From the Easy Chair

The State of American Literature

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 65-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BG109

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BG109, The State of American Literature from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[Rushdoony] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 217, May 14, 1990.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss the state of American literature. And I am going to ask Otto to make a general introduction to the subject.

[Scott] Well, thank you, Rush. The state of American literature is one of advanced decay as far as I can tell. And very strange things have been going on. In recent years the general publications, as usual, review novels, but novels are now only 10 percent of the books that are published in the United States. Most of the books that are published are how to books and books on how to make yourself Hercules or Cleopatra, how to improve yourself, in other words, and books that have an immediate purpose. At the same time we have, on the larger level a development which brings to mind what de Tocqueville said about the difference between literature in an aristocracy and literature in a democracy. In an aristocracy, he said, literature is apt to be devoted to the extraordinary individual, because the individual is in the eyes of an old and traditional society responsible for the turn of events. But in a democracy where everybody is pushed down to a common level the idea arises that impersonal forces are responsible for events. So we have a great many non fiction books devoted to trends and to abstract causes and motivations and so forth.

The gap between scholarly books or semi scholarly books in most cases put out by the university and the popular books put out on the news racks of the airline terminals and places like that, is getting wider and wider. We seem to have a choice been pedantry and semi pornography. And that is about the way it looks to me, Rush.

[Rushdoony] Well, what you said ties in with what I was commenting about yesterday with regard to Joachim Neander the Church historian. Neander’s Church History reflects a kind of encyclopedic knowledge, a full awareness of all the ins and outs of Church history that reflects a time when a scholar was not interrupted, as I said yesterday, by the telephone or television and therefore could spend endless hours researching.

But Neander is now forgotten precisely for the same reason that no longer will the academy view as serious any work that places the emphasis on what men have done. It has to be social forces, impersonal movements, economic factors, a variety of things that impersonalize history.

[Scott] Well, of course, implicit in that attitude is a sort of ... if I could use the phrase, democratic envy of the extraordinary. I keep running into the fact that men find it difficult to believe that there are superior people. When I met Paul Blazier of Ashton Oil, founder, and talked to him I found him to be at that point the most brilliant man I ever talked to. And very courteous, very charming, but very much to the point. When ... and I had to write him down. I found that I couldn’t write him the way he really was because the average man would not believe that anyone that superior exists. The average person is almost educated to believe that everything is... all progress is the result of an accident, of... of manipulation, of luck, of the fact that you may be better born, you may have a break somewhere or things of that sort.

To actually believe that anyone was that superior would strain his credulity and make the book unreadable. So I actually had to reduce him in the book.

[Rushdoony] That is understandable. Dorothy was reading recently a work by a highly regarded English writer and there was a character in it whose role was basically a good one, an elderly woman living alone, a figure that you would sympathize with and respect for her general character. What the authoress did was to deal endlessly with the problems with regard to the toilet that this woman had to make it very difficult for you to feel sympathetic towards that woman and that is a kind of strategy that is very, very common now, to demean every figure they deal with.

[Scott] Well, you are moving on into our next topic.

[Rushdoony] Yes. I didn’t intend to, but it pointed to that.

[Scott] The... but there is much of that in the biographies now.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] There is very little new insight in the upgraded biographies that are appearing about well known historic personages, excepting the bedroom. And now the veil has been parted.

I recall reading Thomas Mann’s book Joseph In Egypt and it was a trilogy, if I recall.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And there was one point where Joseph had been pulled out of the prison by Pharaoh and then when eh was well situated in the court he got married. And I recall that Thomas Mann’s phrase was: We will not carry this narrative beyond the doors of the bedroom, nor was it necessary, but now apparently all is to be revealed as soon as a person is dead and, of course, you know, in American law you cannot libel the dead. And consequently the minute people die anyone of note, any celebrity dies there is a flood of vultures, of grave robbers who go to work on his reputation.

[Rushdoony] At the same time the person who is guilty of the pornographic perspective is idolized. I think an example of that is the photographer Mapplethorpe. He, of course, has been very much in the news because his photography has dealt with homosexual and other acts, has been funded by the federal government and recently created a major disturbance at the Cincinnati gallery, I believe. And the interesting thing is when someone does that the favor they immediately gain. They become something of a hero so that a new book has just appeared which has nothing to do with Mapplethorpe and his kind of thing and a very objectionable photograph by Mapplethorpe is on the book jacket.

Now they are reaching today to exalt that which once was felt to fit for the public view.

[Scott] Well, Samuel Littman in Commentary magazine has a lead article in a recent issue entitled, “Backward and Downward with the Arts.” And obviously literature is part of the arts and, in fact, a directing part of the arts. I think this country is very paradoxical in its attitude and behavior toward writers. I can vouch for the fact that almost everyone in this country who can sign his name with anything beside an x is positive that if he had the time he could be a writer.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] It is the most common delusion in the nation. They seem to think that it comes automatically, that nobody has to study or work at it. It doesn't require any great effort and certainly no skill beyond what the next man has. But I ... your comments about Mapplethorpe made me think of Tom Wolfe’s book The Painted Word in which the modern paintings, the modernists, the abstract expression of school would never have come into being, would never maintain itself, although it is now sagging badly, if it hadn't been for the words that accompany it, if it hadn't been for the various art critics who decided that the drip message of Jackson Pollack really represented art and a deliberate effort instead of just dripping paint across the canvas at random. They saw deep significance. And in a larger sense our society is still dependent upon the printed word for the ... whatever intelligence it makes out of what occurs.

We are the... the people on television read mainly news as is gathered by the wire services. They do not write and compose or create that news themselves. In very rare instances where the interview is... where the camera can reach them they may get a couple of sound bytes, but they can’t tell you the purpose or the thrust or the trend of the interview. They are not as articulate. We discovered that during the San Francisco earthquake when they were reduced to asking people how they felt instead of what happened to them. And literature for western society or even, I would say, the Christian society... the Christian society is based up a book. It is base upon the Bible. And when literature ceases to have coherence this civilization will cease to exist.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, in the 1920s apart from some of the major weeklies like the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers and Liberty, which carried short stories, you also had periodicals, monthlies which were devoted exclusively to fiction. And the materials they published were of a very high quality. I am ... you know, I picked up three volumes of W. W. Jacobs in Portland recently. Well, I was introduced to Jacobs in some of those periodicals of the 20s. They were exceptionally good writing because while they were not great literature, they reflected a wholesome and an intelligent perspective on life and it gave you a glimpse into a particular area.

For example, I mentioned W. W. Jacobs. His knowledge of English seamen, English canal boat men and fishermen was very, very great. He, perhaps, had a background in that. But at any rate, you learn to appreciate a particular segment of life and through these characters and get a wholesome perspective on the world they lived in, on the problems they face. And that is gone now.

[Scott] Well, I have a different view of the 20s. The ... the big writers of the 20s were very cynical. They were Hemmingway...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And Scott Fitzgerald and the others. The 20s is a period I only recall what the later part of the 20s, of course. But it was a rough, vulgar, stupid era. Anyone who calls it... who thinks that it was a happy era has no knowledge of what it really was like. And the literature was to a great deal, extent, debunking... debunking literature, making fun of the Victorians and... and Hemming... what Hemmingway called the noble words with a sneer.

The 30s were closer to me, because I was a bit older. And the 30s were popular literature in the 30s because of the Depression paid more attention to the common people than the literature of the 20s. And even the New Yorker, for instance, they had... I remember one of the best stories that appeared in the New Yorker in the 30s was the luckiest man in the world who had gotten a job driving a dynamite truck. And there were blue collar people in the New Yorker stories and there were people who had money troubles and how they helped, how they handled them.

Now for a day the New Yorker is off into fantasy of some sort. The stories have... all mood. They have no plot. They have ... they are all middle. They have no end, no beginning. And, of course, again, perversion stalks through the pages.

[Rushdoony] You are very right about the 20s as they were reflected in the reigning novels of the area... era. But remember some of the great old story tellers like Clarence Buddington Killon.

[Scott] That I do.

[Rushdoony] And Peter B. Kind.

[Scott] Yes, that I do.

[Rushdoony] And there many, many others were still around.

[Scott] That its true.

[Rushdoony] ...and were writing for may publications.

[Scott] That is true.

[Rushdoony] The men you mentioned, of course, came increasingly to the fore because they were promoted by the New York critics who were of the same general school as H. L. Mencken, cynics.

[Scott] Well, what we had here—and I have the book at home—a university book called the making of Faulkner. Faulkner was made by the universities.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And he really didn't hit the popular mind until after World War II when they published a portable Faulkner. And that the drums really rolled and he really... that... that is when he was suddenly erected as a great writer. I have trouble with Faulkner. I have trouble with {?} I have trouble with {?} I have trouble with anybody who can’t complete a sentence.

[Rushdoony] Yes. well, I read Faulkner when I was in the university and I learned about the same time that he was an alcoholic and my conclusion was that if I thought like that and wrote like that, I would be drunk all the time to run away from myself. He was a mess.

[Scott] He was a mess and a very unhappy mess and so are all the ones I have just mentioned.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] And this idea of art and especially writers as being unhealthy people is now a part of the American legend. I have another book at home on alcoholic writers and they go on from one to the next to the next and I remember when I was in South Africa that one of the party in the tour, in the first tour I took bought some wine and served ... had... gave everybody cups and was serving wine. This was early in the morning and even the smell of wine early in the morning is not attractive to me and he said, “Oh, come on.” He said, “We all know that you are a writer and all writers are alcoholics.”

[Rushdoony] Did you say, “I am a teetotaler writer?”

[Scott] I just laughed. Gave my cup to somebody else. But what is happening here is that the university has gradually moved in to the old aristocratic position of determining who is a real writer and who is not and who is acceptable and who is not. Now I have been very fortunate in some of my historical books in not having to go through a peer review. Anne’s cousin, Gilman Ostrander, who was a professor of American history and had a number of books published suffered the agonies of the damned because the minute he turned in a manuscript the publisher would send it to a peer review of other professors of American history and you know they wouldn’t leave a sentence alone.

[Rushdoony] Well, in the 30s when I was a student English departments at that time at colleges and universities tended to be very heavily tilted towards homosexual professors who, in turn, favorably promoted homosexual writers and homosexual students. And it was a well known thing how you could get a doctorate the easy way.

Now that is the kind of temperament that began to reign.

[Scott] Well, of course, in literature you recall in, say, the late 40s and early 50s where you would pick up a book if it was a novel and you would see where the writer had been a motorcycle rider, a dishwasher, a truck driver. Gosh knows they had the wildest backgrounds you can imagine.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That is all gone. Now you get his educational résumé and more and more they ... the... I have forgotten the name of the publication now that is put out by Phi Beta Kappa, but American Scholar, I think it is....

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...had a long article a few issues back on the type of literature, the type of fiction that is coming out of the universities and he said they are writing for other professors.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They are not writing for the American people. And this is, I think one of the problems of the American culture today.

We know, of course, that there is a small coterie that writes the television scripts, because Stein has told us about that, Ben Stein. But every country needs its legends. Every country needs its narrations. Every country needs a literature that is living with it and is part of it and that doesn’t hate it. This is the only country and the only literature, I think, in all history that is written by people who seem to hate their fellow citizens and their culture.

[Rushdoony] I think, however, Otto, that that is common now to the western world, because the academic community in country after country has begun to dominate the literary scene. They set the standards. They are closely linked with the critics and they do have guest professorships whereby they go from one country to another and the foundations finance that so that we are developing an international culture of studied ruthlessness and a contempt for the old values.

[Scott] Well, the critics are mainly non WASP, as you know. And they absolutely push all the WASP values under the water.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They take great pleasure in denigrating them.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now this is a ... this is a rather sinister turn of events, because it robs people of what they have the right to expect from their writers and their intellectuals.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think one of the clearest indications of what has happened is poetry. If you go back to the 20s you find that there were poets like Edna Saint Vincent Milet who despite her rather warped perspective had a magnificent lyrical quality.

[Scott] She was a lyric poet.

[Rushdoony] And Sarah Teasdale, with her superb poetry. Rachel Lindsey who came out of a Salvation Army family and who believed that poetry should be read by the people and would recite it in public. His poetry reads magnificently when read aloud. You had a host of poets like that. But today the poets have university lectureships. They get grants from foundations. They write poetry that no one but a professor will read which are for most part meaningless and when they do have meaning you are sorry they do. They are so foul. But this is poetry. Who reads it now?

[Scott] I don't know. There is a great deal of it printed. When Athenaeum was operating as an independent house the production manager, Harry Ford, was also the poetry editor which I always found to be a very unusual combination of talents and in their catalog every year they had a number of books of poetry. I have only a very few poems... poets that I can endure. I like Keats. I like Byron. I know you don’t, but I do. And I like a few others, very few others. Mostly some bad school teachers hammered poetry right out of my heart and I just couldn’t stand it and I got through gnawing on one or two phrases for three months I got to the point where I hated the whole idea and I could never understood who issued the license that enabled them to break all the rules.

[Rushdoony] Well, I delight in poetry. So I pick up a few books of poetry each year hoping to find something that will be intelligible.

[Scott] How does it work out?

[Rushdoony] Badly.

[Scott] Badly.

[Rushdoony] Very badly, very, very badly.

[Scott] Well ,of course, Dillon Thomas was a pleasure. I don’t know. Have you read him?

[Rushdoony] Who?

[Scott] Dillon Thomas.

[Rushdoony] Oh, Dillon Thomas. Yes. He was occasionally a readable, but by and large the books of poetry are published with foundation grants to be sold to universities.

[Scott] Well, that is true a great deal.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Now the university presses, of course, are union publications. They are turning out some very good things, some very interesting things, but I recall being told by a publisher in New York who rejected a manuscript of mine, he said, “The problem, Otto, is you ... your work,” he said, “is not heavily pedantic.” He said, “It isn’t footnoted every other minute like the universities would turn out. And,” he said, “it isn’t down to the common level.” He said, “you come in between. And,” he said, “unfortunately, you get lost.”

I said, “That is where most people are.”

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I couldn’t see his argument for little green apples.

[Rushdoony] That is right.

Well, the state of literature today is a very sorry one because the problem is two fold. First, people are not learning how to read in the public schools and the number of functional illiterates is growing by leaps and bounds. And, second, those who can read can’t find anything fit to read.

[Scott] Well, we do have probably the busiest people in the world. Most of the... we really lead harassed lives. Most Americans, I think, in their prime today are oppressed on the job with reports, with voluminous papers and with things to fill out and things to look at and things to review and when they get through they really don’t have the energy to read. There are and somebody said this once and he said it better, I am sure, that some of the most beautiful flowers emerge from dung hills. You know that some of the great pieces of literature the world has come out of some very troubled and very unpleasant periods. So you really... there is no... there seems to be no real thumb on this. You really can’t say that literature is totally dependent upon society. But what we are running into here its that the publishers in New York have adopted a Hollywood system. They have stars. They want blockbusters and they will no longer promote the writing for a smaller audience who can produce steadily and on a high level over a period of time. And they will no longer promote the writer for a smaller audience who can produce steadily and on a high level over a period of time.

The writers that you recalled in the 30s when writers were really held aloft...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They were celebrities. But now there are no great writers in the country as far as the average person is concerned. There are some very popular writers, but let’s look a them. I mean, will anybody remember Judy Bloom?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] We don’t have any female writers like Vena Delmar and some of the others who used to write for the women.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Women don’t read as much... but even so, women read more than men do.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Women have been more prone to read and they have been important to literature because not being tied to a nine to five job...

[Scott] ... in the past.

[Rushdoony] ... in the past, they have been the readers. But two things have happened. One more and more women are working so they are reading less and, second, their tastes have been debauched so they are reading paper book romances. What is it Barbara Cartilage type of things?

[Scott] {?} Harlequins.

[Rushdoony] You began earlier, Otto, by calling attention to the fact that tat one time literature was written for an aristocracy and others benefited by the fact that there was an audience that concentrated on literature, on the arts, generally that was intelligent, that had an awareness of the importance of the individual. Well, that was an important factor which has not been appreciated in the histories of literature and the arts. In the arts more so in painting, but in the sphere of literature it has not been appreciated. In fact, it has been dealt with rather negatively. And I think a major turning point in western literature in this country, in particular came with women’s vote. One very fine political scientist in this country at Columbia called attention after World War II to what would happen now. He said that women’s role had been critical in the past in a number of areas. Two important ones were the arts and charities. And he predicted that with women now voting they would seek to replace charity with Welfarism which, of course, has happened.

And the other area, as women have gone form voting to working, the audience that was very important to the arts is now gone. It used to be that there was a regular circuit before World War II across the country, of women’s organizations, clubs, church groups and the like to ... which writers spoke . They made a tour of a country that way. And now it is replaced with the television promotional and a radio promotional.

But that is not the same. It is an entirely different thing.

[Scott] It certainly isn't the same. Well, of course, after the civil war, as you know, American men got busy in business and industry building roads, factories and so forth, take care of the flood of immigrants and bring the industrialization of the country really took an upwards spurt after 65. And the arts were turned over to the women. There was a feminization of American art and genteel literature reigned because the women’s audience was the big audience and the writers were very careful and it was a sort of a post Victorian type of literature which prevailed up until the turn of the century when the muckrakers came in and, of course, that sort of literature, you might say, adulterated literature. It couldn’t last. It really was too unrealistic.

But what we have now, as you indicate, the women’s clubs are fading because the women don't have time for them anymore. They are mainly occupied by older women today. Younger women are not joining them, don’t have the time. But women are more interested in the political and the economic than they used to be...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...because they are in the work place. And so they have become almost like men in their regard to literature. They want books and magazines that are practical, that have an immediate meaning that help them in specific projects. And this, of course, is one of the aspects of a democracy is that everybody is busy on projects. And our literature even the fairly good products that are coming out of the universities are aimed at audiences of specialists, not at general audiences. In fact, the professors believe that anyone who reaches general popularity is by that factor de passé. He no longer has professional status. They turn their back on that sort of thing. Very few of them escape that. Just a few, if they are on the left, they can escape it, Margaret Meade, for instance and her trash could... could get someplace, but generally speaking, no.

What we have in ... in the terms of literature, much as in the terms of the American society, we have a great number of very skilful writers who are all following a very narrow field. And there is no overall literature in the real sense of the word. There has been no embracive vision of the nation or the people. The people are different than they were. They are more variegated. We have more racists. We have more religions. We have more of everything that we had. We have here an empire of people which has not been equaled since the days of Rome, but we don’t have the image of Rome. We don’t have the old image of America and none of our literatures have recovered the glimpse of the eagle that once flew so high.

This is a very serious lack.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, because the academy has taken over literature analysis has replaced appreciation.

[Scott] That is a very good point.

[Rushdoony] And I called attention before we began to the fact that Coleridge’s poem:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree :

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran...

And so on. A poem of about, maybe 40 lines. And yet thousands of pages have been written by academicians analyzing sentence after sentence of that poem.

Now it is that spirit of deception that has taken over and, I think, has helped destroy literature.

[Scott] Well, it is timidity, too. We have burning issues at stake here in the United States. You can’t even look out the window without seeing a novel and yet I went through a card catalog not too long ago and by mistake opened up something in the Js and there was the entire card catalog was packed with books on William James.

Now William James isn't worth more than five cards at the most.

[Rushdoony] Well, when I was a student I recall very vividly this other student who was a major, I think in physics or chemistry, something like that, who was in a course in the English department in which I was enrolled and after about two months he decided to drop out. I have forgotten what poets were being studied. It may have been the romantic, but I don’t recall. And he, in particular, was very fond of one of the poets and hoped to know more about him and get a better appreciation of his poetry and he said, “All I have gotten here is deception.” And he said, “I am going to quit before they sour me on the poet.”

[Scott] Well, of course. And, of course, now, of course, they have schools of literature. The idea that the writer doesn’t know what he said.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Didn’t understand what he... what he tried to produce. And then we have the school that believes that words have no really meaning at all...

[Rushdoony] Yes...

[Scott] Because they are taken to have different meanings by different people. Ergo, there is no meaning. And, of course, we could say that about the person who said that. But he wouldn’t feel too good about it. We have literature for specialists, literature for every segment of the market. The publishing companies now have marketing men who sit alongside the editor and the editor may select a book, but the marketing man will destroy the book. James I which Ross House reprinted was seriously considered by Harper and Rowe in San Francisco and the marketing man turned it down.

Now the marketing people have the market all divided like a pie plate into slices. And everything has to be categorized. Well, I can think of many books that don’t fit any category. I recall an engineering friend of mine who I... looked at one of my corporate manuscripts and I said... I apologized because I gave the engineer short shrift.

He said, “That is all right.” He said, “I like to read about other things than engineering. There are a lot of other things that I am interested in.”

But the marketing men don’t all you to have more than one interest.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Someone on our mailing list wrote to me last year about a manuscript that had been turned down by publishers because while the editor said it was an excellent book, the marketing men were against it.

[Scott] Well, and what have we got?

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] What does a marketing man know about readers?

[Rushdoony] And his prejudices govern the market, because he will not promote a book that...

[Scott] ...he feels that his salesmen can’t describe in 15 seconds...

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] ...to complete the sentence for you. I... I find this one of the most ludicrous things in the world.

[Rushdoony] Well, you and I recall a conversation with a publisher about one of your books and he as afraid that the marketing men would not accept it.

[Scott] Which they didn’t. As a matter of fat, it was a Christian publisher who is apparently addicted to Dick and James theology.

[Rushdoony] Yes. That is a good way of describing it. And is afraid of his own marketing men whom he can fire at will.

[Scott] Yes. But in the meantime the bird has been shot. He doesn't fly. And one of the reasons that people do not read is because the things that are put in front of them are not worth reading.

[Rushdoony] That is right.

[Scott] We have best sellers that move from the best seller list to the remainder table in 10 days.

[Rushdoony] Well, I think I told you about what Tinsley the editor of the New Republic did recently.

[Scott] Kinsley.

[Rushdoony] Kinsley, yes. He... he is such a tinsel character most of the time. I don’t know why I want to call him Tinsley. That may be the reason. But at any rate, he went into a major book store and he put slips offering five dollars to anyone who located the slip. He did this to stacks of books. Never had one person call him, because he found his theory was confirmed that most people who read books don't read them. They read the popular reviews. Then they get the book and discuss it with others. But they have no knowledge of what the book says.

[Scott] Well, that is almost as evil a stunt as the trick of sending a large tome, or recommending

a large tome to somebody and saying, “I am sure you will be amused at what they say about you.”

[Rushdoony] Yes, I recall. I have forgotten who it was who pulled that stunt, a dull book of over 1000 pages that everybody read and {?} reference which was non existent.

Well,...

[Scott] Well, journalism has replaced a lot of literature and, in fact, a lot of things that parade now as literature are really journalism.

[Rushdoony] Television has replaced a lot of literature and what you get on television, whether it is on prime time programs or on Masterpiece Theater is illogical. There is no intelligent sequence, cause and effect. Action is everything or, on Masterpiece Theater, dramatic shots, feet walking and so on.

[Scott] Well, I... I... I will always be amused at your irritation at one mystery series of Masterpiece Theater, because it was mysterious and I thought, what else did you expect from a mystery series?

But putting that to one side...

[Rushdoony] It was hokey...

[Scott] It turned out all right. I have forgotten now which one it was.

[Rushdoony] Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

[Scott] Oh, yes. I liked that one.

[Rushdoony] I hated it.

[Scott] I know you did. That is why they make different movies. But the literature, the journalists say is serious, because journalism is almost like coving a thousand chess games a move at a time. There is no background. There is no time in journalism for background and there is no time in journalism of development. It is the minute. That move. This is what you are reporting. They are putting out books that consist of only one point, that has no depth. It just has dialogue and a certain amount of action and that is it. Or a political situation.

Now Casper Weinberger has just gotten out of the department of defense two years ago and has already got a book out about his tenure in office. This is ridiculous. He hasn’t had time to reflect upon his tenure in office. And, therefore, he hasn’t had time to put his own behavior in office in perspective.

One, really serious people shouldn’t be doing things like this.

[Rushdoony] No.

[Scott] It seems to me ridiculous that everyone who holds a public office or a position in this country should issue a book about it.

[Rushdoony] Well, periodically I will read not only a book of poetry, but a contemporary novel just picked up at random in order to see what is being done and the emphasis is so heavily on action that no characters remain in your mind.

Now recently our Joanna lent us one of the old books she picked up, because she has been going around picking up the books that were popular before World War I and shortly thereafter and they are delightful. They are not great literature, but they are good stories. One I read recently I have a vivid recollection of some of the characters and the scenes because they are very real people.

[Scott] Well, they were more realistic.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] They were less taboos. It was possible then to write a book about the world as it was without having yourself called a Nazi, without offending individuals who confused themselves with an entire race of people. We have almost reached the point where the free expression in print is impossible.

[Rushdoony] Yes. Look at what has happened lately to some of the various people on television. What is his name? That got clobbered.

[Scott] Andy Rooney.

[Rushdoony] Andy Rooney and then Jim... Jimmy Breslin.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] More recently.

[Scott] Anyone who takes Jimmy Breslin seriously should know better. He has always been a pop off and why would you expect a man of his age to suddenly become demure when he gets into a quarrel with somebody in the city room? This is ... but this is a very serious thing.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Because the people who are most strident in favor of free speech are the ones in the forefront of throttling free speech.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] In the name of tolerance all kinds of books are turned down. My book on James I would not be published in New York today under any circumstances, because I made it clear that it considered his faggotry a vice. That would not be printed today.

[Rushdoony] No, no.

[Scott] No commercial printer would dare touch that today. And a country that throttles its writers while claiming to be free is especially infuriating.

[Rushdoony] Freedom now means being free to attack Christianity.

[Scott] Well, a white Christians are the only people now... that it is the only white whales left on the horizon and there is lots of hot heads with spears looking of them. It is a very strange state of affairs. And really if we come down to it, I think that is what has killed our literature. We cannot tell the truth about our society and if we can’t do that, how can you write?

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, the media has begun that. For example, you and Douglas Murray were in San Francisco recently and you reported on something there that is not reported in the press, namely that gangs are pouring oil in intersections so that cars cannot pass and then...

[Scott] ...dragging the... breaking the car, breaking the windows, dragging the people out, stripping them and robbing them and beating them.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Yes.

[Rushdoony] But the press has said nothing about that.

[Scott] The press has not reported that and when the city workers went out with sawdust and what not to clean up the oil spill, the rocks and stones were thrown at them. Well, that is not printed. And lots of things that are not reported anymore.

We have here a literature now which is becoming politicized. This is true of... you notice it more and more in the selections of the big distribute... distributing outfits which call themselves book clubs. They are just sales mechanisms. They promote and they push and what do they push? They push one eyed books. They push books that describe an American society that neither you nor I nor anyone else has ever seen and doesn’t know, a fantasy world. Now once in a while a writer breaks through. Tom Wolfe and his Bonfire of the Vanities broke almost all the taboos. He did it very skillfully. It was like watching a man go through a mine field. It was really remarkable. He didn’t ... but he has touched so many taboos that none of the reviewers are able to describe the book. They simply took little pieces of it and they said as little about it as possible, for fear they, too, would fall into the cliff.

One set... one paragraph, one phrase, one expression is enough to ruin somebody. Can you imagine an entire nation being put in intellectual captivity by the people who have been voted out of office in election after election on a national level?

[Rushdoony] Well, I think the hope for the future is in the fact that the Christian schools are going to create steadily a different culture.

[Scott] Well, they are creating readers.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] I have... you know, all our books are read by Christians, families.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] Like they used to read Dickens.

[Rushdoony] Well, our grandson Isaac is 10 years old. He is in 4H and it was interesting. He moved a rock the other day that weighed far more than he did. He did it by using a pipe as a lever. He had learned about that in school. And we were commenting about that and he told us that the 4H club, most of the boys are public school boys. They cannot read simple things.

[Scott] They can’t read instructions.

[Rushdoony] No. If they are asked to get up and present something they are incoherent.

[Scott] They can’t speak.

[Rushdoony] No. And he apparently discussed the use of levers with them and they had not heard of anything like that.

[Scott] They hadn't heard of it.

[Rushdoony] No. So the schools are schools of barbarians.

[Scott] Well, this... I recall in that book by Auerbach Nemesis.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] That he talks about the decline of literacy after the fall of Rome and in the fifth century or so. A bishop sent from Rome to find out why some tribes had fallen out with each other and he reproduced part of the bishop’s report which was a running sentence without punctuation.

Now, of course, Augustine was in the same century, so this wasn’t true of everybody, but you notice that historians in the real sense dropped out of sight for several centuries. Nobody could make sense out of the pattern of events. Nobody could put them down in a coherent fashion. It is possible for civilizations to fall and I think the modern world has forgotten this, that there is a price for everything. I think you are true, but I think the Christians that are coming forward in the next generation, you might say, are going to have a lot of hard work ahead of them.

[Rushdoony] Yes. One of the things that marks our age and a number of people being with Ortega y Gassett in Revolt of the Masses ... a comment on it is that civilization is seen in evolutionary and Darwinian terms as an aspect of nature, not as a product of faith, ideas.

[Scott] No it is... it is definitely a... a product. It has to be worked at.

[Rushdoony] Yes.

[Scott] A marriage has to be worked at. Civilization has to be worked at. It has to be maintained. If you break the veil of manners, if you. if you break the manners that hold people together, then there is nothing but wholesale murder around the corner. In fact, this is what we are witnessing.

[Rushdoony] Ortega y Gassett said the real barbarians—now this was written back in the 20s...

[Scott] Twenty... late 20s.

[Rushdoony] Yes. ... are the scientists and specialists, because they are teaching the world to look at civilization as though it is like the trees and the oceans.

[Scott] As though it is automatic.

[Rushdoony] It is automatic, a part of nature. And, as a result, he said, they are the true barbarians.

[Scott] Well, literature... literature is a very difficult undertaking and is not a spontaneous outpouring of the creative Spirit at all. It is work. It is ... in that sense the same as the fine arts. Painters really don’t have a burst of inspiration and rush at the canvas and slap out whatever they please and call it a painting.

[Rushdoony] An interesting story along that line. Igor Stravinsky offended a great many musicians when he said he was simply another nine to five workman. He maintained regular hours at his desk. And they were furious with him.

[Scott] Yes. It breaks through the Romance. But I am sure that most of those who were furious at him didn’t work nine to five.

[Rushdoony] And were not as successful as Stravinsky.

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