THE YOUNG FARTS

JAMES WOLCOTT

A new breed of neocon magazine writer is poised for power: trouble is they're neither pithy, nor witty, nor wise

Mixed Media

England has its Young Fogeys, a small, pale, but persistent band of writers whose tastes in life, literature, and religion are defiantly tepid. In this age of ?⅝⅜ ⅛ ⅛ extremes, they reject strong brew. They're anti-trendies. Their politics are Tory conservative. Their religion is cozily Church of England, with a slight chill of Catholicism blown in by way of Evelyn Waugh; their literature leans toward a comedy of small social flubs and withered chastity (aging virgins, anxious clerics), a mousy realism. Young Fogeys such as the novelist and biographer A. N. Wilson and the droopy chaps draped around the Spectator revel in an Essential Englishness of cricket, trains, pub smoke, and Malcolm Muggeridge tirades against all things modern. The England of My Beautiful Laundrette—racially, sexually, socially funky —is a punk mess their orderly minds resist.

While England has its Young Fogeys, America has its Young Farts. Based mostly at magazines such as The American Spectator, The New Criterion, and Harper's, the Young Farts are a loose clique of wet blankets and party poopers endowed with critical intelligence (they may be stodgy, but they're not stupid) and poised for cultural power. Their role models and council of senior advisers include Hilton Kramer, the editor of The New Criterion and fabled sourpuss (unable to keep his famous sneer out of even an obituary of Dwight Macdonald); The New Criterion's dedicated, low-profile managing editor, Erich Eichman (the Ollie North of this operation); Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter (whose children John Podhoretz and Naomi Munson are notorious Young Farts); Tom Wolfe (not the early Tomcat who wigged out on surfers and beehive hairdos, but the later Wolfe who trashed radical chic); Kenneth S. Lynn (a fighting critic in the Bernard DeVoto mode); Joseph Epstein (a more traditional man of letters with Old Fart tendencies); and Lewis Lapham, the poor man's Henry Adams in charge of Harper's.

Young Farts admire H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, George Orwell (made palatable by Podhoretz, who christened him a neocon), F. R. Leavis (another link with Podhoretz, who studied at Cambridge under Leavis and learned the steel will of the samurai), T. S. Eliot keeping banking hours, Solzhenitsyn, the Partisan Review in its glory period, Balanchine, Frank Sinatra, English country-house novels, Mozart, big-band jazz, suspenders, fine tobacco, good grooming, women with willowy souls and solid foundations.

Young Farts dislike Jane Fonda, Phil Donahue, Oliver Stone, Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Alfred Kazin, directors praised by Pauline Kael, the lower Bohemianism of the Beats (frowned upon by Podhoretz), the higher Bohemianism of Bloomsbury (frowned upon by Kramer and Gertrude Himmelfarb), punk rock, Prince, Madonna, minimalist writers under the Gordon Lish influence, exercise, deviance.

Young Farts are ambivalent about Bruce Springsteen, Milan Kundera, Lionel Trilling (the Voice of Reason, but too squishy-soft on campus lefties), Hilaire Belloc (an admirable hater of cant, but blatantly anti-Semitic), G. K. Chesterton (ditto), Wyndham Lewis (ditto), George Will, and, by extension, their own Anglophilia.

Young Fart Manifesto: Bryan F. Griffin's Panic Among the Philistines (1983).

Young Farts never watch Soul Train to learn new dance steps.

Young Farts never listen to Patsy Cline or wonder just what's with Tammy Wynette.

Young Farts believe in prior restraint. "It isn't a book about sex, it's a book about chastity. It's about not doing it."— Young Fart novelist Fernanda Eberstadt discussing her book, Low Tide, in Interview magazine.

One of the reasons Young Farts are poised for cultural power is that their commitment to literature is genuine and clearly, firmly expressed. They aren't climbing an interior staircase of cerebral wonder, like the illuminati at the deconstructionist journals; or peering dimly into the gray dawn of the socialist millennium, like the marginal hopers at Dissent; or indulging in nihilistic splatter, like the desperately with-it at Artforum and the Village Voice. They can be forthright, blunt. Their jaws aren't gummed up with jargon. (Although it is interesting that the male critics at The New Criterion tend to be strictly business, while the female critics, with the exception of the stalwart Fernanda Eberstadt, seem encouraged to dither cutely. In a recent piece on the choreographer David Gordon, for example, Young Fart dance critic Eva Resnikova confided irrelevantly, "Gordon is large, cuddly, dark-bearded, Talmudic. It happens to be a type to which I'm partial." Do tell.)

Young Farts also have a political agenda, inherited mostly from their Fearless Leaders Kramer and Podhoretz. They believe in a strong defense, a robust anticommunism, a two-fisted Israel, covert operations, a dismantling of minority programs, a skedaddling of feminism—a return to white-bread elitism. A T. S. Eliot of armed vision, buttressed with warheads.

The liturgical sheet for the Young Farts' political creed is The American Spectator. Edited by Young Fart Emeritus R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. (whose 1979 book, Public Nuisances, used the leading lights of the Carter era for spitball practice), The American Spectator is founded intellectually on the saloon bonhomie of H. L. Mencken. But the problem with Mencken is that there is often nothing under the beer suds of his bonhomie except battery acid. He was a great man who wrote tons of guff, although he towers over his imitators. From Charles Scruggs's The Sage in Harlem, we know how Mencken, for all his reflex jeers about "coons" and "darkies," was immensely helpful to aspiring black writers, encouraging them personally and making room for them professionally in The American Mercury. In contrast, Tyrrell's magazine is far from minority-friendly, not only toward blacks, packing its stony spite in a snowball of Menckenite exaggeration. A few issues ago Tyrrell entertained the whim that homosexuals should henceforth be called squashes. "Cephalic indices and empirical observations of homosexuals at public demonstrations and on Halloween night in San Francisco have established that many homosexuals develop heads shaped very much like squash (Curubita [J/C] maxima). . . . Let the universities hold their Squash Rights Week. And let us accord proper respect to the Squash Community." Whatever else this is, it isn't wit.

Young Farts never watch Soul Train to learn new dance steps.

At The New Criterion, the point man is Bruce Bawer, certainly one of the most industrious and cant-free critics around. He's also the closest parallel over here to A. N. Wilson, minus the sickly faith. Along with his work at the Criterion, Bawer reviews movies for The American Spectator, has published two books, and is the literary editor at the new West Coast culture mag Arrival, where he bashed the "brat pack" of Lish-inspired lo-cal authors in the first issue. (Bashing young fiction writers is the favorite indoor sport of Farts. Joshua Gilder did it in The New Criterion, Madison Bell followed in Harper's, and Mimi Kramer piled on in Spy.) Bawer has brains to bum, but he reviews movies as if he were wearing a monocle—Young Farts have a fear of looking fiercely drawn to a form Hilton Kramer hasn't certified as high art—and his Arrival attack on the Lish gang failed to make fine discriminations, the critic's first task. "Clearly, for anyone who can't write, this is the way to write," concludes Bawer after quoting samples of Amy Hempel, Lorrie Moore, and Susan Minot. If he thinks those three women can't write, he needs to have his windshield wiped. But rival camps often don't play fair, and the Young Farts consider themselves head-to-head with fiction's brats for cultural supremacy. They're out to defend value, tradition, and virtue against these cool goblins of nothingness.

Turf wars are a sign that literature still counts. As Mencken himself wrote, "literature always thrives best, in fact, in an atmosphere of hearty strife." There ought to be limits on how far true believers go, however. What criticism doesn't need is hard-nosed practitioners of reward-and-punish realpolitik, literary counterparts of Elliott Abrams or Michael Ledeen. Criticism needs larger doses of doubt and negative capability than the neoconservative ethos allows. As a critic gets older, he or she usually grows more tetchy and limited in responses—may even become a bigleague scold. Consider P.R.'s Philip Rahv, grumbling in his later years about "hipsters, militant homosexuals, and pomographers," or Leavis, stewing in rancor and a sense of exclusion. With masterly understatement, Marvin Mudrick once described Leavis as "—well, a mite touchy." The mentors for the Young Farts are all—well, a mite touchy. Despite their dedication to The Life of the Mind, they're fabulously petty—their faces prune at the slightest provocation. This ought to give the Young Farts pause. Kids, look at Kramer and Podhoretz, unable to crack a smile in print and vying for the title of Mr. I Told You So. Is this what you want to be when you grow up? A hemorrhoid ad? The true stimulators in criticism are solo explorers such as Kael, Mudrick, Mencken, Seymour Krim, Manny Farber, Albert Goldman, Dwight Macdonald, and Stark Young, who were/are unaffiliated, unwedded to any picky agenda, wide open. Reading a piece on Kerouac by Seymour Krim, for example, I came across this amazing sentence: "Add to this the tone of holiness and desperation in his work, and you get something like a Jazz Prophet who worked in the form of the novel but whose main concern is in rhythmic sermonizing; a White Storefront Church Built Like a Man, on wheels yet." On wheels yet! Nothing I've read by the Young Farts is as speedy, empathetic, and seemingly tom off the top of the head as that riff from Krim. Their prose is square and explanatory, as when Bawer glosses Virginia Woolf's sibylline utterance "On or about December, 1910, human character changed" thusly:

Meaning what? Meaning that sometime around 1910, many men and women of intelligence and culture—traumatized by, among other things, the technological revolution, Darwin's challenge to conventional notions about the sacredness and significance of the human condition, and Freud's teachings on consciousness and sexuality—found themselves [wandering dazed in traffic] groping toward a somewhat different understanding of the nature of reality, a new means of responding aesthetically to life.

Woolf sure is pithier.

Young Farts can trim toplofty reputations, but they can't make anything happen. They're too removed from their time to give it a push. They recoil from the present and long for the quiescent. The irony is that they're pining for a quiescent period they didn't even live through—the 1950s, when criticism was still king. Unlike their elders, the Young Farts haven't had their fanaticism firmed by Stalinism, the Rosenbergs, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Vietnam. They're a bit soft, unformed. Will they become mobile in their enthusiasms or grow their own thin, petty skin? Today no one would confuse a Young Fart with "a White Storefront Church Built Like a Man, on wheels yet." They intone through skinny lips.