On the Deaths of Cockburn, Hughes, and Vidal

By Brett Warnke

First, the death of political journalist Alexander Cockburn, then the essayist and novelist Gore Vidal, and now the art critic and historian Robert Hughes.  This year, the English-language polemic has taken a rapid-fire assault to the head.  If ever there were critics, equipped with the sorcery of forceful argument, it was these three conjurers.  Their prose could sing and scream (Hughes), slice and scorn (Vidal), as well as slash and burn (Cockburn).  Yes, they brought style to the tedium of public affairs.  But beyond this, these three writers brought not only radical attitudes, but radical arguments.

            In the case of Hughes, a Time magazine critic and author, warning against the art establishment’s journey into the flooded basement of post-modernism was more risky then than it seems now.  One must remember how many influential millionaires Hughes must have pissed off and how many of society’s elite he must have humiliated.  His was a voice not of reaction, though his shredded targets claimed this.  “I have never been against new art as such,” he argued.  “Some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.”  He could scrape off an artist’s gimmicky coating and leave them bare for reasoned evaluation.  He also pushed criticism to its highest form, one in which the critique becomes a necessary reference in the interpretation of a work.  I’ll admit, I still can’t read a memoir without a smirk, remembering Hughes’ pungent corollary:  “The unexamined life, said Socrates, is not worth living. The memoirs of Julian Schnabel, such as they are, remind one that the converse is also true. The unlived life is not worth examining.” 

Hughes’s writing demanded that the new generation of critics grapple with past titans before evaluating the “merely new.”  The quality and power within the history of art was not quaint, but necessary.  To Hughes, who sculpted and shaped wood in his free time just as he polished his unmatched prose, the very task of a critic was unending personal training.   Thinking was perfected through rigorous exchange with other thinkers in a tumble and clash of ideas; this would inform description and strengthen argument.  Who in today’s newsrooms is fortunate to have such exchanges?  Hughes, himself, could change direction in his evaluations, even of Warhol.  And The Great Aussie was never an indiscriminate hater.  In his amazing series “American Visions” (heaven’s gift to every secondary social studies teacher), assaults on artists like Thomas Hart Benton were salted with adoration for Jack Levine or Lucian Freud.    

            Like Hughes and Vidal, Cockburn was a choosey lover and a righteous hater.  A columnist, author, and pamphleteer, he started his own newsletter and wrote a “Beat the Devil” column for a quarter of a century at The Nation.  The word that comes most quickly to mind in regards to a Cockburn polemic is “onslaught,” from the Dutch aanslag, for attack.  When I sent my first freelance piece to Alex’s Counterpunch in 2011, I was writing about Obama’s cuts to community action programs.  I had no headline, no dek.  “No problem” Alex wrote me.  He immediately christened my meager piece:  “Obama’s Onslaught on Community Action.” In many of his interviews, articles, and speeches, the word arises again.  Yet, for this spiky writer, was it not the world that had undertaken an onslaught on all that he had known and cared for?  While Vidal, Hughes, and (another fallen star) Christopher Hitchens, travelled on the circuit, Cockburn secluding himself in the hills of northern California.  And from his leafy perch, he hunted liberals.  Not content attacking his own publisher, Katrina vanden Heuvel, he leapt upon his fellow Nation columnists, like Eric Alterman whom he called a “bedraggled little plume on the funeral hearse of the Democratic Party.”  Yet, Cockburn was unique:  a sunny Jacobin, not a radical pessimist like Vidal or Hughes.  He would urge the left to “be of good cheer” just as he could, without irony, bring a tumbril to a small crowd and re-enact Robespierre’s purges. 

            Contrastingly, Vidal had no blood lust for the elite.  From his view as elite son and expatriate, he wanted to shake America’s elite of their sanctimony and illusions.  He demanded they wise-up.  But he was no mere “reformer.”  As he wrote in one of his most excellent collections, “The word ‘radical’ derives from the Latin word for root.  Therefore if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical.”  He scratched the surface of public life with his aphorisms and wit but dug at America’s roots in his fiction.  It was as if, through his voluminous creations and evaluations, Vidal believed thought and history could redirect the wayward Republic.  Or that a truer past could be revealed, say, by disclosing Lincoln’s syphilis.  One of his cleverest creations, Charlie Schuyler of 1876, was like the author—both insider and outsider—paid by the establishment but not paid for. 

             What these three men produced was more than stylish copy, though there was plenty of that.  They generated proof in the power of the written rebellion, real fighting words.  Admittedly, they were imperfect men; but is it really necessary to even write that?  Cockburn's absurd assertion that Stalin's victimes were far less than has been documented by Robert Conquest and others gave me pause.  As did his ignorance about the fact of climate change.  Vidal, too, collapsed into a rambling and conspiratorial shadow of himself in the dark close of the Bush years.  But their commitment and contributions to the written word remain.  And their work needs distinction from the lachrymose babbling of the loony right and the wised-up snark in liberal "critiques," both of which seem ever blessed with the label of “dissent.”  True dissent consists in understanding the role of the writer, the traveler who bears the weighty responsibility of seeking out and revealing truths.  On that ever darkening road, the company of Hughes and Vidal and Cockburn will be missed.