City Desk: Christmas Gala

Just who were these “really good writers”? Therein lies the joy of this collection, most of which first appeared in The New Criterion, where I am an editor. Allen presents what some might call a revisionist reading of the age: Steinbeck and Mailer, out; Isherwood and Henry Green, in. She elevates the century’s marginalized authors—the gossips, the unbelievers, the ones who took some distance, wisely, we might now say, between themselves and the big ideas around them. We therefore learn about Green: “Throughout the thirties (the decade in which . . . all [his] contemporaries . . . were producing literature of passionately left- wing inspiration) Green was engaged in the painstaking composition of Party Going, a novel that dwells almost exclusively upon the fatuous doings of a group of rich and aimless young people.” And Christopher Isherwood: Although he “made an unremitting effort to impose a serious structure on his life, his strong suit, ultimately, was frivolity.” We also run into Harold Ross, James Thurber, Evelyn Waugh, and of course the Mitford sisters (Nancy was “a truly original light novelist and world-class practitioner of the art of tittle-tattle”). The result is enlightening, fun, eminently readable, and wonderfully, woefully politically incorrect.

—JAMES PANERO

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Just who were these “really good writers”? Therein lies the joy of this collection, most of which first appeared in The New Criterion, where I am an editor. Allen presents what some might call a revisionist reading of the age: Steinbeck and Mailer, out; Isherwood and Henry Green, in. She elevates the century’s marginalized authors—the gossips, the unbelievers, the ones who took some distance, wisely, we might now say, between themselves and the big ideas around them. We therefore learn about Green: “Throughout the thirties (the decade in which . . . all [his] contemporaries . . . were producing literature of passionately left- wing inspiration) Green was engaged in the painstaking composition of Party Going, a novel that dwells almost exclusively upon the fatuous doings of a group of rich and aimless young people.” And Christopher Isherwood: Although he “made an unremitting effort to impose a serious structure on his life, his strong suit, ultimately, was frivolity.” We also run into Harold Ross, James Thurber, Evelyn Waugh, and of course the Mitford sisters (Nancy was “a truly original light novelist and world-class practitioner of the art of tittle-tattle”). The result is enlightening, fun, eminently readable, and wonderfully, woefully politically incorrect.

—JAMES PANERO