Opinion: America wants to know what Ann Coulter thinks of Wyndham Lewis

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With an obit, an Op-Ed, an editorial, blog posts and more, we’ve added our own cannons to the 21-gun salute to the late William F. Buckley, but before we move along, a last word on National Review, or as it was known back in the Kennedy years, ‘National Review Bulletin.’

Our editorial noted that the early NR ‘had a fair claim to being the foremost cultural magazine of its time,’ and after two hours of microfiching the 1963-1964 run of the magazine on Wednesday I can expand on that. The cultural sections of the magazine were quite lively, and the sharpness of the overall package still comes across after four decades. Among the big names: Theodore Sturgeon, Arlene Croce (on Resnais and Antonioni!), Steve Allen (yes that Steve Allen), Thomas Szasz (as always channeling either Michel Foucault or L. Ron Hubbard with a piece on ‘Psychiatry’s threat to civil liberties’), John Leonard, Fritz Leiber, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne (is that where they met?), Auberon Waugh, Garry Wills, Hugh Kenner (on Cleanth Brooks!), John dos Passos (with a piss-take on Edmund Wilson — so far so good, but unfortunately the criticism centered on The Cold War and the Income Tax: A Protest, a book NR probably should have been defending), Myrna Bain and Emilie Griffin (a not-insensitive look at John Osborne’s Luther). There was also a pretty good, and prescient, appreciation of Mary McCarthy as a refugee from the left, as well as a critical pan of the movie adaptation of The Cardinal, which Michael McGough references in his Opinion Daily today. And if you think the catalogue of rightwing poetry begins and ends with W.H. von Dreele (who was in there too), cast your eyes on Ezra Pound’s ‘Mindscapes,’ which appeared first in Buckley’s rag in Old ’63. I didn’t see any Renata Adler but I understand she was in there too back in the day.

Between this and Encounter, you could make a case that the right, or at least the strong-anti-communist coalition, was not only culturally competitive but dominant in the fifties and early sixties. Part of that may be materials selection: At what other time were you going to get Didion writing about Evelyn Waugh or Waugh’s own son discussing Muriel Spark? Some ambitious historian ought to do an analysis of NR and Ramparts as the secret Catholic movers of everything in the sixties, the Gallant and Goofus of the Great Disruption.

I make no case for the decline of this or the dumbing down of that, and if all the material above strikes you as an odyssey of boredom, well, I’ll fight like hell for your right to feel that way. But I think the soft power of conservatives is in eclipse. The post-Allen Bloom bellyaching about how feminists or queer theorists are brutalizing our culture might be a little more credible if you could believe the people complaining had something interesting to say about the culture themselves. We know what you think of Hillary, Rich Lowry, but what do you think of James Joyce?