First Things RSS Feed - Roger Kimball

The Neuhaus I Knew

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 -0400

Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square
by randy boyagoda
image, 459 pages, $30

The End of Art

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Nearly everyone cares—or says he cares—about art. After all, art ennobles the spirit, elevates the mind, and educates the emotions. Or does it? In fact, tremendous irony attends our culture’s continuing investment—emotional, financial, and social—in art. We behave as if art were something special, something important, something spiritually refreshing; but, when we canvas the roster of distinguished artists today, what we generally find is far from spiritual, and certainly far from refreshing.

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Barometer Falling

Thu, 01 Apr 1999 00:00:00 -0500

Some books are like barometers: interesting chiefly for what they tell us about the prevailing climate. Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism is a case in point. Readers who care about literary modernism will find little to detain them in this book. The names of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and H.D.-the authors with whom Rainey is primarily concerned-recur frequently. But there is not a single sentence that really engages their work. Instead, Rainey, proposing a “counternarrative” to “trace the institutional profile of modernism,” tells us how much it cost to buy a copy of Ulysses when it was published in 1922, how much money Harriet Shaw Weaver set aside to help Ezra Pound, and why the Dial won out over other magazines in the competition to publish The Waste Land in America. “Patronage,” he tells us at one point, “was the foundation of the institutional structure of the avant-garde.”

Rainey is really not interested in novels or poems. He is quite frank about this. “Some readers, especially those with literary critical training, will find far too little of the detailed examination of actual works that is sometimes held to be the only important or worthwhile form of critical activity.” Rainey does not make this error. I can certify that his book is 100 percent free of examination-detailed or otherwise-of any “actual works.” On the contrary, he is interested exclusively in what he calls “cultural production.” This by now hoary bit of academic jargon marks Institutions of Modernism as the offspring of “cultural studies,” that popular pseudo-discipline that resulted from crossing Marxist animus with deconstructionist verbiage.

Rainey is quite good at it-an A or A-for consistency, I’d say, if only a C for originality. For example, referring to the “institutional field of cultural production” that “rapidly and radically transformed . . . the rigid dichotomy between ‘high’ and ‘low’“ (for academics like Professor Rainey, dichotomies are always “rigid” and high art always needs scare quotes), he tells us that “Modernism’s ambiguous achievement . . . was to probe the interstices dividing that variegated field and to forge within it a strange and unprecedented space for cultural production, one that did indeed entail a certain retreat from the domain of public culture, but one that also continued to overlap and intersect with the public realm in a variety of contradictory ways.”

Perhaps you thought that the classic works of high modernism-works like Ulysses or The Waste Land -were important because they had something pertinent to say about the spiritual conundrums of modern life. Forget about it. Rainey comes bearing the new, academically orthodox, message that “modernism . . . is a strategy whereby the work of art invites and solicits its commodification, but does so in such a way that it becomes a commodity of a special sort, one that is temporarily exempted from the exigencies of immediate consumption prevalent within the larger cultural economy and instead is integrated into a different economic circuit of patronage, collecting, speculation, and investment.” These fragments he has shored against his ruin.

Cultural Studies of the sort exhibited by Institutions of Modernism is all the rage in American and English universities (Rainey teaches at the University of York in England). This is primarily because it has proven to be a powerful aid in the effort to avoid dealing with works of art or literature as products of the human spirit: aesthetic objects that move us with their intricately wrought beauty, humor, and insight.

Once readers start paying attention to the works themselves-to the way they are made, to what they have to tell us-they will inevitably stop taking critics who set themselves up in competition with the works very seriously. I mean critics who, like Rainey, love to begin sentences with formulations like the following: “If it is true, as the logic of poststructuralism asserts, that every erasure will leave its trace in such a way that the very thing one is trying to exclude is disclosed as the hidden center of a contaminated order, then . . . ” Then what? Then an absence is as good as a presence, a denial is really a veiled affirmation, night is day, black is white, and the critic can say whatever he wants about any subject under the sun because what matters to him are not works of art but the progress of his stern-sounding word games. Let him emit words like “commodification,” “contamination,” and “subversion” at regular intervals and he is content.

Not that these games are necessarily easy to play. They require a certain kind of rhetorical skill and, to play it as Rainey does, considerable scholarship. Rainey has expended a lot of effort to write this book. He knows how much the different versions of the first edition of Ulysses cost in francs, pounds, and dollars, how much Eliot received from all sources for publishing The Waste Land and how that compares with the per capita income of the United States at the time, and how much Ezra Pound’s first book had increased in value by 1924. Of course, Rainey bothered to amass such interesting facts not simply to provide a socioeconomic context for modernism but to weave his “counternarrative” in which modernism is both a “powerful critique of commodity capitalism” and a movement that “mortgaged that critique in the future.”

Rainey’s one real historical contribution, showing how Ezra Pound’s infatuation with fascism began in the early 1920s (and not, as has been thought, in the years following the market crash of 1929), doesn’t contribute much to this counternarrative. But by the time he gets around to it in his fourth chapter, one hardly notices. Besides, discussion of Pound’s Fascist sympathies allows Rainey to tell us that, through Pound, “the modernist culture of patronage was assimilated to the emerging culture of fascism.” The thought that Pound’s embrace of Mussolini might count as a betrayal of modernism never seems to occur to Rainey-but that is perhaps just as well, since it would be bound to disturb the pleasing certainty of his adversarial “counternarrative.”

For anyone interested in what chic academic criticism looks and feels like today, Institutions of Modernism is as good a place to start as any. The spiritual aridity, the rebarbative prose, the programmatic subordination of literature to an ideological agenda-all make the book an exemplar of the discipline, which is to say, they make it an exemplar of a discipline in crisis, a discipline that has lost its way. The fact that the book was published in Yale’s Henry McBride Series on Modernism and Modernity adds to the shame of it.

Henry McBride (1867-1962) was an important and immensely congenial art critic whose columns in the New York Sun and the Dial did a great deal to introduce the American audience to modernist art. As a note on the series at the beginning of Rainey’s book observes, Henry McBride “discussed difficult artistic issues in a relaxed, engaging, yet informed style, one that is still a model of clarity, grace, and critical responsiveness.”

In other words, his criticism was the polar opposite of the grim, politicized irrelevancies that Rainey provides. The fact that Rainey is General Editor of the Henry McBride Series adds insult to injury. McBride was famous for his easygoing humor, so perhaps he is smiling at the irony of it all instead of rolling over in his grave. No doubt Rainey regards the publication of his book in this series as a gesture subversive of an outmoded aestheticism. For the rest of us, however-and above all for the patrons of this series commemorating the achievement of a great critic- Institutions of Modernism must be regarded as an impertinence that is as offensive as it is calculated to be.

Roger Kimball is Managing Editor of New Criterion.

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Tracing the Tokens of God’s Presence

Tue, 01 Oct 1996 00:00:00 -0400

The Quest for God: A Personal Pilgrimage
By Paul Johnson
HarperCollins, 216 pages, $24

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The Intellectuals and the Masses

Wed, 01 Jun 1994 00:00:00 -0400

Anyone seeking a vivid illustration of the proposition that an expensive education is no barrier to stupidity will wish to consult John Carey’s new book, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 . Not that the book lacks learning, exactly. Its author, the Merton Professor of English at Oxford and frequent commentator on the BBC, displays all the expected academic curlicues. On the very first page, for example, he speculates that our contemporary use of the term “masses” is religious in origin, deriving from Augustine’s vision of a massa damnata , a condemned mass of humanity, which in turn derives from the Vulgate: Romans 9:21 speaks of a potter having complete power over a massa , a shapeless lump. This allusion has the double advantage of suggesting depths of erudition while also casting aspersions on Christianity for its supposedly unenlightened view of the masses. (An anti-Christian animus, in fact, forms a subplot of the book.) And although it seems odd, to say the least, that a book about “the intellectuals and the masses” in the period from 1880 to 1939 could be written without even mentioning Karl Marx (or Engels or Carlyle or Matthew Arnold or Hannah Arendt or . . . : the list goes on and on), hundreds of endnotes bear witness to Professor Carey’s abundant reading in his own literary fiefdom.

The Intellectuals and the Masses began life in the lecture hall. The first part of the book, called “themes,” is an elaboration of Professor Carey’s T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, delivered at the University of Kent in 1989. Two chapters on H. G. Wells in a section of the book called “case studies” (which also includes chapters on Arnold Bennett and Wyndham Lewis) were given as the Henry James Lecture at the Rye Festival in 1990. That everything about Professor Carey’s effort is an affront to the memory of Eliot and James-not just to the memory of the men themselves, but to the ideals of culture that they struggled to articulate-is one of the governing ironies of his book.

The Intellectuals and the Masses is ostensibly an investigation of the social and political attitudes of such fin-de-siecle and early modernist writers as Wells, George Gissing, Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Lewis: “the response,” as Professor Carey puts it, “of the English literary intelligentsia to the new phenomenon of mass culture.” In fact, it is an attempt to discredit both the idea of high culture and the vocation of intellectuals by equating them with . . . Hitlerism. Yes, as in the philosophy and practice of Adolf Hitler, German dictator, 1889- 1945. More about this later.

In the high school that I attended, the Jesuits encouraged us to meditate on various useful adages. One that The Intellectuals and the Masses brought to mind runs as follows: “Never deny, seldom affirm, always distinguish.” Professor Carey denies and affirms with breathtaking promiscuity; and as for distinctions, the chief distinction of his book is that it is oblivious to them. Thus, for instance, Eliot and Yeats come out looking suspiciously like Hitler, while Hitler is described in terms that Henry James might be proud of. And while the subject of the book is a group of intellectuals’ attitude toward the masses, Professor Carey assures us that there is no such thing as “the masses”: the whole idea is, “of course,” “a fiction” whose purpose is ”to eliminate the human status of the majority of people.” (An amusing study might be made of Professor Carey’s reliance on the phrase “of course”: the more dubious the proposition, the more likely it will be bolstered by an “of course.”) In other words, although the masses do not exist in Professor Carey’s cosmology, he has taken the trouble to write a book in which they have the starring role. The whole thing is a kind of high-wire act without a safety net.

Professor Carey’s thesis is that modernism was born in an access of snobbish revulsion to the spread of literacy and popular culture; modernism, he says, is less a cultural movement motivated by certain aesthetic and spiritual imperatives than a social cabal. Its chief ambition is to exclude as many people as possible from the enjoyment and understanding of culture so that the self-appointed mandarins of culture may enjoy their own superiority unhindered by the press of common folk. In this sense, modernism is fundamentally “antidemocratic.” “The intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy,” Professor Carey explains. “But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand-and this is what they did. The early twentieth century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture.” Hence the aesthetic experiments of a Mallarme, an Eliot, a Joyce, a Virginia Woolf were undertaken not for any compelling aesthetic or spiritual reason but simply as an exercise in obscurantism.

For Professor Carey, one powerful index of modern intellectuals’ alienation from the masses is their disdain for tinned food. Tinned food looms large in the first chapter of The Intellectuals and the Masses . Writers as disparate as E. M. Forster, Eliot, Knut Hamsun, John Betjeman, Graham Greene, and Wells didn’t like the stuff; hence they were snobbish elitists with no feeling for common humanity. In the work of the popular writer Jerome K. Jerome, tinned food became “genial and amusing” (whatever that can mean), which explains why he receives Professor Carey’s Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and why, in the world according to Carey, the non-tinned-food intellectual establishment rejected Jerome’s work as infra dig.

When not ruminating on their own aversion to Spam, many readers will doubtless have occasion to wonder about Professor Carey’s grasp of history. They will note that he nominates Gissing, author of New Grub Street and other novels, as “the earliest English writer to formulate the intellectuals’ case against mass culture.” In fact, the masses have always excited writers’ consternation. For example, Shakespeare, in one of the Henry plays, writes that “the common people swarm like summer flies.” This is exactly the kind of statement that Professor Carey pounces on as evidence of elitism in the authors he discusses. Never mind that it is not Shakespeare but a character who offers this analogy: another problem with Professor Carey’s procedure is that whenever it suits his thesis he fails to distinguish between what characters are made to say and the views of their authors in propria persona .

Part of the problem is that Professor Carey is in the grip of a paralyzing literalness. “Spatial metaphors of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture,” he explains, “are logically meaningless, of course. When Oscar Wilde, for example pronounces that ‘Aesthetics are higher than ethics,’ it does not actually mean anything, any more than it would mean anything to claim that aesthetics were 2 feet to the left or right of ethics.” Really? Would it be impolite to remind the Merton Professor of English that there is a linguistic device, not terribly uncommon, known as metaphor? That when a writer speaks of “high art” he does not mean to imply that such art is physically higher than popular art? That when W. H. Auden spoke of the thirties being a “low dishonest decade” he did not, mirabile dictum , mean that the thirties were located somewhere underneath the decades that came before. One might have hoped that even an Oxford Professor of English might have grasped this distinction.

These are the sorts of things that one encounters throughout The Intellectuals and the Masses , but in the end they concern only the details of Professor Carey’s presentation. His real complaint about the nefarious machinations of the intelligentsia (Professor Carey uses the terms “intellectual,” “modernist,” and “intelligentsia” more or less interchangeably) goes far beyond food preferences and spatial metaphors. According to him, writers from Eliot and Yeats to Thomas Hardy (!), D. H. Lawrence, Wells, and Gissing conspired to demonize the masses and expel them from the ranks of humanity. Largely because of Eliot’s influence, Professor Carey informs us, “the assumption that most people are dead became, by the 1930s, a standard item in the repertoire of any self-respecting intellectual.” Moreover, he adds darkly, if most people are dead already, “their elimination becomes easier to contemplate.”

It’s only a short step from here to the philosophy of Adolf Hitler.

When he expatiates on tinned food and modern intellectuals’ dislike of mass society, Professor Carey is unwittingly funny. But when he gets around to drawing parallels between the intelligentsia and Hitler, he goes over the edge. About the time that Professor Carey brings Hitler into the discussion one realizes that the humming sound in one’s ears is the theme from The Twilight Zone swelling softly in the background. Consider the logic: “It was part of T. S. Eliot’s aesthetic theory that the true artist’s works transcend time, unlike the products of ephemeral commercial culture.” True enough. The same could be said of just about every serious thinker who ever turned his attention to the nature of the appeal of art. But for Professor Carey, Eliot’s aesthetic theory is dangerously similar to Hitler’s. “Hitler also believed just as firmly as, say, T. S. Eliot or Wyndham Lewis in the permanence of aesthetic values.” Hitler also liked dogs. Does a fondness for dogs indicate incipient Nazi tendencies?

Once he has started down this slippery slope, Professor Carey can’t help himself. He goes on to suggest that “there are marked similarities between the cultural ideals promulgated in the Fuhrer’s writings and conversation and those of the intellectuals we have been looking at.” And it is not simply that Hitler believed “just as strongly as the intellectuals in the eternal value of what intellectuals consider great art.” He was also-“like many English intellectuals” (may we say “of course”?)-worried about cultural decline and degeneracy, and “blamed this degeneracy on the mass media.” There is more. Toward the end of his book Professor Carey informs us that Hitler embraced

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Taking Dialogue Seriously

Mon, 01 Feb 1993 00:00:00 -0500

The Diversity of Religions: A Christian Perspective
by j. a. dinoia, o.p.
catholic university press, 200 pages, $29.95

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