Where's conservative art?

Round about 1994, Pat Buchanan convened a conference in Washington dedicated, as I recall, to conservatism and the arts. I stopped in to write a story about it, and did a stand-up interview with Buchanan -- who, as anyone who has talked to him personally knows, is a much more gentle man than his pugnacious TV personality would make you think -- in which we discussed the arts and the Right. Most of the worthies I interviewed that day were pretty clear that the Left thoroughly dominated the popular arts in the US, and what a bad thing that was for us all. But nobody seemed to have the slightest idea why there was no competition from the Right. I don't remember many specifics from that day, but I do recall that everyone believed that the left-wing artistic establishment made it difficult if not impossible to be a conservative in the arts. While that was and is no doubt true, that still can't account for the dearth of contemporary films, plays and novels that could in any sense be called conservative.

Andrew Sullivan draws attention to a longish essay in Britain's Observer, in which a drama critic observes -- and indeed laments -- that there's absolutely no conservative theater to challenge the left-wing orthodoxies that own the British stage. Nothing to make a liberal (like the critic) think, nothing to make him reconsider his worldview. It's clear from the essay that there is an anti-conservative prejudice that's not only against anything that could be called conservative, but which in some cases doesn't even acknowledge that the theater is wholly one-sided. But Nicholas Hytner, director of the Royal National Theatre, says there's just no conservative drama to reject. And two conservative dramatists/screenwriters agree:

The actor Julian Fellowes, who wrote the script for the Oscar-winning country house whodunit Gosford Park and the book for the stage musical of Mary Poppins, is a good place to start. He's professionally posh. He has a son called Peregrine. His wife is a lady-in-waiting to Princess Michael of Kent and a descendent of Lord Kitchener. He is, unsurprisingly, a Conservative Party supporter, and like all good Conservatives he takes the long view. 'Very simply put,' he says, 'after the Second World War the avant garde became the establishment. That meant that no one was poking fun at the establishment any more because they approved of it.'

So is it a conspiracy? 'Absolutely not. I don't want to give the impression that there's some plot going on. It's just become impossible not to be a socialist within the artistic community these days.' He recalls emerging from drama school in the Seventies and realising he didn't fit in. 'Suddenly being young meant being left-wing, because if you were to the right you were a boring old fart.' And that, he says, has not changed despite changes in government. The problem, he says, isn't too much theatre from the left: it's a simple lack of it from the right. 'There's something profoundly non-intellectual about it. Any reasonably free society must allow for a range of views, and we don't have that.'

The writer Ian Curteis agrees. Famously, Curteis became a victim of what was described at the time as the liberal-left establishment when his television play about the Falklands War was dropped by the BBC in the Eighties because his portrait of Margaret Thatcher was deemed to be too positive. A radio and television version was only finally broadcast in 2002.

'It's a thousand pities that this has got tied up with party politics,' he says. 'I tend to think of it in terms of plays that celebrate our values rather than denigrate them.' In this his long view is even longer than that of Fellowes. The Greeks had Aeschylus celebrating society, he says, and Sophocles decrying it. 'Shakespeare,' he argues, 'celebrated the divine order of the universe, while Webster probed the rotten entrails of society. In Edwardian England JM Barrie celebrated, while George Bernard Shaw denigrated.' The problem, according to Curteis, is that since the Sixties the theatre of celebration has disappeared. 'It's so long since we've been in a major war that we've forgotten what we need to protect.'

Interesting point, that last one, and I suspect it applies to American artists too: we (they) have forgotten what we need to protect.

Here's another key question/point from the essay:

What strikes me most, during the discussions I have, is an almost total failure of imagination when it comes to working out what a play from the right might actually look like. We none of us have any problem naming overtly left-wing plays or their playwrights: names like David Edgar, Caryl Churchill, Trevor Griffiths and David Hare fall into conversation with ease. By contrast, even defining an overtly right-wing play, let alone identifying one, is apparently impossible.
[snip]
'I would like to see good plays that challenge current liberal orthodoxy,' [Nick Hytner] says. 'I could imagine a play that exposed lazy and dangerous thinking about religious fundamentalism. I could imagine a play that arrived at a position sceptical of abortion rights. I could imagine a play hostile to the sacrifice of essential liberties to the dictates of community cohesion. I could imagine a play that regretted the passing of paternalistic Toryism, the kind of right-wing politics that cared about social justice.'

As to the notion I have raised - of a play critiquing multiculturalism - he suggests that it is already firmly on their agenda. 'I have to say that every play I've produced from and about cultural minorities at the National has had far more on its mind than the old certainties about racial injustice.'

OK, so two questions about art, cultural politics and the Right:

1. What would a seriously right-wing screenplay, play or novel look like?

Liberal readers, please don't hijack the discussion with fatuous comments about how it would celebrate the triumph of white male capitalists over the wretched of the earth, yadda yadda. In the spirit of the liberal Observer critic, ask yourself what sort of genuinely useful critique of left-liberal cultural and political values a conservative play, film or novel would offer. Conservative readers, please no whining about how the left wouldn't allow real conservative art to be produced or published.

2. What values have we forgotten that we need to protect? (The answer to this question helps answer the first).

As for myself, I have no interest in right-wing agitprop as an antidote to left-wing agitprop. And as regular readers know, I have real concerns about the kind of social, cultural and economic order celebrated by "conservatives" in this society are doing to virtues and mores I consider truly conservative.

That said, I would recognize a conservative play (film, novel) as one that affirmed the existence of a transcendent order, one that binds the conduct of individuals and communities, and to which we are all responsible. I would expect it to treat the past, and tradition, not as a source not of oppression but of liberating wisdom. I would expect it to illuminate the tragic sense of life, and to uphold human dignity according to the traditional Judeo-Christian understanding of man's nature and place in the world (a conservative play in Confucian culture, for example, would differ somewhat).

To be more specific, I think a conservative play (film, novel) could be most valuable by taking on various aspects of life in our unconstrained, therapeutic culture. A play that cast intelligently critical light on the sexual revolution is needed (Rick Moody's "The Ice Storm" counts as conservative in this sense, I think). Along those lines, one that criticized the American cult of individualism, in both its left-wing and right-wing variants, would be appreciated. A play that attacks multiculturalism is desperately needed, but it should be one that discusses the fragility of cultural achievement, and that leaves the audience not necessarily feeling jingoistically triumphant about the West, but rather deeply conscious about how rare the achievement of liberal democracy is in human history, and how easily it could be cast aside, or allowed to decay. We need a play about the danger science in the hands of modern-day Prometheans poses to human life and dignity. We need a work of art about the presence of God. That, I think, would be the hardest one of all to produce, because He is so hard to see and discern amid all the cultural detritus and propaganda from all sides -- especially His most ardent partisans.

Above all, we need a play about Fidelity, and more than that, Fidelity in Love, in a faithless, loveless, brave new world. We need to know what the good life is, and how to live it. The conservative tradition has lots to offer to sincere questers. The truly daring, truly rebellious artists, those who want to push back as hard against the culture as its pushes against them, will discover and mine those rich veins.

That's my top-of-the-head answer. So, how about it? How would you answer those questions? I think I'll write a column about this at some point, so your answers, both from the left and the right, will be helpful to me.