Tea at Trianon: At a Crossroads

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, May 2, 2022

At a Crossroads

From The Nation:

For more than a century, The New York Times Book Review has been one of the most influential, if not most august, institutions in American letters. This rarefied status is largely attributable to its endurance. Once upon a time, every major newspaper had a books section. Some, such as the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle, even had their own stand-alone supplements. But after decades of contraction in the news business, dedicated books divisions have all but perished. Among the daily newspapers, just the Book Review remains. Its only real competition now comes from general interest magazines that tend to cover roughly the same number of books in a year as the Book Review does in a month
For such a durable institution, it is striking that The New York Times Book Review has mostly remained devoted to the template for book reviewing it adopted in the early 20th century. The editors cover the book world as if it were any other news beat: They assign reviews that tend to be informative rather than interpretative, telling readers what books are being published, how relevant the new releases are to current affairs, which of them might be worth purchasing, and which authors are on the rise. According to an early unsigned letter from its editors, the supplement aimed to serve as “an open forum for the discussion of books from all sane and honest points of view.” That modest ambition remains in place today, even if, in practice, “sane and honest” can often mean avoiding provocative arguments in favor of reviews that are evenhanded and descriptive. As its recently departed editor, Pamela Paul, put it in 2018, “The Book Review has a long tradition of being a political Switzerland.”
The Book Review’s pursuit of fairness and balance has become one of its signatures over the decades. While many literary magazines ask reviewers to weigh in on a book primarily because of the strength of their opinions, the Book Review’s pages often seek to be a retreat from the ideological debates raging among intellectuals and the commentariat. In the Times’ view, this gives its reviews an authority that surpasses what can be found elsewhere. “In my mind there’s an almost platonic notion of what the center is,” explained one of the Review’s editors, Barry Gewen, in an interview from 2018, “and we try to bring the discussion to the center.”
Not everyone shares the Book Review’s sense of its own magisterial restraint. A policy of moderation can not only end up endorsing the status quo embodied by “the center” but all too often also make for drab reading, prompting repeated criticism over the years—most famously articulated in Elizabeth Hardwick’s 1959 salvo for Harper’s Magazine, which charged that the Book Review’s “absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity” meant that it served as “a sort of hidden dissuader, gently, blandly, respectfully denying whatever vivacious interest there might be in books or in literary matters generally.” Versions of Hardwick’s complaint have persisted into the 21st century: Rather than offering criticism that sparks the passion of its readers, the Review instead tends to foster the polite, banal atmosphere of a book club. As critic Christian Lorentzen noted in a 2019 Harper’s article, “the Times seems to have lost its sense of its audience’s intelligence.” (Read more.)