Conservative intellectuals have long lamented leftist dominance of culture. They recognize the danger of ceding culture to people who disagree with them on everything and watching their creations erode the founding values of the country.
The focus is mostly on television, film, and other dominant forms of middle- and low-brow entertainment. But conservatives should engage with higher culture, too. Great literature, old and new, must be protected, championed, and nourished.
My friend, the late Michael Novak, recognized this when he was a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He held readings of great works ranging from John Milton’s epic on eternity, Paradise Lost, to P.G. Wodehouse’s breezy tales of a brainy butler and his boneheaded master, Jeeves and Bertie Wooster.
Now, another AEI scholar, senior fellow Christopher Scalia, has taken up the cause, trying to couple conservative intellectual energy to good literature in his latest book, 13 Novels Conservatives Will Love (But Probably Haven’t Read).
Scalia told me, “Over the past 15 years, especially, conservatives have been more aware that they’ve been ceding culture to progressives. Andrew Breitbart’s admonition that politics is downstream of culture, I think, really resonated with … I think conservatives have been more conscious about engaging with culture, whether it’s in universities, setting up alternative learning institutions, but also in television and cinema. But with literature, I think maybe we’re lagging a little bit. What I hope my book does is introduce conservatives to great literature they didn’t know about that helps them think about conservative topics more thoroughly, but also might inspire a couple of novelists to show them how you can grapple with these issues in sophisticated ways and create great literature.”
The novels Scalia chooses are not the best-known works by their authors — for example, George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda rather than her masterpiece, Middlemarch, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance rather than The Scarlet Letter.
All the books — I admit to having read only five of the 13 — deal with conservative themes with great acuity and sophistication.
V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River is, for example, a brilliant evocation of the ever-present threat of barbarism breaking through the precarious rampart of civilization. It is peculiarly relevant today when the domestic and international Left is calling openly for the destruction of Western civilization, celebrating Islamist efforts to carry out anti-Jewish genocide, and lionizing the assassination of corporate executives on America’s streets.
Evelyn Waugh’s uproarious comic novel, Scoop, is still perhaps the most perceptive depiction of news media bent on writing a preconceived narrative rather than reporting the facts. Russia collusion hoax or the Biden cover-up, anyone? It also mocks the vanity and exposes the cruelty of grandiose government.
In the late 1980s, I had Scoop set as a text for journalism students at Columbia University. It was a portent of the closing graduate mind and of creeping presentism that they utterly hated it, failing to get past the fact that a work published in 1938 used racial terms unacceptable 50 years later.
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All the books in Scalia’s splendid list make the conservative case, imaginatively rather than pedantically, that this life cannot be perfect, that we each have duties to ourselves, to others, to the wisdom of the past, and to the desires of the future.
All 13 novels would be good additions to anyone’s bookshelves. Scalia’s book would be a good 14th.