Category Archives: Juvenal Early’s Archive

England’s Augustan Age: On Satirists Alexander Pope And Jonathan Swift

Britain, Christianity, History, Juvenal Early's Archive, Literature, Pseudo-intellectualism, Pseudoscience, The West

The counterculture of England’s Augustan Age was one of the most remarkable in history. It should be a model for the Dissident Right of today

By Juvenal Early

Think of a nominally Christian country in which a beleaguered majority is everywhere beset by the corruption of its leaders and the criminality of rebarbative minorities. Corruption reigns in high places, barbarism and crime reign in the street, and the culture is pervaded by mediocrities, who are celebrated as rebel geniuses, when they’re really just dullards, courtiers, and the usual Establishment lackeys. Can you guess?

That’s right. England in the Augustan Age, 300 years ago.

This was a time after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Catholic James II was usurped by his daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William of Orange. When the Duke of Marlborough proved that it was possible for a General to become richer than a King. This is also the age when the English Language evolved into what we know today.

But although people in the Augustan age were certainly better-read than the savage illiterates of our own times, still, as always, the lowest common denominator prevailed. And so, people eschewed their rich legacy of Dryden and Chaucer and Shakespeare, in favor of the smut purveyed by the odious bookseller Edmund Curll or the profuse dullness (Dulness) on offer from the hacks who infested Grub Street.

In 1721, Robert Walpole became England’s first prime minister, a year after the “South Sea Bubble,” the Wall Street Crash of its day. Scam and corruption were everywhere prevalent. Walpole was a man of his time, enriching his courtiers and punishing his enemies. He stayed in power for 20 years, during which time highwaymen, thieves, and thief-takers—like the infamous Jonathan Wild—held sway, and the average person was under siege.

But a culture always generates a counterculture, and the counterculture of the Augustan Age was one of the most remarkable in history. It should be a model for the Dissident Right of today. The key figures of that counterculture are two of the immortals of literature: Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope. I’ve been hearing about Swift and Pope all my life but hadn’t known that they lived at the same time and were friends—although Swift was an Anglican clergyman and Pope a Catholic (not a big door-opener in post-Tudor England).

Swift and Pope joined with Dr John Arbuthnot and playwright John Gay to form the Scriblerus Club. Arbuthnot, a little too fond of eating, created the great English persona John Bull, the honest citizen who’s a tad slow on the uptake. Gay wrote what may be the first musical, “The Beggar’s Opera” (1728), a rollicking send-up of Walpole’s corrupt England. “The Beggar’s Opera” would be modernized by the German communist Bertolt Brecht into “The Three-penny Opera,” Gay’s protagonist Captain MacHeath transformed into Mack the Knife.

The Scriblerians inspired one another. More than anyone since the great Juvenal, they elevated satire to high art. Their targets were numerous, and they tended to consign them to the charnel house of Dulness (sic). The enemy list included Classics scholar Robert Bentley, depraved bookseller Edmund Curll, laughable Poet Laureate Colley Cibber, and critic Lewis Theobald. Above all, there was Walpole, as criminal-friendly as a Soros DA, who would’ve strung up the Scriblerians, if possible. As it was, he saw to Swift’s Irish exile and banned theatre in London after Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera” proved such a smashing success. Poor Gay died long before his sequel Polly was staged (in the age of Johnson!).

The best work of the Scriblerians still resonates three centuries later, especially in the case of Swift and Pope. They’ll be discussed for as long as great literature still matters.

Born into a Catholic Family, the same year Papist James II was ousted in favor of William and Mary, Pope’s (1688-1744) prospects were never bright. Fortunately, his family had money and could take shelter from the worst of the anti-Catholic persecution in lovely Windsor Forest. Many career paths were never an option for Pope. Plus, he was born with tuberculosis of the spine. Handicapped in body (he never grew above 4’6”), handicapped by religion (Swift tried to bribe him into the Church of England), denied all but the most rudimentary education, Pope could not have been expected to amount to much. Yet, he made more off the printed word than any writer since Shakespeare.

Inclined toward the Ancients, Pope imitated Horace and wrote first-rate translations of Homer. Classics scholars swear by his Iliad. He edited new editions of Shakespeare that were an invaluable link in the English theatre.

A poet, Pope wrote his brilliant satires in verse, mostly iambic pentameter. What does poetry have to do with satire? Oscar Wilde, anyone? Going back to Dryden, verse was a preferred vehicle for satire. Even Jonathan Swift used it occasionally. In Post-Revolutionary America, nothing stung like a good poem, and newspapers used it often. Take Jefferson’s friend Philip Freneau, editor of the National Gazette. Here he is in early 1800, jabbing fellow countrymen for going overboard in mourning the recently deceased George Washington:

He was no god, ye flattering knaves,
He own’d no world, he ruled no waves;
But—and exalt it, if you can,
He was the upright, Honest Man.

 Pope’s eloquent venom was meted out to many agents of dullness, for instance:

Walpole and the courtier John Hervey (Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot):

Whether in florid impotence he speaks,
And, as the prompter (Walpole) breathes, the puppet (Hervey) squeaks.
Or at the ear of Eve (Queen Caroline), familiar toad,
Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad,
In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies,
Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies,
His wit all seesaw, between that and this,
Now high, now low, now master up, now miss [referring to Hervey’s bisexuality].

George Bubb Dodington, a Walpole ally, very susceptible to toadying hacks:

But sick of fops, and poetry, and prate,
To Bufo (toad) left the whole Castalian (spring of the Muses) state.
Proud as Apollo, on his forked hill,
Sate full-blown Bufo, puffed by every quill,…

 Sometimes there was tribute, here to his friend John Gay:

Or simple pride for flattery makes demands,
May dunce by dunce be whistled off my hands!
Blessed be the great! For those they take away,
And those they left me; for they left me Gay;
Left me to see neglected genius bloom,
Neglected die, and tell it on his tomb….

Pope reserved special scorn for bookseller Edmund Curll; Lewis Theobald, a critic who attacked Pope’s edition of Shakespeare at length; and actor-cum-Poet Laureate Colley Cibber. The latter two would find themselves skewered in Pope’s Magnum Opus, The Dunciad, as respective kings of the Dunces.

The scurrilous Curll, a literary thief and plagiarizer, published purloined texts, hack-writer pulp, bios of newly dead celebrities, and even some smut. An opportunist, he’d got the best of Pope early on, but Pope turned the tables later, manipulating Curll into publishing his letters, i.e., presenting Pope’s side of his own story.

Of Curll and his ilk (Grub Street hacks), Pope writes in the Dunciad:

Hence miscellanies spring, the weekly boast,
Of Curll’s chaste press, and Lintot’s rubric post:
Hence hymning Tyburn’s elegiac lines,
Hence Journals Medleys, Merc’ries, Magazines;
Sepulchral lies, our holy walls to grace
And New Year odes, and all the Grub Street race.
In clouded majesty here Dulness shone;
Four guardian virtues round support her throne…

Cibber and Theobald had offended Pope in other ways, including the dullness of their work. Cibber, a comic actor, was elevated to Poet Laureate in 1730, though he was without poetic accomplishment. The critic Theobald nitpicked Pope’s Shakespearian Editions at great length, advertising himself as England’s supreme Bard expert. Both men were deemed suitable candidates for king of the dunces:

I sing. Say you, her instruments the great!
Called to this work by Dulness, Jove, and Fate;
You by whose care, in vain decried and cursed,
Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first.

After his death, Pope’s reputation only grew. He was esteemed by Dr Johnson in the 18th Century; Byron, Lamb, Arnold, and Ruskin in the 19th; and W.H. Auden and Edith Sitwell in the 20th. Only The Bible and Shakespeare have been quoted more. His tormentors outlived him; his reputation buried theirs. They exist only in the footnotes of many Pope biographies.

And what of Swift (1667-1745)? Born in Dublin to a carpetbagging English family, forced by circumstance and Walpole to spend most of his life in Dublin, he felt cheated out his English birthright. An Anglican, he didn’t particularly care for the Catholic Irish. Yet, he excelled in Dublin as a clergyman, and rose to become Dean of St Patrick’s, a post he held from 1713 until his death. An Englishman by temperament, he’s as much a part of the Irish canon as James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. When the English pushed Ireland around a little too much, Swift rose to its defense, and was inspired to write his sublimely satiric “Modest Proposal.”

From 1689 until 1699, Swift worked as the secretary to the writer/diplomat Sir William Temple, in Moor’s Park, Surrey. Temple, whose work hasn’t aged well, was nonetheless a first-rate prose stylist, as Samuel Johnson said of him, “the first writer who gave cadence to English prose.”

During this period, Temple became embroiled in the literary Battle of the Ancients and Moderns. Temple took the Ancient position in opposition to proponents of modern books, like Richard Bentley. Swift, always loyal to Temple, produced his first great satire in Temple’s defense, The Tale of the Tub. There would also be the long essay, The Battle of the Books. Swift’s reputation as a writer was established.

Why did he write? Entertainment be damned. He told Pope he wanted to vex the world, not divert it. Swift’s oeuvre is vast and rich, from The Tale of the Tub to The Bickerstaff Letters, The Drapier Letters, and many essays and poems. But, of course, with Swift, it always comes down to Gulliver’s Travels (1726).

Gulliver’s Travels, is Swift’s masterpiece, the acme of satire in the English letters. It is Swift’s disquisition on Walpole’s England and the rottenness of Human Nature. Americans know Gulliver’s Travel as a bowdlerized children’s book, an entertaining little Disney cartoon, and most people think it begins and ends with the Lilliputians. In fact, it’s a darkly humourous parody of Robinson Crusoe (Swift didn’t care for the Whig hack Daniel Defoe)—filled with puns, bodily functions, and scatology—that’s an exhaustive survey of what’s wrong with the world.  It’s also prescient and speaks to our present condition as much as anything written 300 years—heck, 3 days—ago. Far from being a children’s book, most people can’t appreciate Gulliver’s Travels until they’re over 30.

Ship’s doctor, Lemuel Gulliver, takes four journeys. First to Lilliput, where the tininess of its citizens is meant to represent the smallness of mind and vision Swift observed in Great Britain. There’s a Walpole stand-in Lilliput, the rope-dancing Treasurer Flimnap. Gulliver, soon in trouble for urinating on a fire in the queen’s chamber (thereby saving her!), will eventually need to escape Lilliput and find his way home.

On his second voyage, Gulliver reaches Brobdingnag, inhabited by a race of giants, as large in proportion to Gulliver as he was to the Lilliputians. The Brobdingnagians are large of mind, large in generosity, peaceful, and open-minded. When Gulliver—let’s be clear; Gulliver is not Swift, not yet—proudly tells the Brobdingnag king about England, the king is aghast. He sees through Gulliver’s arguments and rationalizations. Through the king, Swift sends up his native land, including the national bank and national debt; the warmongering of its leaders; the war profiteers, like Winston Churchill’s revered ancestor the Duke of Marlborough:

He asked me, who were our Creditors? and, where we found Money to pay them.  He wondered to hear me talk of such chargeable and extensive Wars; that, certainly we must be a quarrelsome People, or live among very bad Neighbors; and that our Generals must needs be richer than our Kings.

On learning about England’s legal system and its legislators, the king tells Gulliver:

You have made a most admirable Panegyric upon your Country. You have proved that Ignorance, Idleness, and Vice are the proper Ingredients for qualifying a Legislator. That Laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose Interest and Abilities lie in perverting, confounding and eluding them.

The Brobdingnag King might almost be a paleolibertarian—200 years before the birth of Murray Rothbard. He sums up England as follows:

I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth.

The Brobdingnagians also provide Gulliver with the opportunity to see human bodily decay at close-range, man through a microscope. As enormous as the Brobdingnagians are, Gulliver can easily see the imperfections of human flesh, the pores, the moles, the blemishes. The sight of a human mouth eating is a horror beyond words. Illusions are shattered.

On his third trip, Gulliver journeys to the floating island of Laputa, ruled by people who anticipate 21st Century elites who mandate electric cars and pandemic lockdowns, who demonize their opponents as anti-science. Laputa reveres science too. At their grand Academy of Lagado, the so-called Projectors rule the roost. They are eerie precursors to the rabble who run America’s woke universities. With funding available for the most esoteric of projects, the Projectors seek to extract sunbeams from cucumbers or reconstitute food from piles of human excrement. Wiser by now, Gulliver observes that

The only Inconvenience is, that none of these Projects are yet brought to Perfection; and in the meantime, the whole Country lies miserably in waste, the Houses in Ruins, and the People without Food or Cloaths.

Gulliver’s final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhms (say “HUE-nums), horse-like creatures of pure reason. When he arrives, Gulliver is greeted by a revolting horde of human offal, known as the Yahoos (in case you wondered where that term came from). Gulliver runs away from them, in fear for his life, but recognizes in the Yahoos his own English race.

When discovered by the Houyhnhms, they at first take Gulliver for a Yahoo, but he convinces them otherwise. He takes up residence with their leader, and soon feels comfortable among such rational beings whose worldview is so sympathetic to his own. The king’s conversation enlightens Gulliver. Gulliver has found his perfect home.

But the Houyhnhms are unnerved by his presence, so much does he resemble a Yahoo. So, reluctantly, Gulliver leaves and makes his way back to England, where he is now appalled by human contact, even with his family. They’re all Yahoos to him, and for a long time he avoids interaction. He eventually comes to a sort of détente with his fellow human beings, and lives out his days, spending as much time with horses as possible.

What can we say in conclusion about Pope and Swift? To state the obvious, human nature is immutable and projects devoted to perfecting humans are destined to fail. Also, satire is a very effective weapon. Truth, matched with wit, is a powerful combination.

If you’re a Christian, it’s okay to be a misanthrope like Swift. Let’s be honest, all this love thy neighbor/love your enemy stuff gets carried out way too far. Tough love is much better. If you love your neighbor to the point that you’re tolerating open borders, foreign wars, and drag queen story hour, you’ve got a problem.

In conclusion, we need to emulate men like Pope and Swift. They were the coolest guys in town in their own time, and their work has lived on until ours. If you match truth and wit with intelligence and real learning, you just might leave a legacy that people will be talking about 100 years from now.

********************************************************************************
“Juvenal Early” is a contributor to Barely A Blog. His 2020 piece, “The Dissident Right Has An Idiocracy Problem,” created quite a buzz.

* Screen picture credit here

UPDATED (8/14/022): A Few Good Men: Juvenal Early Dons His Shining Armor For A Hebrew

America, Anti-Semitism, Democracy, Hebrew Testament, Ilana Mercer, Juvenal Early's Archive, South-Africa

A woman is lucky to have a friend such as Juvenal Early, writer extraordinaire, and all-round fine human being. That my toil—and persona—inspires such a valiant defense in someone so kind and gifted means a lot—and offsets unkind cuts and slights from other quarters.

While I thoroughly enjoyed the interview with Ed Dutton, and simply love to speak about “Xhosa & Zulu & Buthelezi,” some of my readers, such as the brilliant Juvenal, nom de plume naturally, had prepared substantive questions they did not get the opportunity to ask.  A frustrated Juvenal Early vents spleen on The Unz Review:

Oh, Jew! Jew! Jew! To paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara, is that all you guys ever talk about.

ILANA expressed herself in this long interview with all of intelligence, class, & erudition that she usually brings to her podcasts, and was, as always, great fun to listen to. But I’m afraid she didn’t speak to the issues I was hoping to hear about: CRT, black crime, the morass in Ukraine, the utter worthlessness of the GOP, etc. For that I blame the interlocutor, Mr Dutton. He seemed to be more interested, in the first half, to hear about South Africa, in the most minute details too, & we got a little bit more about tribal traits than we bargained for. Or perhaps that’s just me. ILANA has been in America for 20 years, & few writers understand better than her what’s happening here, & it was that I was led to believe would be the host’s agenda. But no, we got a lot of Xhosa & Zulu & Buthelezi—& the inevitable Jew questions. The patient lady rolled with the punches, & handled herself with aplomb.

When Dr. Dutton turned to the listeners’ questions, it became really evident that the fix was in. The first 3 questions came from the same guy. And they all had something to do with the so-called JQ. The rest of the questions were of a similar mouthbreather sort. The final question posited one those hypothetical situations that is completely irrelevant to the way we live now (& will be living a millennium from now), something about a world where Jews can’t hold office. ILANA’s jolly “Fuck off” was triumphant & completely appropriate, under the circumstances. It shouldn’t have been, but it was the best moment in the whole 98 minutes.

ILANA is an individual, coming at issues from an individualist’s perspective. At one point, she did say that, as far as identity was concerned, she was an Old Testament (she would call it the Hebrew Bible) Hebrew, with all that that implies with respect to embracing the truth, & raining hellfire down on your enemies. I thought that was pretty cool. Certainly an original perspective. She’s always been an original, you know. I scarcely know where the second-handers would be without her.

Now a lot of you will say how she ignores the elephant in the room, doesn’t say who’s behind all the evil in the world. You have the right to do so, & it’s a testament to Mr Unz’s love of free speech that you can do it here in the most colorful & imaginative ways possible. Personally, I get the enjoyment of a weekly wager with a friend, who also reads ILANA’s columns. We each try to guess how many JQ questions will turn up in the Comments before the next column is posted. The loser buys. We’re both getting pretty soused.

UPDATED (8/14/022):  Fred Reed sent similar sentiments:

Again, I must stress that I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Ed, who is a most interesting character.  I enjoy that. I enjoy interesting, out-of-the-mold individuals.  That Ed is. I’m not threatened by difference, as I am different and am blattered for it. I’ve noticed over my “career” (such that it is) that sameness is courted in North America. Perhaps I’m wrong; but I felt that Ed and I share a certain idiom; wry humor …

It’s also interesting to me—who seems to expect too little from people by way of their treatment of me (I need to work on that)—that some valued men felt differently and were kind of protective of me. That’s what makes for chivalry.

Writes Fred Reed:

I just finally got leisure to watch your Dutton interview, but couldn’t finish it. I was very much interested in what you had to say but–forgive me if he is your friend–the frequent interruptions, the lengthy high-speed jabbering were unbearable. As you spoke at a normal rate for thoughtful discourse, I couldn’t focus on what you were saying because I was constantly thinking, When is he going to interrupt and start talking over her. In my perhaps curmudgeonly view, an interviewer’s place is to ask brief questions and shut up.

On the whole America strikes me as unintelligent or at best uninformed and uninterested and without a cultural and moral glue to hold them together. If I had children today, I would much prefer that they grow up in Mexico in Mexican schools than in the US.

Fred

I have uploaded the video with Ed’s kind permission to my own YouTube channel. You can now watch the joust minus the offensive “Jewy” comments below it.

https://lnkd.in/gZeXmsuE

UPDATED (8/12/022): WATCH: My Talk With The ‘Jolly Heretic’ About The Future Of America

Africa, America, Anti-Semitism, Democracy, Judaism & Jews, Juvenal Early's Archive, Race, Racism, South-Africa

Dr. Edward Dutton of the popular “Jolly Heretic” podcast interviews me about my 2011 book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa”; what it portends for America—has the tipping point been reached?—and much more.

Ed quipped that the book has held up “quite well.” I, of course, wrote “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” with a view to boldly outlining for Americans the contours of the anti-white society that will materialize in America if… if…

Alas, that society is upon us.

I suffer the usual glut of Jewy questions and taunts, but I get the last word. A spontaneous one-upmanship, if you will. But don’t go skipping to the end.

Still, Ed and I have a jolly good time of it. Watch:

UPDATE II (8/13/022): I have uploaded the video with Ed’s kind permission to my own YouTube channel. You can now watch the joust minus the offensive “Jewy” comments below it.

https://lnkd.in/gZeXmsuE

Nothing personal, Mr. Sheer. But I’m up to my eyeballs–had it!–with brooding, sour, judgmental puritanical scolds—species prevalent in North America—lying in wait to take offense at me, my jolly fun use of English (“off with her head!”)–and my persona; simply because it’s not flat-lining. The “F” word when used judiciously is fabulous. Ask D.H. Lawrence. Being an alive, if demure, personality among the walking dead isn’t fun.

UPDATE I (8/12/022): The Mercer fan page praises me for turning in a good performance and has some mild, fussy and unfocused words (the worst kind) for the Jewy stuff that occupied the segment.

Reply: You find “Jew, Jew, Jew” “boring”? What an understatement. Try enduring it for decades. As someone who has written in depth, well-developed works on the defining issues of the day, since 1998–I was having to speak not about my writing; but rather, to defend my character on the grounds that I was born Jewish; and in response to the  irrational hate of low-IQ, emotion-driven mouth-breathers for someone they don’t know.

Here is a simple statement from a man with an obvious urge to do the right thing and an ability to say the right thing:

Robert Dolan @UnzReview says:

She takes a lot of abuse here and never whines.
Her book is actually very good.
Everytime she writes a piece we get to hear about how she’s jewish…..as if we didn’t already know….
C’mon. Judge people by their work and their accomplishments.
Consider also the fact that the people facing the harsh (and usually unfair criticism) are public figures…..they have the courage to speak their minds in public and reveal their thoughts to the world at large, inviting not only social ostracism but financial ruin.

As to the comment about “financial ruin,” Robert gets it. My income—syndication dropped—was lost after I came out against the ConOink’s Iraq War in September of 2002. And burned as hot as molten lava against it for years. Dissident in 2001; dissident now. No change.

UPDATE III (8/13/022): Juvenal Early Dons His Shining Armor: 

A woman is lucky to have a friend such as Juvenal Early (nom de plume naturally), writer extraordinaire, and all-round fine human being. That my toil—and persona—inspires such a valiant defense in someone so kind and gifted means a lot—and offsets unkind cuts and slights from other quarters.

Oh, Jew! Jew! Jew! To paraphrase Scarlett O’Hara, is that all you guys ever talk about.

ILANA expressed herself in this long interview with all of intelligence, class, & erudition that she usually brings to her podcasts, and was, as always, great fun to listen to. But I’m afraid she didn’t speak to the issues I was hoping to hear about: CRT, black crime, the morass in Ukraine, the utter worthlessness of the GOP, etc. For that I blame the interlocutor, Mr Dutton. He seemed to be more interested, in the first half, to hear about South Africa, in the most minute details too, & we got a little bit more about tribal traits than we bargained for. Or perhaps that’s just me. ILANA has been in America for 20 years, & few writers understand better than her what’s happening here, & it was that I was led to believe would be the host’s agenda. But no, we got a lot of Xhosa & Zulu & Buthelezi—& the inevitable Jew questions. The patient lady rolled with the punches, & handled herself with aplomb.

When Dr. Dutton turned to the listeners’ questions, it became really evident that the fix was in. The first 3 questions came from the same guy. And they all had something to do with the so-called JQ. The rest of the questions were of a similar mouthbreather sort. The final question posited one those hypothetical situations that is completely irrelevant to the way we live now (& will be living a millennium from now), something about a world where Jews can’t hold office. ILANA’s jolly “Fuck off” was triumphant & completely appropriate, under the circumstances. It shouldn’t have been, but it was the best moment in the whole 98 minutes.

ILANA is an individual, coming at issues from an individualist’s perspective. At one point, she did say that, as far as identity was concerned, she was an Old Testament (she would call it the Hebrew Bible) Hebrew, with all that that implies with respect to embracing the truth, & raining hellfire down on your enemies. I thought that was pretty cool. Certainly an original perspective. She’s always been an original, you know. I scarcely know where the second-handers would be without her.

Now a lot of you will say how she ignores the elephant in the room, doesn’t say who’s behind all the evil in the world. You have the right to do so, & it’s a testament to Mr Unz’s love of free speech that you can do it here in the most colorful & imaginative ways possible. Personally, I get the enjoyment of a weekly wager with a friend, who also reads ILANA’s columns. We each try to guess how many JQ questions will turn up in the Comments before the next column is posted. The loser buys. We’re both getting pretty soused.

Juvenal Early: Chronicles’ Playboy Taki Presses Flesh With Racism-Spotting ‘Poofter’

BAB's A List, Conservatism, Journalism, Juvenal Early's Archive, Literature, Paleoconservatism, Populism, South-Africa

“Murray, from what I can tell, is the latest manifestation of what Tom Wolfe once labeled ‘The Mid-Atlantic Man,’ i.e., the foppish Englishman who makes a generous living off the Americans he’s bamboozled into thinking he’s brilliant.”—Juvenal Early

By Juvenal Early

So, what in the Sam Hill is going on over at Chronicles Magazine?

The June issue features back-page gossip columnist (and reputed Moneybags) Taki extolling the virtues of his friend Douglas Murray’s latest book, The War on the West (another unoriginal title to add to the Murray canon; here’s the first, also extolled by Chronicles).

Though math geek John Derbyshire lamented the book’s lack of numbers and graphs, and said it had nothing new to offer, Taki terms it a “dozey.”  I assume he meant doozy; dozey sounds like a nighttime sleep-aid.

But, but, but. Wasn’t it only back in January that Murray called out Chronicles Wunderkind Pedro Gonzalez for anti-semitism?  And haven’t there been a dearth of Gonzalez appearances in the last few months on Tucker Carlson Tonight? And didn’t Chronicles call out the heavy peashooters in counterattack to the bitchy Brit? In short, hadn’t Murray’s name become persona non grata in the halls of the Charlemagne Institute (publisher of Chronicles)?

Let me back up a little and give some context.

It starts with Tucker, where else?  If you were following his show with any degree of regularity over the past few years, you no doubt became acquainted with Douglas Murray and Pedro Gonzalez, two of Tuck’s go-to guys, when it comes to having opinions on politics and culture. Tucker has even anointed them (unjustly we think) as public intellectuals in extended gingham-shirt interviews on his FoxNation streaming show.

Pedro writes for several outlets, principally for Chronicles, where he’s an editor and also their current Wonder Boy. Though not without talent, he has a track record of expropriating the ideas of others without giving them credit.

Murray, from what I can tell, is the latest manifestation of what Tom Wolfe once labeled “The Mid-Atlantic Man,” i.e., the foppish Englishman who makes a generous living off the Americans he’s bamboozled into thinking he’s brilliant. With aspirations to be the latest Roger Scruton, if not Michael Oakeshott, Doug’s ended up being “Con-Oink’s” House Poofter. Not bad work, if you can get it. Seems like all the Fox hosts are calling on him now. Barely-a-Blog and the “Hard Truth” Podcast have both devoted column space and air time to Murray’s sins. (Also here and here.)

So, when Murray wrote his hit piece on Bari Weiss’s Substack page, maybe he didn’t know that he was castigating a fellow Tucker-bro.  Or maybe he did, and that’s the whole point. It’s dog eat dog in what currently passes for America’s conservative intellectual battlefield.

Enter Taki and his literal PR job on behalf of Douglas Murray. Taki’s June 2022 “Under the Black Flag” column begins: “Douglas Murray’s book The War on the West has just been published, and it’s a dozey [sic]. He is a friend and fellow columnist in the London Spectator, the oldest magazine in the English-speaking world.”

What are we to think? Maybe it’s a sign of health that a polemical magazine offers differing opinions.  Or maybe it was just an oversight that it made it to print.  Or maybe the deep pockets of which Taki’s always reminding us had something to do with it. By all reports, Chronicles has survived hand-to-mouth since Leopold Tyrmand founded it. Maybe they’re not anxious to upset an important patron. Just spitballing here.

As for Taki’s literary output, it is gossip, you know, albeit, high-class gossip, as the brilliant writer and jet-set doyenne Barbara Amiel says in her memoirs.  (Hmm. Pot. Kettle. Black?) He was, she said, maybe capable of better things: “…really, had he put his mind to it, he could have been a significant writer.” Certainly, he was always invoking his heroes—Hemingway and Mailer come to mind—enough that you knew he had more than a passing acquaintance with the best writers of the 20th Century. You get the idea that he aspired to that level.

But perhaps all that money and all those yachts and all those women and all that tennis and all that judo and all that vodka sapped his talent, left him with no more than his platform at the Spectator—or wherever else he could find an eager publisher.

Indeed, the proper term for what Taki became might be writer manqué.

So where did he come by his affinity for Murray?

Well, if you’ve aspired to greatness, but fallen short, the next best thing is to find yourself in the company of the best available option. Which is often just a flavor of the month, like Dougie-boy. For Murray’s part, I imagine he likes having someone colorful picking-up the checks.

As previously mentioned, Taki is always reminding us of his colorfulness and his ability to pick-up checks. Then there’s the fortune, yachts, the houses, the women—the “candyfloss,” in the words of Barbara Amiel (before she turned around and squandered her talent on Conrad and the high-life).

Yes, money, Taki does have. He’s been telling us for well over 40 years how much better his life is than ours. He’ll get down and slum with the people, now and then, but don’t try to insinuate yourself into his world. A friend was once at conference featuring Taki. He was part of a group that surrounded Taki at a cocktail reception. Taki was holding forth on Gstaad, the ski retreat in Switzerland where he owns a house. My friend, upper middle class, well-read, well-traveled, a first-rate financial analyst, mentioned that he’d been in Gstaad recently, and had been very impressed with the place’s beauty. Taki sized him up, and replied dismissively: “you were never in Gstaad.” Why’d he do that? Push comes to shove, he’s probably just a snob at heart

And he’s just the kind of white whale a bloke like Murray dreams of hooking. Murray’s a punch-down kinda guy, or at least that’s the impression I have. He’ll suck up to who he has to, but I can’t see him sharing a pint with Joe Sixpack. A custom fit for the Greek Boy? Snobs of a feather?  Just asking.

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“Juvenal Early” is a contributor to Barely A Blog. His 2020 piece, “The Dissident Right Has An Idiocracy Problem,” created quite a buzz.

When Juvenal approached me about the above piece, I applauded his instincts. Taki is, after all, quoted in Into The Cannibal’s Pot (p.18), enthusing over South Africa being “the greatest triumph of chatter over machine-gun clatter. It’s not perfect, and crime is at an all-time high in South African cities,” babbled Taki, “but at least the massacres are a thing of the past and life goes on much better than before.”

The loss of my homeland lauded … The Nasionale Party trashed by the so-called Smart Set. 

Once upon a time, the epistolary fluff ensconced at The American Conservative was detonated daily by the “pugnacious” Lawrence Auster. When Auster died, a void opened up. The “typically shapeless pieces” coming out of paleoconservative quarters, at once “weird and solipsistic”—Auster’s delicious descriptions—have escaped scrutiny. Going by the pen name “Juvenal Early,” a disillusioned former donor to Chronicles has stepped up to clear the same “shapeless” thickets once hacked down to size by Lawrence Auster.
Enjoy.
ilana

 

* Douglas pic credit