25 Years of The New Criterion; The Sequel to Dartmouth’s J-School

By Jeffery Hart | Friday, October 13, 2006

but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Ezra Pound, Canto CXV

For readers of The Dartmouth Review the monthly New Criterion possesses a special interest. James Panero ‘98, a former editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth Review, is now managing editor of The New Criterion. Stefan Beck ‘04, a former managing editor of The Dartmouth Review is associate editor of The New Criterion. Panero, who did graduate work in art at Brown, has inaugurated a new feature for the magazine, providing up to date coverage of the art galleries in New York City, while Beck has been a regular book reviewer, most recently analyzing in the 25th anniversary issue the badness of a slew of recent bad novels. In the winter of 2006, Courtney Andree ’07, on The Dartmouth Review staff was an intern at The New Criterion and Nicholas Desai ’08, Managing Editor The Dartmouth Review, was a Spring term intern at The New Criterion, and Emily Ghods-Esfahani ‘09, associate editor, was a summer intern. Both are writers skilled far beyond their years.

If you happened to visit the offices of The New Criterion at 900 Broadway, a building appropriately enough designed by Stanford White, the greatest American architect, you might for a moment think you had wandered by error into the office of The Dartmouth Review. Then you add that former Dartmouth Review editor-in-chief Joe Rago ’05 is now a features editor at the Wall Street Journal, and made his first appearance in The New Criterion in the April 2006 issue with a witty review of a book on “crunchy” conservatives, meaning granola conservatives who wear Birkenstocks even in the winter. Then you add again that Hugo Restall ‘92 has moved from the Wall Street Journal in New York to the editorship of the Asian Wall Street Journal and then of The Asian Economic Review, both in Hong Kong, now you begin to get the picture. The Dartmouth Review is Dartmouth’s very successful School of Journalism, located on Main Street in Hanover. As soon as Dartmouth understands what the Review has accomplished, the College surely will grant advanced degrees in journalism to the editors and frequent contributors to The Dartmouth Review. It is probably outperforming the Columbia School of Journalism.

The New Criterion takes its name from T.S. Eliot’s original Criterion, which published in London for nearly twenty years between the wars. Its focus was on literature, especially modernism, and in 1922 published the most influential twentieth century poem written in English, Eliot’s Waste Land, which then also appeared in New York in The Dial. Eliot said that getting modernist literature accepted in England was like cracking a safe. His strategy was to publish such writers as Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and himself, but slide them in among traditional authors such as George Saintsbury, thus camouflaged, he said, as Westminster Abbey.

In 1982, Hilton Kramer, a distinguished art critic but also expert over the full range of high culture, saw the exigent need for a magazine with a comparable mission. His New Criterion would assert the integrity of high culture in literature and the arts against post-modernism and politically motivated vulgarization. Eliot’s Criterion had welcomed the then new modernism. Kramer’s complementary New Criterion would defend the integrity established by modernism against assorted corruptions.

The first issue of The New Criterion appeared in September 1982; its 25th anniversary issue has just been published. For the first issue Kramer provided what amounted to a manifesto. He noticed an acute feeling of dissatisfaction among discerning people

with existing journals, and with the ideas and practices that govern them for anyone capable of recalling a time when criticism was more strictly concerned to distinguish achievement from failure, to identify and uphold a standard of quality, and to speak plainly and vigorously about the problems that beset the life of the arts and the life of the mind in our society.

Kramer elaborated upon this in this first issue in an article titled “Postmodern: The 1980s.” Here he identified both willed frivolity and politicized vulgarization as fashionable enemies of high culture as represented in the recent past by the integrity of modernism. Then we see a connection of The New Criterion with Eliot’s original Criterion, the more recent magazine defending principles Eliot’s journal had been a principal force in establishing. As Kramer put it in his essay “Postmodern,”

What was now admired in these rediscovered styles of the last century had nothing to do with a strict artistic probity, the traditional hallmark of the modernist outlook. On the contrary, it was their freedom from modernist constraints – from modernist “conscience” – that commended these styles to their new admirers. The productions of bourgeois art were now admired for their amplitude and flamboyance, for their easy access to grand gestures and a showy sociability, even for their mediocrity and frivolity.

Kramer here cited the “Camp” sensibility identified and admired by Susan Sontag as one such corruption, standing as it did as parody of seriousness essentially nihilistic in its bearing. Here Kramer’s examples range from the admired high Camp of Philip Johnson’s architecture with its parodies of traditional forms to the celebrity “artist” Andy Warhol, who was not condemned for vulgarity and superficiality but admired in his parodies of artistic seriousness. In her famous essay on “Camp,” Sontag had identified it as arising from homosexual culture, though she did not take the next logical step and observe that homosexuality itself can be seen as possessing a quality of parody.

Kramer had already identified in his manifesto another corruption of integrity and taste in the politicization of cultural commentary from the direction of the Left: “For more than a decade now there has been a school of criticism at work promoting the notion that the New York School [of Abstract Expressionists] was little more than a political instrument conjured up by those ‘1950s hegemonists’ for the purpose of fighting the Cold War,” and citing also examples of academics and critics who have been diverted from seriousness into ideology.

This entire first issue of The New Criterion follows from Kramer’s introductory manifesto and his explication of postmodernism.

For example, I can cite Norman Podhoretz’s essay on F.R. Leavis, a major critic with whom Podhoretz had studied at Cambridge on a Columbia fellowship. Leavis was a critic of overpowering seriousness, about as far as possible as can be imagined from postmodernism in all its permutations. Podhoretz’s essay here is the best I’ve read on this important critic. Of seriousness there could be no better exemplar than Leavis:

He is always called a Puritan, and so he was in his moral standards and even more in his moral seriousness. But if we remind ourselves of the intimate connection between Puritanism and the Old Testament we begin to see that what Leavis, the descendent of Hugenots, was trying to do in drawing a new map of English literature as the secular equivalent of what the rabbis did in fixing the scriptural canon. . . . So with Leavis, for whom literature was surely a substitute for the Bible on which the Puritanism of his Protestant ancestors had been nourished, and for whom literary criticism accordingly became accordingly became a substitute for devotional meditation and scriptural meditation.

What Leavis admitted to the canon of English literature was poetry and prose that uses “the body and action of the English language,” and does not deviate into shallowness of emotion or counterfeit significance. The Leavis canon excluded such “classics” as Spenser, Milton, Shelly, Joyce, Sterne, Thackeray, and Woolf, major exclusions indeed. Many are called but few are chosen. In the presence of Leavis, postmodern “artists” such as Andy Warhol and Philip Johnson would have turned to pillars of salt, then at once the rest of the postmodernists and practitioners of Camp.

Everything in this first appearance of The New Criterion invites serious attention and rewards it. We learn (Robert Nisbet), and to my surprise, that in fact Toqueville knew very little about America, seeing it through the prism of his concerns in Europe. E.V. Shaw takes account of the paintings of Arshile Gorky and Hilton Kramer analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of Thomas Eakins. Elias Canetti provides a portrait of Berlin in 1928 featuring Berthold Brecht, George Grosz, Isaac Babel and Karl Kraus, and a sense of overwhelming decadence:

Everything was equally close in Berlin, every kind of effect was permitted: no one was prohibited from making himself noticeable if he didn’t mind the strain. For it was no easy matter: the noise was great, and you were always aware, in the midst of the noise and tumult, that things were worth hearing and seeing. Anything went. The taboos, of which there was no lack anywhere, especially in Germany, dried out here. You could come from an old capital like Vienna and feel like a provincial here, and you gaped until your eyes grew accustomed to remaining open.

And:

The animal quality and the intellectual quality, bared and intensified to the utmost, were mutually entangled, in a kind of alternating current. If you had awakened to your own animality before coming here, you had to increase it in order to hold out against the animality of other people: and if you weren’t very strong, were soon used up.

This is the Berlin of the Weimar Republic, powerfully evoked here by Canetti and also, for example, in Mann’s great novel Doctor Faustus, indeed by Christopher Isherwood and by many others. The emotion unstated here is that something had to give. And we have the knowledge as we read Canetti that Hitler was waiting in the wings.

With this first issue The New Criterion was off to a splendid start, and as it continued it met the challenge it had issued when it was named after T.S. Eliot’s original Criterion.

In 1988 appeared The New Criterion Reader: The First Five Years, edited with an introduction by Hilton Kramer. I do not have space here to discuss in detail the achievement represented in this volume, but I can say with assurance that standing alone it represents a critical achievement of the first order. In a couple of weeks I will return it to Baker-Berry. The hint has now been given for those who have ears to hear.

With the semi-retirement of Hilton Kramer in 2005, Roger Kimball took over as co-editor of the magazine without loss of high quality. So many fine things have appeared under Kimball’s leadership that I cannot even begin to discuss them in detail. But I will single out one to stand as a synecdoche, because I learned a great deal from it about a poet I had considered minor but also was a representative figure in a period to which I long have been drawn, the decade of the 1920s, our first modern decade and also a period that can be called the second American Literary Renaissance, a modernist Renaissance. The modernity of the period involved a rejection of 19th century manners and morals, and it was as if a powerful charge of erotic energy had released a fresh literary creativity as writers were challenged by Ezra Pound’s injunction to “Make it New.” As an example of the change in manners we can cite Scott Fitzgerald’s often quoted chapter “Petting” in This Side of Paradise (1920):

None of the Victorian mothers – and most of the mothers were Victorian – had any idea how casually their daughters were accustomed to being kissed. . . . When the hand-knit sleeveless jerseys were stylish, Amory, in a burst of inspiration, named them “petting shirts.” The name traveled from coast to coast on the lips of parlor-snakes and P.D’s [Popular Daughters].

During the 1920s the new Ford closed sedan was denounced by the older generation as a “rolling brothel”, and the designer Coco Chanel of Paris re-imagined the contours of women’s bodies. Corsets and hourglass shapes went out and svelte came in—maybe even in Kansas, though that seems doubtful -- and Gatsby’s parties testify to the effect of Prohibition. The perfume Chanel No. 5 became as popular as bathtub gin. (See the very useful book Flapper by Joshua Zeitz (2005)). When Lindbergh flew to Paris in 1927, John Held Jr.’s sheiks and shebas began bouncing in a dance called the Lindy Hop, and when Babe Ruth hit his sixty home runs the same year a candy bar appeared called the Baby Ruth.

If I were to choose from recent issues of The New Criterion the single essay that made the most difference to me, I would have to cite John Simon’s (April 2006) review of a book of Edna St. Vincent Millay selections. He made me see Millay as a poet of least the middle rank whereas I had heretofore viewed her as an attractive and representative figure but a minor poet. Simon provided for me a recognition of her full capability, an invaluable new sense of her best work that has been a permanent acquisition for me, in literary terms a pearl of infinite price.

Of course she does remain representative of the 1920s, central even; which is why Edmund Wilson, one of her many lovers, evoked her in a long appreciative essay to conclude his collection of reviews from the 1920s, The Shores of Light (splendidly appropriate title, from Virgil). Here is Wilson’s Millay, young and with her red-haired beauty, during the 1920s:

Running around the corner of Macdougal Street, flushed and laughing, like a nymph, with her hair swinging, Floyd Dell, also laughing, pursued her. . . I leave this image here at the end . . . a glimpse of Edna as the fleeing and challenging Daphne of her Figs From Thistles poem – from the time when . . . she had first come down from Vassar to the Village.

John Simon’s splendid demonstration of the more complex achievement she demonstrated, especially in his analysis of some of her best sonnets, does not at all erase for me the evocative quality or the purity of such early lyrics as these, reflecting her knowledge of the Latin poets, notably Catullus:

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, an oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light.

And:

Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon sand.

This in her high-spirited way alludes to, and rejects, the Jesus of

Matthew 24-27:

Whoever then hears these commandments of mine and carries them out is like a wise man who built his house upon rock, and the rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall; it was founded upon rock. But whoever hears these commandments of mine and does not carry them out is like a fool, who built his house on sand; and the rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat upon that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it.

You have to love a young woman who blew that away in with a couplet.

The president of Vassar had begged Miss Millay to please obey the college rules, saying he didn’t want to be remembered as the man who expelled Shelly.
Finally here, what amounts to one of her manifestoes of independence:

Thursday

And if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday –
So much is true.

And why you come complaining
Is more than I can see.
I loved you Wednesday, -- yes – but what
Is that to me?

It seemed for a decade or so that everyone was in love with Edna Millay.

So now, at its 25th anniversary—thus a year younger than The Dartmouth Review—The New Criterion has lived up to the promise of that splendid first number, and Hilton Kramer’s declaration of war against post-modernism and the corruption of taste. The New Criterion had its gala celebration at the Union League Club in New York, even as The Dartmouth Review did in 2005.

25 Years of The New Criterion; The Sequel to Dartmouth’s J-School

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