The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War

In these provocative and engaging writings, Mr. Kramer explores, in effect, the intellectual history of the cold war and its divisive impact on our politics and culture. Tracing the critical debate over communism and modernism, he surveys the writers who were in the forefront of that debate and the issues that animated their criticism and controversies. An honest, unsparing, and often devastating analysis. -Kirkus Reviews

This seems to be a period of stocktaking by neoconservatives, for Kramer's collection of essays and reviews comes on the heels of Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends. The two authors share many attitudes, having both evolved from radical leftists in their early years to vociferous critics of what they see as today's totalitarian dominance of American political and cultural thought by the left. But Podhoretz's book was freshly written and observed, while Kramer's is basically a collection of book reviews and essays, most of them written during the past dozen years. While Podhoretz is essentially retired, Kramer continues to enjoy a journalistic pulpit with his weekly pieces of art criticism in the New York Observer. He takes a lot of expected swipes here, usually employing as his base a biography of the subject under discussion: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Susan Sontag, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kenneth Tynan. He blames Saul Bellow for not being sufficiently vigorous in responding to the PC attacks leveled against him, and has interesting observations on the permutations through which journals like Partisan Review and the New Republic have passed. There are thoughtful and revealing essays on two major art critics, Kramer's mentor Clement Greenberg and Meyer Schapiro, and on the mysterious Whittaker Chambers (whose now largely forgotten Witness Kramer describes as "one of the best books ever written about the Communist experience in America"). Readers will find this to be a lively collection, whether or not they adhere to Kramer's stern view of recent intellectual history.
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An honest, unsparing, and often devastating analysis of how the intellectuals of the leftand for much of the last 70 years the term `intellectual' was almost synonymous with the leftdealt with the supreme moral conflict of our times, that between communism and democracy. Kramer (The Revenge of the Philistines: Art and Culture 19721984, 1985), editor of the New Criterion, calls the Cold War ``as much a war of ideas as it was a contest for military superiority'' and writes bluntly that ``many talented people in the West . . . fought on the side of the political enemy.'' The evidence is presented in a series of essays written over the last 25 years, mostly dealing with individuals, of whom the Americans cause him the greatest anguish: those, for example, who condemned Whittaker Chambers, who at great personal cost revealed the part he had played in a Communist spy ring, rather than Alger Hiss, who in the face of increasingly incontrovertible evidence denied any role; the left in Hollywood, epitomized by John Huston, in Hollywood on Trial, who averred that in 1946 ``Winston Churchill drew an iron curtain across Eastern Europe''; the radicals of the '60s who likened Amerika to Nazi Germany; Mary McCarthy, who in Hanoi praised the virtuous tyranny of the regime and castigated both the American prisoners-of-war and America itself; and George Steiner, who attacked Solzhenitsyn for the moral indecency of implying that Soviet terror was as hideous as Hitlerism. Kramer does not, however, adduce evidence in this book for his much more far-reaching assertion that, as an intellectual tradition, liberalism is bankrupt and that it has surrendered to socialist ideology. Nor does he do much to link the decline in the fortunes of Marxism with that of modernism, his other theme. The Cold War was a war, and Kramer is scarred, but few fought it with more honor, consistency, and moral passion. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Kramer, former art critic for the New York Times and founding editor of the New Criterion, here collects essays from the latter as well as from Commentary, the Atlantic Monthly, and others. Many of the essays are updated to include Kramer's current reflections on the events and personalities he discusses. Taking postwar "intellectualism" and its effect on American culture as his theme, Kramer focuses on the "intellectuals" themselves more than on the events surrounding them. Though many of the personalities have faded from the popular imagination (Josephine Herbst, Nora Sayre), others remain alive in popular or academic milieus (Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy). Kramer also includes interesting essays on Clement Greenberg, Meyer Shapiro, and Lincoln Kirstein. For a more focused view of Kramer's take on the visual arts, see his Against the Grain: The New Criterion on Art and Intellect at the End of the Twentieth Century (LJ 3/1/95). Though for this reviewer's taste, Kramer finds a few too many Stalinists in the American cultural hierarchy, this is a recommended purchase for most collections.AMartin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DC
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.