The Great Books War

Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World

By David Denby

Simon & Schuster

493 pp.; $30

The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History

By Lawrence W. Levine

Beacon Press

212 pp.; $20

We read and write today with the roar of the culture wars ever in the background. Neither David Denby’s Great Books nor Lawrence Levine’s The Opening of the American Mind can keep it there. Both authors have garnered considerable media attention. Denby has received more, and more varied, responses than Levine; this is fitting.

Denby, movie critic for New York magazine, decided, at age 48, to return to Columbia University, armed with a writer’s tell-all intention, to retake the fabled but now challenged core courses in Literature, Humanities, and Contemporary Civilization that he had taken 30 years earlier. Levine, long-time professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, decided, before finishing his career, to defend the academy of his affections from its detractors.

Both Denby and Levine are New York Jewish boys who grew up to be secular liberals. Both belong to the cultural elite and share to some degree what Thomas Sowell has acidly called “the vision of the anointed.” Both take their cultural bearings by ragging on William Bennett. (Ah, the social uses of being Bennett. Can a book on the culture wars get past three pages without mentioning him?)

It’s their differences that fascinate. Denby is deeply, personally engaged with the Great Books of the Western tradition; Levine feels no pain at their curricular demise. Denby, while imagining himself evenhanded, criticizes conservatives occasionally and perfunctorily but the cultural Left frequently and passionately; Levine is an avatar of the cultural Left who lambastes the Right and only the Right. Denby is unpredictable, sometimes maddeningly so; Levine is predictable, utterly and always so. These differences make it, I think, possible to dislike both books or to like one and dislike the other, but impossible to like them both.

The reviews of Denby have been all over the map. Joyce Carol Oates and Sir Frank Kermode are quite appreciative. Liberal Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and conservative Paul Cantor, after seesawing, come down on his side. Harvard’s Helen Vendler assails the “Lit Hum” reading list. “Muddled in its principles,” harrumphs the hoity-toity aesthete, and Denby is caught in her wake: “muddled thinking” by “a patronizing booby.” Then there is Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals. There is no doubt what he would think of Lefty Levine (who takes a swipe or six at him). But what about Denby (who takes only one swipe)? Despite Denby’s cheerleading for good old Western civ, Kimball calls Denby’s book “the silliest and most superficial book about higher education that I have ever encountered.” Unpredictable.

All surprise vanishes when Levine appears. Fellow leftists eagerly rally around a new champion. In “Bloom Buried,” Martin Duberman praises Levine’s “awesomely moderate” tone and “Olympian” spirit, grumbles that Levine’s Opening won’t sell as well as Bloom’s Closing, and blames an intransigent American public. Gregory Jay lauds Levine’s “left version of D’Souza” for its “sweet reasonableness” and recommends it as a “brief, witty, persuasive volume you can give to skeptical friends and family who are wondering whether the professors have lost their minds.” The publisher’s list of blurb writers is a who’s who of the academic Left. Predictable.

Denby writes as an amateur (etymologically, lover). He casts quirky judgments on classics. No one could agree with him all the time. The ebullient loner takes risks, goes “gaga” (his word), makes himself vulnerable. He commits some howlers, as his professional reviewers have sternly pointed out. All right, so give him an A- instead of an A. His “naive” reading is bracing. He has no line to push. His passion is for pleasure in reading.

Levine writes as a professional. This past president of the Organization of American Historians received support for his project from a Guggenheim Fellowship, spent a month at the Rockefeller Foundation’s pad in Italy, and used research funds from his named chair at Berkeley. A partisan with an agenda, he seeks to persuade, but he will only confirm readers in their prior agreement or disagreement. His passion is for right thinking: ortho-doxy.

The “conundrum” facing Levine is “why in our own time have [critics of the university] found such resonance in American society?” Had he really tried to resolve his conundrum, he would have written a different book. He would not have caricatured the critics’ views nor equated the university and the cultural Left. He would have admitted that the critics of the New Academic Order include not only those dismissible conservatives but also some liberals, now including Denby. He would have taken into account the recent defectors from the cultural Left, of whom Duke’s bad boy Frank Lentricchia is only the most sensational. He would, in short, have brought into his ken the complexities that he says he and his kin are so good at espying.

But concession is not in Levine’s rhetorical repertoire. Why should it be, when he is quite pleased with the way the university is going? An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education cites him as agreeing “that, in this one sliver of American life, he thinks things are, indeed, getting better and better.” Or, as the subheading for the Kermode review puts it, “According to Lawrence W. Levine, the American university has never been better.”

Levine’s historical sketch of the American university provides some real challenges. Western civ courses came into being only in the early twentieth century and not without some political strings attached. This story is hardly sanction for his preferred alternatives and, indeed, may be used to argue that any “progressive” hegemony will pass, too. America’s increasing subcultural variety does require a curricular response. His prescriptions could help concentrate the attention, though leftists are not the only ones thinking about this issue. But why go on? This is just a grownup’s version of John K. Wilson’s The Myth of Political Correctness (Duke University Press). Its smug triumphalism stops debate cold.

That the Western tradition (can we quit calling it canon?) is not some monolithic imposition but an ongoing conversation in which the classics are sometimes “at war with one another” is not news to Denby. He takes greatest joy from the sheer good writing he encounters. His repeated invocations of the pleasure principle might seem wearisome–unless one were reading, say, Levine alongside. And then Denby’s judgment about ambitious graduate students at a conference he wandered into–“They do not love literature. They do not love it”–seems just right.

The movie man, restless in midlife, then adds that, beyond seeking pleasure, we read “to know that death exists, which also means knowing how to live.” He reads, he says, to build a self. This self-centered reading has irritated some critics. They frown when reading King Lear evokes reflections on his mother, difficult in old age, or when reading Hobbes brings to his mind a past mugging. But he is relating literature to life, and for these personal applications I can forgive him all sorts of technical errors. Sometimes conservative critics seem simply not to like the self Denby is shaping. But why should reading great books make conservatives of us all? He is who he is, and I find him likable.

Although most of his engrossing narrative is devoted to his interaction with books from Homer to Catherine McKinnon(!), he brings the classroom to life with vignettes of professors and students. His profs impress him. The students are earnest, sometimes ardent, largely schooled in postmodernist relativism and bland niceness, and some of Denby’s comments about them, were they to appear as identification items on an exam, might readily be attributed to Allan Bloom. Most of all, the students are thoroughly secular; many, reading the Bible for the first time, are astounded that anyone could find it a guide to conduct.

Religious students, including those from “the more strenuous wards of Christianity,” earn Denby’s deep respect. They seem “braver” than “the many nonreligious.” Nevertheless, religion is not his forte. He is unexpectedly elated at Jesus (“supremely witty”). But he can’t abide Dante; the pleasure principle balks at the idea of eternal judgment. Mainly, it is astonishing that one could read many centuries’ worth of writers who routinely posit divine transcendence and seldom mention God or the gods. We are reminded how severely the secular university truncates its field of vision.

In the epilogue, despite insisting that both Left and Right “are largely talking nonsense,” Denby laments that “there isn’t much traditional culture left to explode.” Then he allows, “I agree with William Bennett and other traditionalists to this extent: Men and women educated in the Western tradition will have the best possible shot at the daunting task of reinventing morality and community in a republic now badly tattered by fear and mistrust.” Mr. Denby has moved, maybe more than he realizes. And, as is true when liberal education takes, the consequences of his heady year at school are not yet at an end.

Edward E. Ericson, Jr., is professor of English at Calvin College.

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