A Tragic Conflict
Dana
A Tragic Conflict
The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the
Cold War. By Hilton Kramer. Ivan R. Dee. 363 pp. $27.50.
Reviewed by Gregory Wolfe
In the summer of 1952, Hilton Kramer's life took a fateful turn. While
attending a program known as the "School of Letters" in Indiana-where he had
gone to study Dante with Allen Tate and Shakespeare with Francis
Fergusson-the young Kramer met Philip Rahv, one of the founding editors of
Partisan Review. Partisan Review was then in its heyday as one of America's
leading journals of politics and culture, decidedly left of center and yet
consistently anti-Stalinist. A few months after meeting Rahv, Kramer
submitted an essay to Partisan Review on the contemporary art scene, and to
Kramer's amazement, Rahv accepted it. As Kramer recalls in one of the essays
collected in The Twilight of the Intellectuals, it was his debut as an art
critic, "and I quickly discovered that, owing to the intellectual authority
which PR then enjoyed, publication in the magazine was in itself a ticket to
a career I wasn't yet certain that I wanted." But on the basis of this
article, offers poured in for him to write for other publications, and
Kramer did embrace the life of an intellectual. It is a role that he
continues to ply, with verve and distinction, to the present day.
If Kramer experienced any sort of honeymoon in his early days as a cultural
critic, however, it didn't last long. As Kramer progressed through the 1950s
and 1960s, he confronted an increasingly painful dichotomy: on the one hand,
his brilliance as an art critic propelled him toward the center of the
cultural establishment (he eventually became chief art critic of the New
York Times); on the other hand, his political and moral concerns estranged
him from the growing radicalism of the intellectual class that controlled
the establishment. Kramer was repulsed by the increasing number of leftists
who had become apologists for the Soviet Union, which he saw as a clear and
present danger to the United States and to free societies around the world.
At the same time, he was among the first to recognize that a larger
"cultural revolution" (headquartered in the academy) was taking shape,
replacing the tradition of Western humanism with the reductivist ideologies
of race, class, and gender.
And so Kramer joined a group of distinguished defectors from liberal ranks
who called themselves neoconservatives. In 1981 he founded the New
Criterion, a journal that reflects both his passion for art and aesthetic
standards and his skills as a chronicler of the ideological follies so
abundant in the academy and other centers of cultural power today.
The essays gathered in The Twilight of the Intellectuals, most of which were
first published in the New Criterion, constitute a mordant retrospective on
what Julien Benda early in the twentieth century called la trahison des
clercs-the treason committed by modern intellectuals (who were mostly
middle-class writers, scholars, and artists) against the principles and
institutions that had nurtured them. The Twilight of the Intellectuals,
Kramer adds, "is also, perforce, about the impact of the 1930s and the
1960s-the two decades in which the political left achieved its greatest
intellectual influence in this country."
The book is divided into five sections, some of which emphasize "politics"
while others focus more on "culture." Among the intellectuals treated are
the Bloomsbury Group, George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Irving
Howe, Lincoln Kirstein, and Meyer Schapiro. Several pieces revolve around
the Hiss-Chambers case, and the final section reflects on the fate of
"liberal anti-communism" as found in the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the
New Republic, and Partisan Review.
Since this is territory that has been well covered in recent years-in
biographies of the principal players, as well as in numerous volumes of
history and political analysis-the question naturally arises: what does
Kramer have to say that sheds new light on the subject? A crude answer to
that question would be: not much. Despite the comprehensive tone of its
subtitle, The Twilight of the Intellectuals comprises a series of set pieces
rather than a systematic survey. While some of the essays are based on
first-hand knowledge and original research, most are not. And, as is the
case with most essay collections, this book has the inevitable redundancies
and longueurs.
One nonetheless finds many pleasures and insights in the book. On reading
several of these pieces consecutively, it becomes clear that Kramer is not
so much a philosopher as a historian and moralist. Rather than probing the
theories behind modern ideology, he focuses on the inconsistencies,
obfuscations, and outright lies that leftist intellectuals employed in order
to promote the chimera of a socialist future. Kramer's method is not unlike
that used by Paul Johnson in his book Intellectuals: he measures the ideas
and rhetoric espoused by these self-appointed experts against their own
behavior, both public and private.
Kramer has a gift for writing about the history of ideas. Nearly every essay
in this collection is a model of narrative clarity, economy, and brio. He
has an unerring sense of when to punctuate his narratives with epigrams that
deftly encapsulate his arguments. He describes Dwight Macdonald's political
writings as "a kind of free fall where the gravity of history was suspended
in favor of sheer weightlessness." Of Mary McCarthy's opportunistic
reversals of opinion, he writes that she "had become . . . a political pen
for all seasons." Susan Sontag "was admired not only for what she said but
for the pain, shock, and disarray she caused in saying it." And again: "It
was not that Sontag was ever prepared to abandon her stand on aestheticism.
It was only that she did not want it to cost her anything." Contrasting the
styles of two former New Republic editors, Kramer writes: "While [Hendrik]
Hertzberg's liberalism wore a frown of scornful disapproval, [Michael]
Kinsley's displayed the self-satisfied smile of the perennial undergraduate
scoring points against his elders."
Tart as some of these epigrams may be, they rarely come across as cheap
shots. All the same, many of these essays have the air of someone taking a
sledgehammer to a swarm of gnats. So many of the figures Kramer writes about
seem, in the space of just a generation or two, to be lightweights. Do
Lillian Hellman, Nora Sayre, Dwight Macdonald, Cyril Connolly, or Kenneth
Tynan still merit impassioned critiques? Granted, it is easy to say this in
hindsight, outside the heat of battle. But Kramer himself wrote nearly all
of these essays in hindsight-the earliest essay in the collection dates from
1980, but most were written in the 1990s. Perhaps, in a century dominated by
lies and myths, there is a strong moral imperative to set the record
straight, but in many of these essays there remains a somewhat unsettling
disparity be tween authorial passion and subject matter that is not far
removed from "weightlessness."
When Kramer treats writers whose work is likely to endure, the match seems
to be played by antagonists who are closer to the same weight class-and the
results are more edifying. Whether he is championing the flawed but
courageous Whittaker Chambers, extricating the true George Orwell from the
misreadings of his leftist interpreters, or estimating the achievements of
Edmund Wilson, Sidney Hook, and Clement Greenberg, Kramer manifests the
judiciousness and enthusiasm that lie at the heart of all good criticism.
But it is when he turns to matters of art and aesthetics that Kramer's
strengths as a thinker come most fully into play. Though a host of his
ideological enemies have branded him a "reactionary elitist" for his belief
in objective aesthetic standards, Kramer is no Philistine. After half a
century, he retains a qualified but genuine love for the achievements of
modernism in art. For all of its contradictions and dead ends, modernism was
a movement that cared about beauty, meaning, and the prophetic calling of
the artist.
Kramer brings these commitments to bear on Susan Sontag in one of the best
essays in the collection. In an unsparing dissection of Sontag's famous 1964
essay "On Camp," Kramer sees this "pasionaria of style" to be the herald of
our postmodern malaise. Sontag's celebration of camp, with its fundamentally
amoral vision ("the victory of 'style' over 'content,' 'aesthetics' over
'morality,' 'irony' over 'tragedy'"), has gone hand-in-hand with the triumph
of pop culture, the decay of standards, and the sort of blithe nihilism that
dominates much of academia today.
Unfortunately, politics tends to dominate culture in The Twilight of the
Intellectuals. Kramer himself provides a clue as to why this might be in his
consideration of the career of Edmund Wilson. Kramer rejects the label of
"public intellectual" that has been pinned on Wilson, because it
subordinates "literature to the interests of politics and the adumbration of
social policy." Instead, he argues that Wilson should be remembered as "a
man of letters." "The world in which [Wilson] prospered has passed into
history, and what has supplanted it is a degraded, highly politicized
literary culture guaranteed to misconstrue his accomplishment and
misrepresent its virtues."
There is a certain poignancy to this comment, because it can be argued that
Kramer's lifelong battle against politicized intellectuals has shaped-and
therefore limited-his own career. Kramer's courage, integrity, and honesty
are beyond reproach; he has fought the good fight. But it is hard not to
wonder what might have happened if he had stuck with Tate and Fergusson, and
chosen to be more the man of letters and less the public intellectual. To
say this is not to denigrate Kramer's accomplishments, but to suggest that
he-and many of his generation-have been caught up in something akin to a
tragic conflict. Culture wars, no less than shooting wars, have their
casualties. Perhaps one type of casualty is that the longer you fight an
enemy, the more you come to resemble him.
But unlike the ideologues he continues to battle-those who have become,
oxymoronically speaking, perpetual revolutionaries-it seems clear that
Kramer still hopes for a time when men and women of letters can flourish
once more. If Hilton Kramer's labors as a conservative intellectual have
contributed toward that end, we can all be grateful for his witness.
--
"I did not have sex with Ms. Lewinski in any way, shape, or form"
Clintons affidavit. His lawyer responded: "I can no longer vouch for the
veracity of my clients statements"
The president responded to plaintiffs' questions by giving false,
misleading and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct
the judicial process."
-- Judge Susan Webber Wright
"You will also take note that I don't "defend" clinton."
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