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Daphne Merkin and Christopher Caldwell

the breakfast table
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from: Christopher Caldwell

Demolition Derby

Posted Thursday, July 15, 1999, at 4:24 PM ET

Dear Daphne,

Chastain must be the anglicized version of châtaigne, or "chestnut"--fitting, huh? Although you're right that Québecois names often retain those funny spellings out of Rabelais, like Bloy and Bonnefoy, so maybe it's one of those.

Since it's you who brought up your own surname, I can mention that I have nothing but fond associations with "Merkin." I grew up two blocks away from a head-turningly pretty and precociously elegant girl named Valerie Merkin, who was a couple of years older than me. Even at a distance, a 13-year-old girl makes quite an impression on an 11-year-old boy, and she was like something out of Poe: all raven tresses and rustling whispers. So whenever I hear the name (or even the word) I'm filled not with mirth but with nostalgia and remembered awe.

Your nice description of Tom Cruise ("not enough going on behind his eyes") reminded me that last night I read the most devastating piece of critical demolition I've seen in years. In this week's Times Literary Supplement, there's a review by Eric Griffiths of Roger Scruton's new book on culture. There are two basic ways to attack a bad book: through wit (dismissal) or through erudition (refutation). This review--in a way that makes you think of Clement Greenberg--is a dismissal that does the work of refutation. It's something else.

Scruton, as those who've read him won't need to be told, is given to ponderous Spenglerian pronunciamentos of a hell-in-a-handbasket variety--and Griffiths slaps them all down effortlessly. When Scruton tries to show England's hostility to intellectuals by claiming the word "intellectual" didn't enter the language until this century, Griffiths produces three top-of-the head examples from the Romantic poets that any reader will recognize. When Scruton cites a line from The Waste Land as a description of grace, Griffiths shows to the reader's satisfaction that it's a description of casual sex (adding that Scruton does not even seem to know the titles of Eliot's books). When Scruton bemoans the inattention to concrete detail that entered the culture through Tennyson's decadent poetic dalliance with Arthur Henry Hallam at Oxford, Griffiths quips that inattention can't be that big a problem for Scruton, since Tennyson and Hallam went to Cambridge. Griffiths shows up Scruton as a faux-fogey, an impostor straight out of the celebrity culture he condemns, yowling in defense of a high culture that he doesn't ultimately understand.

One reads on almost guiltily. The essay grows more exciting as it grows more brutal, like boxing. I don't know whether I'd recommend it to my writer friends. It would convince them (as critics) that they have the most exciting job in the world, and (as authors) that they have the most potentially humiliating one.

Best,
Chris

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Christopher Caldwell

Demolition Derby

Posted Thursday, July 15, 1999, at 4:24 PM ET
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Daphne Merkin is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes "Reckonings," a column on personal and cultural life. She is the author of Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays (click hereto buy the book). Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the New York Press.
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