Sharpening the Knife

When the New York Review of Books first appeared four years ago, it was given the kind of hearty welcome usually reserved for long-awaited novels. Here at last were intellectuals putting out a review of depth, personality and bite, one that would treat books and their ideas with the seriousness they deserve. To some extent, Review still does just that. But in the past year or so, a distinct change has come over the tabloid-sized bimonthly.

The Review now runs fewer, if longer, book reviews, and devotes much of its space to New Left political commentary. Back in 1963, for example, a book review by Marcus Raskin persuasively rebutted those members of the military establishment who urged a continuing accumulation of nuclear weapons. Raskin's case was all the more convincing because it was coolly and rationally made. Rationality was not in evidence in the latest issue of the Review when Noam Chomsky, linguistics professor at M.I.T., offered his comment on the military establishment. Rehashing the recent Washington Peace March, he called the Pentagon the "most hideous institution on earth" and Senator Mike Mansfield the "kind of man who is the terror of our age." Guilty of "monstrous crimes" in Viet Nam, U.S. leadership, said Chomsky, is "taking the road of the Fascist aggressors of a generation ago."

Demand for Demolition. This change in tone has been accompanied by a shift in reviewers. Some of the most perceptive writers -- Sociologists Lewis Coser and Nathan Glazer, Economist Oscar Gass -- are no longer contributing to the Review. Space is now filled by such New Left Partisans as Paul Goodman, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Andrew Kopkind and Chomsky, who reflect the opinions of the Review's principal founder, Jason Epstein, and its editor, Robert Silvers. "I wanted to write critical reviews," says Coser, a professor of sociology at Brandeis, "not the kind of demolition jobs they asked for. They kept telling me to sharpen the knife more." Like the Review, Coser opposes the war in Viet Nam and considers him self a member in good standing of the left." But in becoming more extremist in its politics," he says, "the Review has taken a very narrow, destructive line."

What has particularly upset Coser and other intellectuals is the Review's response to last summer's urban riots. In a long commentary on the subject, Kopkind wrote that everybody was helpless and society in convulsion. "Liberalism proves hardly more effective than fascism." Belittling Martin Luther King as an "irrelevancy," Kopkind defended the rioters. "Morality, like politics," he wrote, "starts at the barrel of a gun."

Keeping up with the Review's growing militancy, Cartoonist David Levine has moved from rather whimsical sketches of literary figures to savage caricatures of President Johnson and other members of his Administration. Often, a bloated, supercomplacent L.B.J. is pictured providing nourishment for lesser creatures. In one instance, he is in bed with South Viet Nam Vice President Ky, who is sucking blood from his arm through a tube. In another, Johnson is cast as a crocodile suckling generals, industrialists and a computer or two.

Popular on Campus. Review, to be sure, makes lively reading. "It always gets a violent reaction, pro or con," says F. W. Dupee, a Columbia University English professor who continues to contribute first-rate fiction reviews. "Which shows, at least, that its people care." With sales particularly high at Berkeley and Cambridge, its circulation has grown from 28,000 to 76,000 since 1963. Its advertising has also increased at a steady clip, enabling the Review to break even last year. It will not show a profit this year, largely because it has financed some ambitious editorial projects. Political Writer Ronald Steel was sent to Greece to report on the colonels' takeover and Mary McCarthy went to Viet Nam--and told her readers not to think about "solutions" but just to demand withdrawal. At its best, the Review can be definitive. Nobody writes more astutely on the varieties of Marxism than George Lichtheim. In a recent issue, Anthony Quinton shrewdly interpreted Marshall McLuhan's brave new electronic world as a "scheme of social salvation" at bargain-basement prices.

The fact that cogent book reviews can still be found amid all the New Left drumbeating indicates that the Review may be simply following the latest fad, which happens to be New Left radicalism. As Literary Critic Irving Howe put it in a rebuttal to a Review article: "The radicalism now arising in the intellectual world is in quality and content as crude, fashion-driven, smugly moralistic and supremely verbal as was the turn to conservatism in the Fifties. One decade anti-Marxism and end-of-ideology are in; next, Black Power and peasant revolution. Lemminglike, the herd of independent minds, rushes after the latest thing."

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