Terry Teachout and the Last of the Conservative Critics

The critic and dramatist Terry Teachout had many friends, so news of his death at age 65 on January 13 spread very quickly. I heard about it that afternoon, shortly after listening to the episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy dealing with the recent death of another prominent writer: Joan Didion. The podcast and Teachout’s death became quickly intertwined in my mind not just because of the coincidence of timing. Didion and Teachout were both exemplars of a kind of literate and skeptical cultural conservatism that with their deaths now seems a preciously rare commodity. The United States in 2022 is awash in conservatives trying to ignite a culture war, but now there aren’t many conservatives engaged in genuine cultural conversation and debate.

Podcast hosts Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell were joined by Sam Tanenhaus and approached Didion from a particular angle, focusing on her start as a writer for National Review from 1960 to ’66. In the ’50s and ’60s, National Review had a distinguished “back of the book” that published some of the very early works of not just Didion but also Garry Wills, Arlene Croce, John Leonard, Hugh Kenner, and Guy Davenport. These writers were all metropolitan but skeptical of liberalism, which they often saw as sentimental and doctrinaire. They tended to be aristocratic modernists who prized the well-honed, irony-rich sentence. In the later 1960s, under the pressure of the Vietnam War and the rise of a more populist right with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, many of these writers became disenchanted with National Review and either moved left or become more apolitical.

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