The fourteenth colony

National Review, Dec 31, 1986 by Scott Lahti

NIEBUHR WAS RIGHT," sighed Goethe from the twilit retrospection of high old age, "when he saw a barbarous age coming. It is already here, we are in it, for in what does barbarism consist, if not in the failure to appreciate what is excellent?" A prophetic foreshadowing of our own barbarous age, whose barbarism is high-lighted most visibly in its periodical journalism. Another enduring, and more pointed, criticism issues from the sage of Baltimore, H. L. Mencken. "The New York reviewers are all bad," Mencken noted in a letter to Edmund Wilson in 1946, after justly exempting Wilson's own New Yorker essays from his derisive gaze.

To anyone who admires Mencken's work and the essentially nineteenth-century style of literacy that informed it, the truth of that statement must seem even more self-evident today. For we feel the absence of Mencken's spirit from our journalism, and the thinning of the more spacious and hospitable journalistic air in which his spirit once breathed with such astonishing vigor. What give critics of the pedigree of Mencken or his friend Albert Jay Nock--a pedigree that derives from what Jacques Barzun called "the great American Tradition of the judicious eccentric"--much of their effective power is their capacity to stand outside the bounds of respectable, mainstream middlebrow opinion and academic habits of mind, and to deliver, as if from a world higher than our own, criticism whose own style, audacity, and discernment--never issuing from ideological malice, but always finding a more catholic resonance--show up the homogenized attitudes prevailing inside those narrow bounds.

Such criticism is vital to the health of any literary culture, and it is good that the occasional independent journal should exist to give it voice, sustaining a vigorous and native iconoclasm, and a superior style and feeling for the literary past. From our century, one thinks at once of Mencken's epoch-making tenure, from 1924 to 1933, as founding editor of The American Mercury, which carried an almost superhuman vigor into the domain of the monthlies. Under Mencken's blistering gaze, American social and literary criticism attained to a freedom of expression and intellectual fearlessness that has not been seen since; and his incomparable satiric style gave his criticism a rare buoyancy, infusing the whole with a delightful, impish charm. That style, a thundering storm of Wagnerian fury, a crashing Gotterdammerung of linguistic fervor, was memorable above all for its unfailing flexibility, its easy command of the rhythms of the American language, and its apparently boundless vocabulary and range of reference--gifts ripened to supple perfection over a lifetime of omnivorous reading and enormous production.

Mencken's friend Albert Jay Nock, editor of The Freeman (1920-1924), was a highly cultivated man of letters whose "judicious eccentricity" took the form of sparkling, crystalline prose bespeaking an almost ethereal disdain for mass culture, his style and thought deriving from his devotion to the literature of Greek and Roman antiquity and the works of the French Renaissance. his many books and essays, all of them works of cameo refinement, culminated in his crowning gem, The Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), a work flickering with an aristocratic feeling of approaching cultural eclipse.

Figures like Nock and Mencken are no longer to befound in our periodicals, nor are the styles of literacy and breadth of culture that they represented--which is another way of saying that our intellectual journalism is not what it once was, not nearly. What one notices nowadays is a determination to play it safe at all costs, an unwillingness on the part of writers and editors to risk offending even the least civilized elements of public opinion, an anti-historical emphasis on newness for its own sake (what Christopher Booker has aptly termed neophilia), and, all too frequently, a nasty ideological tone that hampers fruitful discussion--and which, by the way, bears little relation to the larger iconoclasm of old.

The reasons for this journalistic desiccation are not hard to fathom. The growing presence of the egalitarian mentality, cultural no less than politico-economic, during and after the New Deal and Second World War straitened the scope of journalistic expression; "judicious eccentricity," to the faint of heart and mind, seemed merely impolite (as well as impolite). As far as the new impresarios knew or cared, the older, more discriminating critics had breathed their last. The blinkered ideology of their postwar epigones, each with but a single axiom to grind, made fast the new isolation. And, in this, they were merely treading an intellectual stage that, since the spread of revolutionary Marxism, had fallen grim with the corrosive rancor of ideological polemic.

In the sociology of knowledge, literary criticism came to be usurped by the academy during the precipitate postwar expansion of higher "education"; the older, coherent humanism was dispersed into a rapidly subdividing proliferation of academic specializations. Increasingly, official credentials, rather than mere talent or learning, were needed to secure a lofty berth. The world of the "bookman," that now old-fashioned title of the rounded literary journalist, had indeed changed, as the new professionals of criticism took complacent refuge amid the rough tools of the academic hardware shop. With such blunt methodological instruments--the newest models imported at second hand from Paris via New Haven--they hauled and battered both thought and the English language into bloodied submission. Meanwhile, as William Pfaff notes in a recent issue of Salmagundi, an entire class of newspapers that had helped to sustain the older, literate journalism--papers such as the New York Sun, the New York Herald Tribune, the Chicago Daily News, and the Boston Evening Transcript--vanished; and Gresham's Law ensure that the ensuing breach in periodical literature would be filled with a flood tide of commercialism.