ing exclusively political in its view of culture, and thus, for example, including no poets, novelists, painters, or musicians. Well, how about this symposium? It is, in fact, relentlessly political. It has a justified quarrel with the destructive cultural trends of the 1960s, but that quarrel seems to have become an exclusive preoccupation. And there are no producing artists here; the participants are mostly academic. Why do we not hear, for example, from John del Vecchio, whose Thirteenth Valley may be the best novel written about Vietnam? Why not Daniel Mark Epstein (perhaps our best poet in the thirties age group), or Donald Hall? Or Keith Mano, or Hugh Kenner?
Still, this is an important, and thoroughly admirable, book. It points, really, to a war within the American academy. Its participants are highly intelligent, but the names are pretty predictable. Sometimes it is difficult to tell whether “neoconservatism” is a political movement or a university faction, complete with its own faculty club. □
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