and Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post-World War II American Fiction (2011).
Schryer applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, National Review's Literary Network: Conservative Circuits, and reported the following:
Page 99 recounts a key moment in the history of National Review’s literary network, when two literary critics – Hugh Kenner and Jeffrey Hart – argued over Governor Ronald Reagan’s proposed cutbacks to the University of California system. Before 1968, Kenner had been a conservative stalwart who supported National Review’s attempts to push the Republican Party to the right; he wrote an article supporting Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential run. He believed that Goldwater, if elected, would promote a cultural revolution in the academy, one that would benefit conservative intellectuals like himself. However, faced in 1968 with the practical consequences of electing a populist conservative, he became disenchanted with National Review’s brand of politics.Learn more about National Review's Literary Network at the Oxford University Press website.
Kenner also lost faith in his ability to create a conservative cultural renaissance. Throughout the 1960s, Hugh Kenner used National Review as a venue for bringing highbrow literary culture to the American right. He published poems by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and other experimental writers, and he published essays testing out ideas that would make their way into his ground-breaking study, The Pound Era (1971). However, when Kenner criticized Reagan, the standard-bearer of movement conservatism, National Review recruited fellow literary critic and Reagan speechwriter Jeffrey Hart to rebut him. Echoing Reagan’s anti-intellectual rhetoric, Hart ridiculed Kenner’s multi-syllabic prose style, depicting him as an out-of-touch liberal. Deeply disillusioned, Kenner temporarily withdrew from active participation in the magazine. “After painful thought,” he wrote to his close friend Guy Davenport, “I have formally but not publicly severed all connection with NR . . . the ideologues have gotten control.”
Readers flipping to page 99 will get a good sense of my book’s argument. I’m interested in the network of writers who gravitated towards National Review in the 1960s: figures like Kenner, short-story writer Guy Davenport, novelist John Dos Passos, historian and new journalist Garry Wills, and novelist and new journalist Joan Didion. Especially in the early 1960s, National Review was a great place for up-and-coming writers to make their mark. However, this upwelling of conservative writing didn’t last. By the 1970s, most of the high-profile literary figures associated with the magazine in the 1960s had drifted away, publishing in liberal magazines and sometimes embracing political positions that were unpalatable to movement conservatives. After 1970, it became increasingly difficult to find literary critics or highbrow writers openly affiliated with conservative politics.
Kenner’s debate with Hart highlights a crucial reason for this leftward drift. Kenner was drawn to National Review because of his friendship with William F. Buckley, Jr. He was also drawn to the magazine’s critique of what Buckley and other editors called the liberal establishment: left-wing ideologues whom conservatives believed had taken over the academy, the media, and the federal government. Kenner wanted to use his public writing to differentiate himself from this establishment, fashioning himself as a maverick anti-academic critic whose prose style echoed the experimentalism of modernists like Pound and Williams. When conservatives were political outsiders, he was able to overlook the populist anti-intellectualism that was always implicit in the idea of the liberal establishment. After 1968, this selective blindness became increasingly difficult. Kenner realized that the conservative attack on the liberal establishment threatened the very possibility of institutional expertise – the lifeblood of his career as a literary critic.
--Marshal Zeringue
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