An Interview with Slate's Stephen Metcalf

JASON GURIEL talks to the host of the Culture Gabfest

A FEW YEARS back, I put together a list of some favorite books of criticism, and couldn't resist inventing a volume: The Dilettante: Revews, Essays, and Rants, by Stephen Metcalf. Metcalf himself isn't an invention; for years, he's been a Slate critic and, most conspicuously, the host of the Culture Gabfest. But that's the problem: Metcalf's remarkable critical voice remains dispersed across various media, including print, webpage, and podcast.

That's not to diminish the digital; the Culture Gabfest isn't simply one of Slate's pioneering podcasts, it's one of the great works of criticism by other means—and one of the great, ongoing, off-the-cuff collaborations of recent years. Every Wednesday or so, a new episode materializes in iTunes, beamed there from whichever mountain peak the classical Greeks assigned to chatty, charming raconteurs. Metcalf's sparring partners include Julia Turner, Slate's editor, and Dana Stevens, the magazine's movie critic. ("[A] ridiculous snob, a world-beating cyborg, and a wood nymph," joked Metcalf, when he described the dynamic to me.)

But there's much more to Metcalf, who's currently writing a book about the 1980s. A student of Richard Rorty and a refugee from academia, he can seem like an emissary dispatched by some dying race of intellectuals, those who still engage with the Habermas, but who can also address themselves with style and clarity to a public readership—those who, in Metcalf's words, "can write simply about ideas." Just take a look at his long-running Dilettante column, where he rehearses a firm handle on such diverse phenomena as Libertarianism, Toni Morrison, and the meaning of Days of Thunder (yes, it has one).

I interviewed Metcalf by email over the last several months. Our conversation touched on podcasting, quitting academia for journalism, why Robert Frost will still be read millennia from now, and the hitherto-unremarked-upon connection between Taylor Swift and Lisa Loeb.

JASON GURIEL
Having listened to your weekly podcast for years, it was sort of thrilling to read your 2011 essay for New York magazine, on the fours shrinks you’ve frequented. Up to that point, you hadn’t written much about yourself, and the essay offers something like an oblique autobiography by way of therapy; as the reader gets a glimpse of each shrink, she gets a glimpse of a particular point in Stephen Metcalf’s life. More specifically, she learns that you were adopted, that you were expelled from boarding school, that you met your critical heroes at Yale. Lesser hands would’ve stretched the essay to book-length taffy, but you kept it contained, and cut it with just enough self-reflexivity. (“Admit it,” you write, “Like my friend Adam, you’re getting sleepy… very, very sleepy.”) So that’s a long, potentially sleep-inducing way of wondering: have you been conscious about not revealing too much of yourself in your criticism or on the podcast?

STEPHEN METCALF
Conscious, yes, but maybe not in that way. Early in their relationship, Greenspan once told his dom, Ayn Rand, that he wasn’t sure he existed, if I remember correctly, because he couldn’t prove it. Surely that suspicion, that you don’t exist, is more an epiphenomenon of a personality type, than the result of any deep reflection. It’s a pathology, and I’ve always had it. Are the most prominent people—in the sense of loudest, most arrogant, most self-sure—the most sure they exist, or the least? It strikes me no one was ever more sure she existed than Emily Dickinson. Anyhow, a podcast is maybe the perfect—or perfectly malign, depending on our point of view—medium for such a personality. You record in a broom closet, you suspect, often with reason, no one is listening. It lulls you, it gulls the listener. The delivery system is only incidental to the real fact of it, which is that it’s radio for an age of digital manners, which are leveling. If you talk like Brian Williams on a podcast you’re not making a podcast. I find it very hard to understand whether I ought to speak in my own voice, a fake radio voice, whether I’m being “natural” or putting forth a caricature. I never know when to expand, when to contract. (Maybe I should read more Emily Dickinson.) I’ve written to the whiners—and we get a lot, still, of mail from whiners—that the show is a work of semi-fiction, starring a ridiculous snob, a world-beating cyborg, and a wood nymph. Har, har, but the jokes on me. In the end, your voice reveals everything, whatever you choose to say.

GURIEL
There are many, many devotees who tune in every Wednesday to root for that “ridiculous snob”—or at least get his take on the latest cultural scandal. What do you make of the popularity of the show? Are you surprised by it?

“I think we deserve credit for inventing a form. There are now culture roundtables all over the place, but we were, I’m sure of it, the first.”

METCALF
It’s niche-popular, which is fine. More than fine. The goal for me at least was to talk without embarrassment as smart grad students talk, and to invite anyone to overhear. I think we deserve credit for inventing a form. There are now culture roundtables all over the place, but we were, I’m sure of it, the first. The surprise of its relative success comes when someone who absolutely loathes the type—who hates the kind of person who says “dialectic” without explaining it or abjectly apologizing for using it—writes in to scream at us (at me) for being awful snobs. Then you know you’ve traveled outside the narrow band. This can be inspiring or dismaying, depending on where you are in your caffeine cycle.

GURIEL
In your lovely remembrance of the late Denis Dutton, who curated Arts and Letters Daily, you talk a bit about your “awkward—some might say excruciating and as yet incomplete—transition from graduate student to freelance journalist.” Why did you leave grad school? And who were some of your models as you made the move to Grub Street?

METCALF
When I was in grad school, if your head was filled with Dwight MacDonald, the Orwell of Inside the Whale, Edmund Wilson, etc., and your eye was on The New Yorker, you had to keep that pretty quiet. Writing, such as it was, was on an original research, monograph model, with everything geared, first to a single mentor, then to a committee, then to a job-market. When it turned out it was a job-market without jobs, a situation that went from bad to savage in the nineties, a lot of people suddenly discovered—ha!—they were critics, not scholars. This coincided with the rise of the Internet and the return to bourgeois standards of personal safety of New York City. A lot of people ditched the PhD and moved to the East Village with a laptop, a futon, and that godawful halogen lamp. Those in a department with, say, John McPhee slipped a lot quicker into the freelance bloodstream than those stuck with Harold Bloom. But either way, thanks in part to the Internet, you could plausibly call yourself a writer, and in almost no time flat.

“Writing, such as it was, was on an original research, monograph model, with everything geared, first to a single mentor, then to a committee, then to a job-market. When it turned out it was a job-market without jobs, a situation that went from bad to savage in the nineties, a lot of people suddenly discovered—ha!—they were critics, not scholars.”

I had started as a grad student at UVA when Richard Rorty was there, at that time, probably the most widely discussed, if widely abused, American philosopher. He had rejected the whole orientation of academic philosophy, concluding that truth was rhetorical power, and, accordingly, he was hanging around English departments and writing for a general audience. I didn’t get to know him well, but I studied him closely—on the page and off. It is very, very important, in my estimation, to witness a true eminence up close, at least as one part of your formal education. The sheer fact of a professor’s moral presence, the effect it can have, has been radically downgraded over the decades. Now, personal stature means nothing without the work itself; and there are “towering” figures who don’t tower at all, some very much to their credit. But to see Rorty up close, a man in dialogue with the big Europeans, with Foucault and Harbermas, not to mention with the exalted dead, with Dewey and Heidegger, and all while preserving a plain-spoken American idiom—well, that was something.

Once in New York, I became somewhat obsessed with Louis Menand. He was doing what Rorty was doing, but for the magazines. And he was doing it in this new context, of a revived New York and an exodus of young critical talent out of the university. He was publishing wonderful, wry, flowing essays, about Kael, the sixties, The New Yorker itself, essays whose simplicity of tone hides a very unique, almost Nietzschean, turn of mind. He was in the university, but not exactly of it; comfortable with ideas of whatever difficulty, and yet perfectly at ease with the commuter on the 6 train, browsing a copy of The New Republic. I want to be clear, I am not in the company of these writers, but they served as models, for writing simply about ideas. Both gave me habits I have labored to lose, as they are not, in any organic way, mine.

GURIEL
How did you wind up writing speeches for Hillary Clinton? Did you have much contact with her?

METCALF
None at all, aside from a cursory handshake. I was at loose ends after grad school, and a friend of my then-girlfriend’s, now-wife’s, from Yale Law School was one of her policy advisers. I didn’t have deep feelings about HRC, but I did genuinely loathe D’Amato, whose seat she was aiming to fill, and Giuliani, whom she was running against.

“[T]hanks in part to the Internet, you could plausibly call yourself a writer, and in almost no time flat.”

GURIEL
Dutton believed in free markets. You (sensibly, to my mind) don’t. But you do point out that he “brought an ancient and enduring grace [to the Internet]—the belief in a free and contentious marketplace in ideas.” This line of thought, that there’s something to be learned from a scrappy figure like Dutton, seems reasonable enough. But in our increasingly polarized world, one could easily dismiss a Dutton as “conservative.” Your own opinions of movies, books, and albums sometimes earn you, if only jokingly, the declinist label—even though your politics present as progressive. (You certainly prove that a critic can be tough on Beloved, a beloved property of the Left, while being tough on Libertarianism, too.) Do you see these tensions in your work? Do you ever feel, say, insufficiently progressive—or, conversely, too reactionary? Or is it that being a culture journalist who filed a column called “The Dilettante” has enabled you to think with a bit more freedom and nuance than academia might have allowed?

METCALF
Let me try to answer this question with an example. Edmund Wilson wrote two great books, in my estimation, To the Finland Station and Patriotic Gore. In a strict historical sense, both books are “wrong,” though wrong in opposite ways. To the Finland Station is credulous about Bolshevism and Patriotic Gore is skeptical, and to a shocking degree, about abolitionism. Wilson somehow located the tyrant in Lincoln but missed it in Lenin. He ascribed a noble lineage to Communism but could only see a kind of mass moral hysteria behind the anti-slavery cause. But both books are masterpieces. Now, how is that possible? Wilson wrote one book animated by political idealism, the other by a political hatred, and these led him to a thumping confidence in theses no one could have patience for now. But he couldn’t help himself; he didn’t execute on either book at the level of the thesis. The polemicist, in both instances, gave way to the critic, and in this capacity he couldn’t help being discerning, nuanced, clever, deep, original; really and truly brilliant. The critic in him simply overrode in every particular that part of him that wanted salvation or revenge. The summa in this regard has to be Orwell. In Inside the Whale or his essays on Dickens, Kipling, etc., the subtilizing critic and the passionate advocate do not abuse one another, or cancel one another out. But who can do that? Hitchens often verged on being a great critic, but as a political thinker he was a declaiming idiot.

“Hitchens often verged on being a great critic, but as a political thinker he was a declaiming idiot.”

GURIEL
“[H]e didn’t execute on either book at the level of the thesis.”—that’s fascinating and puts me in mind of what Eliot said about James: “He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” Is it that criticism often flourishes in the mossy shadows of ideas and theses and agendas, when the critic is at her most ‘hands on’—engaged in close reading, say, or shaking some cultural object? I mean, Hitchens often worked better at the level of the book review, even the sentence—where his style and local insights often outshone the scaffolding of his book-length efforts.

METCALF
I’d hazard very few books of any kind are held up by their scaffolding. When I teach, which is too rarely, I try to put one bromide into the head of the students, only because I believe it. “Every good argument is a story, and every good story is an argument.” I believe in structure only to the degree it reveals itself in the act of writing, of spinning out a story or argument—it’s what the writer discovers, not what he imposed. Look, if it didn’t surprise you, it won’t surprise anybody else. Or, put another way: Every book starts out a building, but ends up an organism.

GURIEL
I love your defence of the dignified, midcentury voice in the novel A Separate Peace. At the end of that essay, you write, “In expecting of Gene a facile recitation, as to the nature of his sexuality, of his social class, gender, and race, we take the measure of our smallness, not his.” Do you find we focus too much on identity politics in criticism these days?

“Wilson somehow located the tyrant in Lincoln but missed it in Lenin. He ascribed a noble lineage to Communism but could only see a kind of mass moral hysteria behind the anti-slavery cause. But both books are masterpieces. Now, how is that possible?”

METCALF
If you think according to fixed and received categories, you aren’t doing criticism. To the degree urgent reform is required on the basis of fixed and received categories, of gender, race, ethnicity, etc., the work that needs to be done isn’t critical, it’s activist. Criticism (I think) has to seek out those points at which social or aesthetic problems appear intractable, even at the formulation stage. You are trying to get at the thought a culture denies itself the ability to think or say. That is the work a critic can do on behalf of readers. I understand for some critics, many vastly more well-regarded than me, criticism is playing upon the song flute of their reader’s fine feelings; and for other critics, equally vastly more prominent than me, it is giving readers permission to be morally indifferent to art; and for still others, it is midwifing into public view righteous emotions everyone sentient feels anyway. I just don’t think there is any staying power to stating the obvious, not because subtlety itself has value—it doesn’t—but because your job is to at least try to say that which the culture can’t otherwise say. That may sound pompous. I fail at this worse than anybody, believe me.

GURIEL
What’s the most problematic tendency you’re seeing in the criticism that gets published today? Is there a trend that troubles you?

METCALF
Reverting to prior statements—most of it isn’t criticism. It’s gossip, pop sociology, warmed over Freakonomics, TV recaps, fine feelings, outrage. If you think criticism is, as Kenneth Burke said, preventing a culture from being too much itself, you have to look hard to find criticism. That said, do yourself a favor, and read anything by Andrew O’Hagan.

“To the degree urgent reform is required on the basis of fixed and received categories, of gender, race, ethnicity, etc., the work that needs to be done isn’t critical, it’s activist. Criticism (I think) has to seek out those points at which social or aesthetic problems appear intractable, even at the formulation stage.”

GURIEL
You always seem to be recommending Frost. What draws you to his work?

METCALF
I hope I am not stealing this from somewhere, but to me Frost took the common American idiom, as it is spoken and felt, and turned it into an ancient language. (I hastily add: the white, male American idiom. But still.) I have given up pushing my tastes on anybody, and there isn’t a single objection to Frost that I would disagree with. He is a bleak, self-centered, sentimental crank. But it also doesn’t change my mind about him one whit. I believe his poetry will be read with avidity and respect in two thousand years.

GURIEL
You used to get into spirited arguments on the podcast, with Slate’s former music critic, Jody Rosen, about pop music. You seemed to take issue with a certain kind of “poptimist” sensibility, which can bring to bear a lot of ink and education on stuff that might not deserve it, like the music of Taylor Swift. But to be frank, you seem a touch quieter these days, when pop music is discussed on the show. Have you lost interest in the debate?

METCALF
I’ve given up making evaluative judgments. They have no empirical basis and pretending they do is as enlightening as talking politics at Thanksgiving. The social psychologist in me does wonder why a generation of critics is deferring to the American habit, of bowing down before the grand success. It may be that it took Dickens, and for that matter Shakespeare, X number of generations to be regarded as more than popular. It’s a weird sort of syllogism that argues everything popular now will one day be Dickens or Shakespeare. I can’t restrain myself from noting, had you taken six of the finest Taylor Swift’s songs and put them on a Lisa Loeb comeback album eight or ten years ago, no one would have noticed them.

“[H]ad you taken six of the finest Taylor Swift’s songs and put them on a Lisa Loeb comeback album eight or ten years ago, no one would have noticed them.”

GURIEL
Ha! Are we now overinvested in what used to be called “pop culture?” (And I ask this question as someone who’s a devotee of pop products like The Bachelor.) The decades-long erosion of our trust in canons and critical authority has certainly had its pluses. But it now seems like there’s a strain of fashionable and aggressive anti-elitism circulating among a lot of our critics and editors. It’s exponentially easier to pitch a piece on Justin Bieber than, say, Itzhak Perlman, my late father’s artistic hero. I’m also thinking of what you said recently on the podcast, about Habermas, who represents a tradition of thought that, you noted, the culture won’t permit now.

METCALF
We have lost the university and the popular press as automatic transmitters of unpopular culture. We’ve seen the giants of modernism cut down to size, as it were, because difficulty is (so it’s said) the strategy of the weak. It’s hard to get one’s head around it, but keeping some beloved totems alive may require something less like academia or even my snotty podcast, and something more like the medieval monks, with their small acts of deathless, patient transcribing.

“[Frost] is a bleak, self-centered, sentimental crank. But it also doesn’t change my mind about him one whit. I believe his poetry will be read with avidity and respect in two thousand years.”

GURIEL
Your book about the ‘80s has been in the works for a while. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned about the decade in your research?

METCALF
I’m surprised by how long it’s been in the works. After that, maybe how massively and evidently the culture changed between 1979 and 1985, relative to how little we’ve reckoned that change.

GURIEL
Can you give an example of a big cultural change that few of us have reckoned with?

METCALF
Tom Cruise?

GURIEL
You’re a Springsteen fan. Which of his songs doesn’t get enough love? I think it’s “New York City Serenade.”

METCALF
Hmm. Well, it’s either all of them, or none of them. Right?

JASON GURIEL co-edits Partisan. His recent work appears in The New Republic.

STEPHEN METCALF is Slate's critic at large and host of the Culture Gabfest. His work has appeared in Slate, The Nation, New York magazine, and elsewhere. He's working on a book about the 1980s.