The Permanent War for Culture

T he late and much-feared New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer was once seated next to Woody Allen at a dinner. Allen asked whether Kramer ever felt embarrassed when he encountered in social settings artists whose work he had disparaged in print. No, said Kramer. Why should he be embarrassed? They made the bad art. He merely described it. It occurred to the critic after the party had concluded that he had once published an adverse review of an Allen movie, The Front.

Forty years ago, Kramer founded The New Criterion, which was taken over in his declining years by Roger Kimball, who supplies the anecdote above in a marvelous chrestomathy, The Critical Temper: Interventions from The New Criterion at 40, a volume that brings together some of the funniest, most cutting, most perceptive, and most appreciative pieces published in that august, sometimes Augustan, journal over the past decade. Kramer and Kimball’s monthly magazine of arts, culture, and media has far outlasted its honored ancestor The Criterion, T. S. Eliot’s publication, which dissolved on the eve of World War II after 17 years of contrarian and conservative rebuke to its era’s prevailing cultural dogmas.

With his dry wit, his sesquipedalian playfulness, his deep learning, and his dapper sangfroid, Kimball is perhaps our closest living heir to his friend William F. Buckley Jr. As Bill did, Roger retains a certain boyish (or even impish) aspect well into middle age, along with a never-slackening thirst to charge back into the fray, no matter how outnumbered his side. Roger enjoys quoting Hamlet’s injunction “to find quarrel in a straw when honor’s at the stake.”

He is also ruthlessly honest in his judgments, which makes his monthly unsigned introductory piece in The New Criterion an unflagging source of stimulation. Woe be upon those whose follies drift within Roger’s field of vision. I’m honored to have served as his theater critic and re-honored to see that he has included one of my pieces in the present volume, which he edited. Essays by my NR colleagues and fellow TNC contributors Jay Nordlinger and Andrew Stuttaford also appear.

Remembering Kramer, shortly after his death in 2012, led Roger to reaffirm the principles that define TNC. “Seriousness is compatible with humor, but not with frivolity,” he notes, then par exemple laments what Philip Johnson dubbed “the giggle” of postmodernism. “That giggle bespoke not the laughter of joyful affirmation but the rictus of a corrosive and deflationary snideness, a version of nihilism.” Kramer called attention to the distinctions between the two sides, displaying “an unerring instinct for the fraudulent.” Too, Roger rejects the childish impulse to strike a pose of opposition to all things bourgeois, a notable failing of bourgeois critics who too often exercise their various self-loathing instincts with their pens. The avant-garde “gradually transformed a recalcitrant bourgeois culture into a willing collaborator in its raids on establishment taste,” he writes. But when the counterculture becomes the culture — that battle was over by the early Seventies — what remains but meaningless posturing? Roger calls this “aesthetic buffoonery” and gestures in the general direction of the vacuous political statements that litter today’s museums and galleries.

Criticism is, or ought to be, tightly wrapped up with an urgent need to tell the truth as one sees it. Urgency becomes emergency when everyone in the vicinity is committed to a lie. The critic is born when the little boy or girl declares that the emperor has no clothes when all around her are giving five-star reviews of the imperial fashion choices. The encounter with Allen brings up one type of the corruption to which TNC is proudly immune. Anxieties about potential social repercussions cause some critics to withhold fire; others fear excommunication from the progressive cultural establishment. Toadying and pusillanimity define much cultural writing — “Please, shoot me last; I will happily denounce myself!” cry the white males; “No, shoot them first,” coldly reply the children of affirmative action who seek to take their places and turn all culture into a question of competing claims of superior victimhood. The more ridiculous and arid these discussions become, the more doggedly The New Criterion sticks to the old criterion: artistic merit, alone. To cultural poison it is a bracing antidote.

The Critical Temper contains four sections of essays: One excoriates venerated figures and notions, one celebrates artists who have divided opinion, one explores the importance of our Anglosphere patrimony, and one gathers pieces that do not quite fit into the other categories. Ayn Rand, kitsch, V. I. Lenin, and the 1619 Project get a proper seeing-to; Harry Flashman, Madame Bovary, P. G. Wodehouse, and Edmund Burke are heaped with laurels. Joseph Epstein’s typically jaunty and fresh appreciation of Henry James is a standout. Epstein concedes that “many are the criticisms against James, none of them entirely invalid,” noting that “some claim that in his fiction he chewed much more than he bit off,” and that he was not only “not a happy-ending man” but sometimes came “closer to being a no-ending man.” And yet, “for all its rococo circumlocution,” James’s style “did exactly what he wanted it to do, which was to capture consciousness in all its complexity. . . . James learned from Turgenev that great fiction begins, not in event or incident, but in character, and he extended this by broadening the meaning of character by showing how it can be affected by interior thought as much as by circumstances.”

Adam Kirsch’s piece “T. S. Eliot’s Animus” is equally sagacious, reflecting on Eliot’s critical essays and the nature of criticism itself. “I continue to believe,” writes Kirsch, “that any critic who wants to write something lasting — who believes that criticism can be a species of literature — must write partly out of aggression. Or perhaps a better word is animus, in the sense of a fixed intention, a partiality. . . . Criticism tries to move literature and ideas in the direction of what should be.”

The great essayist and TNC mainstay Anthony Daniels (who sometimes writes under the name Theodore Dalrymple) contributes a forceful and highly amusing piece that ought to constitute the last word on Rand: “Her integrity led to a lack of self-criticism; she frequently wrote twenty thousand words where one would do. . . . She has a habit of quoting herself as independent verification of what she says; reading her is like being cornered at a party by a man, intelligent but dull, who is determined to prove to you that right is on his side in the property dispute upon which he is engaged and will omit no detail.”

When I came across the late Yale teacher and diplomat Charles Hill elegantly summarizing Burke as saying that “the hallmark of a sane society is reconciliation of the present and the future to the past,” I had to check to see whether this was written in response to the present-warping, past-obscuring, reconciliation-despising 1619 Project, published in 2019. It was written six years earlier. Truths endure but need to be stated again and again; lessons once learned are often forgotten but can felicitously be relearned.

Which requires fighting for them. “To have a pen is to have a war,” writes David Pryce-Jones in his contribution, “Bad Ideas Never Die.” Or, as Voltaire put it, “qui plume a, guerre a.” “From his day to ours, this war inherent in writing has had the simplest of objectives, which is to get hold of public opinion either by describing things as they are, or by trying to prevent things being described as they are.” Girding up to fight for truth means enlisting in a war that will never be won, but can certainly be lost. Surrender is not an option. Besides, as adduced by the demolitionary vigor and rejoicing in liberty displayed in The Critical Temper, fighting can be an awful lot of fun.