The BOOKPRESS | September 1998 |
As William Phillips, the editor of
Partisan Review, put it, "These men believed that if their radicalism
was to be desirable and fulfilling, their thinking, their arguing, must
reflect the furthest reaches and the most profound forms of modern consciousness."
Morris Dickstein makes a telling remark that characterizes the general
evolution in their viewpoint, namely that, in the postwar years, the New
York intellectuals became deradicalized. "In a way, the anti-communism
of the New York intellectuals was prophetic of the direction that the entire
country took after the war."
The film's basic point of departure
is the "argument" over Karl Marx's theory of capitalism and the socialist
ideal, these students' original inspiration. At City College, the anti-Stalinist
Trotskyists were congregated in luncheon alcove #1, the Stalinists in alcove
#2, the two camps being hostile and virtually incommunicado then and ever
after. As they matured, their radical allegiances changed. Irving Howe
stayed devoted to the socialist ideal, a democratic socialist to the end;
Irving Kristol became the founding neo-conservative; Bell an anti-communist
liberal ("cultural conservative, political liberal, a socialist in economics");
Glazer, never a Trotskyist, a middle-of-the-road liberal, typified by his
ambivalent attitude toward affirmative action, for years "con," today "pro."
Beside their incisive political commentary, they share wit, often self-deprecatory,
always sharp. Relentlessly, the film moves on to the climactic episodes
of the infamous 1936 Moscow show trials, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the McCarthy
hearings, the Vietnam War and the student riots of the 1960s, and the momentous
breakup between Kristol and his neoconservatives, on the one hand, and
Bell, Howe, Glazer and the liberals and social-democrats on the other.
Here is the consistently amusing
Irving Kristol: "Ever since I can remember, I've been a neo-something,
a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-liberal, a neo-conservative, in
religion always a neo-Orthodox, even while I was a neo-Trotskyist and a
neo-Marxist. I'm going to end up a neo. Just neo, that's all. Neo dash
nothing."
Here is Dan Bell: When he had his
bar mitzvah he said to the rabbi, "I've found the truth. I don't believe
in God.... I'm joining the Young People's Socialist League. So he looked
at me and he said, 'Kid, you know you've found the truth. You don't believe
in God.' He says, 'Tell me, you think God cares?' Well, I was so angry
at that."
Irving Howe: "A good street corner
preacher could go on for three-quarters of an hour. I rarely lasted more
than twenty minutes, even if that long. I had a certain gift. I could lose
an audience in about three minutes."
Kristol: "Like most young people
with some political consciousness in the 1930s, I assumed the world was
coming to an end, and there would be no point in preparing oneself a profession.
I knew absolutely nothing about City College. All I knew was that it was
free."
Howe: "The Stalinists were middle
brow, the Trotskyists were high brow, because they thought in the kind
of terms that you had when Partisan Review started coming out, the
union of two avant gardes, a political avant garde and a cultural avant
garde. We prided ourselves on reading Joyce and Thomas Mann and Proust,
maybe not completely, but at least dipping in, whereas they were reading
palookas like Howard Fast."
Lionel Abel: "He [Trotsky] had a
literary verve, which was unmistakable. He was a great journalist, and
the intellectual power of his criticism of the Stalin regime, most of which
has been . . . is accepted nowadays as justified that he was right. But
we didn't know he was right, we knew he was interesting. And, in a way,
if you lived in the Village, what was interesting was right. Certainly,
the uninteresting was wrong. I'm not willing to altogether give that up,
even today."
Kristol: "My major memory of a dinner
party, I got a plate full of food, and there was a couch, and so I walked
over and sat down in the middle of the couch, not knowing who was going
to join me, not really much caring. Well, what happened was that Mary McCarthy
sat down on one side of me, Hannah Arendt sat down on the other side of
me, and then Diana Trilling pulled up a chair and sat facing me, and I
was a prisoner. I couldn't get out. And they then had a long, hour-and-a-half
discussion on Freud, in which they disagreed, and I don't remember what
the disagreements were. All I know is I sat there, quiet and terror-stricken."
The momentum of Arguing the World
increases till the very end, with the death of Irving Howe. He and
Daniel Bell are the stars of the film for this reviewer. The Jewish-immigrant
world of New York is the starting point, with historic turn-of-the-century
shots of bustling city slums. Each of the four protagonists tours his original
home location in the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and in the Bronx. Then
the scene is their student days at City College-"The basic memory was tussles
with the other radical students," Bell recollects. "At City College there
was an atmosphere of perfervid, overly heated, overly excited intellectuality,"
comments Howe.
The opening crisis, the debate that
established their intellectual framework, was over Russia's socialist "experiment,"
Trotsky versus Lenin and Stalin. Nathan Glazer, the youngster of the four,
was a left-wing Zionist, joining Kristol, Howe and Bell in the anti-Stalinist
alcove #1 at City College. The 1936 Moscow trials, featuring ludicrous
accusations of foreign espionage, and equally ludicrous confessions, followed
by execution, deepened their conviction that Stalin was a murderous dictator,
that "tyranny arose out of the movement which was supposed to bring social
justice to the world."
As the cast ages, the advent of Senator
Joseph McCarthy and his congressional inquisition of communism is a central
feature in the film. Bell remarks critically of McCarthy's left-wing victims,
"Instead of saying 'We are communists, we have a right to be communists,
we defy you, these are our ideas, you're trying to destroy us,' they didn't.
They fudged. They took the Fifth Amendment or denied." He goes on to say
the Communist Party and McCarthyites "both played each other's game, and
the liberals were being caught between them."
About this time, Kristol and Howe,
who at the time lived in the same apartment building, split decisively.
Kristol expressed indifference to Howe's dissent, while Howe's thinking
evolved to the point that "political struggle would become no longer between
democratic capitalism and communist totalitarianism, but will now be a
struggle between conservatism-Thatcherite conservatism or Reaganite or
Kristolite conservativism-on the one hand, and social democracy on the
other."
Kristol felt "expelled" by Howe;
Howe simply states, "I made a big mistake with Irving Kristol and that
was recruiting him to begin. He wasn't the . . . let's say good material,
but he wasn't 'expelled' ever." A striking moment occurs in the film when
Diana Trilling recalls, quite devastatingly, "Just before we [she and Lionel]
went to Europe in 1972, Gertrude Himmelfarb, who was Mrs. Irving Kristol
as you know, phoned to ask whether we would give our names to an ad in
the New York Times for Nixon. I had much criticism of McGovern, but I wouldn't
dream of giving my name to, for, Nixon, and neither would Lionel." This
was the "Democrats for Nixon" movement, the very start of the neo-conservative
movement, she avers, leading to Republican political victories in the White
House.
Close lifetime friends and colleagues
though they were, Bell split with Kristol also. Bell remarks that Kristol
wrote, in The National Interest, that, "'For me, the Cold War is
not over. To me it's a war against liberalism.' And I blink. I say, 'Well,
you know, I can be critical of liberalism, but a war against liberalism?
Why?' Well, liberalism is responsible for the moral decay of the country.
Well, this I find quite wrong. If there's a sense of decay, it's been in
the ethics of so much, not all, but so much of those business corporations,
and the way in which they've simply lived lives of total luxury and spoilation,
not a word of condemnation of this. So moral decay is always the poor blacks,
homosexuals, others, as a form of family values, and nothing on the other
side."
Irving Howe's comment brought a laugh
from the audience at the showings I attended: "I look upon him [Kristol]
as a political opponent and the fact we were together doesn't stir the
faintest touch of sentiment in me. I wish him well personally, lead a long
life with many political failures."
Michael Walzer, the current editor
of Dissent, goes to the heart of the neo-conservative position when
he remarks, "It seems to me that increasingly the neo-conservatives were
in the grip of an ideology, and the ideology was the ideology of the free
market, and they seemed to me to be Bolsheviks in the way they adopted
and defended and promoted this ideology . "
Arguing the World is illuminating
also in clarifying the "New York intellectuals'" relations with the student
radicals of the 1960s. In 1968, student anger over the Vietnam War erupted
on college campuses. Radicals attacked Columbia University, where Bell
had been a faculty member for a decade. As Irving Howe put it, "We felt
very strongly that by 1968 or so, the New Left people were not engaged
in intellectual discussion or debate or political struggle with us; they
were out to destroy our bona fides. They were out to deny that we had a
right, so to speak, to exist, and this was one of the ways in which the
idea of confrontation took place." Bell found negotiation with the takeover-radicals
at Columbia impossible. He felt the great universities were the essential
institutions for free debate and were complex and fragile. He tells that
when police were called in at Columbia, he was with Lionel Trilling, came
home at two a.m. and "burst into tears." He felt Columbia was all but destroyed,
the faculty torn apart. He left for Harvard.
Both Bell and Howe found radical
leader Tom Hayden off-putting, with a "very strong authoritarian, manipulative
streak. We could see the commissar in him, and that put us off." Bell noted
Hayden had been called "the Richard Nixon of the Left," and Bell agreed.
He remarks here that, "Liberalism has no fixed dogmas. It has no fixed
points; you say, 'this is the liberal position.' It changed because it's
an attitude. It's a skepticism. It's a pluralism. It's agnostic." Howe
says here, "To me, socialism is no longer a dogma or an ideology, but it's
a vision, a hope, an expectation, for a world in which there will be greater
equality, common ownership of major industries by people who work in industries,
a gradual transformation from the ethic of accumulation and me-ism."
In his "defense" of the charge he
had become a "champion of the growing political participation of the religious
right," Kristol states, "The notion that a purely secular society can cope
with all of the terrible pathologies that now affect our society, I think,
has turned out to be false, and that is making me culturally conservative.
I mean, I really think religion has a role now to play in redeeming the
country, and liberalism is not prepared to give religion a role. Conservatism
is, but it doesn't know how to do it."
Some useful criticism of Arguing
the World has emerged. Bell and others have agreed with me that Sidney
Hook was neglected. He was a potent voice on the very matters that engaged
the New York intellectuals. Ellen Willis felt women were somewhat slighted,
but Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick and Diana Trilling
are quoted and are seen as "writers," not "women." Stewart Kalman was negative
in The Nation. Bell himself, most omnivorous of readers, regretted
the lack of detailed references to Stalin's campaign against the Jews in
Russia and Eastern Europe. Senator McCarthy's hearings at the time diverted
attention from these crimes: the execution of Russian Jewish writers David
Bergelson, Peretz Markish and several others; the staged murder of Jewish
anti-Fascist Solomon Micheols; the purge trial of Slansky; the so-called
"doctors plot," where sixteen Jewish doctors were condemned for an alleged
poison plot against the Politburo.
Ann Douglas, in Raritan, doesn't
deal with the film but slights the achievements of its cast. While conceding
they were often, like Trilling, "geniuses," she echoes Dwight Macdonald's
charge of insufficient "disinterestedness" but she criticizes Macdonald
as a "leader in the group's reactionary charge against American
mass culture" (italics mine). She feels they simply didn't get it. She
excoriates Alfred Kazin and champions C. Wright Mills over all the intellectuals
of that time.
Godfrey Cheshire, in the New York
Press (1/7-13/98), writes perceptively on Arguing the World.
He poses the question of why the ascent and prominence from the 1930s till
the 1980s of "members of one new and very marginal immigrant subgroup became
so central to the cultural and political life of a nation to which they
were, at first, profoundly and almost belligerently alien?" He points out
that another, later group of European Jewish refugees, immigrants or their
children went on to become a potent cultural force in Hollywood, "an empire
of their own," in the title of Neal Gabler's celebrated book. He credits
Bell, Howe, Glazer and Kristol, et al. with likewise building "a principality
of remarkable power and cohesiveness within, and having an ever-increasing
impact on, America's intellectual realm." Well said.
The film has only been shown for
short runs in a few cities and at selected places like the Film Forum and
the Century Club in New York City. But it will be shown on national Public
TV in April 1999, and doubtless shown in numerous venues in the coming
months as word of its excellence gets around.
Most of the movie critics' comments
so far are a good omen for the film's reception as it reaches a national
audience.
"This fascinating film, whose lean,
information-packed narrative doesn't waste a word, succeeds in compiling
sharp, concise portraits of its subjects. The movie offers one of the deepest
portraits ever filmed of the fluidity of ideas, as good minds grapple with
the cataclysms of history and the human condition and have the temerity
to keep searching for answers" (New York Times, January 18, 1998).
"It's all very moving and illuminating"
(The New Yorker, January 12, 1998).
"Arguing the World captures it all
with precision, humor, even a touch of emotion. In significant part, this
is attributable to each of the four explaining the twists and turns of
his own thinking over the past half century in a way that illuminates the
usually little understood essential differences among them. In part, too,
it is because of the useful running commentary provided by a host of involved
contemporaries and later observers (including Morris Dickstein, Diana Trilling,
Lionel Abel, Michael Walzer, and William L. O'Neill), plus the deft use
of old photographs and newsreel footage" (The New Leader, December
29, 1997-January 12, 1998).
Edward T. Chase is the
former editor-in-chief of New York Times Books and senior editor at Scribner.
An unlikely, even astonishing achievement
in creative film making this year, is Joseph Dorman's documentary, Arguing
the World. In 107 minutes, the film covers the history of four central
figures of the "New York intellectuals," from their 1930s student days
into the 1980s. By doing so, it is a gloss of key political-ideological
developments and ideas that have shaped the 20th century. The protagonists
are Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and the late Irving Howe.
Essentially a series of verbal portraits depicting the evolution of these
four men in their own words, interspersed with historic newsreel shots
and some priceless period footage, the film has real narrative momentum,
much wit, incisive commentary, emotional vibrancy, and even an effective
musical accompaniment.
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