Mourning ‘The Last Intellectuals’

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid

Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;

Hands that the rod of empire might have swayed,

Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page

Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;

Chill Penury repressed their noble rage,

And froze the genial currents of the soul.

Among those whom Thomas Gray mourned in his “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” one group was those whom we now would call free-lance writers. The words free lance are a metaphor that only comes back to life if one imagines its opposite: bound lance. The metaphor is one by which writers are imagined to be soldiers of a particular kind: not conscripts but mercenaries free to carry the lance under any flag. The conceit is one that Gray--who mourned mute Cromwells as well as mute Miltons--would have appreciated.

Russell Jacoby has just published a book that might be entitled “Elegy in a City Coffeehouse.” “The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe” (Basic Books: $18.95; 320 pp.) claims that the generation of American writers born after 1940 will, by and large, take its best thoughts with it to the grave. This generation may have produced its share of journalists, professors, advertising and entertainment writers. But when it comes to writers whose agenda is not set by any newspaper publisher or editor, who do not keep a weather eye on what will pass muster in some academic discipline, and who do not aim to sell a product or to entertain--when it comes, as Jacoby thus externally defines the dread word, to intellectuals --this generation is as quiet as a country churchyard.

As recently as the 1950s, Jacoby says, a generation of writers born before 1920 was providing an independent, nonacademic, non-journalistic critique of American life and letters. Some members of that generation are still writing, but they are the last of their line, says Jacoby.

“Chill Penury” he finds to be much of the reason why. The low-income, low-cost life that writers managed to live in the ‘30s, the ‘40s and even the ‘50s became financially impossible by the mid-’60s. Greenwich Village rents rose faster than royalties and other free-lance emoluments.

But he notes other, more sociological reasons as well. After Jack Kerouac and the Beats took Bohemia “On the Road,” you no longer had to go to the Village to find political coffee houses or gay bars or movie houses with foreign films. And perhaps more important, the United States began, in the 1950s, an improbable but real love affair with intellectuals, a change of mood that proved especially important for Jewish intellectuals. The media and the government may have gained by this change. The tradition of vigorous critical writing by unaffiliated intellectuals, says Jacoby, did not.

Finally, Jacoby writes, just as free-lance writing was ceasing to provide a living wage to aspiring intellectuals, the baby boom hit the university. Instead of writing and starving, you could now teach and eat. A generation that otherwise might have grown up to be the unaffiliated intellectuals of the late ‘70s and ‘80s became instead the affiliated intellectuals of the university, discussing some of the same subjects but doing so, he says, in an academic argot that nobody outside academe would ever learn.

Clearly, Jacoby is talking about events that have really occurred. And he gives a lively, richly informed account of them. Unfortunately, his exposition is marked by telling omissions on either side of his turning point, in both of the generations he considers.

In the pre-1920 generation, Jacoby does not mention Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), Norman Cousins (1915- ), or Carey McWilliams (1905-1983). Now, Jacoby might object that these three were journalists, not intellectuals. But Lippmann, a New York Herald-Tribune columnist of almost oracular influence from 1931 to 1962, was also an extremely prolific author of books. The same is true of Cousins, editor of Saturday Review from 1942 to 1971, and of McWilliams, editor at The Nation from 1945 to 1975. All three of these editors affected their publications far more than they were affected by them.

Partisan Review, founded in 1934, figures prominently in Jacoby’s account, as it has in so many other recent accounts of American intellectual life in the 1950s. But, significantly, Jacoby makes no mention of Kenyon Review, founded in 1939. John Crowe Ransom and the “New Critics” associated with him at Kenyon Review--Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Donaldson, Cleanth Brooks and others--were at the zenith of their influence in the 1950s, a decade that Jacoby sees as a relative heyday for intellectuals. New Criticism was both serious enough to transform the teaching of English in American universities and popular enough to make Brooks’ “The Well-Wrought Urn” one of the best-selling works of serious literary criticism ever published in the United States.

Jacoby might object, of course, on a parallel count, that many of the New Critics were professors. But just as Lippmann, Cousins and McWilliams, though journalists, were not only journalists, so Crowe, Tate and Warren were not only--perhaps not even mainly--professors: They were mainly poets and critics.

Jacoby intends to offer not a catalogue but only a set of representative types. However, a 1940s-1950s political-literary typology omitting Walter Lippmann and the New Critics is deficient even as a typology. One begins to suspect that Jacoby neglects the more impressive examples of journalist/intellectual and professor/intellectual because they weaken his premise about the unique role of the unaffiliated intellectual.

Jacoby’s omissions from the pre-1920 generation are joined by a troubling post-1940 omission. Jacoby writes in his preface: “Apart from some references to novelists marking the landscape, I confine my account to nonfiction, especially literary, social, philosophical, and economic thought.... I am excluding music, dance, painting, poetry, and other arts.”

Jacoby does not even notice that he is excluding science and technology, but he thereby excludes a group of contemporary writers, at most only secondarily associated with campuses or publications, who have linked an impressive body of knowledge to a durable social critique. I refer to the intellectuals of the environmental movement, such as Ralph Nader in Washington, Barry Commoner in Missouri, Michael McCloskey in San Francisco (who turned the genteel Sierra Club into a powerful lobby) and Paul Ehrlich (of “The Population Bomb” and other kindred books).

Literary intellectuals still have a role to play, but what is distinctive about the 1980s is the growing role played in public life by scientific intellectuals who can write. The Nuclear Freeze Initiative, one recalls, was spearheaded by a group of articulate physicians.

Jacoby is no New York chauvinist, much less a New York Jewish chauvinist. “The talent and vigor of the New York and Jewish intellectuals,” he writes, “cannot be challenged. In retrospect, however, their radicalism seems shaky, and their accomplishments not small, but smaller than supposed.” But despite such tough talk, Jacoby’s book does seem to me to partake a bit of Norman Birnbaum’s sardonic definition (which Jacoby quotes): “A New York intellectual was one who wrote for, edited, or read Partisan Review.” The result is not just that Jacoby overlooks the New Critics, many of whom were Southern, or the environmental movement, which has been heavily Western, but also that he exaggerates both the independence of the free-lance writer and the dependence of journalists and professors.

A foreigner who had only Jacoby as guide to American intellectual life would never guess that two professors--Allen Bloom with “The Closing of the American Mind” and E. D. Hirsch with “Cultural Literacy”--had written lately with resounding success for just that broad audience for which, according to Jacoby, professors never write. Jacoby never acknowledges that, at its best, the campus has provided many writers with protection for a mixed literary career, one that could include outspoken social criticism of a sort rarely possible for a writer who must please his audience each time out or starve.

And as for the relative independence of free-lance vs. salaried writers, I fear that self-employed writers deal with their publishers from a position of even greater weakness than salaried writers do. It is always easier for an editor to pick up or drop a free-lance writer than it is to pick up or drop a “salary line.” Accordingly, editors may find that they receive more, not less, deference from free-lance writers than they receive from salaried ones. And one need attend only a single “Writers’ Conference” as an acquiring editor for a book publishing house to find out how willing most free-lance writers are to write to the publisher’s orders.

For these reasons, I am, relatively speaking, less alarmed than Jacoby is about the demise of the intellectual, defined (in his way) as the serious, unaffiliated free-lance writer. He is surely right about the decline of Bohemia. (For confirmation, read Paul William Kingston and Jonathan R. Cole, “The Wages of Writing: Per Word, Per Piece, or Perhaps” (Columbia University Press).) But I am relatively more troubled than he is by the fact, first, that newspapers are coalescing into chains with fewer jobs for writers of any kind and, second, that the expansion of the campuses ended a good 15 years ago.

But I want to qualify, not refute, Jacoby’s central thesis. Most works of lasting importance in the history of thought are neither journalism nor scholarship. If, to support himself in this country, a writer must now write one or the other on a full-time basis, fewer works of lasting importance will be written. Jacoby sounds a timely alarm, therefore. He extracts an important story from a welter of conflicting partial accounts and tells it with more coherence than anyone has yet achieved. If he leaves a lot out, he includes much that is deeply engrossing, never more so than in a set of “Where are they now?” vignettes that are as perceptively written as they are relevant to his subject.There may have been scarcely a page of his book that I could read without disagreeing in some way, but there was not a page of it that I felt I could safely skip. Jacoby has written, in short, a necessary book.