There’s not much good that reform-minded liberals can take away from the First World War. If the American Civil War was the first modern “total war,” World War I greatly accelerated the West’s passage into such conflict, involving fully mobilized home fronts and new modes of technological combat that produced unprecedented casualties. The Great War also proved a major setback to the European left, which was helpless as the international socialist movement’s working-class constituencies fanned out in support of their home countries’ nationalist causes.
When Hitler had conquered nearly all of Europe, Winston Churchill resisted the considerable pressure to make terms with Germany. Britons take a justifiable pride in their most famous Prime Minster’s foresight, and his achievements during the war that followed.
The history of independent bookstores is littered with fallen monuments. Manhattan’s Eighth Street Bookshop counted the Beats and Auden as customers, but it was long gone when I moved to New York in 1992. In the past several years, we’ve lost the wonderful Dutton’s in Los Angeles; the Trover Shop, once an institution on Capitol Hill; and Cody’s in Berkeley (since when aren’t even that city’s good leftist citizens able to keep an independent bookstore open?). There is something inherently ephemeral about the trade, and the obstacles—indifferent publics, high rents, minuscule profit margins—are too many to list. It’s not just
Published in 1978, The Stories of John Cheever was a luminous treasure at the end of gravity’s rainbow. In that retrospective collection, Cheever’s fiction faced backward against the ranks of Pynchon, Barth, Gaddis, and Gass to sum up a rapidly vanishing era of smart manners and discreet affluence, but the hulking volume also heralded a new moment for the American short story. (The book sold some half a million copies, a record for short fiction.) Even if the New Yorker formula Cheever had perfected had become a bit tweedy, his sturdy old realism had life in it yet.
Modernist culture may have become a museum piece and épater le bourgeois a harmless little slogan, but critics and historians seem unwilling to say good-bye to all that. Earlier this year, the omnivorous Australian critic Clive James weighed in with Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts, a sprawling, ruminative homage to modernismVienna style in all but name.
