A dying breed

Those days are not quite gone, he acknowledges -- civilized people still recognize Dickensian allusions like "Barkis is willin'" and "Something will turn up" -- but our fund of reference, he thinks, is being vitiated by the inroads of popular culture. "Contemporary America can still work itself into something of a swivet over the question of 'Who shot J.R.?'" he huffs. "A century and a half on, Micawber and Little Nell, Pickwick and Mr. Bumble, and a host of other Dickensian figures are still part, if a steadily diminishing part, of our common conversation. Who really thinks that even just ten years from now such 'Seinfeld' characters as George Costanza or Kramer will remain fixtures in the public mind?"

To which one might say: Well, if that's the case, what is he whingeing about? It sounds to my ear like whistling in the dark, the positing of a future that is by no means certain, even to Will. This is the man, after all, who believes that "classic" is "a designation usually reserved in America for a variant of Coca-Cola." In his heart of hearts, he must know that, with the benefit of reruns and reunion specials, the characters of "Seinfeld" will still be fixtures in the public mind a decade, three decades hence (just as Lucy Ricardo and Ralph Kramden are still with us half a century later).

What he doesn't seem to recognize is the wobbly line he has drawn in the sand. Even if he hadn't chosen as his whipping boy "Seinfeld," one of the smarter entertainments TV has given us in recent years, even if he had dragged into the equation "American Idol" or "The Osbournes" or "Touched by an Angel," he would still have to acknowledge that high and low can co-exist, that people can read Dickens and watch "American Idol." Surely one kind of familiarity does not preclude the other.

But television is, of course, one of modernity's tools, and Will is modernity's sworn enemy. "Schools, including universities, must insist upon the prestige of reading," he writes, "and especially of reading old books." Without contesting the point, we may still glimpse here the defining quality of Will's ideal society: a village of antiquarians. A populace that still weeps at the deaths of Little Nell and Little Eva. A populace that, in short, no longer exists.

This reactionary, almost necrophiliac esthetic is best observed when Will dips his toes into the currents of popular culture. We get crumpet-laden pleasantries with overrated mystery writer P.D. James ("Baroness James of Holland Park," he instructs us). A head bowed over the grave of overrated historical novelist Patrick O'Brien ("proof of Chesterton's axiom that great men take up great space even when gone"). A swift boot to the keister of Salinger's Holden Caulfield ("as limited and tiresome as his vocabulary") and a warm bath in the apologetics of C.S. Lewis, hailed for his "adversarial stance toward life in our time."

Even from this small sampling, a pattern emerges, yes? Anglophiliac. (It is surely no accident that Will's daughter is named Victoria.) Deeply at variance with the present day. And firmly, if unconsciously, rooted in the strictures of class.

To the casual eye, of course, Will's ramrod WASP posture has always looked like blue blood in its most extruded form. You would have to know a little bit about his history to know that he hailed from Champaign, Ill., that his father taught at a public university and that he got his undergraduate degree at Hartford's non-Ivy Trinity College. It hardly matters. Will's Gatsbyite self-reinvention as East Coast Brahmin has been so persuasive that he himself is the most persuaded of all, and his columns are an increasingly desperate search for the right kind of people -- the ones who have read the right books, absorbed the right etiquette and have le mot juste for every occasion. (In this context, Will's obsessive love for baseball and its practitioners is a bit like the 19th century fondness for the "noble savage.")

Will's treatment of Bill Clinton is instructive in this regard. As l'affaire Lewinsky heats up, the columnist's rhetoric rises to higher and higher dudgeon: "A liar ... a narcissist's delight ... unserious ... the worst person ever to have been president" ... a sower of "moral chaos." But is that the problem with Bill Clinton? Or is it that he misattributed Lincoln's "of the people, by the people, for the people"? Or is it, more likely, the assertion of an Oxford newsletter that Clinton "followed the B.Phil. course." "'Followed'?" sniffs Will, a genuine Oxford grad. "What a delicate way of saying he failed to get a degree." There you have it. Not only a sower of moral chaos but a pretender ... a social-climbing hick from Arkansas.

It takes some doing to paint a Rhodes scholar as intellectually backward, and one would think that a bar raised so high would effectively decapitate Clinton's successor, who, despite his Ivy pedigree, has been found guilty of such locutions as "Build the pie higher" and "Is our children learning?" Perhaps the challenge of defending Ronald Reagan's intellect during the 1980s proved too taxing in the end, for Will is strangely silent on the whole subject of George W. An approving nod for Bush's post-Sept. 11 orations, a dollop of praise for his position on stem cell research, scattered digs at his positions on education and campaign finance reform ... little else.

Next page: No role for Will among the carny barkers of the right?