This review appears in the July/August 2007 issue of
The American Spectator. To subscribe to our monthly print
edition, click here.
Counterpoints: Twenty-Five Years of The New
Criterion on Culture and the Arts
Edited by Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer
(Ivan R. Dee, 500 pages, $35)
FOR MORE THAN TWO CENTURIES, beginning with the Edinburgh
Review, serious, well-written periodicals have played a major
part in the culture of the Anglo-Saxon world. Now there are very
few of them. In Britain, since the extinction of
Encounter, there are none, unless you count
Prospect, which is a bit too attached to the European
Union to qualify as a politically independent magazine.
In the United States, happily, there are still one or two which
keep the tradition going, notably Commentary and the
New Criterion. Each has its strengths and limitations.
Both are indispensable. I would hate to have to choose between
them. Commentary is stronger on religion and politics, the
New Criterion on literature and the arts. Both are highly
literary and lightly (but firmly) edited, and both do honor to
their country. As an Englishman, I am envious and sad that we have
no equivalents.
However, the New Criterion, as this compilation shows,
goes some way to supplying the lack of a truly civilized and
intelligent review on our side of the Atlantic, for many of its
contributors are British, and the topics touched upon often involve
English literature. In the anthology under review, of the 40 or so
authors, Roger Scruton is a well-known English philosopher,
jack-of-all controversies, and rider-to-hounds. Kenneth Minogue,
the economist, though antipodean by birth, is very much part of the
London intellectual scene. John Gross, former editor of the
Times Literary Supplement, is perhaps our out-standing man
of letters. David Pryce-Jones is our leading expert on the Middle
East. Anthony Daniels and Theodore Dalrymple are our two leading
commentators on physical, mental, and indeed spiritual health, and
Paul Dean, head of English at Oxford’s famous Dragon School, is one
of our top grammarians. That list in itself shows the breadth of
the British reservoir of talent from which the New
Criterion draws its authors.
British literary and arts subjects also command attention from
minds ranged on both sides of the Atlantic. John Derbyshire, a
columnist for National Review, has a well-judged essay on
Aldous Huxley. Gertrude Himmelfarb has some wise and penetrating
things to say about Lord Acton. There is a wonderful piece by James
Penrose, the journal’s regular music critic, on Donald Francis
Tovey, author of the British classic, Essays in Musical
Analysis, and Brooke Allen, author of that excellent book,
Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers,
contributes a delightful and (to me) nostalgic piece on that
rascally but endearing novelist, Simon Raven. There are also good
pieces on the Victorian sporting novelist Robert Surtees and the
irascible Cambridge literary pundit, F.R. Leavis.
Naturally, the bulk of the material deals with American
creators, personalities, and issues, none of them hackneyed,
however, and some of them important but difficult subjects
overlooked by the rest of the media. It’s both natural and right
for a journal of this kind to write about “The Legacy of Russell
Kirk” and “The Hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky” — and both are dealt
with in authoritative and trenchant fashion. Far less obvious,
however, is the essay on “Thomas Kuhn’s Nationalism,” contributed
by the science writer James Franklin, or the reassessment of Edward
Bellamy’s utopia novel, Looking Backward, by that
sharp-eyed literary critic, Martin Gardner. I enjoyed too Mark
Steyn’s appreciation of that accomplished man of the theater,
George Abbott (“Missing Mister Abbott”), and the treatment of the
“New York School Poets” by the Broadway critic John Simon.
THE SHEER RANGE AND VARIETY of the essays in this volume is, of
course, a tribute to the catholicity of the editors, Hilton Kramer
and Roger Kimball, who between them have a detailed knowledge and
acute feelings about most of the glories of our culture, as well as
strictly disciplined detestation of trends and individuals that
disgrace it. They make an unusually well-matched team, and both
make characteristic contributions to this volume. Kramer asks,
“Does Abstract Art Have a Future?” and gives a gloomy but
well-reasoned answer, and Kimball offers his thoughts on re-reading
John Buchan, that ambitious Scots imperialist who combined
high-minded statesmanship with the enviable ability to tell a
rattling good adventure tale.
In general, and thanks certainly to the consistency with which
Kramer and Kimball have conducted the journal, the New
Criterion is notable for four qualities. The first is the
belief that there are absolute standards, not just in literature
and the arts, but in public conduct and philosophical treatment of
fundamental issues. The review is suspicious of relativism in any
form but especially of its moral manifestations. Secondly, the
paper and its contributions avoid any commitment to ideology and
party but have a general disposition or temperament inclined to
recognize the merits of long-established cultural facts, and to
subject all novelties to skeptical scrutiny. Genuine originality,
provided it is combined with skill and experience, is always
acceptable and applauded. But here fashion gets short shrift, and
every kind of specious neologism and euphemious dodging is cracked
down on hard.
A third and important propensity is an eagerness to rescue from
oblivion writers, artists, and ideas that have fallen from favor
but are still relevant to our needs, and enjoyable. This is a very
important task which, so far as I know, is undertaken by no other
periodical. It is one of the chief reasons why I always look
forward with relish to opening a copy of the New
Criterion.
Finally, there is the sheer quality of the writing. There is
nothing formulaic about the journal, none of the emollient
uniformity that made the New Yorker, even in its best
days, so tiresome. One gets the impression that editing is minimal.
The real control of quality is exercised by the selection of the
writers, who are notable for their clarity of expression, their
ability to organize their material, and their liveliness of idiom.
They, like the journal that gives them the hospitality of its
pages, form a wide but also intimate circle of civilized men and
women who light wise candles in a world that often seems threatened
by modernity’s tenebrae.
