Orthodoxy: the American Spectator anniversary anthology.

Orthodoxy: The American Spectator Anniversary Anthology

edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. (Harper & Row, 511 pp., $24.95)

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR just turned twenty, which hardly seems possible, I can remember when NATIONAL REVIEW was twenty. (I was a child at the time.)

The founder and editor, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., has plucked about seventy articles from the storehouse of back issues and packed them into a five-hundred-page book waggishly titled Orthodoxy. It's a delight.

The Spectator has always been a good read, the perfect magazine to go with a beer. It seems to invite first-rate writers to kick off their shoes and make themselves at home. The results are charming, and this culling of the best is a book to keep.

Some of these pieces are famous: Taki's essay on ugly women, Patrick Buchanan and J. Gordon Muir's on AIDS, P. J. O'Rourke's review of Iacocca, Lewis Lapham's review of Jimmy Carter's White House memoirs. Not a bad cross-section: all four are audacious to the point of making your beer come out your nose, and three are hilarious.

My favorites here are Hugh Kenner's reflection on the Hiss-Chambers case and Tom Bethell's profile of Eric Hoffer. Kenner freshens up the old debate--though he has no doubt that Hiss was guilty--by addressing some problematic traits of Chambers and making some arresting notes on his style: "Chambers's taste, especially in paragraph endings, was for the resolved cadence, to an extent perverse in the twentieth century. (His way of signaling an irony is to leave them unresolved.)" Bethell self-effacingly draws Hoffer out, capturing the familiar vivid personality in unexpected utterance:

"This is something I can't explain," he said, puzzled and serious once again. "The uniqueness of the Jews. I can describe their uniqueness, but why they became what they are I don't know. It's the greatest mystery in the world for me, and I have been preoccupied with the Jews since 1929. It's a special thing to be a Jew, and this is what most Jews don't know. They think they are like others, but they are not."

(This may be the place to point out, for those who haven't noticed, that my friend Bethell is one of the most versatile writers around. He makes so many different kinds of writing look easy that it doesn't hit you until you've read a dozen or so of his articles.)

J. D. Lofton has a ball with the authorized biography of Leonid Brezhnev (quite a writer himself, if the Lenin Prize for Literature is any measure):

We learn of Brezhnev's finely tuned perceptiveness, how in 1915 at the age of nine, during several strikes at the Kamenshoye steel mill, "he sensed the determination of the workers and their exultation when they managed to wrest concessions from the mill-onwers." . . . Speaking of World War II, this book is full of never-before-told tales of Brezhnev's personal courage which, quite frankly, makes one wonder why the rest of the Red Army was really necessary. In April of 1943, during heavy fighting on the Little Land, Brezhnev uttered a "winged phrase" which passed from mouth to mouth among the soldiers. The phrase? "You can kill a Soviet man, but you cannot defeat him!"

Arnold Beichman's sardonic wit and long memory make short work of Irving Howe's autobiography and his "benevolent Trotskyism." Kenneth S. Lynn is equally devastating to Malcolm Cowley's autosycophancy. (Cowley had apparently forgotten his own ringing defenses of Stalin's purge trials and his smears of those who voiced suspicion.)

It's especially gratifying to see reprinted John Muggeridge's beautiful though dispiriting 1981 essay on the state of Canada. It manages to make you interested in Canada while explaining in an unexpected way why you hadn't been before.

Not to mention Malcolm Muggeridge, Tom Wolfe, Vic Gold, George Will, John Simon, Fred Barnes, Colin Welch, David Niven, Luigi Barzini, and dozens of others, even the least known of whom have the Spectator touch of easygoing urbanity. It would be hard to find a cheerier collection of intellectuals, though I'm disappointed that the book includes nothing by the witty Brenda Becker, who, like John Muggeridge, should be required by law to write more often.

As Tyrrell notes in his introduction, "The American Spectator was the first intellectual review to bring together the traditional conservatives and those liberals who would eventually be called neoconservatives." What it was, was a refuge from what Chesterton called the Usual Article. The only ground rule seemed to be: If it's already been said, don't say it here. Most of the radical "underground" papers of the Sixties, which all sounded alike, have long since folded. The Spectator carries on, still a popping good read.