The fourteenth colony

National Review, Dec 31, 1986 by Scott Lahti

The results of this constriction are visible in every major New York book-review organ. The New York Times Book Review, not a book review at all but merely a house organ for the Manhattan publishing industry, is useless to the serious reader because of its lowest-common-denominator editorial policy, the consequently short shrift it gives to serious titles, and the overall incompetence and lack of authority of its reviews. The Nation, which once employed this century's most civilized economic journalist, Henry Hazlitt, as its literary editor, is today little more than a party organ for the anti-anti-Communist progressive wing of the American Left. The New Yorker, light-years from the urbanity of Harold Ross, has yet to recover from its postwar slide into shrill, radical-chic advocacy journalism, accompanied by the rejection of applied science, instrumental reason, and economic growth, and by a growing tendency toward formulaic and predictable dullness (excepting only the occasional Edmund Wilson-style review essays of V. S. Pritchett). As for the more scholarly New York Review of Books, it is a curate's egg: Although good in spots--art history (Ernst Gombrich), criticism (John Bayley, D. J. Enright, Frank Kermode, etc.), history (Noel Annan, Geoffrey Elton, Hugh Trevor-Roper), and science (Martin Gardner, Peter Medawar)--The New York Review nonetheless grants an ideological monopoly to the Dissent and New Republic schools of left-liberal egalitarianism, as if they alone represented high scholarship. For the most part, TNYRB reads as if it were centrally planned by John Kenneth Galbraith and Irving Howe.

YES, THE NEW YORK REVIEWERS are still all bad, in one or another respect. Although we have a few admirable quarterly "little" magazines, such as Partisan Review and Salmagundi, which often feature fine, indepedent criticism, none of our major weeklies or monthlies comes close to mirroring the richness and variety available in the best of the new books themselves. If, as Franz Kafka wrote, "a book must be an ice axe to break the sea frozen inside us," want to do for an alternative to the dulled journalistic hatchets on offer in Manhattan?

Go east, young man: For the most enlarging, wide-ranging intellectual journalism, London's finest periodicals are far richer than their American counterparts. As Dwight Macdonald pointed out, the sharper cultural lines traditionally drawn in Britain have resulted in a mass culture distinctly inferior to that of the United States, and an elite culture that rises to the top, flourishing free from the lure of commercialism.

This sharpness of cultural distinctions has become a byword in the field of broadcasting. Anyone who has seen the telecasts of such English series as Flambards, The Glittering Prizes, or Monty Python's Flying Circus, or has listened to the authoritative cultural lectures on BBC Radio 3, will readily assent to the superiority of Britain's best; viewers of British game shows and morning "news" programs (where a report on arms-control negotiations is followed, with unseemly haste, by the adventures of that stalwart patron of the fine arts, Popeye the Sailor Man) have been subjected to the rank imbecility of the worst.