I've so wearied of politics lately that I'm focusing most of my freelance efforts on books and poetry. Since this site has become -- for better or worse -- a dynamic resume, and yet I consistently fail to update my cataloged work on the right scroll box, I figured I'd offer reprinted teasers of two of the essays I've most enjoyed writing. Both were for Democratiya, about which I can't say enough good things. (My next piece for the magazine -- half done amid a flurry of blogorrhea -- will be on Victor Serge).

The Politics of Edmund Wilson

Edmund Wilson has been an object of saintly veneration and nostalgia to those old enough to remember when literary critics were arbiters of how people spent their time between meals and work. Who now, in the age of the hatchet job and the shrinking Books section, speaks of 'permanent criticism,' the criticism that endures because it ranks as literature itself? The Library of America has just published Wilson's collected works in an elegant two-volume set spanning the critic's most productive decades--the 20s, 30s and 40s. Coming a year after Lewis Dabney's definitive biography, the resurrection of such sorely missed volumes as The Shores of Light, Axel's Castle and The Wound and the Bow surely qualifies an 'event' publication. Now there's a term the owlish sage of Red Bank would have loathed to no end.

It's a shame, though, that Wilson's magnificent study of socialism, To the Finland Station, has been left out of this series because it represents not just the yield of seven years of hard study, for which he learned German and Russian, but also the culmination of one of the lesser examined leitmotifs of his interdisciplinary and breathtaking oeuvre: his political radicalism.

Wilson always preferred to think of himself as a journalist rather than a critic; writing for publications such as Vanity Fair, The New Republic and The New Yorker, he reported from the squalid underbelly of the Jazz Age as well the breadlines and courtrooms of the Great Depression, serving witness to many of the formative scandals and uprisings that impelled progressive opinion. Even his classic literary essays on the hierophants of the canon - Proust, Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce - were scarcely free from reference to Marxism, or the materialist conception of history, with which he had a longstanding and complicated relationship. Wilson began a tenuous fellow traveler of Communism and wound up an idiosyncratic left-libertarian, all the while never committing to any faction or party in either his struggle against current or historic injustices. His intellect was keen and rapacious enough prevent his lapse into any kind of ideological or critical dogma, and his slightly cultivated role as the aloof but opinionated observer of the major convulsions of his age, whether in art or revolution, made him one of the most perceptive chroniclers of it.

Dabney is quite right to locate Wilson's overarching sensibility as Hellenistic, and in deep sympathy with Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy. He always harbored a strong attraction to the Old Testament and Jewish morality. As a neoclassicist, he was an especial fan of the 'Athens-and-Jerusalem' tribal offshoot, which informed his later archaeological interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls and impelled him to study Hebrew. More than that, Dabney asserts, 'his evocation of the shaping of God's institutions from the things of this world marks the Hebraism that would be liberated when it appeared to him wrapped in the flag of Marx's scientific socialism.'

Wilson's sympathy for the underdog, not to say the working class, can be glimpsed in some of his early dispatches from the twenties. Very often his sense of the heroic molded his conception of the indignities and inequities of American society. For instance, in 1925, he extolled a promising young magician who was the son of a Wisconsin rabbi and went by the stage name Harry Houdini. The illusionist, nee Erich Weiss, had risen up, wrote Wilson--himself a lifelong practitioner of the parlor trick--from 'the East Side cabarets and dime museums' and personified 'the struggle of a superior man to emerge from the commonplaces, the ignominies and the pains of common life, to make for himself a position and a livelihood among his less able fellows at the same time that he learns to perfect himself in the pursuit of his chosen work.' Houdini was a great debunker of superstition and mysticism, so this Nietzschean panegyric to the hard-knock school of 20th century materialism was not wasted on a mere celebrity figure. It is also worth noting that Wilson was at one time the protégé of H.L. Mencken, of whom it is impossible to imagine a likeminded paean to the Yiddishkeit vaudeville circuits of lower Manhattan.

As the learned eminence of the New Republic's 'back of the book,' Wilson spent a good amount of the twenties doing what we'd today call advocacy journalism. One example was his deft prose sketch of the participants in the murder trial of Dorothy Perkins, a seventeen-year-old girl charged in New York with the Chicago-like crime of fatally shooting her male suitor. The presiding judge - viciously lampooned by Wilson, not usually thought of as a proto-feminist - had based his harsh sentence of the minor on the fact that 'women have done too much killing.' That might have stoked the fires of any progressive muckraker, but Wilson took to a fiery stanzaic indictment of the entire creative class, which he felt had not done enough to highlight Perkins' plight. In 'To a Young Girl Indicted for Murder,' he intoned: '[T]hose praisers of the past, accepters of defeat, / The ghosts of poets--violent against God / no longer in my day.' Well, it was one way of saying that poetry makes nothing happen.

Wilson's reporting on the more prominent capital murder trial of Sacco and Vanzetti was particularly fascinating, given that, unlike so many of his radical colleagues, he was skeptical of their innocence--a prescient judgment, given the new evidence unearthed about the twin martyrs of the American left. Nevertheless, he was angered by the tendentious state of their prosecution, which he blamed on the chauvinism of an Anglo-Saxon establishment abetted by the Boston Irish. Two immigrants couldn't get a fair trial in New England, and that was that. When his editor at the New Republic, the celebrated liberal Herbert Croly, author of Progressive Democracy and The Promise of American Life, thanked him for not filtering his indignation through the sieve of class warfare, Wilson regretted that he hadn't done so. Opposition, in other words, was in his blood.

Guilt over his sub-Marxian handling of Sacco and Vanzetti might have led him to draft his famous editorial in 1931, titled 'An Appeal to Progressives.' It came at a time when the flapper had given way to the ledge-jumper, and the gravamen of Wilson's argument was that liberals should 'take Communism away from the Communists, and without ambiguities.' How was this to be done? He advocated a policy that was a measure beyond the imminent redistributionism of the New Deal: state ownership of the means of production. (No wonder Freud conceived of the 'narcissism of the small difference' the same year the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia). It took Wilson a full decade to become thoroughly disillusioned of the desirability and feasibility of this model, but until then, he remained an enthusiast for the Soviet 'experiment.'

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The Hidden Stranger: Alfred Kazin

In 1959, Alfred Kazin wrote 'The Alone Generation,' an incisive and brilliant essay about the failures of modern literature. The critic who would later describe himself as a 'cultural conservative' and, semi-seriously, a 'literary reactionary' uttered this cri de coeur:

I am tired of reading for compassion instead of pleasure. In novel after novel, I am presented with people who are so soft, so wheedling, so importunate, that the actions in which they are involved are too indecisive to be interesting or to develop those implications which are the life-blood of narrative. The age of 'psychological man,' of the herd of aloners, has finally proved the truth of Tocqueville's observation that in modern times the average man is absorbed in a very puny object, himself, to the point of satiety.

Not many people write like this anymore, with daring subjectivity. Rare today is the freelance reviewer who sees compassion as an insufficient measure of aptitude in fiction. Kazin avoided the Marxian gloss or the close reading of the New Critics, preferring instead a full-blooded, fist-pounding approach to telling good books from bad. He was demanding, irritable and shrewd; and for almost half a century, he was well sought after for his opinions.

In fact, it would be hard to mistake the author of the above passage for a man of any other generation or milieu. 'Herd of aloners' sounds suspiciously like Harold Rosenberg's famous epithet for the detractors and unwitting apologists of mass culture - the 'herd of independent minds' - which Rosenberg applied as cuttingly to the highbrow Partisan Review crowd as he did to the purveyors of passive entertainment, for whom the common denominator could never be low enough. Also, 'psychological man' had been around a while before Jack Kerouac and Herbert Gold laid their unsure pens to paper, so we glimpse at once the longing of a recovering radical for the literature of size and social engagement; the literature of the 1930's, in other words. Finally, alone - it is a word that stalks like a golem through his entire oeuvre, from his first, career-making work, On Native Grounds, to his mature series of sensitive and meditative memoirs. If Kazin deploys it here to underscore the undesirable aspects of the novel - solipsism, or the puny object of the self, is denigrated because it ignores an engagement with the way we live now - then we should applaud him for self-criticism, too. Alienation was a sentiment he mistrusted most in literature because he mistrusted it most in himself.

A major achievement of Richard Cook's fine biography is the reconciliation of two contradictions in Kazin's life. How did one of the most temperamentally and spiritually isolated writers of his time become such an astute chronicler of it? And how did a man who hated tidy schools of thought, artistic or ideological, maintain an abiding belief in the liberating social possibilities of literature? The answer to both lay in Kazin's Jewishness, a lodestone to which his intellectual pursuits and personal torments kept returning.

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Apologies for the late notice, but for the past week and a half I've been blogging for Rule Dentonia again. All my stuff aggregated here.

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New @ Jewcy:

There's a New York you don't read about anymore but you should. It's the one in which the Ansonia is still a residence hotel on the Upper West Side, catering to dying salesmen, down-at-heel hucksters, and catchpenny gutter philosophers. It's the one where you walk into a Woolworth's to discuss Marx and Wilde while having your roast beef flooded with flour gravy. It's the one where middle-class poverty is not only livable but the cause for political fellowship, and where cigarettes are allowed everywhere, and you get a strange look if you ask someone to put his out. It's the New York of Leonard Schiller in bloom.

Sadly, when we meet him in Starting Out in the Evening, a subtle and fine film that was adapted from Brian Morton's novel of the same name and recently released on DVD, most of the color has gone out of his life and work. Played wonderfully by Frank Langella, Leonard is a forgotten novelist and who's been writing his fifth and, in all likelihood, final book for about a decade. His others, bearing titles such as Tenderness and The Lost City, have long been out of print, and he seems resigned to his status as a has-been until an ambitious and comely young graduate student Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) offers to help revive his reputation by writing her Masters thesis on him. This is the moment some older gentlemen of letters must wait for all their lives, but Leonard is reluctant. He wants to be left alone in his hermitage, and nothing about him, from his careful and precise speech to his outdated wardrobe, makes this request appear confected out of false modesty. After being told by a publisher that the industry is now all "celebrity confessions and self-help books," Leonard reconsiders. However, in agreeing to be interviewed and scrutinized, especially by a biographer-critic who wears her confidence as lushly as her lipstick, he is soon drawn into the kind of literary relationship that has felled less disciplined talents.

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New @ PJM:

Listening to the chorus of fainthearted responses to this week's New Yorker cover, one gets the impression that satire, like everything else in our sad culture, must now come with a warning label and child-safety latch. Barry Blitt's slightly overwrought but still amusing illustration, which is even pedantically titled "The Politics of Fear," features the Obamas fist-bumping in the Oval Office. Michelle is rendered as an AK-47-wielding Angela Davis, Barack is tricked out as a pious Muslim, an Osama Bin Laden portrait hangs on the wall and an American flag burns in the fireplace.

Irony should cut like a rapier, not drop like a Steinway, but still, it's not hard to appreciate what this pictorial intends. Yet it has got a few supporters of the Illinois senator barking mad.

Obama himself had no direct response to the cover, presumably because the task of appearing dull-witted and earnest fell to his campaign spokesman Bill Burton, who said: "Most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree." How Mr. Burton presumes to know what most readers will think is a question for another day, but the McCain camp, likely fearing any other interpretation might be seen as darkly motivated, swooped in to second his artistic criticism.

Some outraged liberals have gone so far as to cancel their subscriptions to the New Yorker -- or at least claim that's what they've done until Seymour Hersh announces next month that the Pentagon already bombed Iran over the 4th of July -- while others are quick to insist they "get" the joke but still fear the reactionary hysterics and illiterate rubes it lampoons will not.

Eve Fairbanks at the New Republic is a particularly sensitive minder of low IQs. The Blitt pic, she says, is "no better than Perry Bacon's infamous Washington Post story, 'Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him.' Both outlets claimed not to support the allegations they were visually or rhetorically putting forward -- obviously! -- and yet a reader would have to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of each outlet's ethos to immediately intuit the intended ironic distance."

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New @ TNC:

There is no better curator of the museum of American Communism than Ronald Radosh. Part of the pleasure to be derived from reading him lies in his intimate association with many of the antiquities and relics on display, and I mean no disrespect in phrasing it like that. A dispassionate scholar may unearth all the necessary evidence about 20th-century Reds and fellow travelers, but to have been one oneself lends a certain, shall we say, urgency to the subject. Once you've read Radosh's review of the new hagiographic documentary on Dalton Trumbo in the Weekly Standard, you know you can skip all the others.

Radosh is fair and expansive, giving credit where it's due to the most fascinating and perhaps most talented member of the Hollywood Ten, but not stinting on the dirt that was conveniently and expectedly left out of the celluloid:

There is a lengthy sequence in which Donald Sutherland reads from Trumbo's 1939 antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Nowhere do we learn that Johnny, touted by the Communists during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and serialized in their newspaper, was withdrawn from circulation by Trumbo when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Literally overnight, the Communist party's peace campaign ended and was replaced by calls for intervention against Hitler.

Accordingly, Trumbo censored his own book, took the plates from the publisher, and let it go out of print. But the novel, which had gotten good reviews, was still popular, and readers wrote to Trumbo to find out where it could be found. Not satisfied that his book was no longer available, Trumbo-fearing, undoubtedly correctly, that many of those letter-writers were isolationists, and some even pro-fascist-invited the FBI to visit him at home in 1944, and turned the letters over to the agents. He informed on Americans who only wanted to read his own novel! It was the right wing, he explained, that was trying to make censorship of Johnny Got His Gun into "a civil liberties issue," so he had no compunction about informing on these people. After all, he told the agents, some of them were "organizing politically" and others had called Franklin Roosevelt a "criminal incendiary."

Apart from being a delicious irony in itself, there is an added value of this anecdote. One of the more outrageous and enduring pieties of the American left is the notion that McCarthyism was our very own Great Terror, blacklisted screenwriters our Old Bolsheviks, and a thuggish and mediocre senator from Wisconsin the Midwestern Vyshinsky. Historically illiterate and morally cretinous though this bit of equivalence was, is and forever will be (notice that the radical left is only interested in Stalinist abortions of justice when they can be used as cudgels for U.S. failings), here we have a case in which one of the heroes of McCarthyism plays the part of paranoid inquisitor and snitch. (Someone wake up Elia Kazan.) And yet Radosh is generous and mature enough to refrain from making the obvious -- and far more justified -- comparison between denunciator and denounced.

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New @ PJM:

There are two walls of separation that the United States holds dear. The first is that between church and state, and the second is that between civilian control of the military and the military execution of war policy, which carries with it the Clausewitzian understanding that war is simply the continuation of politics by other means. A corollary of this guiding principle is that competence or genius as a solider do not predetermine those same qualities as a commander-in-chief.

Despite the fact that our own history abounds with presidents who were once war heroes, there are plenty of pertinent examples that vindicate the saneness of this view. The Civil War might not have been won by the Union had Lincoln not removed the hapless and megalomaniacal general-in-chief George McClellan, who at one point made the boast to his wife, which no general should ever be allowed to make, that all that was stopping him from becoming a dictator was his own "self-denial."

As scandalous as Truman's firing of Douglas MacArthur was at the close of the Korean War, few historians would now argue that the cease-fire that MacArthur stubbornly and unconstitutionally refused to allow prevented the disastrous spread of fighting into China.

And of course, more recently, George W. Bush's replacement of Gen. George Casey with Gen. David Petraeus is widely credited with the tremendous reduction of violence and chaos in Iraq, a reduction that has surprised many members of the military establishment who would surely not have made the same staffing decision.

So Wesley Clark's comments two weeks ago that John McCain's experiences as a Navy fighter pilot and POW were not recommendations for his presidency should not have been, on the surface, controversial. Clark was speaking on Face the Nation in his capacity as an Obama campaigner, and however politically motivated or sneeringly phrased his remarks were, his very presence on that program was ample proof of his own proposition. Didn't Clark himself try in 2004 to pass off his tenure as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO as the only real measure of his fitness for high office? And didn't he discover the hard way that epaulets don't translate so effortlessly into votes? Indeed, as we saw that same year with John Kerry, a presidential candidate who bolsters his candidacy with his past military credentials can and should be expected to have those credentials scrutinized or dismissed as insufficient for civilian leadership.

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New @ TNC:

By now you'll have heard that a handful of conservative blogs -- including Gateway Pundit and Little Green Footballs -- suspected at first or second glance that this image of Iran's recent missile launch had been doctored. It had been: one missile was reduplicated by some enterprising young master of Photoshop. Never mind that the New York Times' website, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times and scores of other daily newspapers ran with the original photograph published without much scrutiny by Agence France-Presse, which obtained it from Iranian state media. Noah Shachtman of the ever-reliable Danger Room compiles a slew of fun parodies here.

Now the Drudge Report discloses that tomorrow's NY Times will show there was further falsification by the Iranian regime:

The missiles tested DID NOT not have 2,000-kilometer range, the NEW YORK TIMES is planning to report on Saturday.

Iran DID NOT launch a Shahab-3 missile, able to reach Israel.

It was an older missile that was out of production, newsroom sources tell DRUDGE.

And a video showing what appeared to be many missiles being fired -- is actually one missile, filmed from different angles!

NYT's Bill Broad is planning to quote military insiders.

While it's encouraging that the mullahs feel insecure enough to want to embellish their displays of military prowess, one wonders if this gotcha won't lead to public skepiticism about their weapons capabilities and true intentions. Most Americans, not to mention a host of journalists, haven't yet realized that the 2007 NIE on Iran did not in fact give the all-clear on its continuing nuclear ambition. And consider how much linguistic attention has been paid to whether Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map" or "erased from the pages of time," when either outcome would probably upset Israelis' weekend plans. (Take a step back from that phrase, itself a holdover from the apocalyptic speechifying of Khomeini, and ask yourself if a Judenrein Levant wouldn't put a smile on Ahadminejad's already goofy face.) Now we have this clownish bluffing by a state that, try though it does to be taken at face value, can't help but be willfully misunderstood time and time again. A tyranny that toils in dead earnest has been made to look ridiculous, yet somehow it's hard to crack a smile.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:41 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ TNC:

In a way, it's almost comforting to know that terrorists who normally settle disputes with assassinations and suicide bombings resort to the English court system whenever their feelings are hurt. Or, to be more precise, whenever someone accurately represents their views in print.

My friend David T at Harry's Place, a popular social democratic blog in the UK, is being threated with libel litigation by one Mohammad Sawalha, a man the BBC has identified as the mastermind behind "much of Hamas' political and military strategy." Sawalha is also the president of a front organization for Hamas known as the British Muslim Initiative, and it is in this capacity that he has taken issue with David's post about a speech Sawalha gave at an anti-Israel rally in Trafalgar Square:

The reason that the British Muslim Initiate is upset with us is this. This weekend, Mr Sawalha attended a demonstration against a festival celebrating the re-founding of the State of Israel. He gave a speech, in Arabic, to Al Jazeera. In that speech, he stated that the purpose of his demonstration was to:

"express our resentment at the celebrations by the Jewish community"

He also made another statement, which has been the subject of some dispute. Al Jazeera initially reported the phrase in question as containing the word "الوبيل". That word translates as "evil" or "baneful", or some variant thereon. The next word was "يهودي ", which means "Jew" or "Jewish". We translated the phrase, as it appeared, as "evil Jew" or "Jewish evil".

The British Muslim Initiative then issued a bombastic "press release", which it pasted in our comments section, claiming that we had:

"deliberately skewed the word 'Lobby' to turn it into some other word and make it seem as though it means 'evil/noxious'"

It went on to describe Mr Sawalha as a promoter of "community relations and cultural dialogue", and object to him being "demonised" as a "'Jew-hater' and 'anti-Semitic'."

As I've written privately to David, my suspicion is that Sawalha can and will be easily shown up here. Let's assume he saw Harry's Place's original post about his speech -- or the speech's reprinting by Melanie Phillips -- and then put in a call to Al Jazeera to ask them to doctor the transcript. (If this is so, then David and many others have a fair case against the Arabic news network for willfully and tendentiously altering a matter of public record.) The original phrase "evil Jew," once published on Al Jazeera's website, remains forever, "cached" in some way traceable via Google or the WayBack Machine, which archives almost every iteration of every bit of HTML ever to appear on the web.

Sawalha might only be trying to intimidate honest chroniclers of his hate-filled oratory, or he might be like those Saudi billionaires who follow through on their thuggish threats. At any rate, he has chosen a British law firm, Dean and Dean, whose reputation suggests it would be advertising on late-night television on this side of the Atlantic. Take heart, David.

Another follow-up post at HP here. Also, see this blurb by Nick Cohen, who withdrew from this year's Islam Expo, another shambolic piece of Islamist theatre passed off as multiculturalism, which is run by -- you guessed it -- the British Muslim Initiative.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Last Thursday, Phyllis Chesler and I hosted a party for my friend and editor Alan Johnson of Democratiya. We had planned to make it a fundraiser for the journal, but it wound up becoming the kind of literary/political salon New York used to be famous for hosting. Paul Berman, Ibn Warraq, Fred Siegel, Sol Stern, Austin Dacey and others were there. Phyllis has a nice write-up of the affair (though she flatters me only slightly too much) on her PJM blog:

Alan came in with Paul Berman-I said the gathering was glittering. Professor Berman's book, Terror and Liberalism, is a hugely important work and his incisive and wide-ranging mind takes no prisoners. Paul, who currently teaches at New York University, and I have met before but this evening he reminded me of no one so much as Pete Seeger-or of a 1950s style kibbutznik, in his jeans and open shirt.

Also gathered were: The-man-who-knows-almost-everything-and-is-willing-to-tell-you: My equally dear friend, History Professor and author Fred Seigel and his Professor wife Jan Rosenberg. Fred, Jan, and I all raised our sons in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, at the same time and they will always feel like family.

Professors Nahma Sandrow (Yiddishist, retired Professor and all-round lovely soul) and her husband, Bill Meyers, a true Renaissance man (playwright and photographer extraordinaire) also came-an honor indeed, since they are grieving the loss of their wonderful son. They brought their son Isaac's fiancée, Margot, (whose last name I can't recall: Margot, please forgive me), a lustrous young poet.

And, my dear friend Ibn Warraq, the author of Defending The West, came shyly in and stood most of the time, rather quietly. Even I could not get him to say much-not that there was any lull in the conversation. He brought his comrade-in-arms, Austin Dacey, philosopher and secularist who works with the Center for Inquiry, and who co-ordinated the first Islamic Dissident Conference in a very impressive fashion.

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