show is a prime exhibit in his case for pri- New York City’s first “educational” sta- introduction’s promise to do so, this book vatization. Since its premiere in 1983, tion. If PBS were to lose government sup- offers no coherent proposal of how thai “Frontline” has reliably taken a left-lib- port, it would need to boost its 2 percent might be accomplished. Will the era1 slant, whether showing the brighter share of the viewership and start running inevitable costcutting mean a shake-up oj side of Soviet Communism or the darker commercials-both unattractive prospects the network establishment, or are its mem. side of Israel’s Palestinian policy, some- for the rest of the industry. bers as dug-in as tenured university fac. times on the basis of highly dubious data. Of course, cutting off the subsidy won’t ulty? Lobbyists for CPB are even demand. Other news coverage has tended to fol- by itself make PBS any more ideologi- ing a billiondollar gift, as a “trust fund,’ low this line. Even nature documentaries, cally balanced than ABC or The American before public broadcasting is weaned from always among PBS‘s most popular offer- Spectator. Jarvik seems to assume that the taxpayer‘s wallet. That’s not a program ings, predictably extol the virtues of prim- subjecting the network to market forces many Americans can be very eager to see itive society while warning against the will turn it into a “free marketplace of and its cancellation depends on mort dangers of modem technology. The occa- ideas.” Well, perhaps-yet despite the reviews like Jarvik‘s. # sional conservative offerings, such as William F. Buckley’s long-running “Firing Line” or Milton Friedman’s miniseries, “Free to Choose,” are token gestures typ- ically banished to obscure time slots. David Brudnoy’s Comeback he Corporation for Public Broad- pretenses, and describes a sense of “heal- casting (CPB) was established by Life Is Not a Rehearsal ing” when the inevitable “outing” came TCongress in 1967 to fund and reg- David Brudnoy Though some of the details are trou. ulate public television and radio. A man- Doubleday / 299 pages $22.95 bling, there’s something admirable in date for fairness was written into its found- Brudnoy’s refusal either to supplicate foi ing legislation. Two years later CPB in REVIEWED BY pity or seek absolution from readers. He turn established PBS to organize the dis- Matthew Scully disdains, for the most part, what he calls tribution of programming. This separa- the attitude that “all my woes are some- tion of powers was meant to insulate net- t’s been two years since David Brud- body else’s fault.” He doesn’t want to be work executives and producers from noy, the popular radio host and con- seen as David Brudnoy, homosexual, 01 government influence, but the eventual servative writer, turned up in a Boston conservative homosexual, or “AIDS result was to lessen their accountability dospital gravely ill from AIDS.A “seem- celebrity,” but just as David Brudnoy: a to any standard of objectivity. After the ingly unlimited capacity for denial,” as man with his own share of strengths and Nixon administration sought to replace he tells the story, led him to shrug off the weaknesses, achievements and mistakes. politically charged programming with early symptoms until finally his body “The Best Little Boy in the World,” cultural and educational shows, the “pub experienced a massive collapse. For nine the chapter about his childhood, describes lic affairs” division fought back with twice- “lost” days he was nearly comatose. Over a mostly happy youth in a small Minnesota a-day broadcasts of the Watergate hear- the next two months he survived pneu- town and his growing sense of disappoint- ings during the summer of 1973. That monia, congestive heart failure, liver ed expectations. During his first three particular miniseries turned out to be the problems, shingles, and the prospect of years, his father was away in the Army; that most influential PBS program ever, has- permanent paralysis in his legs. Today, absence, he writes, fulfills “one of the tening the downfall of the president and at 56, Brudnoy is back on the air, broad- hoariest clichCs of the etiology of homo- making stars of the network‘s hosts, Robert casting from home to save strength, and, sexuality in young boys.” But Brudnoy McNeil and Jim Lehrer. as this book attests, in full possession of his rejects this explanation on the grounds The PBS establishment, a “topheavy, writing powers. that if it were so, “then millions of boys- expensive, and stifling bureaucracy” “Life is not a rehearsal,” he writes, “it’s all of whom grew up while Daddy was according to one of its former presidents, the real thing”; so we’d better avoid the away at war or grew up with no dad at all - is not the only group interested in keeping role-playing and each be the person we would probably be homosexual.” things as they are. The major commer- are. For many years he had led a not quite He was always a “just SO” person, a cial networks are happy to let public tele- secret double life, conservative polemi- neatnik with a sense of order and a love of vision provide the social services that edu- cist by day and homosexual prowler by fine things, like his stamp collection, nice- cators and government officials demand, night. He was never harshly critical of ly arranged. A sharp wit made up for his while making advertising time an even homosexuals, so it wasn’t a case of being an unathletic, gawky kid, though scarcer and more valuable commodity. hypocrisy. But he was uneasy with the always Brudnoy felt “somethingabout me This has been the pattern at least since ...... ,. .. . wasn’t quite right, something didn’t quite 1961, when the Big Three networks backed MATTHEWSCULLY is a writer living in cohere into a well-rounded boy.” Often the conversion of WNTA into WNDT, Arlington, Virginia. with his best friend Clara, a live-in maid,

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ie went to the local theater. “But for me, book, Brudnoy talks about the “myths” signal along our way from infancy to the in undiscussed pleasure at the movies surroundinghomosexuals. But his own grave to apotheosize that one tme love, but was watching not the screen goddesses story confirms one’s worst suspicions. we are not allowed to solemnize that as )ut the supporting gods.” There were gay bars, more hotel rooms, heterosexuals can. We are betwixt and His story of being taunted as a “fairy” by more parks, “the bathhouse scene,” between, and even having, as I had, a Stephen to love couldn’t be acknowledged i schoolmate recalled for me painful mem- sauna rooms at the Y, and on and on, beyond our small group of other outsiders. iries of using similar words in grade school, recalled in a tone bordering at times on If the appeal of variety, to put it politely, is ind the eon or so I will spend in purgato- nostalgic reverie: powerful, the boundaries put up by our y for the hurt they caused. In high school culture almost propel us into promiscuity. 3rudnoy dated girls half-heartedly, but In those days before AIDS, nothing irrived at Yale still in a state of inner tur- seemed impossible or dangerous or That “almost”suggests he sees his ratio- noil. “When I wasn’t studying or doing unhealthy. I had the sense that what- nalizing for what it is-an attempt to pret- ;ood, I could be found lingering hopehl- ever I wanted was within my grasp, that tify something deeply distasteful, some- whomever I wanted I could have, and yon the sidelines of life, glancing at hand- thing not easy to square with Brudnoy’s ,ome classmates, wishing that someone that I could successfully function as a college teacher, program administra- own sense of order and “just so“ tem- vould drag me into the arena of action.” tor, and man about town-a gay blade, perament. Someone does, and though we all have though the expression didn’t come to )ur share ofsecrets and troubles, I must say mind then. My energy seemed limit- rudnoy is bearing his affliction with he next hundred or so pages make a jarring less, and on an ordinary day I would be amazing courage, and is in no need ead. The first arena of action turned out to at the college by seven in the morning, Bof lectures on decency or manhood )e Bryant Park behind the New York Pub teaching and administering the honors from me or anyone else. In many ways ic Library. After what followed, at a nearby program until late in the day, then at the book is truly inspiring. I myself have iotel, he felt “soiled, abused, frightened,” the gym for a strenuous workout-and endured the flu with less strength and dig- )ut also “a wave of satisfaction that I had sometimes a quickie in the steam nity than Brudnoy has displayed these past room-and then, as often as not, I lone what I set out to do and now I two years. Even the “double life” he led would pop by one of the bars and once lad the option to do it again seems a mostly valiant attempt to be a v i, in; while find the true lust du jour. md again.” \\I/// man first and homosexual second, avoid- \ Though he can be ruth- ;r ing the mania of identity politics. essly introspective on A Let he who is without sin write the first her counts, here Brud- 1 harsh review, but let’s also call things what ioy never does quite tell they are. Whatever else we might say about is how he now regards homosexuality, it does no one any good his behavior, or what to dress it up as a yearning to “solemnize” )asic questions it that one true love. However mysterious night raise about its cause, and however unfair that only iomosexuality. 1 some must bear it, clearly there is not just helong stretch of desire involved here, but also terrible com- he book takes us pulsion. Yearnings for that one true love do hrough his summer not lead us after hours into public parks, vorking in New York any more than they lead to brothels or 3ty in 1961; his teach- adult video arcades or topless joints. Nor do ng days in the early six-\ they usually end in the kind of grief so ies in San Antonio; a many homosexual men know today. Nor, hree-month tour of Q easy as it is for a heterosexual to say, does Curope; and his early years ik! even a genetic predisposition to do bad n Boston as a teacher, media things make them good. )ersonality, and pro- cA The social boundaries, after all, have ific writer for both 4 now been mostly cleared away. Why are \rational Review and homosexual men still carrying on as before? his magazine. Dur- Why, unlike Brudnoy, are many of them so ng that time there b truculent in defending such behavior, if eems to be about one they own up to it at all, even when the lives ncounter per page; A and health of other people are in danger? he tour of Europe One would think that answering such ques- 3 s unbelievable. A tions is a step toward finding a measure of ’

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of free love. He already had a mistress, much of the thirties helping opponents but with the igyear-old West taking the of the regime to flee. By the eve of war, Nothing Like lead, the two of them launched an affair. West was vehemently opposed to the paci- The following year, she bore him a child, fism that had so weakened English pre- This Dame the future novelist and New Yorker critic paredness;Anthony West’s unwillingness Anthony West. to fight led to the opening skirmish in a Wells comes off badly in Rollyson’s series of adult disagreements that would Rebecca West: A Life treatment, but not nearly badly enough. drive mother and son apart more or less Carl Rollyson Until recently it would have been called permanently. Scribner l511pages /$35 “ironic” that such an apostle of sexual In the late I~~o’s,West had made a equality as Wells should have caused so series of visits to Yugoslavia, which con- REVIEWED BY much misery to so many women; today, vinced her that the minor countries oi Christopher Caldwell we can see his attitude as satyriasis in the Europe were about to be obliterated by guise of progressivism. And not only that either German fascism or Russian Com- ebecca West was born early Wells may have boldly flouted “society’s” munism. Between 1937 and 1941, she wrote enough to join in dinner-table strictures, but feared that the news of a her half-million-word masterpiece Black ,arguments over the Dreyfus affair fresh bastard would throw him off his Lamb and Grey Falcon. While we read it as it happened, and died late enough to game with his other mistresses. So he in the 1990s as the authoritative (if Serb comment on the novels of Martin Amis as urged that West present herself to her slanted) treatment of Yugoslavian ethnic they appeared. In between, she laid claim growing son as his “aunt” with the result conflict, Rollyson is right to see it as much to being this century’s most gifted Eng- that the boy had no idea of his parentage more, a twentiethcentury Thousand-and- lish-language prose stylist (according to until late boyhood. One Nights-that is, a combination of many critics), the author of its finest novel Certainly, by stringing West along, philosophy and autobiography in which (according to Elizabeth Bowen), its great- .Wells deprived the world of vastly more West measured her own ideas and her life est journalist (according to Bernard good literature than he provided it; by her against those of a people she admired. Levin), and the inventor of the non-fiction late thirties, fifteen years into a book-writ- It is also the first sign of West’s increas- novel (according to Truman Capote). ing career, she had written only two books. ingly Manichean conception of world This very largeness and variety has worked Of her third, a criticism collection that conflict, with the liberal West on one side against biographers, and it works against appeared in 1928 when they had drifted far and Communism and fascism on the her latest, Carl Rollyson, a professor of apart, Wells wrote: “This book is a sham. other. Her 1949 The Meaning ofTreason English at Baruch College who has writ- It is a beautiful voice and a keen and sen- argued -against progressive opinion - ten biographies of Marilyn Monroe and sitive mind doing ‘Big Thinks’ to the that British Nazi collaborators should be Lillian Hellman. utmost of its ability-which is nil.” Over hanged, on the grounds that all that stood West was born Cicely Fairfield in Lon- the long haul, of course, West proved a between the West and totalitarianism was don in 1892. (She took her pen name from thinker of vastly greater depth and origi- the Rule of Law. “I believe,” she wrote in a shrew in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.) Her nality than Wells, who now strikes us as 1950, “in the Christian conception of man father was an AngleIrish cad who made merely a high-energy mediocrity with lit- and the French Revolution’s interpreta- his living as a right-wing journalist before tle to say to our own time. tion of his political necessities.” abandoning the family when Rebecca was This “Burkean”vision, as West described 9; her mother was a genteel Scotswoman est married the banker Henry it, made her notorious in intellectual circles whose family misfortunes and wretched Andrews in 1930, and it was during the Cold War. “Becky is nuts,” as marriage led her into a downward social W only then that she began to Richard Rovere put it, and the opinion was spiral. Like many who find themselves breathe the clear air of her own genius. unanimous. Although she considered the most rattily accoutered in their social The marriage would last until Henry’s Joseph McCarthy “a stupid and violent group, West grew up with a chip on her death in 1968, despite infidelities on both demagogue,” she was better informed about shoulder. She was drawn first into the the- sides. It would also shape the postwar polit- international Communism than her jour- ater and then into radical feminism, pen- ical journalism which is today the cor- nalistic and academic colleagues. Not only ning a constant flow of literary criticism nerstone of her literary reputation. had she spent time in Yugoslavia and and propaganda for a kooky London week- Andrews was the scion of a British family befriended the New York Herald-Tribune’s ly called the Freewoman. An attack on the long expatriated on the Continent: he prize-winning anti-Communist reporter novelist H.G. Wells won West an invita- had spent the whole of World War I in an Bert Andrews; her husband had counted tion to Wells’s home. Wells, then on his internment camp, and made his career both Allen Dulles and Jan Masaryk among second wife, had become a vocal apostle as a banker in Germany. Avocal oppo- his friends in the thirties and forties...... -...... nent of Nazism, he was fired from his job In articles accusing liberals of hypocrisy CHRISTOPHERCALDWELL is senior writer in 1934 for protesting the replacement of and moral preening, she became the most at the Weekly Standard. a Jewish colleague with a Nazi, and spent virulent critic of America’s anti-anticom-

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