A Line Out for a Walk.

A Line Out for a Walk

Mark Winchell has an interesting idea, a new category. Of course a neoconservative could be a literary critic. But is there a distinctive neoconservative criticism, as there is psychoanalytic, mythic, explicative, Marxist, or deconstructive criticism? Winchell argues that there is, and makes the case with three quite different writers: Norman Podhoretz, Kenneth Lynn, and Joseph Epstein.

Now each of these writers has a great deal to say apart from any neoconservative categorization. Each is an impressive stylist and a fine literary critic; each has re-illumined important works of literature. In that sense they have functioned as all good critics function. But let us consider Winchell's category.

A thumbnail definition of a neoconservative is a former liberal who has become highly critical of today's liberalism. No doubt many such neoconservatives would contest the adjective "former." They would say, many of them, that they remain liberals in the true sense of the word, but that liberalism today has been corrupted by an assortment of bogus ideologies. The latter statement is doubtless true, but operationally neoconservatives are conservatives.

Norman Podhoretz did swim in the murky currents of the 1960s, then climbed out, and today, as editor of Commentary, relentlessly attacks the depredations bequeathed us by that decade. The end of Joseph Epstein's liberalism seems to have come as a result of his stint as the administrator of an anti-poverty program in Little Rock. A healthy skepticism grew out of experience.

The case of Kenneth Lynn is not obviously parallel. A student under the brilliant but fellow-traveling F. O. Matthiessen at Harvard, he launched a successful academic career and produced excellent but standard literary-critical works. In mid-course he developed an agenda: the recovery of American literature from ideological distortion and misinterpretation. This agenda gave his critical essays an augmented power and interest, and then energized his masterpiece to date, the 1987 biography Hemingway.

Mr. Winchell, who teaches at Clemson, succeeds in making the case that there is a "neoconservative criticism," and on the following basis. All three of his writers are tough and resourceful critics of cultural radicalism and its destructive illusions. In my view, they are neoconservative rather than simply conservative in this respect: they do not carry with them much intellectual weight of tradition, of that sense of the past we find in Eliot, Arnold, or Burke. Their range of reference is nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture.

Joseph Epstein, editor of The American Scholar and a professor at Northwestern University, is a very able literary critic in the tradition of Edmund Wilson, and he is a master of the genre of the familiar essay. In the latter role, of which A Line Out for a Walk provides excellent examples, those familiar with his work do not blink when he is compared with Hazlitt, Lamb, or even Montaigne. As in the present volume, he can take an apparently minor subject, such as "The Gentle Art of the Resounding Putdown," or the health-fascist campaign against smoking, and seductively involve us in a small masterpiece.

Like Montaigne he writes much about himself, and part of his strength is that he is actually a regionalist, an urban regionalist, one of the very few important American writers who is thoroughly at home in the city. Chicago is his Yoknapatawpha County, Lake Country, northern Michigan. It is surely this urban sensibility that enabled Epstein elsewhere to see and define the greatness of Dreiser. Another aspect of Epstein's strength is his style, sentences of sinuous and elegant structure which weave together high culture and street smarts.

The essays in his book are rich and marvelous, so rich indeed that I advise you to read them slowly, perhaps one per day. After all, they originally appeared at three-month intervals in The American Scholar. If you try to read straight through the book, it will be like trying to read straight through, well, Montaigne.

Here's a sample of Epstein at his best, from a recent Hudson Review essay in which he discusses the current fiasco of the American academy:

"It's not what I had in mind," said my

friend, eight, nine, maybe it was even ten

years ago. He had just returned from a

Modern Language Association meeting in

Houston, which he described in what for

him was scarifying detail: Marxists, professional

lesbians, obscurantists were all

over the joint - they appeared not only to

be in charge but to give the meeting, and

hence the occupation of teaching literature,

its character. "It's not what I had in

mind," he repeated, wistfully, without

irony or anger. He had studied at Columbia

toward the close of its glory days

. . . Columbia, in the days of his graduate

study there, retained an unmistakable

and immensely impressive metropolitan

spirit, which years afterward

still clung to my friend, who taught in a

suit and wore a serious hat. But what

had once seemed the apogee of the "profession,"

as university teachers of literature

had come to refer to themselves in

their collectivity, was now clearly its

anomaly. Then in his late thirties, my

friend, with his metropolitan spirit and

Arnoldian notions about literary culture,

was a young fogey, already a dinosaur.

Most distinctly, it was not what he had

in mind.

Mr. Hart, an NR senior editor, is a professor of English at Dartmouth College.