Irving Kristol – the Australian Connection
(
The connection between
Still, a Kristol–Australian connection has existed for the past four decades, and it has had a significant effect on
Except for a short break in the 1960s, he has been continuously involved with intellectual magazines from the time he became assistant editor of Commentary in 1947 until now, when he easily (and from my point of view, embarrassingly) combines being editor of the Public Interest and publisher of the National Interest with a variety of other activities. In between,
Like many others, I first got to know about—and, in a sense, to know—
Recently married, my wife Dorothy and I made the long four-and-a-half-week journey from London in the P & O liner, the SS Strathmore, travelling the great British imperial route—Gibraltar, Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Singapore, Perth—in its last days, just a year before the Suez crisis. (This may be as good a place as any to note that
Despite the Bulletin and the fact that Robert Menzies’s conservative party was in office, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was dominated by the pro-communist Left, and a shallow, reflexive, progressive orthodoxy prevailed. A man widely regarded as
Such behaviour will not strike American intellectuals of a certain vintage as particularly unusual. There was a lot of it about in the 1950s in all parts of the West, and indeed to an extent Australian academics and intellectuals were only mimicking admired overseas models. But there was a difference. In a much smaller and more isolated cultural community—one characterised simultaneously by an aggressive commitment to an egalitarian ethos and by desperate concern to distinguish itself from the surrounding philistinism—there was much less diversity and pluralism, less in the way of countervailing challenges to this orthodoxy, than in either America or Europe. To the untutored eye, at least, the Australian cultural landscape seemed as flat and unvaried as an Australian sheep station.
Although my own views at the time were leftish (I had, after all, grown up in a
In these circumstances, I discovered Encounter, and its effect was exhilarating. I had never before heard the political and cultural case for the West argued with such assurance, style and intellectual force. This was not surprising because for at least twenty years no one else had heard it either—the initiative had been entirely with the Left. What celebration there had been of the West—mostly during the war—had been left in the inadequate hands of the likes of
Now
One of the interesting things about little magazines is that while they are produced in the great metropolitan centres with the readers of those cities principally in mind, they often have their greatest impact in the provinces and on the periphery. At the centre, the magazines represent merely one form in a dense complex of activities (public meetings, debates, clubs, cafes, dinner and cocktail parties, many other readily available magazines and newspapers); on the periphery, a good magazine may be the only thing that effectively and regularly links someone to the larger issues and intellectual community, and it can assume an inordinate importance in a life. At least, that was substantially the case forty years ago, when communications were much more primitive—and
But it didn’t take long to find out what should have been obvious from the start (I was very young at the time): there were others, native-born Australians, who were roughly in the same predicament and who had the same concerns, often in a much more developed form. They included some distinguished and interesting men: Sir John Latham (a former chief justice of the Australian High Court); John Kerr QC (later to be the governor-general who dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in controversial circumstances); James McAuley (one of Australia’s best poets, and co-perpetrator of the famous anti-modernist Ern Malley hoax); Peter Coleman (writer and editor and politician-to-be, who would one day write the history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom); Donald Horne (author, later, of The Lucky Country); and a bunch of academics including Richard Spann, Doug McCallum and David Armstrong.
And there was one other who was of outstanding importance:
How was that committee to be most effective in an environment made up, in more or less equal parts, of indifference and hostility? The answer was given to
Thus did
More generally, Quadrant became a rallying point for Australian intellectuals who rejected the prevailing leftism and the perverse but comfortable notion that principled liberalism required an anti-anticommunist posture. Around it grew a pattern of activity involving seminars and lectures and dinners and committee meetings—as well as close friendships and intense rivalries. (When it was eventually disclosed in the 1960s that the Paris congress, and through it the Australian association of Quadrant, had been funded secretly by the CIA, our general inclination was not to condemn but to congratulate the CIA for having been smart enough to give us the wherewithal to do what we wanted to do in any case—and then not to interfere or to impose conditions. The secrecy was regrettable, but we didn’t live in a perfect world and it had been a condition for the thing being done at all.)
In due course, air travel became cheaper and quicker, and the tyranny of distance over Australian life slackened. In the 1960s, visits to the
My own first meeting with
At the same time, there seemed to be none of the insecurity or vanity that is commonly part of the makeup of intellectuals, no urge simply to score points or put down or claim credit. The wit was funny—very funny—but not vicious, and the gossip was affectionate and tolerant.
In the mid-1970s, I left academic life—left with no regrets whatsoever, for the foolishness and cowardice of the American university scene had been faithfully copied in
When I had to write a major speech outlining Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s political philosophy—not the easiest of tasks, given that Fraser, though gifted with a strong intelligence, was not comfortable expressing himself in terms of abstract ideas and principles—I did so with Irving’s Two Cheers for Capitalism open at my elbow. The speech was later published as a definitive statement of
But what to do next?
In the event, all our worries were misplaced. Bob and I got on famously, and Irving, perhaps remembering the trouble that he himself had experienced with interference from the Paris office of the Congress for Cultural Freedom during his Encounter editorship, performed immaculately as publisher: always interested and supportive, always respectful of editorial autonomy, ready with praise and tactful with advice and criticism, taking on himself the onerous but crucial responsibility of looking after the funding. On one thing
After a quiet start, the National Interest steadily gained prestige and influence. Oddly, though we could be fairly characterised as a “Cold War magazine” when we began (in our first issue, we asserted quite firmly that “the Soviet Union constitutes the greatest single threat to
While the magazine has always welcomed a variety of conservative and centrist views, the prevailing editorial position—or disposition—has been one of realism. Initially, this was something that
One of the great pleasures of going to work as editor of the National Interest is that one gets to meet
Another major advantage of working with him is that one gets to meet a lot of bright and nice young people.
This commitment to the young is a matter of affinity as well as policy: he likes the company of young people. When I was beginning to write this piece in the fall of 1994,
Owen Harries is now visiting fellow at the Lowy Foundation,
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins