TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120390/1203470.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 114

No Liberals Need Apply Here


In monthly meetings and a just-published anthology, the Vile
Body's young conservatives take the measure of yuppiedom

By JOHN ELSON


    To anyone who has seen the mini-hit film Metropolitan, the
setting will be instantly familiar. This large, chastely
furnished library, in a town house on Manhattan's Upper East
Side, was where the callow preppies of "Sally Fowler's rat pack"
were filmed during their postdance gabfests. On a Wednesday
evening the place is filled with grownup baby boomers, many of
them huddled at a small bar near the door. But the talk, for the
most part, isn't about Hamptons and debentures. A petite blond
writer in an electric red dress speculates for a guest about
what might happen at National Review now that Bill Buckley has
retired. A tweedy editor of the critical monthly New Criterion
has some delicious gossip about faculty problems at Duke. A
lanky novelist asks if anyone else plans to catch the lecture
on Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain at the Opus Dei center
next door.

    Welcome to the Vile Body, an informal collective of
youngish (25  to 40) conservative and libertarian intellectuals;
liberals need not apply. Anywhere from 20 to 60 or more of these
best and rightest meet for cocktails once a month at the
Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, to schmooze,
network and, above all, exchange ideas and witticisms. The name
of the group, proposed by Metropolitan's writer-director Whit
Stillman, echoes the title of a brittle comedy by Evelyn Waugh,
an author much admired by many Vile Body regulars. Says Terry
Teachout, 34, who writes editorials for the New York Daily News:
"Waugh was effective in imposing himself on a hostile ethos --
very much of an in-your-face attitude."

    The Vile Body is largely the creation of Teachout, a
Missouri-born polymath who plays jazz piano, reviews records and
ballet, and is gearing up to write a biography of H.L. Mencken.
When he moved to New York from the Midwest three years ago,
Teachout was dismayed to discover that the city was, as he puts
it, "hostile to civilized friendship." There was little
opportunity for people of his age and ideology to coalesce for
intellectual sustenance. "Conservatives and libertarians exist
in an adversary culture," he explains. "You need a community
where you don't have to be arguing first causes all the time."
Teachout and George Sim Johnston, 38, who has quit investment
banking to be a writer full time, decided to set up a kind of
salon, in the European sense, where they could meet with
like-minded friends on a regular basis.

    The Vile Body has no dues and no agenda, and it does more
than just promote chat and nurture. Views and attitudes of 15 of
its adherents are on display in a new anthology of essays called
Beyond the Boom (Poseidon Press; $18.95), edited by Teachout and
with a sprightly introduction by Tom Wolfe. The book is not so
much a group manifesto as what Teachout calls a "core sample"
of opinions by these right-of-center urban yuppies. Beyond the
Boom's contributors can boast of having 14 books produced or in
the works.

    As journalists, they tend to preach to true believers:
their names can be found on the mastheads and in the bylines of
such periodicals as Commentary, National Review, the American
Spectator, the Wall Street Journal, the New Criterion and NY:
The City Journal, a new quarterly of urban affairs. "We're not a
unified sect," insists Teachout, adding that they do have one
tenet in common: "The political and intellectual legacies of our
older brothers and sisters, the baby boomers of the '60s, were
a flop, a failure, a disaster." He sums up those legacies as
"stale '60s romanticism, wan '70s disillusion, tedious '80s
whining."

    The essays in Beyond the Boom vary considerably in quality.
By far the liveliest is David Brooks' "Portrait of a Washington
Policy Wonk," a dead-on, deadpan satire about how legislative
aides and assistants to Cabinet secretaries can rise above their
lowly station. Johnston, in "Break Glass in Case of Emergency,"
effectively skewers yuppiedom's jejune New Age spirituality. And
Teachout, in "A Farewell to Politics," argues plausibly that the
great ideological battles of the '90s will be fought over
culture, a word he defines broadly enough to include abortion;
family policy; and "sensitivity fascism" in American academia
(which he describes elsewhere in the book as "a thoroughly
uncongenial intellectual retirement home for tenured radicals
of the '60s").

    As that lofty jape suggests, Beyond the Boom's writers are
not above a few slap shots and kidney punches. The anthology's
contributors, for the most part, are stronger on aphorism and
assertion than on analysis. They also indulge in an awful lot of
navel gazing, often in a tone of self-satisfied righteousness;
witness Dana Mack's account of being brave and lonely as a
student at San Francisco's Lowell High School. The book's two
essays on film, by Bruce Bawer and John Podhoretz, seem
tendentious and repetitive.

    Teachout frowns at the charge of smugness. "We would agree
that we're all more or less on the side of the angels," he says.
"We all took a deep breath when the Berlin Wall fell. But then
we turned to other things." Among them is whether the Vile Body
has any future in a city teetering on the brink of terminal
decay. It's not a prospect that cheers the salon regulars. New
York may be a city under enemy (read: tired old liberal) aegis.
But it is also the center of a vernacular culture that makes the
U.S., in Johnston's sardonic phrase, "the most amusing place to
live in the history of the planet." And there is no doubt in the
minds of Johnston and his friends what room offers the best
view, if only once a month.