Customer Reviews

The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War

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At any college in the 1960s, there was no more ominous presence than that of Jean Paul Sartre. He was an expressionless obsidian Buddha high on on a mountaintop, a force of nature, a thinker greater than nature itself. Sooner or later he would tip over and crush you as you dozed off in Contemporary Crusades or the Histrionics of the Lower Classes or in whatever class his cosmic status was accepted a priori. Thank you, Hilton Kramer for your marvelous book. Your chapter called "The Flowers on Sartre's Grave" has put Sartre in perspective for me. I believed in 1965 that intellectuals were supposed to like communism (a distant communism, it turns out), but how did Sartre ever subsume his theoties of individualism to such a hideous cause? Apparently even this Buddha made mistakes. Mr. Kramer makes it clear that Sartre was an apologist for the worst tyrannies in modern history.

It is truly liberating to read Kramer's critique of all the many anti-anti-communists whose writings have littered the second half of the 20th century. If Joseph McCarthy had not existed, the anti-anti-communists would have had to create him. Look at how this continues today with the snubbing of Elian (excuse me---Elia) Kazan at Oscars night.

At any rate, this book clarified a great deal about Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling, and other critics whose direction and magnitude were always so mysterious to me. It was very revealing to see how these men, just by suggesting that communism had faults, drew the bitter ire of so many American writers.

To me, the place of honor that Hilton Kramer holds in literary history is due largely to the fact that (thanks to Tom Wolfe in "The Intelligent Co-ed's Guide" I know this) he was the only American Intellectual who, in 1976, sang the praises of the great scourge of socialism, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. Five stars!

I found this collection of essays to be outstanding, yet depressing - outstanding because of the author's scintilating portraits of the people he writes about and depressing because of most of the people he writes about were clearly as awful as they were arrogant.

Additionally, his essay on biographies of the 'Bloomsbury' group changed the way I look at literary biographies generally - the reason for reading an author's bio is to enhance your understanding of their works, not to read

gossip about someone who may now be ignored as an author, but who has become 'famous for being famous'.

This book piqued my interest to such a degree that I read it in two sittings. I loved the section on Susan Sontag. I've never been able to understand her which has always annoyed me because it's terrible to feel like your out of your depth with somebody you know is a total weasal. Kramer does a great job articulating her ideas so that I can see them for what they are. He introduces me to many people I've never heard of, namely Whitaker Chambers (what a fascinating character). To read a book written from the perspective of a non-Leftist thinking person is always a treat. A+

In a 1994 interview on C-SPAN's Booknotes, reporter and critic John Corry told how politically one-sided the _New York Times_' newsroom was in 1980. In that year, of all the reporters and editors on staff, he only knew of one person who voted for Ronald Reagan, and that was the paper's art critic, Hilton Kramer. Kramer left a couple of years later, continuing his art criticism in the _New York Observer_. But he also set out to do battle with the cultural Left, that "herd of independent minds", in Harold Rosenberg's famous phrase. Eventually, he founded the _New Criterion_, an intellectual journal, which features some of the finest cultural criticism on offer today. This book, Twilight of the Intellectuals, is as much a retrospective of his often lonely mission, as it is a survey of the political climate of American intellectual culture in this century.

_Twilight_ differs from Paul Johnson's _Intellectuals_ in treating only 20th century intellectuals. Plus, Kramer's high culture background allows him to provide the reader with more insight into his subjects' worlds, as opposed to Johnson's uniform tarring of his as scoundrels (mostly accurately, though). Kramer even expresses some nostalgia for some of the people here, such as Kenneth Tynan, giving him his artistic due over the political divide.

But in the main, his work here is a series of political polemics. "Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion," is how the Catholic intellectual Richard John Neuhaus described the mindset that Kramer battles here. Throughout, Kramer selects his old articles with the intent of fixing the truth about influential leftist intellectuals firmly in the cultural memory. People like Lillian Hellman, Alger Hiss, Dwight MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, and such are all known qualities now, and do not need to be refuted afresh. But they still hold places of honor in institutions where like-minded intellectuals cluster, so the task of telling the truth about them is an ongoing one. The progressive myth surrounding Hiss is still so thick that Kramer felt compelled to include two essays about his case.

His praise of Sidney Hook, the lone ranger of socialism, is fulsome, and deservedly so. Hook did much of the heavy lifting in building the Marxist mindset among American intellectuals in the Thirties, and then atoned for it with a long, noble and lonely career as an anti-communist cold warrior. He oddly tags Hook for a philistine, though, for having pooh-poohed an anti-communist arts festival with the comment that artistic greatness could appear in dictatorships, too. Hook was right on that point, though, in my opinion. A musical program of Shostakovich and Prokovieff at their best would more than stand comparison with a program of contemporaneous Western composers, caged birds though the Soviet artists were otherwise.

His estimation of Saul Bellow may be a little unfair. Bellow has never been known for being a brawler, which may explain Kramer's disappointment in his seeming acquiescence to PC attacks against him. One _Herzog_, one _Mr. Sammler's Planet_, ought to be enough to ask from any writer's career, without also being called upon to spend creative energy in opinion journal polemics.

A print reviewer of this book commented on how entering the culture wars must have retarded Kramer's potential as a critic, by draining his powers. I don't know about that, but he makes a convincing Horatius At The Gate, giving battle to the herd of independent minds, who marched in leftist lockstep so disgracefully, for so long.

With this book, Hilton Kramer, a Cold-War anti-Communist Liberal of the last half of the 20th century, fills in many historical gaps for younger seekers of intellectual purity. While the book does a credible job explaining shifting differences of cold-war opinion amongst leftist academics and ideologues, it begs us to consider how otherwise intelligent people could continue to support tyranny in the face of such incontrovertible evidence of its evil. Kramer cites the verbal and media assault on anyone daring to question the tenets of the Cold War Socialist Left. He outlines the criticisms of Alexander Solzhinitsyn by George Steiner, the diatribes of Lillian Hellman, that staunch supporter of Stalinism, and the scurrilousness of Mary McCarthy, the pro-Hanoi apologist. He shines light on the Communists in Hollywood and the media and the many ways in which they aided the Soviet cause.

Starting with the intellectual rejection of Whittaker Chambers, in favor of the Soviet spy Alger Hiss, we are treated to a travesty of heresies that have yet to be renounced by their proponents. Kramer points out that Bard College today has an academic chair in their Humanities department in Alger Hiss's name. By the same token, women's studies departments at many universities still use "I, Rigoberta Minchu" as a text even while knowing that she made the story up. Current Writers who have kept on with this tradition of making it up as they go along, in the name of the class warrior socialist cause, are Mike Barnicle of the Boston Globe, Stephen Glass of the New Republic, Joseph Ellis of Mount Hollyoke and Janet Cooke of the Washington Post; and these are just the ones who got caught. Even though they are a tribe of diminishing numbers, the shrillness of their followers is reminiscent of the Pod People in "the Invasion of the Body Snatchers". They still make their presence known in the universities, worshippers of their secular religion, their social studies professor's a fit for the over 50 white guy demographic of those remaining listeners of Pacifica Radio. Even with Cold War Left intellectualism "water over the dam", we still stand witness to the twilight of the intellectual era while we watch a continued post-modernist assault on free market values. In the war of ideas, they still fight on the side of our political enemies, and their fight is as relentless as it is prolonged. The saving grace is that their numbers continue to dwindle as their message becomes ever more diluted and confused. We can only sit in awe as we watch them "rage against the machine" and tilt at the windmills of free market capitalism. The Ruckus society, Greenpeace, PETA and Friends of the Earth come to mind.

The book outlines the details of urgent political debates that tore apart friendships and sundered institutions. Kramer gives life to these issues that animated controversies, but ended in the triumph of a new sensibility over modernism, what he calls a strange fate for liberal anti-communism. What's so interesting is how people like Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling and George Orwell were able to see the truth where other fellow travelers would not. It seems that the rigid ones suffered, and suffer still, from the condition that Thomas Sowell often refers to as compartmentalized brain syndrome. Hilton Kramer has done a fine job for those of us who are younger but still curious about this struggle of Cold war peripatetic's espousing their tale of the inevitability of a Marxist heaven on earth as the logical future for all mankind. This cruel plan, which oversaw the deaths of more than 100 million people in the 20th century, never succeeded and some of the credit has to go to those intellectuals with the courage to see the error of their ways. Hilton Kramer gives them their due.

I didn't know what to expect when I started reading this book. I had minimal prior knowledge of the contents, and just sat down and read it over about 5 days. Most of it is interesting, even for someone who is not very familiar with the characters discussed in the book. After I read the book, I feel I have a pretty good understanding of the issues involved, at least from Kramer's point of view; and his point of view is compelling.

In his introduction, Hilton Kramer declares himself to be a "partisan" of artistic "modernism" and a "liberal anti-Communist." These essays are, then, a critique of twentieth-century Western leftist/modernist intellectuals by one of their own.

Much of the book is taken up with denunciations of the Stalinism which was rampant among Western intellectuals in the 1930s and '40s. Kramer is here generally on target: there is no longer any honest doubt that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy or that Lillian Hellman was a pathologically dishonest Stalinist stooge.

Even towards those intellectuals who were not tools of Stalinism, Kramer is unsparing. Although he seems in some ways to admire Mary McCarthy, he declares, "Mary McCarthy's politics were like her sex life -- promiscuous and unprincipled, more a question of opportunity than of commitment or belief."

The greater interest of the book lies in the hints Kramer offers the reader as to what went wrong with the whole twentieth-century intellectual enterprise. The author is never able to draw these hints together into a coherent explanation, perhaps because he himself continues to share the basic premises underlying the twentieth-century intellectual catastrophe.

Ernest Gellner once suggested that the rise of Anglo-American "linguistic philosophy" in the twentieth century was a consequence of verbalist intellectuals, having been displaced by modern science, trying to create for themselves a new niche which would justify their own skills of verbal manipulation.

The same analysis explains the intellectuals' attraction to both Marxism and "modernism."

In discussing modern art, Kramer refers approvingly to the "culture of modernism, with its 'difficult' texts requiring lengthy and laborious study..." He specifically lavishes praise on Clement Greenberg, one of the most influential of modernist art critics.

Why it is that "'difficult' texts requiring lengthy and laborious study..." are per se a good thing, Kramer does not say. The answer of course is that such texts provide a raison d'etre for verbalist intellectuals who possess no actual knowledge or any useful expertise. Tom Wolfe, in "The Painted Word," developed this point in a brutally brilliant (and hilarious) attack on artistic modernism, focusing specifically on Kramer's hero Clem Greenberg: modern art is nothing but illustrations for the insanely convoluted and incomprehensible scribblings of self-important twentieth-century verbalist intellectuals.

Similarly, Marxism assigns to intellectuals a far more exalted status than they would otherwise appear to deserve: whatever the ultimate metaphysical role of the proletariat, it is, in practice, the intellectuals, not the poor workers, who have grasped the Marxian dynamics of history. It is therefore the intellectuals who are fitted to run the show under Marxism.

That modernism and Marxism would appeal to intellectuals is therefore obvious. But does it matter? How could a small band of discontented intellectuals affect society at large?

Kramer again offers us hints of how relatively small numbers of leftist/modernist intellectuals spread their influence throughout American society. Kramer explains that Stalinists insinuated themselves into such "capitalist" institutions as Time magazine, the New York Times, and the universities, and, in some cases, received monetary subsidies from the Soviet Union.

The Soviets never accepted modern art, so Soviet funds were not available to fund artistic modernism. Curiously, funding for political leftists who espoused artistic modernism was provided by the American CIA! Kramer explains in some detail that the CIA-funded "Congress for Cultural Freedom" exhibited an "over dependence on the political Left as the intellectual mainstay of the Congress..." He adds approvingly, and not surprisingly given his own leftist leanings, that this "may indeed have been necessary given the realities of the moment..."

The most bizarrely fascinating essay in the book discusses the famous "Bloomsbury group" -- which included Vrginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, etc. The phrase "moral decadence" is not adequate to capture the picture Kramer paints.

For example, Vanessa Bell, sister of Vrigina Woolf and the pivotal figure in the group, although married to Clive Bell, had a child by Duncan Grant, whose own real romantic interest was not Vanessa Bell but his own gay lover, David Garnett. In a final weird twist, the gay lover Garnett ended up marrying the illegitimate daughter when she matured.

The Bloomsburyites, who prided themselves on their sexual openness and lack of hypocrisy, kept the whole strange matter secret from the unfortunate girl who thought her biological father was Clive Bell.

In the early twentieth century, the Bloomsbury ethos was the preserve of a tiny group of upper-class aesthetes -- although Bloomsbury member John Maynard Keynes did succeed in selling Western governments upon an economic theory built upon the take-no-thought-for-the-morrow Bloomsbury ethos, with a resulting near collapse in the value of Western currencies.

But that ethos has now trickled down widely to the middle and working class in America, as is illustrated, for example, by the infamous Jerry Springer television program: Springer is a twenty-first century pop-culture version of the Bloomsbury group.

As an old-fashioned liberal (what is nowadays called a "neoconservative"), Hilton Kramer is an apologist for the basic political, social, and cultural institutions of the twentieth century. While he deplores much of what his intellectual colleagues have done to our society, he lacks the vantage point to see that the early twentieth century liberal "advances" in the power of government, the structure of education, etc. made this destruction possible.

That Kramer himself is now often dubbed a conservative, rather than, as he himself confesses in his introduction, a liberal, is a sign of the lack of any real conservative alternative or response to the catastrophic social and intellectual decline that constituted the twentieth century.

Nonetheless, if Kramer can offer no cure, "Twilight of the Intellectuals" is a fascinating and readable look at some of those intellectuals who helped cause the illnesses from which we and our society now suffer.

Although I have a great interest in the topic, and I found its title promising, I could not bear myself to finish this book. Besides acknowledging the acritical position of some intellectuals toward the Soviet Union and Stalin, I did not find much of interest in this book. Kramer's book is another exemplar of the usual tirade of rightwing intellectuals against the left and liberals in general. I found particularly deplorable Kramer's intend to rehabilitate the memory of Joseph McCarthy (See "The Blacklist Revised"). In this regard, even Ann Coulter is more refreshing.

This book is not what it is advertised to be. I was very interested in the premise, so I struggled through it, but be cautioned that it is in fact a series of critical essays about intellectuals and their writings about other intellectuals and their writings, ad nauseum. If you read it all, you will get some sense of the enduring political naivete of these people (and their successors), but it is a painful and mostly unproductive exercise.