High Culture and the Right: The Example of Thomas F. Bertonneau

William G. Carpenter

William G. Carpenter studied literature at Stanford and Princeton and taught for five years in California and the People’s Republic of China. His translation of The Dream of the Rood was published in The Sewanee Theological Review. In 2021 he published Epandun: Epic Poem, by Beaver’s Pond Press, about a Christian hero set in the 9th century in England. He lives and works near Lake Hiawatha in Minneapolis, where the English and Scandinavian contact continues.

Ladies and gentleman, I am happy to be here, having greatly enjoyed last year’s annual meeting, and I look forward to next year’s. My thanks to Mr. Suszko for taking an interest in Eþandun, my epic poem. I am also grateful to Mr. Swisher, at whose recommendation I am now about 800 pages into Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion as a source for my current project on the English Civil War.

When Mr. Suszko approached me with the topic “High Culture and the Right,” my first thought was of my late friend Tom Bertonneau, who incarnated this topic in his own person and body of work. I first met Tom at UCLA where he was a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and I had a temporary appointment as a lecturer. I have brought along a partial bibliography which marks some of the principal geographic features of today’s topic. First, there is the learned, thorough attention to the works of high culture: A glance at the bibliography reveals Tom’s studies of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Wagner, Mahler, Haydn, Bach, Delius, and Berlioz, in the realm of music. The significance of great works of art is spelled out in his series on “conservative obligations,” published in the Brussels Journal in 2009 and 2010, naming as such Bach’s Art of the Fugue, the music of Haydn, Mahler’s Second Symphony, and two films, Michael Powell’s I Know Where I’m Going and David Lean’s The Sound Barrier. In the first of these “conservative obligation” pieces, the one on Bach, he writes:

“A desideratum of conservatives is to recognize and fulfill certain traditional, impersonal obligations that they regard as incumbent upon them to the end that society and the civilized order might endure. The Commandments thus oblige one, as does the cultivation of mind; beauty also obliges one — to refine one’s sense of it, to learn the proper responses to it, to conform one’s demeanor to it as far as possible.”

Is there anything more pertinent and succinct? There is an entire world view here. The self is not at the center of it. Desire is not at the center of it. Tradition and obligation are at the center of it. That is “high culture and the right” in a nutshell. That is the “orientation toward transcendence” that Eric Voegelin regarded as the original, defining trait of Western culture.

This worldview is stated more fully in Tom’s essay on Sibelius — pardon me for reading the paragraph at length:

“In an increasingly ugly world the sources of beauty constantly increase in value but at the same time they become increasingly difficult for ordinary people to discover and explore. The garbage of pseudo-art so crowds the scene that the chance encounter with beauty — by which in the past young people especially found themselves bowled over by aesthetic experience that altered their lives — occurs with ever greater infrequency. The fewer the number of people who already know of something nourishingly beautiful, the fewer docents there are to discover those things for others. Beauty often occasions an analog of conversion. Beauty suggests transcendence. The modern world, however, takes a stance of rigorous opposition to transcendence, which it categorizes among the falsehoods that have, in their pestiferous way, survived the cleansing power of rationality to confuse and delude those who might otherwise devote their services to the enlightened order. The modern world hates the beautiful, which is why it has made a cult of ugliness. Ugliness never gets in the way of utility, but beauty does. Beauty distracts the attention from the petty concerns of a totally immanent world. Beauty fosters nonconformity. It nourishes the soul, which, like transcendence, is not supposed to exist. The present essay addresses one particular, musical source of beauty, knowledge of which the author wishes to disseminate among as many others as possible. . . . The artist under discussion in the following paragraphs is one dear to the author of those paragraphs. His encounter many decades ago with that artist’s work constituted, and powerfully so, a conversion to beauty. The author wishes to repay his debt.”

In addressing high culture, it is plain, Tom Bertonneau meant the highest culture: Works of art that reveal the reality of the transcendent dimension that human beings may perceive and to which they may pay the honor due. What is “right” about this exaltation of high culture? It is an indictment of every society that is not oriented toward the transcendent, but is instead oriented solely towards gratifying worldly appetites. The obligations toward transcendence imply the restraint of worldly appetites in favor of our higher purposes. Although the left may claim an allegiance to transcendence, every leftward impulse attacks tradition and obligation as oppression of the individual, unless they be traditions and obligations manufactured by leftist power.

To return to the bibliography, you will also notice an engagement with thinkers on modernity who hold the half-truths of capitalist liberal democracies at arm’s length: Nicolai Berdyaev, Oswald Spengler, Rene Guenon, Eric Voegelin, Rene Girard, Julius Evola, and William F. Buckley. We may also call these authors “conservative obligations” as calling us from unthinking acceptance of the clichés that justify our political, economic, and cultural milieu. We may venture to say that the critic, under which name such writers may be collected, has an essential role in high culture as the “docent” mentioned in Tom’s Sibelius essay, helping people find and understand what to value. Needless to say, despite his immense learning and devotion to teaching, Tom’s outspoken orientation toward high culture did not endear him to contemporary academic authorities, and he spent his entire career as a visiting professor, his longest appointment being at SUNY Oswego. Voegelin View, Brussels Journal, Orthosphere, the Imaginative Conservative, and Sydney Trads are not the prestige publications of contemporary academia. Nor was Praesidium, the journal of the Center for Literate Values of which Tom served as secretary. Fortunately, these publications are still extant on the internet.

This leads us to another common feature of high culture and the right, which is the paradox of individualism and tradition. The works of high culture are sui generis. A profound engagement with tradition takes one where no man has gone before, nor woman either. The conservative obligation is authenticity: Humble respect for the best that has gone before us, and humble acceptance of the tasks the tradition gives us. No one else can do what you are called to do. No one else could have written what Tom Bertonneau wrote in humble acceptance of what great works and great thinkers required of him. This includes his idiosyncratic affection for early pulp fiction and World War II aviation, which you can see in the bibliography. Russel Kirk’s Confessions of a Bohemian Tory come to mind — Tom was a Scholar in Residence at the Russell Kirk Center for several years and published numerous pieces at the University Bookman. The conservative’s rejection of the modern cant of individualism leads to a truer individualism. To the extent they escape ideological clichés, conservatives are like-minded in not being like-minded — which is undoubtedly an obstacle to obtaining political power.

I will close this brief introduction to a man of high culture and the right with a passage from Paul Gottfried’s eulogy in Chronicles from November 2021:

“Tom was an unapologetic conservative who would have placed himself unhesitatingly in the paleoconservative camp. He was also a self-avowed Neoplatonist, who attended Catholic services with his wife since there were no Neoplatonic ones to attend (at least not in Oswego). He was the most unpretentious man of learning I have known and someone who seemed happy with his lot.”

I would now like to turn back to an essential shared characteristic of high culture that the right suggested: The rejection of ideology. An ideology is a rationalistic representation of the world that pretends to explain and coordinate the world’s essential features. Ideologies, or the most salient shibboleths that summarize them, become idols that rule people’s minds and hearts to the exclusion of authentic knowledge. You may observe in your own church, for example, an apparent confusion between Christianity and the current version of liberal ideology. Sam Francis identified liberalism as the ideology of the managerial elite that both made itself attractive in its ostensible ideals and strengthened the cultural, political, and economic domination of the managerial elite. You can see this in an ill-paid cleric advocating the DFL platform as Holy Writ, out of sheer identification with the Establishment. High culture and the right take a critical stance toward ideologies, perhaps acknowledging the nuggets of truth they may incorporate but rejecting ideologies per se as valid forms of thought. We grow up learning that there is an array of ideologies from which to choose, and that adoption and championing of an ideology is a worthy form of political participation. The learning of high culture, however, teaches that human experience is too vast and varied to be encapsulated in a rationalistic system, not to mention a contemporary ideological fad. Here I will refer to the philosophers of Neopopulism, Erick Kaardal and Tom Dahlberg of the Twin Cities. Neopopulism is not an ideology, but the rejection of ideology. Enlightenment rationalism, the parent of liberalism, is the ideology that pretends it is the tradition-free objective measure of truth by which all things, including all traditions, can be known and controlled. That is, the government’s ideology that it seeks to impose through regulation and education. Kaardal and Dahlberg draw on the philosophy of language to show that the government’s pretended tradition-free rationalism is just another tradition that governments and their allies are constantly seeking to impose at the expense of the people’s own traditions of language, religion, and common sense. There, again, is high culture and the right in a nutshell. Traditions intelligently discerned and applied, not rationalistic ideologies, are the proper guides for cultural and political life. Neopopulism, though it calls itself an “ism” to gain notice in the marketplace of ideas, is the mature right rejection of ideology as a cultural form, let alone a cultural form entitled to dominance over all others. Kaardal and Dahlberg speak of “putting reason in its place.” They don’t hate it. They just say that true reason is traditional and must take its proper place among traditions. I mention Neopopulism in this context as a contemporary and local expression of the right’s defining rejection of ideology, which is also an essential feature of high culture. Ideology and high culture are incompatible, just as ideology and independent thought are incompatible.

Since Mr. Suszko invited me here on the strength of my epic poem Eþandun, I will say a few words about how my intentions for it relate to our topic today — keeping in mind Socrates’ disappointment at the inability of poets to say anything meaningful about their work, and the probability that a poet will only make an ass of himself by pretending to act as a critic of his own creations. The starting point for my intentions is the reverence for the epic poem as a traditional form, the preeminent examples of which are among the most prominent artifacts of high culture: the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost. Like Frederick Turner, the recently deceased author of three science fiction epics, as well as of a critical work on the epic form throughout history and around the world — I felt that the grandeur of the epic form as a depiction of the human community pursuing its destiny in the presence of transcendent realities is a valid pursuit today, despite the challenges we are experiencing to the existence of community and common culture. My Christian West Saxons face the invading pagan Danes. It is a struggle for survival. The story, which is based on historical events, has been told before in epic poems and in Chesterton’s epic-like “Ballad of the White Horse.” I wanted to highlight certain features of the story. First, based on Alfred’s pedagogical program of translating certain Latin volumes into English, I wanted to include Alfred’s effort to bring Gregory the Great, Orosius, Augustine, Bede, and Boethius into the common store of his contemporary culture. Second, I wanted to create a world in which Christian belief is as pervasive a presence to West Saxon men of action as the Greek gods were to Homer’s heroes. The self-consciousness and self-examination of an Augustine, the leading Father in Alfred’s era, provides a cultural model for the 9th-century Christian hero, a model both of consciousness and consciousness of history. Third, I wanted to make the poem as historical as possible, populating it solely with West Saxons named in written records. Fourth, relatedly, I wanted to bring to life the fine detail of the historical period, which is part of our history, presenting the permanent features of human life in the complicated struggles of a millennium ago. Fifth, I wanted to remind all English speakers of the origins of their language in Old English and the world of Old English, with its Latin literary culture and its alliterative Old English poetry. Sixth, I wanted to connect contemporary Western readers with their origins as Romanized Germans, or Celts or Slavs, and as Christianized pagans. Gregory the Great set forth formulas for Christianizing pagans. The West Saxons are old Christians, of 250 years’ standing. At the end of the poem the Danes are brand-new Christians. The story of the Danes is a conversion story. That of the West Saxons, a story of reconversion. Both live at the threshold of Christianity and paganism, very much our condition today.

I can only claim to have aspired to high culture. I worked on polishing the poem for many years, following James Joyce, who spent seven years writing Ulysses and 17 years on Finnegans Wake. I have also aspired to humbly accept the guidance of tradition and the responsibility to bring to it whatever I can in the spirit of authentic idiosyncrasy. I am satisfied if any reader finds that the poem renews his or her connection with our language, history, or high culture, or finds in it a call to the noble work of restoration.

I will finish by reading the opening paragraph of Eþandun:

Pour your glory, Lord, on the struggling king,

who by your hand ransomed the ravaged land;

illuminate the faces of your people,

who bled for you on every slaughterfield;

and kindle, Comforter, our uncouth hearts

that we may burn to do your will and earn

the blessings, not the curses, of our ancestors.

The pagan Danes had conquered the four kingdoms.

Clerics and kings, churls and thanes they’d slain,

while the living they plundered and enslaved.

Alfred, caked with the blood of friend and foe,

tasted the dregs of that envenomed horn,

but granted faith and craft by our dear Savior

he steeped old Godrum’s host in faith and fear

and steered the stubborn oarsmen from our soil.     *

High Culture and the Right: A Thomas Bertonneau Sampler