The Little Magazine That Could
Little magazines have the lifespan of gerbils and goldfish — you can shower them with love and attention but still count on them dying in three years. For a literary journal like the New Criterion to have survived a quarter century is equivalent of a man reaching the age of 100: He stands as a triumph of the life principle, no matter how much of a codger he may now be.
Tonight at the CUNY graduate center, the magazine will celebrate its 25th anniversary and the publication of "Counterpoints: 25 Years of The New Criterion on Culture & the Arts" (Ivan R. Dee, 484 pages, $35), an anthology of some its best essays on literature, history, fine arts, theater, music, and world affairs. The symposium will include Judge Robert Bork, Anthony Daniel, Eric Ormsby, Mark Steyn, and co-editor Roger Kimball in what is sure to be a lively discussion about the state of American culture.
The New Criterion was born at an important cultural moment that shows no signs of subsiding. In 1982, Hilton Kramer, exasperated by waning critical standards at the New York Times, left his post as chief art critic to start a new magazine dedicated, in T.S. Eliot's words, to "the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste." Along with his co-editor, the late Samuel Lipman, the first issue featured Norman Podhoretz on F.R. Leavis, Joseph Epstein on the state of literary culture, Frederick Brown on Simon de Beauvoir, and Elias Canetti on his first impressions of Bertolt Brecht. Many of the best New York intellectual journals — the New Leader, Partisan Review, Commentary, the New York Review of Books — gave prominent coverage to the arts, but here at last was one devoted exclusively and unabashedly to high culture.
If the household gods of the magazine have been T.S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh, its perennial targets have been the academy and assorted depredations of the art world. The magazine pits itself against the complacent, jacket-copy style reviewing of the popular press, as well as the obscurantism promulgated by some corners of the academy. Itching for old-style literary brawls, the editors have cherished their enemies and welcomed new ones. Few other conservative journals would deign to take an interest in a small magazine like the New Left Review, but Mr. Kimball was more than happy to oblige with an excoriating polemic. More recently, Stefan Beck launched an early attack on the newborn n+1, a magazine that had been heralded elsewhere with much fanfare.
Like all institutions of a certain age, the New Criterion has its tics. Mr. Kimball has said the magazine aims to "repopulate the vista of our yesterdays, showing what once mattered still matters." But the New Criterion can sometimes lapse into a veneration of the past that finds the present so wanting that it can contribute to the very cultural stagnation it deplores. The editors revere Eliot, but his reservations about the cultural shortcomings of capitalism and its effects on the arts are rarely examined with the same critical vigor applied to, say, vestigial Marxism.
But part of the fun of reading the New Criterion is arguing with it. The monthly review that opens each issue is unfailingly interesting. The genteel, sometimes deliberately archaic tone struck in its pages, is leavened by the brash broadsides of James Wolcott, John Simon, and Mark Steyn. More importantly, the magazine has succeeded in encouraging young talent, most admirably with its annual poetry competition for "a book of poems paying close attention to form." Its editors and writers have gone on to positions of wide influence at the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Sun, which make it all the more fascinating to tap into the undiluted source.
Mr. Kimball is fond of quoting the Oxford philosopher J.A. Smith, who told his students "Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in life — save only this — that if you work hard and intelligently, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot." The New Criterion is at its best when exposing rot. There will be plenty for years to come.
