teeming population of marginal cultural figures mentioned in the text: that fat-faced gourmand must be Cyril Connolly, and that exquisite young man with the snooty profile must be Brian Howard, the almost entirely poisonous aesthete who later went on to write one of my favorite poems, “Gone to Report.”
As I read, I can feel it all slipping away into time as I am myself. Probably all this stuff—this last stretch of a privileged social history—will never again come back into favor. Perhaps we loved reading about it out there in the colonies only because we, the colonized, were even more reluctant than the imperialists to let go of a dying empire. John Carey, the cleverest of all critics in a generation of clever critics, has always hated that whole self-consciously arty era, to the point of arguing that it wasn’t artistic at all. He thought that all good things were in the grip of alucky elite, and needed to be prized loose. He was probably right. Certainly the whole cozy shebang is hard to explain to Americans, who live in a proclaimed democracy, and not in a stratified society whose top layer gives up its advantages as slowly as it can. But even Carey was obliged, when picking out his fifty most enjoyable books of the twentieth century, to admit that Waugh’s Decline and Fall was one of them. It’s one of the good things about the study of literature: taste trumps prejudice. I feel the same way about Osbert Lancaster’s lineup of slim volumes: I ought to disapprove, but I can’t leave them alone.
American Power
I FIRST BOUGHT and read David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be in Washington, in 1980. On assignment from the Observer , and faced with such daunting tasks as interviewing Zbigniew Brzezinski, I needed books that would explain the American political system to me as concisely as possible. In his knowledgeable analysis of how the power structure of the media related to the power structure of the nation—the newspapers were still instrumental in those days, but television was already becoming a preponderant element—Halberstam helped to form my taste for reading about American politics. Reading the book again now, I am usefully reminded that the sainthood of William Paley was questionable. Contrary to legend, it wasn’t the CBS news programmes, with Ed Murrow to the fore, that undid McCarthy; and Paley not only ensured that Murrow was kept on a taut leash, he eventually got rid of him altogether.Paley’s supposedly ethical empire turned stupid in order to expand: an edemic declension that he encouraged, having deduced, correctly, that in America his prestige would be enhanced the more power he took. All this was laid out well by Halberstam, and it still reads like essential news. Unfortunately, one is also once again reminded that Halberstam, so diligent in his research, was hopelessly careless at the level of constructing a sentence. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t write at all: he could, but only a breath at a time. Clauses were botched together with no thought for grammatical continuity. Today, his scrappy paragraphs look so clumsy that I wonder why, at the time, I wasn’t put off American political writing altogether.
But others wrote better, and anyway the subject was too rich to leave alone. About power in the media, Ken Auletta has written a whole string of thrilling books about which conglomerate merged with which, and dozens of books such as Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus bring you the very smell of the political reporters crammed onto the zoo plane and behaving more and more badly as they slog away at translating press handouts into printable copy. As for power in Washington, by now there are enough essential books to keep you going forever, or anyway to makeyou redefine the word “essential.” I went on to read all the many books about Washington by Elizabeth Drew, and at least one book— The Wise Men , by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas—opened up for me the huge subject of
As I read, I can feel it all slipping away into time as I am myself. Probably all this stuff—this last stretch of a privileged social history—will never again come back into favor. Perhaps we loved reading about it out there in the colonies only because we, the colonized, were even more reluctant than the imperialists to let go of a dying empire. John Carey, the cleverest of all critics in a generation of clever critics, has always hated that whole self-consciously arty era, to the point of arguing that it wasn’t artistic at all. He thought that all good things were in the grip of alucky elite, and needed to be prized loose. He was probably right. Certainly the whole cozy shebang is hard to explain to Americans, who live in a proclaimed democracy, and not in a stratified society whose top layer gives up its advantages as slowly as it can. But even Carey was obliged, when picking out his fifty most enjoyable books of the twentieth century, to admit that Waugh’s Decline and Fall was one of them. It’s one of the good things about the study of literature: taste trumps prejudice. I feel the same way about Osbert Lancaster’s lineup of slim volumes: I ought to disapprove, but I can’t leave them alone.
American Power
I FIRST BOUGHT and read David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be in Washington, in 1980. On assignment from the Observer , and faced with such daunting tasks as interviewing Zbigniew Brzezinski, I needed books that would explain the American political system to me as concisely as possible. In his knowledgeable analysis of how the power structure of the media related to the power structure of the nation—the newspapers were still instrumental in those days, but television was already becoming a preponderant element—Halberstam helped to form my taste for reading about American politics. Reading the book again now, I am usefully reminded that the sainthood of William Paley was questionable. Contrary to legend, it wasn’t the CBS news programmes, with Ed Murrow to the fore, that undid McCarthy; and Paley not only ensured that Murrow was kept on a taut leash, he eventually got rid of him altogether.Paley’s supposedly ethical empire turned stupid in order to expand: an edemic declension that he encouraged, having deduced, correctly, that in America his prestige would be enhanced the more power he took. All this was laid out well by Halberstam, and it still reads like essential news. Unfortunately, one is also once again reminded that Halberstam, so diligent in his research, was hopelessly careless at the level of constructing a sentence. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t write at all: he could, but only a breath at a time. Clauses were botched together with no thought for grammatical continuity. Today, his scrappy paragraphs look so clumsy that I wonder why, at the time, I wasn’t put off American political writing altogether.
But others wrote better, and anyway the subject was too rich to leave alone. About power in the media, Ken Auletta has written a whole string of thrilling books about which conglomerate merged with which, and dozens of books such as Timothy Crouse’s The Boys on the Bus bring you the very smell of the political reporters crammed onto the zoo plane and behaving more and more badly as they slog away at translating press handouts into printable copy. As for power in Washington, by now there are enough essential books to keep you going forever, or anyway to makeyou redefine the word “essential.” I went on to read all the many books about Washington by Elizabeth Drew, and at least one book— The Wise Men , by Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas—opened up for me the huge subject of
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