WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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in retreat. One of his main charges against the neoconservatives was
that they were too complacent about existing society and about the
social abuses of the government in power in this country. Now, there
is nothing wrong with changing one's opinions; sometimes it can
even be a change for the better. But the smugness and the piety with
which Epstein held his former radical views and now dispenses his
new conservative ones suggest not so much a process of intellectual
evolution as a shift from one orthodoxy to another.
As the watchdog of the party line, Epstein also praises and
castigates writers according to their political views, much as the
Stalinists have been doing since the days of social realism and pro–
letarian literature in order to separate those who were for the com–
munists from those against them. Thus Epstein saves the American
republic by panning Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike,
Bernard Malamud, Renata Adler, Joan Didion, and Gabriel Garda
Marquez, among others , for not having the right political line. On
the other hand, he resurrects James Gould Cozzens, and extols the
later John Dos Passos and the reformed Van Wyck Brooks, for their
sound conservative visions of America. On Cynthia Ozick, he blows
hot and cold, presumably because she is a conservative who some–
times strays into seemingly more liberal pastures, and does not act,
either in her writing or her other activities, like a party member.
Epstein also has lamented what he considers to be the lack of good
contemporary literary critics . Since there are obviously a number of
good critics - Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Lionel Abel, Denis Donog–
hue, John Hollander, Robert Alter, Susan Sontag, Diana Trilling,
Steven Marcus, Frank Kermode, Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary Mc–
Carthy, to mention just a few older critics (there are some good
younger ones, too) - Epstein must mean that there is a shortage of
conservative
critics, and that those who do not conform politically are
inferior. As we know, the relation of politics to literature is not sim–
ple and is often mysterious, but Epstein simplifies the relation and
takes the mystery out of it .
So much for the guardian of the faith. Sidney Hook also has
recently been putting down the writers associated with
Partisan
Review,
apparently out of political motives, too, although there seem
to be personal ones. But Hook is a cut above Epstein. Indeed, it is
sad to see someone of Hook's abilities and early achievements - par–
ticularly in perceiving in the thirties the true nature of com–
munism - end up descending to a crotchety and self-serving dismis–
sal of almost an entire intellectual generation.
