Conservative Circuits: Hugh Kenner, Modernism, and National Review

Writing for National Review during the 1964 Republican National Convention, Hugh Kenner describes the cultural revolution that would ensue if Barry Goldwater won the presidential election. Reiterating an idea that appears throughout his criticism on international modernism, Kenner claims that the United States is unique amongst world powers in that it has no capital, no urban center where artists and intellectuals congregate. Instead, the nation has a “communications network” passing “mostly through the universities” but with crucial nodes in New York and Washington. Through this network “of professors and alumni . . . the shaping ideas travel in America, precisely as they once traveled about Paris.” For decades, these shaping ideas had been liberal. A Goldwater Administration would rewire the network, activating “standby circuits” occupied by conservative thinkers and effecting “a chain of alterations among the hundreds of minor values with which the network irradiates the land.” These circuits would bring back knowledge about “what persons are and what activities are for: what economic activity is for: what foreign policy is for.”¹ Kenner’s essay states a recurring theme of post-World War II American conservative thought: the idea that America is ruled by a new class of liberal professionals and technocrats out of touch with the basic truths of human life. Although Goldwater lost the election, Kenner is prescient about the strategy that conservative intellectuals would pursue in response to this perceived tyranny. They would create a counter system of institutions, staffed by an alternate intelligentsia, ready to be activated when conservatives came to power. The results are by now familiar: alternative research institutes promoting supply-side economics, intelligent design, welfare reform, and conservative climate science.

However, if Kenner successfully predicts the evolution of post-Goldwater conservatism, he is less prescient about his own discipline—literary studies. He imagines that literature, the species’s “memory,” is crucial to the conservative standby circuits. This prominence derives from the fact that those circuits do not simply provide a conservative alternative to liberal ideology. Rather, they provide an alternative to ideology in all its forms. Drawing on a common refrain of American conservatives, who viewed liberalism as a rationalistic political philosophy that sought to eradicate local customs and folkways, Kenner distinguishes between ideologies and principles: “an ideology you keep in your pocket, like a calorie chart, and it makes decisions for you. A principle you keep in mind, like a knowledge of the unwisdom of gluttony, and it helps you make decisions” (“A View,” 599).² As the human race’s memory bank, literature is the repository of its principles; it only becomes ideological when misinterpreted by liberal activist critics, for whom “literature is the symbolic expression, now of the reforming spirit, now of the malaise which reform would exorcise” (597). From 1957 to 1998, Kenner enacted this conception of literary culture in the pages of National Review, publishing reviews and essays that he expanded into some of his best-known books, including The Pound Era (1971) and A Homemade World (1975). During this same period, however, the literary field’s political center of gravity shifted decisively to the left. As Michael Kimmage sums up, “the world of conservatives . . . acquired great power at the political center in the years after 1968, without generating much of a literary culture.”³ Outside of genre fiction, conservative writers became scarce, with notable exceptions like Saul Bellow, Tom Wolfe, and Mark Helprin. Conservative critics became even scarcer as Kenner’s generation of scholars was displaced by a new cohort of leftist intellectuals influenced by the political and cultural climate of the 1960s. Meanwhile, conservative intellectuals associated with National Review grew to distrust highbrow literature as a vehicle for conservative values; as Bryan Santin argues, they “found it increasingly difficult to position themselves simultaneously as the disinterested champions of complex, morally ambivalent literature and as the populist defenders of aggrieved white innocence, laissez-faire capitalism, and aggressive American nationalism.”⁴ Kenner’s criticism dramatizes why movement conservatives found it so difficult to position themselves in this way. As Kenner underscores in his readings of writers like Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, modernism embodied an anti-traditionalist...