Thread by @michaeldweiss

This title is still in print and the buying frenzy of all Dr. Seuss books only benefits the company that decided to discontinue (or “cancel”) the more controversial ones. One side in this kulturkampf is enriching the other side it accuses of being totalitarian.

https://twitter.com/arosegregory/status/1367198354501996548

I’m old enough (just barely) to remember the first iteration of this madness; perhaps it’s my generational bias, but I found the reaction to “PC” in the 90s more entertaining and edifying. Hughes. O’Rourke. Amis. Hitchens. This era is dumber than a box of dirt.

Two of my favorite essays are about the same thing: the attempt to reassess or abnegate Philip Larkin as a poet because of what was revealed about his scabrous, racist and misogynistic tendencies when Motion’s biography and Larkin’s letters came out.

The first—published in New Left Review, no less: newleftreview.org/issues/i200/ar…

The second, in the New Yorker: google.com/amp/s/www.newy…

The point of both was not to deny the shortcomings of the artist (both went to great pains to chronicle those in all their wince-making details). Rather, it was to show where the art transcended or overcame the deficiencies of the artist—which is what good criticism does.

What we have now isn’t criticism or even a nodding acquaintance with historical literacy and aesthetics: it’s overdetermined stock responses based on ideological presumptions.

I wrote a long piece about Auden’s “cancelling” some of his most memorable political poems from the 30s, composed during his Communist (or fellow traveler) period. I find them a lot better than older, anti-Communist Auden gave them credit for being: thedailybeast.com/why-wh-auden-h…

And here, too, the challenge for me wasn’t excusing bad politics: it was seeing where the talent — or, in this case, the genius — triumphed over bad politics, which I think it did more often than not, contra Orwell, Larkin and even Mendelson (Auden’s biographer and executor).

And if you want to see a sterling example of a critic’s eviscerating bad politics *and* bad art — by showing how the one affected the other — look up Robert Conquest’s treatment of Pound in “The Abomination of Moab.” A master class.