Irving Kristol
REFLECTIONS OF A NEOCONSERVATIVE
How have my literary, cultural, and political views changed
over the past decades? My answer to that question is as clear to me
as, I believe, it is to others: I have become more "conservative" in
all
of those views. The answer, however, gets rather more complicated
when one tries to explain the nature of that change and the reasons
for it.
Partisan Review
had as its self-declared mission the union of
"modern sensibility" in literature and the arts with the "radical con–
sciousness" in politics. That mission was accomplished in the 1960s
-though in a totally unforeseen way.
It
is a case, once again, of
nothing having failed like success. For it turned out that this "mod–
ern sensibility" could be disengaged from the "highbrow" avant–
garde tradition that
PR
celebrated and find a powerful, energetic,
but- by
PR's
original standards- debased existence in what was
once contemptuously dismissed as the "middlebrow" and "popular"
levels of culture.
It is both sad and ironic to observe the ways in which the
original elite of
PR's ancien regime
reacted to this new situation.
Basically, they- at least most of them- decided that the "modern"
they wished to be associated with ended about 1950. Clement Green–
berg and Harold Rosenberg, those
enfants terribles
of "modern" art
criticism, found themselves writing polemics against the very latest
versions of modern sensibility in the arts. The avant-garde was now
the old avant-garde, which is to say, the old guard. Meyer Schapiro,
the leading academic expositor and defender of impressionism, cubism,
expressionism, surrealism, and even abstract expressionism, re–
treated into his scholarly citadel. Lionel Trilling wrote some typi–
cally sensitive and thoughtful essays on the dilemma that he, the first
to teach "modern" literature at Columbia University, had created for
himself. William Barrett and Lionel Abel turned to the study of con–
temporary philosophy and ended up more or less "conservative."
Along with secession, incrimination, and self-examination, there
went co-optation. Mary McCarthy suddenly discovered that the in–
fusion of the "modern sensibility" into the hitherto middlebrow realm
of culture permitted her novels and stories to be quite popular and
commercially successful. Similarly, a significant number of
PR
writers-McCarthy, Rosenberg, Edmund Wilson, Hannah Arendt
