“Charles Krauthammer used to pride himself on not going to cocktail parties, instead preferring to be at home with his wife quietly reading, writing, doing whatever. And he was probably better for it.”
At a book launch party I attended with a handful of Merion West editors and writers not long ago, they were all there: The people I had followed on Twitter for the better part of a decade, writers whose columns I had forwarded to friends since college, familiar faces from the podcast circuit. It was much the same at another party I attended not long after—and seems to be the case more and more. Now that Merion West has been around for nearly a decade, many of these commentators I see at events such as these have interacted with the magazine once or twice. They have joined me or one of our contributing editors for an interview, submitted an article, or politely declined an email request to weigh in on an issue of their expertise. But more than that I recognized them, they all seemed to recognize each other, embracing instead of shaking hands, asking if they plan to attend such-and-such event the following month. I know what they mean now when they say “the circles are small.”
Charles Krauthammer used to pride himself on not going to cocktail parties, instead preferring to be at home with his wife quietly reading, writing, doing whatever. And he was probably better for it. The more I watch the collegiality on display at various forums and events, the more I imagine how difficult it must be to respond dispassionately to the ideas or the works of other members of the scene. As such, I have to think—as unoriginal a thought as it is—that those writers who remain something of outsiders really do retain an advantage when it comes to writing as truthfully as possible.
Now surely, having close relationships with fellow writers or commentators can have its benefits. Just as Saul Bellow would help a then-largely unknown writer named Cormac McCarthy secure a MacArthur Fellowship, which provided McCarthy the money he needed to research Blood Meridian, writers today recommend their friends (and friends of friends) for positions or to editors. This gives them a foot in the door they would likely not otherwise have or puts them on the right person’s radar. This is all the more important for up-and-coming young writers. The right introduction or mentor can make the difference between being a prodigy that didn’t pan out or becoming a respected author. (1)
But the problem, as I see it, tends to flow from this reality of collegiality, and how just about everyone knows everyone else. Most immediately, one can see where it would be difficult to write critically of another scholar’s work if he sees him socially on the regular. (This, of course, is an argument frequently put forward to explain the seeming metamorphosis of certain political figures, Tom Coburn and his compatriots notably excluded, between who they were on the campaign and what they become after a year or two in the nation’s capital: Who wants to be excluded from D.C. society?) And then, secondly, should a writer eventually cross that line and begin to criticize a friend or acquaintance’s work, it is easy to see how this could quickly turn particularly acrimonious. It is difficult to write dispassionately about someone with whom he dines. And once the line has been crossed, previously minor comments can be retroactively blown out of proportion and small things read into. The past isn’t always seen through rose-tinted glasses.
When I was in school, I recall listening to a professor of mine, a scholar of the European Union, rail against a colleague, who from what I could tell had nearly indistinguishable views from his own. My professor’s eyes would narrow, and his jaw would clench when forced to acknowledge—from time to time—the scholarship of this fellow academic. But the academic reasons were clearly not the real reasons when it came to this level of distaste. Maybe this other professor had made a pass at his wife, or my professor overheard him making fun of the unique wardrobe choices he was known for making, or maybe he hadn’t held the elevator door for him at a conference. But I suppose it was easier to rant about his scholarship than to say the real reason, to risk broadcasting his pettiness.
So many heated debates about policy or ideas, when one scratches below the surface, are clearly more of personal bouts. This has been prevalent in the political world of today. I think of Mary Trump, the niece of President-elect Donald Trump, who made a media career for herself the past few years excoriating her uncle to anyone who would listen. One suspects that her anger does not lie in carefully considered opposition to her uncle’s trade or immigration policies but rather from disputes over a greater share of an inheritance that she believed should have come her way. (Mary’s father, Fred, died in 1981, nearly 18 years before the death of his father, Fred Trump Sr.) Similarly, political feuds, such as the one between the Cheney’s and the Paul’s have spanned generations, exacerbated by children angered at insults flung at their fathers. (2) Some even say the invasion of Iraq sprung—at least partially—from President George W. Bush’s anger over an assassination attempt on his father by Saddam Hussein. Sometimes it is personal. (3)
The writing world is no different, it seems. Emil Cioran’s sharp criticisms of Albert Camus’ work are believed to have their origin in Camus turning down a submission of Cioran’s to Gallimard where he was working as an editor at the time, an affront Cioran is said to have never gotten over. Then, there was the infamous affair of Henry Fairlie, who nursed a longtime grudge against William F. Buckley, excoriating Buckley’s 1985 anthology Right Reason in The New Republic. Amid the fallout, Buckley even placed a full-page advertisement in The New Republic condemning Farlie. The back-and-forth was seemingly a war of ideas, but, upon closer examination, Fairlie had never gotten over being a target of criticism in Buckley’s columns. (Ought one attempt to review the book of someone whose work he can’t even begin to evaluate objectively?) Even looking at the recent falling out between Walter Block and his colleagues at Mises Institute, which was recently covered at Merion West, one wonders if it would have been as acrimonious as it was if these men had not known each other for decades, socialized together, and once considered each other dear friends. As I mentioned, initially one may be reluctant to train his fire toward his friends, but once it happens, the rupture can be particularly explosive.
Many of Norman Podhoretz’s fallings out with friends followed a similar trajectory. In 1999, he published an essay titled “Ex-Friends,” about the various intellectuals who were once close to him but with whom he fell out with over the course of his long career. Usually, it was over his breaking ranks with them on issues of importance rather than over trivialities. To this point, Podhoretz writes: “The first of these questions is why it is so hard for friends who disagree about large and apparently impersonal subjects like politics or literature to remain friends. To this my answer is that they can—but only provided the things they disagree about are not all that important to them.” Although I personally seek to follow Thomas Jefferson’s dictum that “I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend,” I have seen many long-standing friendships end recently over the most pressing questions of our day, whether it be the ongoing war in the Middle East or the abortion question, two very important issues indeed.
So sometimes it really is about the ideas, but, as I see time and again, especially from the perch of having edited Merion West now for nearly a decade, there is a complex web of relationships and previous interactions that form a background to many of the debates putatively about ideas. There are grudges from an interview gone wrong, favors owed, or a sort of informal ceasefire between certain ideological opponents. And though readers are rarely aware of this when reading barbed exchanges between ideological rivals, sometimes the lurking source of the bitterness lies not in differing answers to a public policy question but, rather, in a perception of betrayal or hurt feelings. (4)
On a related note, I sometimes wonder about all the pieces passed on or projects never brought to completion because one does not know the right person. President George W. Bush, for example, published an impressive book about immigrants to the United States in 2021 called Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants, complete with his own paintings of the various newcomers to America. As well done as the book was, had someone else conceived of it, even a far more talented artist, I doubt anything would have come of it. Sometimes one has to have been President (or have held a high position) to have his ideas taken seriously. To this point, I recall driving one evening in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania several years ago with a friend of mine who was a quite talented photographer. It was October, one of the first cold nights of the year. And we saw a line of Amish horse and buggies tied up by a parking lot while an Amish family, with maybe six or seven kids in tow, walked toward a Rita’s Water Ice. It was just before sundown, and the sky was a hundred shades of purple and red, the sort of sky few photographers can do justice. But my friend, she captured it all perfectly: The colors; the contrast, both in the lighting and in the collision between the ways of old and the ineluctable pull of modernity: the conflicted look on the parents’ faces as they begrudgingly bought the water ice. I encouraged her to submit it to a photography contest her library was running at the time. She never heard back. But if Jimmy Carter had taken that same photo, my guess is it would have won a Pulitzer Prize.
Although I’m no fan of the cynicism George Carlin often trafficked in later in his career, I cannot help but sometimes think of a famous quip of his: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
George Santayana believed that the scholar should wander alone like a rhinoceros in the savanna, liberated from the considerations of the academy and his peers. (It was for this reason he resigned from the Harvard faculty the moment he was financially able.) As I have often thought, the smartest people in the world aren’t in TIME magazine; they’re living on the sides of the mountains. With that said, it probably is not necessary to go full on Roscoe Bartlett in order to realize one’s intellectual autonomy, to write without regard to what the prevailing voices of the day consider respectable work. (5) As I mentioned previously, writers no doubt can benefit from peers, providing comments on their work, sharpening their arguments so to speak, as well as making a well-timed introduction. Just take a look at the acknowledgments section of nearly any book. But that is quite different from writing in service of, as they say, making the scene, where give and take and mutual back scratching often take the place of honest assessments of other’s work and arguments. So, even though it might be dismissed as a case of the Fox and the Grapes or what the young people today call “copium,” there are some benefits that accrue to those who remain somewhat out of the loop, with few well-placed personal contacts to impress or avoid offending. Perhaps those at least slightly on the outside truly can see everything a bit more clearly.
Erich J. Prince is the editor-in-chief of Merion West.
Endnotes
- Whatever the merits of writing for oneself alone, certain philosophers have long maintained that earning the esteem of those whom one respects is a necessary precondition for contentment.
- In the case of the Cheney’s and the Paul’s, different desired approaches to foreign policy are clearly at play. In this case, the acrimony may indeed have its origin in philosophy and policy, with this exacerbated by the trading of acerbic condemnations over the decades.
- Within political falling outs there is a particularly fraught subsection: That of the mentee who turns on his erstwhile mentor. And, in certain cases, the opposite can take place as well, such as when former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley vociferously attacked on a debate stage the man whose career she largely created: Senator Tim Scott. (In the writing world, a famous instance of a mentor-mentee relationship giving way to enmity is that of V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux.)
- There is also the reality that many of these writers and thinkers have personal thoughts about the quality of the scholarship of their peers and often wonder why one became famous and another did not. Today, that may take the form of “Why did so-and-so’s conference lecture get 900,000 views on YouTube and another, better one only receive 400?” This is nothing new of course, and, famously, many members of the Partisan Review crowd were amazed that Hannah Arendt, the one whose work they considered the least insightful, became the most well-known of them all and the only one still widely read after death.
- As critics have pointed out, awards and grants so often go to those who hold the right viewpoints at the right time, hence the apparent dearth of actual geniuses receiving MacArthur “Genius Grants.”
