New New York Intellectual: An Interview with Louis Menand

Jeffrey J. Williams New New York Intellectual: An Interview with Louis Menand Jeffrey Williams: Itseems as ifyou effortlessly bridge the two spheres of literature and criticism, or journalism and scholarship, without discernible tension. You're now a staff writer for The New Yorker, contributing editor of the New York Review ofBooks, and you were at one time an editor of The New Republic, but you're also an academic critic, with an Oxford book on modernism, and editor of the Cambridge History ofLiterary Criticism on the modern period. I'd like to ask about your background and how you came to do this. But I'd also like to ask how you see the two spheres fitting together; on the one hand, you make it seem like a natural mix, but on the other hand, you have a somewhat anomalous position. You could easily be identified as part of the new breed of public intellectuals, but still most professors don't usually do both journalism and academic work. Louis Menand: The answer to the first part of your question is that I went to Pomona College, whose English department in those days was very eclectic. Some of the people there wrote poetry; some directed theatre; some did scholarly editions, literary history, criticism, and so on. The big thing that we English majors did was follow contemporary poetry in little magazines. This seemed a very natural way to have an English department, with a lot of different approaches to literature and to literary culture, and with connections to the bigger world of contemporary literature and the arts. So it doesn't feel anomalous to me at all to be someone who has an identity that embraces both scholarly and non-scholarly kinds of writing . I'm also fortunate to be at CUNY, because we have a relatively eclectic faculty. We all do different things, but we don't make any invidious distinctions among them. I think that because I am a professor and because I write for magazines like The New Yorker, people make the assumption that I wear two different hats. I don't think of myself that way. I just think of myself as a writer. I write about things that interest me. If it's for a scholarly audience, obviously you make certain assumptions about your audience that are different from the assumptions you make if you're writing for The Neiv Yorker. But as far as the writing goes, I don't think myselfas doing anythingdifferently. I pretty much write the same way and strive for the same virtues in my prose. JW: What are the virtues you strive for? 142 the minnesota review LM: I just try, like any writer, to be entertaining and interesting. I want people to get some pleasure and to learn something. It doesn't really matter whether it's about T. S. Eliot or about Tom Clancy. I don't think of myself as someone who has a scholarly motive and a political motive. I think the term "public intellectual" tends to imply that distinction. When people talk about public intellectuals, they seem to be talking about people who have an academic career that's based on work in a professional discipline or with a small group of peers, who then step outside of that discipline to address a larger audience on issues of public interest that they feel strongly about. I certainly don't identify myself with that model. So I don't think of myself as a public intellectual; I just think of myself as a writer. Another thing about public intellectuals that's confusing is that there are two models, and they're quite different. One model is the New York intellectuals of the 50s—Trilling, Howe, Kazin. They played the role of purveying intellectual culture to a wider audience , and spoke to people outside their own fields. People who get called public intellectuals today are different. Now it's thought of as citizen-scholars, people who want to engage with issues about globalization or affirmative action or U.S. policy or whatever it might be, which drives them to find some kind of public space to let...