Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Autobiographical
- Part I Critics and criticism
- Part II Contemporary culture in conflict
- 8 The New York Review: a close look
- 9 The new Apocalypse
- 10 Eros, politics, and pornography: a decade with Evergreen Review
- 11 The deradicalized intellectuals
- 12 The New York Review loves an Englishman
- Part III Writing in America and elsewhere
12 - The New York Review loves an Englishman
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Autobiographical
- Part I Critics and criticism
- Part II Contemporary culture in conflict
- 8 The New York Review: a close look
- 9 The new Apocalypse
- 10 Eros, politics, and pornography: a decade with Evergreen Review
- 11 The deradicalized intellectuals
- 12 The New York Review loves an Englishman
- Part III Writing in America and elsewhere
Summary
In 1970 I wrote an article for Dissent on The New York Review in which I criticized its association with the New Left. I recall that Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, suggested that I title the essay “The New York Review and Radical Chic.” I demurred, because I thought it a possibly unfair characterization of the motives of the journal. Howe and I settled on the evasive and less vivid title: “The New York Review: A Close Look.” It was difficult to know at the time just how much of the NYR's politics was genuine conviction and how much a fashionable flirtation with radical attitudes.
Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and Andrew Kopkind were hardly writers one had come to expect in the NYR given its high-brow concern for quality in thought and expression. “Given the open commitment of the NYR to critical writing and thinking,” I wrote, “the presence of articles by Rubin, Kopkind, and Hayden invites suspicion about the political seriousness of its editors.” And I wondered what would happen when the New Left lost its cachet for intellectuals. Would the NYR turn to the next new thing? Clearly, I shared Howe's suspicions about radical chic, but I also felt that the bond between the NYR and the New Left expressed a significant political reality of the time.
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- Pieces of Resistance , pp. 110 - 118Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987