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has been a lot of talk recently, including some on this site, about
civilization. But what is it? "A sense of permanence,"
declared Kenneth Clarke in his book Civilisation:
"Civilised man ... must feel that he belongs somewhere in space
and time; that he consciously looks forward and looks back..."
I am not going to try to improve on that, though I do recommend
you read the whole book, or view the
video series it is based on, to get the full force of Clarke's
argument.
Connotations
are generally more interesting than definitions. What comes to mind
when you hear the word "civilization"? Rather a lot, if
you belong to the dwindling band of human beings who are interested
in anything at all beyond their own precious selves. Some big, obvious
things — the Parthenon, perhaps, or the plays of Shakespeare,
or Monet's water-lilies — but also some smaller, more personal
ones. For me, a lot of interiors come to mind. I have mentioned
in a
previous piece the house of the Kellermans, an elderly central-European
Jewish couple I knew in my schooldays. There are one or two other
private houses or rooms that seem to me to capture at least part
of what it means to live a civilized life: the Coolidge homestead
in Plymouth, Vermont, and the study of an old-style Chinese gentleman
I knew in Taiwan. Some private clubs, too — the Reform in London,
the National Arts Club in New York. And then there are the offices
of The New Criterion.
The
New Criterion is a monthly review of arts and culture, with
offices on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. I go in there three or four
times a year, either for a party — they throw very good parties
— or to talk about something I'm writing for them, or just
because I'm passing by and have time. It's a pretty typical small-magazine
place: four or five rooms with computers on the desks, stacks of
back issues on utility shelving, and books everywhere. Piles of
books, stacks of books, wobbling towers of books, books on shelves,
books on desks and tables, books underfoot and heaped on spare chairs.
TNC is the sort of place where, to get at anything,
or even just to sit down, you generally have to move an armful of
books.
What brings
TNC to mind in a word-association test on "civilization"
is the mission the magazine set itself when it was founded, and
which it still doggedly pursues today. NC was the brainchild
of two men: the concert pianist and music critic Samuel Lipman,
and art critic Hilton Kramer. They were both senior figures in their
respective lines of work: Lipman, as well as his concert performances,
was music critic of Commentary, Kramer was head art critic
of the New York Times. Both were fed up with the way that
juvenile leftist ideologies and nihilistic fads had taken over so
much of the arts, of arts criticism, and of intellectual life in
general. They determined to do something about it, taking as their
model T. S. Eliot's defunct literary review The Criterion
(1922-39). With Lipman raising the funds and Kramer recruiting the
talent, they founded TNC in September of 1982, appealing,
in a sort of manifesto that ran as the first issue's editorial,
to "anyone capable of recalling a time when criticism was more
strictly concerned to distinguish achievement from failure, to identify
and uphold a standard of quality, and to speak plainly and vigorously
about the problems that beset the life of the arts and the life
of the mind in our society."
A conservative
magazine of the arts and high culture? You could hardly expect the
critical establishment to take that lying down. In fact,
they — notably Carlin Romano in The Philadelphia Inquirer
and Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic — denounced
TNC even before its first issue appeared. That was
19 years ago. TNC is still here, offering thoughtful, highly
literate commentary on intellectual and artistic trends by a deep
bench of contributors of a mainly conservative inclination. Which
is to say, they do not believe that any useful, interesting or inspiring
work can be done by authors and artists who disdain, or are ignorant
of, or seek to hold up to scorn, the accumulated wisdom of civilized
humanity. The denunciations continue, mostly along the lines that
TNC represents the "rich" (it is run as a non-profit,
sustained mostly by the generosity of private contributors —
none of them, I would venture to speculate, anything like as rich
as Edward Kennedy, Barbra Streisand, or Jesse Jackson) protecting
"their" culture.
An especially
satisfying feature of TNC, for those of use who like conservatism
in all things, has been the magazine's unchanging appearance across
the first two decades of its existence. Other than the introduction
of poetry — real poetry, that usually scans, often rhymes,
and always makes sense — which began with the April 1984 issue,
only one new department has been instituted: the "Notes and
Comments" section, which began in September 1989, offering
editorial remarks about current events. There have been no changes
of layout, no "make-overs." The covers of the ten annual
issues (TNC does not publish in July or August) are color-coded
— September is cyan, October yellow, November mauve and so
on, the only exceptions being those that started the tenth and twentieth
years of TNC's existence. Browsing through the first 190
issues at the TNC offices last week, I was able to discern
only a single change of format: The list of contributors was broken
into two columns from the September 1990 issue on. By TNC
standards, this was practically a stylistic revolution.
Samuel Lipman
died in 1994 but Hilton Kramer remains as editor of The New Criterion,
still wielding the charm, erudition, and sly wit that has endeared
him to three full generations of American intellectuals (he was
the model for the minor character "Magnasco" in Saul Bellow's
novel Humboldt's Gift). Erich Eichman, the original Managing
Editor, moved on to the Wall Street Journal in 1989, being
replaced by Roger Kimball, whose withering broadsides against the
shams and mountebanks who infest our high culture — deconstructionists,
gender-theorists, performance artists and the rest of the motley
crew — were enlivening the pages of TNC well before
he joined the staff. (Those broadsides have been collected in three
books: Tenured
Radicals, The
Long March and Experiments
Against Reality.) Principal support for Hilton and Roger
these past three years has been Associate Editor Robert Messenger,
who is leaving the magazine this month. As well as being the most
prodigiously well-read person I have ever met in my life, Robert
is that rarest of birds, an American WWI buff. Editorial assistant
Sara Lussier, webmaster Max Watman, and poetry editor Robert Richman
(he started out with the title "Business Manager" —
go figure) complete the house staff. Somehow this little band turns
out the funniest, angriest, most literate review of high culture
in America today, while still having time for a chat and a cup of
coffee with any idle freelancer that decides to impose himself on
them for half an hour.
There really
is such a thing as civilization — Clarke's "sense of permanence"
— and civilization really does have enemies, as has recently
been demonstrated to us very dramatically. I do not at all mean
to belittle the magnitude or horror of those recent events when
I say that there are other enemies at work too, quietly and without
overt violence, without bombs or guns or even box-cutters, digging
away in our schools and universities, in our libraries and galleries,
in our academies and conservatories, sapping away at the spiritual
and intellectual foundations of our civilization. It is good to
know that The New Criterion, just embarked on its twentieth
year of publication, is out there defending reason, sense, science,
tradition, and the divine revelation of true art. I wish them 20
years more, and then 20 more after that; for this war, unlike (let
us hope) the other one, is a war that will never be won, as long
as there is fool's gold to be dug from the rocks, and fools to buy
it.
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