Which reads like an electric, Kool-Aid doctoral thesis. Dah-dit: you can hear the telegrapher’s fist keypunching it out: bitterness, frustration: a writer who has had his army cot fragged once too often by associate professors. Subject, formal; structure, formal (review of œuvre, then assessment): but tone is badlands alkaline and more informal than wino spit. “I grouchily insist on my status as an Independent voter, and give no quarter to the blathering politicians who can make life such a strain for the civilized minority.” What PhD candidate could say that, without the mother of all ibids in support? Ross’s bar fight is not with politocracy; it’s with people who have more certain tenure. “The English professors . . . concentrated their energies on defining movements within sub-movements of schools. Leave them to it: they are harmless, and their day shall pass.” Sounds like someone who was once locked in the Harvard stacks over a weekend and never forgot it.
Ross has gut instincts: those of a pushy young Washington hostess: one angling for good attendance at her first salon. He has invited the best—most saleable—public personae, even when they don’t complement his thesis. Buck- ley, Schlesinger, Galbraith, and Vidal are appropriate. Mailer, not really. Lowell, not at all. And Kissinger the literatus (can you yawn in German?) is around because Kissinger could sell tickets to a comb-and-tissue-paper concert. Ross has “sub-literaries,” also: Nixon, Humphrey, Johnson, Truman. This makes his book disjoint, rather like a Lego house put together by three cats. Ross, don’t misconstrue, is intelligent and very well-read, but I felt the annoying, constant sense of “Watch me, I’m brash.” The Literary Politicians is as self-serving as a presidential memoir. Better called The Literary Politician. Ross.
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