On "red-diaper baby socialist patchouli sponges" ... and Tolkien

Kevin D. Williamson of NRO's Media Blog has a fine vitriolic rant on reactions to David Mamet's apparent conversion to conservatism. The passage (from Williamson) that most caught my eye was the following: “Conservatism assumes that the world is necessarily imperfect, that our institutions are imperfect, and that mankind is inescapably morally compromised. These brain-dead leftists have, apparently, never heard of T.S. Eliot, Russell Kirk, Evelyn Waugh, Burke, Tom Wolfe, Disraeli, or V.S. Naipaul.” I am only passingly familiar with most of these men, as writers, though I know Waugh fairly well, and if any man or his writing was ever a study in moral ambiguity, it was he.

This reminds me of the canard that continuously comes up about Tolkien, that, as Time Magazine put it a few years ago in a review of A Feast for Crows, by George R. R. Martin (“R. R.”? – who’s he copying?), “Tolkien's work has enormous imaginative force, but you have to go elsewhere for moral complexity.” I will now proceed to cheat on my blog by supplying my commentary in the slightly edited form of the letter I wrote to a friend when he forwarded this same review to me almost one year ago this week:

This guy can't have possibly read Tolkien, and he somehow confuses the recognition that evil exists, and the ability to identify it (as you [the friend to whom I was writing] put it, “a profoundly Catholic world view of darkness vs. light”) with an utter lack of complexity. Does he know anything about the intimate portrait of a confused and tortured Smeagol? about kind Sam Gamgee's interest in killing Gollum? about the pride and skill and love of beauty of Fëanor in The Silmarillion? about the fact that a big chunk of Sauron's army is made up of men, not predestined orcs? about the love and hate and bitterness and lust for power that makes up the psyche of Denethor II, Steward of the beautiful white city who tries to burn himself and his half-dead son Faramir to death before the final battle? about the failure and repentance of that same king's other and more favored son Boromir? about the pitiable craven weakness of Wormtongue? about the crass and selfish but hardly evil cousins of Bilbo Baggins? about the brave but avaricious dwarves? Does he not know that Frodo fails in his quest? That his moral undoing is only undone by the undoing of Smeagol? I could go on and on, but this notion that Tolkien was a Manichean is ridiculous.

There. Hope that one-year-old epistle on a three-year-old review of a three-year-old novel wasn’t too warmed-over. Changes to the letter include the final two rhetorical questions (an odd detail to forget), the addition of names I couldn’t remember at the time (the letter has thus lost some of its sputtering quality, unfortunately: “Does he know anything about the pride and skill and love of beauty of (forgot his name) the gem-forging elf in the Silmarillion?”), as well as elisions of certain mild but still disparaging terms I applied to a writer whose name I had not bothered to notice in the heat of writing to a personal friend a private letter I thought would not see the light of day. I imagine that Mr. Lev Grossman would survive the application of these terms to his self, but prefer not to add insult to disagreement, especially when I know the man’s name.