad ford, whose talents would have been magnificently wasted in Bennett Land.

In Oliver Cromwell, Bradford recognizes a figure who “is with us still, gathering new Ironsides in every gene ration” and especially in the United States, “where his vision and style have had better fruition than at home.” Despite the fact that there remain scholars to this day who will insist upon the Puritan tradition as the fountain head of American liberties, Bradford—who regards Cromwell the lieutenant general of the New Model Army and Cromwell the Protector as an exhibitor of “the pure gnostic delight in conflict with being itself, the adept’s passion for destroying and making over things given”—maintains that the English and New English inheritance was too teleocratic in its approach both to government and society, too much “dedicated to a proposition” (in Old Abe’s phrase) to be properly representative of the American tradition as a whole. “Managed development (as op posed to ‘benign neglect’) is the idea that helped bring on the American Revolution”; while “Christian faith discouraged in the Fathers the modern tendency to seek salvation in politics, protected the private sphere, and discouraged men from divinizing the state.” This explains, he believes, why the American heritage remained fundamentally conservative until around 1819; “[o]ur subsequent departures from that original heritage [having] been more or less the measure of what is not conservative about American society in our own day.”

In an age in which both religion and art have been superseded by politics as the enveloping action of culture and society, no—honest critic, as Bradford says of Norman Podhoretz, may “deceive himself with the idea that high art exists in a supernal realm, beyond the contaminations of history, available to the disinterested contemplation of the gods.” This means that even in literary matters being a reactionary is “steady work,” so that here, as elsewhere, Bradford is eager to shoulder his share of the burden; understanding that, tedious as the job of combating them may be, attempts at artistic preemption must not be left unresisted. To that end, his labor has produced what is perhaps the finest essay in this book “Brother, Son, and Heir: The Structural Focus of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!“—in which Bradford, along the way toward giving the lie to ideological readers of the novel who have found in Faulkner’s greatest work a simplistic indictment of slavery and of Southern society, has written a masterful explication of the literary art and method of William Faulkner; as well as another literary essay of note, “Artists at Home: Frost and Faulkner,” where he succeeds in defeating the claims of Northeastern critics who have argued that the work of Faulkner, Frost, and other “provincial” writers are to be understood as “really” reaffirmations of the anomie and alienation embodied by the modern cosmopolitan canon.

Lionel Trilling, confesses Bradford in his preface, “stanch out in my mind because some twenty-five years ago I heard him deliver a lecture which, despite his standing among American scholars, convinced me immediately that his vision of the world was too special and small to account for the full spectrum of American life.”

Unlike his late colleague from Columbia University, M.E. Bradford displays great case in operating across that spectrum.

 

[The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary and Political, by M.E. Bradford (La Salle, IL: Sherwood Sugden) 230 pp., $23.50 (hardcover), $10.95 (paper)]