Elliot Cohen and Commentary's Campus

...We kidded ourselves and our regular contributors...

...The center was designed to meet the needs of caterers...

...For example, when one of Grossinger's flacks charged that Mr...

...I wondered sometimes whether the main talent cultivated by some people moving through and around our offices wasn't that of self-promotion only, so few were their contributions, and so shallow...

...it is hard to imagine it thriving anywhere else...

...of the adopting family, by the father...

...His (and Elliot's) whole manner of responding to contemporary culture was exhilarating...

...The other sensitive area had to do with the statistic that eleven "absolutely equally suitable" couples, to quote a case worker, were waiting for every Jewish child available for adoption...

...Revaluation is a continuing process in which great names are put down or reputations refined, and lowly or unknown names raised up...

...Public relations is sometimes best carried on through silence...

...Two of my sketches were written furtively, as a release, during the last months I was working on my doctoral dissertation in Butler Library at Columbia University...

...Still, it took an effort at first to overcome my plain awe working in the offices of Commentary, adapting to its heady elitism, brushing against, say, James T. Farrell, James Baldwin, or Hannah Arendt in the corridors, being introduced to them while I was on the run with some editorial task...

...Marty had an old-fashioned academic respect for authorship...

...Martin Greenberg was an early translator of Kafka...

...My career in the service," I recall he was saying to Marty, "is only a continuation of high school and Columbia...

...It doesn't take away from the day, and the evening doesn't begin until afterwards anyway...

...This may still be the arrangement...

...Her reply, that she had a stong sentiment for them, quite satisfied him...

...New York openly cheers eminence of achievement...

...and more general journals, like Fortune, the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, the Atlantic, and, not least, the New Yorker in its emphasis on careful writing and.in its reportage, criticism, and its columns of '' Reflections...

...Marty and Bob had been at Michigan together...

...Elliot did present "himself, I noticed early, simply as first among equals...

...You were the first applicant we had had in years from the state of Georgia.'' Commentary's properly academic respect for creativity, authority, and precision could be observed at once in its earliest tables of contents on the outside front cover and in its very text...

...I had no relatives who were alumni...

...We rejected it...

...The president of their board, a prominent figure in New York Jewish and philanthropic circles, raised a vehement protest with Elliot against running the article as written...

...I suppose this is the sort of thing Elliot had in mind when he spoke of educating the community...

...Once, in the midst of some editorial wrangle, he muttered, apropos of some side remark someone had made, "So he's mature...

...I knew I'd never get into Yale," Elliot told me, "on the basis of my record...

...One gawks at celebrities in a New York theater lobby...

...He spends his time in a brothel-like dance hall in the company of a half-naked black woman, where the tailor does eventually find him...

...The library for the Jewish studies school stored folding chairs and tables...

...Elliot Cohen, who founded the magazine and was editor-in-chief when I worked for it, seemed at times to think of himself as the dean of a small and fractious faculty...

...He admired Louis Armstrong and Roy Campa-nella particularly...

...Inevitably, perhaps, it documented what has come to be described as "Eastern" values, although it has been neither fashionably liberal in politics nor middle class in taste...

...When I did my article on Sam Levenson, and in the course of writing it established a personal friendship with him, Elliot asked me to arrange a luncheon so that he could meet him...

...It's the generation difference," Marty offered...

...The magazine was regularly charged with one kind of betrayal or another, sometimes in serious enough places...

...All this, too, was a form of academic activity...

...They were professional careerists, skilled in the higher schnorring...

...I would meet alone with Elliot every so often to discuss projects...

...One day in spring, I recall, Bill Phillips of Partisan Review came into Clem's office and found him, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, absorbed in editing a text...

...I proposed an article, perhaps a piece of straight dense reportage, perhaps an analysis by a psychiatrist or sociologist, with the working hypothesis that the insane hostility was a pathological inversion of anti-Semitism...

...I remember saying that maybe Yale had gone to his head...

...Commentary reversed Groucho Marx's formulation, that if a country club invited you to become a member, it couldn't be worth joining: If Commentary invited you to write for it, that alone proved your worth...

...Grossinger could not have been in the boxing ring on Yom Kippur, disgust registered on Elliot's face when I told him that the New York Daily News had run a photograph the day after of Harry Grossinger with the two prize fighters...

...Given a critical study of Henry James to review, one indefatigable nudnik, we learned later, went out to read the novels for the first time...

...He was impressed by professionalism among celebrities...

...A huge milling crowd had gathered at the Riverside Memorial Chapel, on Broadway...

...Every so often, like any dean, Elliot would try to whip all of us into the office by nine o'clock...

...He was committed to "educating" the communities, Jewish and non-Jewish, and he believed with some passion, it seemed to me, that truth, sometimes taking unexpected forms, could only be helpful ultimately in a never-ending process of understanding and thus, inevitably, of education...

...Bob's pleasure was only slightly diminished when he realized that the comment had simply to do with the cleanness of the text...

...the Yale Review...

...He had an unsparing eye for a text, but took care never to confuse a person with his work...

...Bob was always gentle and thoughtful, troubled about bruising the feelings of rejected contributors, and about not being able to satisfy those people who would have liked to be an editor like himself...

...Mammy" was changed to "Mother...

...His hair was cut short, and he struck me as tall and thin, perhaps because I remained seated and he stood in the doorway...

...It tried to capture the best features of an unlikely combination and range of intellectual publications: the Menorah Journal, which provided precedent for its secular Jewish orientation...

...The editors never thought of their readership as exclusively Jewish...

...He wanted to know what was happening...

...On many occasions writers have taken extremely conservative political positions, even "reactionary" ones, but never, to my knowledge, any narrow party ones...

...He's from Utah...

...She worried about the increasing use of "a television" for "a television set" and of "drapes" for "draperies...

...He told me he had once thanked the dean at Yale, after the two had become friends, for its quota system...

...Clem Greenberg thought important historical or sociological points might sometimes better be made through fiction or reminiscence than in reviews and articles...

...In addition to his vague academic longings, Elliot had a more focused one: to be an influence on the American scene...

...He had little patience with the contention that only "favorable" details, invented when necessary, should be publicized about Jews...

...When I returned to the office one afternoon from a Modern Language Association convention down the street, a major occasion for academic recruitment throughout the country, Elliot greeted me with his sweet crooked smile and said he'd match any offer I got...

...The editors had a predilection for bold, iconoclastic academic writing, and, one way or another, we got professors of law, literature, history, sociology, religion, and international affairs to...

...You might thank Yale for its quotas all right," he replied, "but you didn't get in because you were a Jew as I recall...

...It used to be called "assimilationist" because it never descended to the simple-minded and defensive puffery common in Jewish house organs...

...Although we made quick judgments often, these were substantive and based on text...

...What are you doing...

...After Elliot's death, the section was dropped...

...Two continuing features, "From the American Scene," to which I contributed extensively, and "Cedars of Lebanon," reflected a specifically Jewish focus although neither served merely promotional ends...

...My father, a faithful reader of the Jewish Daily Forward, for years had pressed on me the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer...

...Another time, he entered our office, laughing...

...One of my qualifications that appealed to Elliot was my acquaintance with Yiddish, which I could speak and read passably well...

...One morning, I got a call at my home on Long Island from Midge Decter telling me that he had died of a heart attack during the night...

...Students and professors early on learn that they are somehow most properly involved in, appraising and reappraising claims to importance...

...He encouraged me in my sketches about Madame Vishnak, a character I invented...

...It was possible, at last, to assert that there was no monolithic ' 'Jewish" position on anything...

...Before I became an editor on the magazine, in 1953, I was on the faculty at CCNY, and when I left, it was to go to the University of New Mexico...

...Elliot sometimes had a quite ambivalent notion of what might offend Commentary readers, and especially "the community," although his concern had little to do, I think, with believing that we should present attractive Potemkin village-like facades to hide ugliness or nothingness...

...He was also proud of the magazine for listing poems with the same, emphasis as articles...

...Although sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, Commentary was never parochial in its Jewishness...

...But it quickly seemed natural and proper to be involved in the staff's regular and impersonal determination of what and who was intellectually and esthetically respectable and important, and what and who not...

...The dialogues I sustained with Elliot during my association with Commentary had the air of those free-ranging, free-associational, speculative talks I used to find myself holding with colleagues in graduate school on long walks around the Columbia campus...

...In spite of Woody Allen's notion of merging Dissent and Commentary to form "Dissentary," Dissent, with its narrow ideology, seems to me to help define Commentary more by contrast than by similarity...

...Clement, his older brother, who was involved with Elliot in founding the magazine, had already achieved importance in the academy for his critical work on modern art, much of it published in Partisan Review, and later in his book, Art and Culture...

...We laughed...

...Irving Kristol left to be secretary of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and, at various times and among other things, co-editor of Encounter and of the Public Interest, a professor at NYU, and a free-lance conservative eminence grise, which included doing a column for the Wall Street Journal...

...After I had been at Commentary a while, my father gathered a sheaf of clippings for me of Singer's series, all in Yiddish, on his father's domestic court in a Polish shtetl, which contained occasionally raw passages...

...Now and then I tried to bring something to my academic work of Commentary's free-floating curiosity, its respect for all intellectual probing and rumina tion that transcended disciplinary boundaries, even that basic skepti cism toward orthodoxy that one might have thought would be espe cially welcome on campuses, and each time the inordinate effort em phasized for me how ideally "aca demic" my period at Commentary indeed had been...

...My title was vetoed...

...Once, in a frenzy of concentrated proofreading, he rewrote a quotation from a book a contributor was reviewing...

...I circled Iowa and turned to Marty...

...One social worker remarked that a banner across the facades might read "You make 'em, we take 'em...

...We heard a strong, carefully argued presentation of an anti-Zionist position, but it was not offered as a directive, merely as the impression of a recent visitor to Israel...

...Most professors and editors prefer not to engage in the risky and slippery business of sustaining a perpetual inventory of the world's thinkers and makers and discovering new ones...

...I reported two areas of possibly disturbing import in the practice of adoption in the Jewish community in New York...

...I trusted his instinct, which I knew had been made sensitive through experience...

...You and I lived through the Depression of the thirties...

...One day, Martin Green-berg, with whom I shared an office, Morris Freedman's work has appeared in the American Scholar, Harper's and Commentary, of which he was an associate editor...

...The coarse, pushy, undisguised self-promotion of petty entrepreneurs was sadly evident every day...

...If anything, "Cedars" kept raising the nagging question for some of the editors of whether classical Jewish writing of religious and secular sages, which this section printed in available translated excerpts, could really seem so consistently shallow and beside the point...

...Although we worked intensively when at our desks, we felt no hesitation about taking off when the weather was suddenly good...

...He would spend much time editing out dashes...

...Benson is a Mormon," I said...

...Oh, those goyish places west of the Hudson," Marty replied, with a wave of his hand toward the river, "all sound the same, Iowa, Utah, Ohio, you know...

...Marty could summon up and recite with relish long passages he liked...

...Our little dialogues at the water cooler, the substance and attitudes of our editorial conferences, kept reinforcing me in my sense of being on a faculty rather than in a journalistic enterprise in New York, with deadlines, financial concerns, frenzied auctorial and editorial conflicts and preoccupations...

...When Campanella puts on his mask and catcher's regalia and gets behind the plate," he once said admiringly, "it's as though he's entering his office to go to work...

...For adoption purposes, the religion of the child was determined by that of the mother...

...Commentary was unique in American publishing from its inception...

...From the American Scene" narrowed in on the American Jewish community but with no ideological slant unless one considered a certain reportorial neutrality itself a slant...

...Important leaders in the Reformed, Conservative, and Orthodox rabbinate in the United States over the years contributed essays on important issues...

...I proposed to Elliot that we run them and gave him synopses of several, translating a passage here and there...

...Inevitably, I was acutely aware of the intellectual heroes of the magazine, which prided itself on always knowing who was in and who out...

...He enjoyed going to his movies before dinner...

...Contrary to some suspicion, we did not have a coterie of contributors, although obviously we did have favorites...

...Articles about most Jewish community subjects could be counted on to produce some outburst of indignant reaction...

...She was a Bohemian actress from Russia by way of Israel who launched sad salons of roomers and friends in those large apartments with long halls and many bedrooms on Manhattan's West Side, and travelled summers through the Catskills putting on Yiddish plays in "social halls...

...My first appearance in Commentary, in its third issue, in January 1946, was with a short story...

...There was an outcry when I reported that Harry Grossinger appeared in the training gymnasium in the ring with Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano on Yom Kippur while the resort was otherwise stripped down for a strict Orthodox observance...

...Although its copy was always near impeccable, the magazine was rarely available to subscribers or newsstand buyers before the actual month of issue, suggesting a sort of academic inclination to be meticulous rather than merely on time...

...The adoption agency, which established the roster of Jewish couples it judged suitable to become adoptive parents, worked closely with the one helping unwed Jewish mothers...

...I was not much bothered by Elliot's indecisive-ness, even with its heavy toll of editorial breakage, although it evidently annoyed many...

...After a long silence, Elliot lifted his chin and said broodingly, "Do you realize, Morris, we're the only two people in the world right now who understand what's going on...

...And, also of course, good numbers of altogether knowing and serious readers, Jewish and not, were, and continue to be, outraged by Commentary's stance on this or that issue...

...He had earned his bachelor's degree at Yale and sported cuff links which carried a small replica of the university's seal with its Hebrew letters...

...All you have to do to get your face on the front cover," he growled dourly, "is to introduce a new word or phrase into the language...

...Although it has been called anti-Zionist and even anti-Semitic, the charges always came down to the formula that if you weren't with the accusers in exactly their way you were against them...

...I think the agency may have overstated its description of absolute equality among waiting couples to emphasize the disparity between the supply of adoptable infants and the demand for them...

...Our meetings late in the day were eerie, the light outside the office windows on West 33rd Street dimming from grey to black, Elliot's pursed mouth grim in his melancholy craggy face that could twist itself suddenly into a dazzling smile...

...Partisan Review, one of whose editors was Clement Greenberg and whose pages regularly carried Commentary writers...

...We've kept this guy's short book review nearly two years, and suddenly we're on the phone to the West coast asking him to approve our changes immediately...

...He was much kinder than I was about some of the rigidly Stalinist types we both had known on campuses...

...Some of my own pieces, for example, on Manischewitz kosher wine, Yiddish theater in the Catskills, Jewish Bohemianism, a community of Jewish farmers in Lakewood, Barton's kosher candies, Gertrude Berg (the creator and star in the radio and television serial about Molly Goldberg and her family), Sam Levenson, Grossinger's, were sometimes characterized as "anti-Semitic," or at least not friendly to Jews, by a certain class of readers, because they revealed "unflattering" facts to goyim...

...Around deadline time, a slight change in atmospheric pressure could be felt, like that on a campus before examinations...

...There's a hell of a lot less doubt now...

...One of my articles was a report on a suburban Jewish center that purported to be a place of worship and study...

...I found Elliot's childlike (sometimes childish), wide-ranging curiosity appealing...

...Editors frequently worked at home, calling in suggestions for titles of articles, say, or changes in copy...

...the Virginia Quarterly...

...He recounted one or two mildly funny jokes...

...The office buildings adjoined...

...The disgust seemed to me his reaction to the attempt to deny a starkly plain fact...

...it derived, I remember, from an article by an English contributor...

...Huckstering, rib jabbing, was as common among Commentary's several circles as among pushcart peddlers and their gross customers in New York's street markets...

...Bob Warshow's pioneering critical essays on movies, also in PR, influenced the introduction and character of film courses in colleges and universities...

...Lionel Trilling's moving and intimate essay about Bob, the introduction to Bob's posthumously published essays, The Immediate Experience, provides an extended impression of the kind of person Warshow was...

...I fell naturally into the more narrowly academic modes and idioms of the office, which were, of course, familiar to me, rather than into the harsher, more far reaching ones of New York publishing...

...I always get the highest scores on all the tests I take...

...One time, a would-be contributor, after I introduced him to Warshow (then managing editor), brusquely cut me out and invited Bob to lunch...

...Some contributors, it was true, who cultivated an expertise in the ways intellectual reputations are established and exploited in this country, engaged in long campaigns of self-aggrandizement, like well-planted moles in international espionage...

...I went to his funeral, numbed...

...We particularly respected a number of British writers, most of whom we had never met, whose copy, frequently in longhand, could be sent directly to the printer with changes only of spelling...

...I was often uncertain as to how far I could go in making a point...

...The story of his death made national news...

...Some conflict of interest was inevitable in helping the mothers of the babies to be placed make the decision to give them up...

...Pat Covici of Viking asked me to expand my two articles on Grossinger's into a book and was surprised to learn that the management of the hotel was not delighted by them...

...Later, there was some discussion about printing Bernard Mala-mud's "The Angel Levine," in which a novice black Jewish angel, rebuffed by a skeptical elderly tailor named Manische-witz whose wife is deathly sick, goes to Harlem to wait for Manischewitz's call...

...He was a subtle editor, able to carve out from some mountain of unpromising ore just the small lode we were looking for...

...The time was the twenties and thirties...

...Academics in the humanities keep reading and re-reading texts, always aware that they are determining a lasting, true, inner value...

...Nathan Glazer, who worked with David Riesman on The Lonely Crowd while still on the staff, resigned to join Jason Epstein in developing Anchor Books, the paperback library that revolutionized college teaching...

...Commentary gathered and gave coherence to a growing and increasingly liberated American intellectual population, heavily Jewish, predominantly academic, politically activist, which needed to crystallize and voice its concerns and articulate a variety of responses...

...remarked to me after noticing the cuff links for the first time, that Elliot's Jewishness had finally gone to his head...

...As I worked with a range of contributors, and fell into the routine habit of making decisions about texts, including those of personages, my awe dissipated, and I took as routine my dealing with names...

...When he said he had to consult with his associates in making a decision, he was not merely stalling...

...For more than a decade after that, I regularly contributed fiction, essays, reportage, and some criticism...

...What's so terribly special about maturity?' ' He was very proud when his son had a letter in Life congratulating it for printing the first picture of Marilyn Monroe with her mouth closed...

...In our office, Marty and I would occasionally find ourselves exchanging appreciations of poets we both had enjoyed reading in school, sparked by some comment in a book review one of us was editing, or by a book we might be assigning for review...

...I was startled to look up from my desk and see a replica of myself in the snapshots I had posed for in the Air Force almost exactly ten years earlier, even to the long nose and the lean face...

...Walking into my office, he threw an advance copy of Time on my desk...

...the American Scholar...

...He was in khaki uniform, that of a private, tie tucked into his shirt, belt buckle centered precisely in line with his shirt front and fly...

...I didn't get to know Bob Warshow as well as I should have liked...

...Once Marty passed on to me the galleys of an article he had just finished proofing, in which then Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson was identified as being from Iowa...

...He was at the same time disgruntled...

...Norman had already become our wunderkind contributor...

...Elliot had become gun-shy in anticipating how something might be read in the community...

...Elliot was especially wary of discommoding the Jewish social agencies in the city although he wanted very much to report their work to a general audience...

...Later, Bob ruefully excused the man as having been "anxious...

...He had been hospitalized for a heart condition...

...One night we had agreed on some point about the international situation...

...I remember a curiously "academic" discussion Elliot and I carried on once about three Jewish young men on New York's lower East Side who had pushed several drunken Bowery bums into the river after inflicting cigarette burns on them...

...Commentary early on was a main stop on New York's Grub Street...

...My article was never published, but no other article on the agencies appeared either...

...In the present piece of writing, I vouch for the spirit of all of the quotations, not their letter...

...The daily air of the office was easygoing and unhurried...

...We also liked the relaxed professional understanding with which most of them accepted editorial suggestions...

...A delegation of Orthodox rabbis, several in caftans and with canes, waited on Elliot to protest the trifling with tradition...

...He told me confessionally that he had started in the graduate program in English at Columbia immediately after the war, as I had done, but found so uncomfortable those crowded lectures and the barriers between the hordes of students and the remote faculty that he quickly dropped out...

...Nevertheless, the magazine's early and sustained courage in defying in so many ways various establishments in this country, including major Jewish ones, testified to the strengthened place of Jews in American life after World War II...

...I remember Bob Warshow once laying a bundle of pages on my desk...

...Ordinarily, because we were in the business of contributing to reputation in some way, most of us were blase and relaxed with at least our own stable of names, if not actually cynical on occasion...

...The agencies wanted us to publish a straightforward publicity puff, to help them in fund-raising...

...He had served on the staff during Elliot's illness and was one of his strongest supports, I understand, in that very difficult time...

...Make a baby...

...I wanted to call the article "Wine like Mammy Used to Make...

...At Columbia, I had assimilated some of the arrogance of the campus, where one daily rubbed shoulders with one or another international intellectual dignitary...

...I have heard many readers deplore the magazine's increasingly "political" emphasis under Podhoretz's editorship...

...The concerns of the magazine were early defined, as much in editorial practice as in manifesto, as those of civilized, middle-class, well-educated, intellectual, alert, curious, thoughtful, reasonable, reasoning, non-defensive people, ready to have their commitments enriched, challenged, or revised...

...Isaac Rosenfeld did a wry, personal essay on the observance of kashruth, which mused about whether the taboo against mixing dairy and meat products might have to do with some ancient reservation about mixing the sexes...

...One of the editorial assistants during my association with Commentary was Richard Clurman, who later was to rise to the top levels of the Time-Life hierarchy...

...Perhaps because I had seen enough less talented self-entrepreneurs in the academic world, I was not especially repelled or appalled by these types in our offices...

...When we noticed it in a competitor's pages, we remembered our decision and wondered whether we had made a mistake, or whether the other magazine was just slipping...

...The dominant manners of carriage, however, were Nat Glazer's, say, with his boyishly sensitive directness and candor, Irving Kristol's efficient, intelligent, and impartial bluntness, and Bob Warshow's grace...

...she was scrupulously patient about shaping a good-looking page...

...One time Elliot and I were talking about campus quotas against Jews, which, of course, were relaxing after the war but had been scrupulously, not to say notoriously, observed during the twenties when Elliot went to college...

...The loudly threatening president of the center, who called to lodge a complaint after reading the article but before bothering to look at the building closely, was subdued after talking with Elliot and me...

...The office had no air-conditioning, and on sweltering summer days, one or another editor might take copy with him down to the nearby cool Automat during the afternoon...

...We shared an admiration for John Milton...

...when caught out, he claimed he did so only part-time...

...No doubt, I was influenced in this euphoria by some sour memories of both CCNY and Columbia...

...Snide personal envy or plain political hostility could be plainly discerned in many published comments about the magazine or its writers and editors...

...I met Norman Podhoretz for the first time when he was on leave from military service and poked his head into the office I was sharing with Marty Greenberg...

...appear in Commentary's pages with what sometimes became "position" papers...

...When the attack on my article shifted ground to ask why was it necessary to report matters that might give readers "wrong" ideas about Jews, he told me to ignore it...

...It troubled him that Commentary was not appreciated at the New Yorker except for its clean copy, and that his film criticism seemed unknown to the staff there...

...I did so, and Elliot, with the air of a little boy about to meet a favorite performer, asked me if he could invite Abe Raskin of the Times to join us...

...He liked to offer piquant, irreverent reappraisals of established literary names in a probing yet grandly confident way...

...At the same time, other readers were calling the Commentary office to make reservations for a stay at the resort...

...Black children, unless specifically identified as Catholic, were placed by the Protestant agencies...

...Foreign Affairs...

...So I concluded that I got in because I was one of the few Jews who had bothered to apply, and I said this to the dean...

...One of my assignments was to do a piece on adoption, which at the time in New York, as in other cities, was formally supervised by agencies allied with the three main religious communities, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant...

...Norman didn't...

...He's an official of the church...

...After I left the magazine and was settling in at the University of New Mexico, I learned that he was going through a severe depression and could not be left alone...

...When David Riesman's portrait appeared on Time on the occasion of the publication of The Lonely Crowd, he was pleased to have one of his insights confirmed about achieving fame in America...

...Clem often got lost in his work...

...Marty Greenberg gently but firmly cautioned me against thinking of Elliot as a father figure...

...Many leaders commonly preferred looking at their enterprises in terms of aspiration rather than of actuality...

...In my schooling I had fallen into the common habit of occasionally regarding in a parental light teachers I respected, and I seem to have shown signs of doing so with Elliot...

...The magazine remains emphatically anti-Communist and anti-Stalinist...

...Years later I learned that the funeral had been an occasion in the New York intellectual and publishing worlds, memorialized eventually in a novel and movie...

...At few campuses and in few editorial offices do similarly ambitious and possibly pretentious and arrogant processes of determination go on...

...Once we got a long, heavily written essay on film from a critic then beginning what became a justly impressive career...

...Here's another unformed blob of protoplasm from so and so," he said, naming one of our more distinguished writers...

...At first it seemed presumptuous to be passing judgment all the time on some of the important writers of our time and in such purely practical terms as suitability for publishing (either something by the eminences themselves or something about them...

...Clem looked up startled, silently rolled his sleeves down, buttoned them, put on his jacket, and left the office on the run...

...in London, one may nod to a respected famous face, or courteously ignore it...

...I said that I had never exuded so much confidence, and I was pleased to see an image of me in uniform so exuberant, not to say cocky...

...We admitted error as readily as we dismissed this or that publishing eminence...

...Names of contributors were among the academic and intellectual aristocracy in the United States and Britain...

...They had a nose for what would sell at any moment, and they persisted in pushing themselves...

...That way," he explained, "I feel less guilty, especially if the movie is a bad one...

...We used to lunch together, and we had long quiet talks while strolling...

...I suggested he do a piece for us, "Free and Equal in Paris...

...The editors often approached subjects with the sort of curiosity that connects disparate disciplines or events, the sort encouraged in fertile academic atmospheres...

...That story, despite its raciness, did at last appear...

...I tried to be oblivious to the larger grubby world of New York cultural intrigue, centering around publishing, of which Commentary was inevitably part...

...Another time he told me it was he who suggested to Time that the way to emphasize a point in a story was to put it in a footnote...

...The sanctuary for worship was actually a small, architectural gem, almost lost within a vast building of sparely functional and cavernous dining halls and kitchens...

...Commentary began publication in 1946, as the country was calming down, reconstituting itself, with the end of World War II...

...He told us later that he was advised to consult with them in the future if he wanted to run really randy and much funnier items derived from holy text...

...I merely returned to one...

...Poems and stories were listed with the same emphasis as articles...

...It turned out that the critic himself worked for Time...

...In his earlier days he had been associated with the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies...

...The wife of a colleague, listening to a discussion at a dinner party about television wrestling, exclaimed, "It's amazing what Commentary editors know and will talk about...

...I sat through Marty's brief, choked eulogy and spoke to no one...

...After an hour or so, he group emerged convivially laughing, Elliot in their center...

...The editors knew well the politics of fame, as precisely as Lady Bracknell knew the fashionable and unfashionable sides of a street...

...It affirmed the Columbia assumption that mortal men like those around us could daily achieve significance while denying the defeatist attitude I found so common at CCNY, that the best had already been, or was being, or could only be, done elsewhere...

...They were bolder, often more clever, and sometimes had a chutzpedik dash...

...Midge Decter was beginning her career as an essayist and editor...

...After he left, I remarked to Marty about my deja vu sense of seeing myself ten years back...

...Some rejected manuscripts left us brooding with misgivings...

...Most prefer to work with people the establishment has already evaluated and classified...

...Clem respected good academic writing and had a quick instinct for identifying the shallow and shoddy, for what passed for thought or talent, for "kitsch," a term he helped make current...

...We did not run Singer in my time...

...We knew we weren't publishing immortal prose in every issue...

...In one piece, editors and contributors to Commentary were lumped with writers and editors of establishment news weeklies as "prostitutes...

...They expect things to come much more readily today...

...When Sherry Abel was interviewed by Bob Warshow for the job of preparing text for the printer, Cohen said he wanted to know only one thing: Did she have a passion for commas...

...As I did with all my articles containing extensive or sensitive quotations, which I could only hope to approximate from notes or from memory, I submitted a draft to the people at the two agencies I had talked with...

...It was Sherry who taught me some of the subtler and more esoteric aspects of proofreading and layout...

...He was the first adult on record to die that way...

...I can hardly think of my interlude at Commentary as a break in my academic career...

...Matter of pride," he once murmured to me apologetically, to explain holding back a manuscript from the printer...

...I had just begun teaching at CCNY...

...Every month it had items with some Jewish slant although the concern, the orientation, was always more general...

...No article developed from our talk...

...The dean, who happened to remember the circumstances of Cohen's admission, was amused...

...During my time as an editor, the staff met only once with the magazine's publications board...

...He had been with Arthur Miller at the University of Michigan and was more generous in appraising him than it was customary to do at the time, although his precisely discerning criticism of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible remains the most insightfully devastating we have...

...Of course, the magazine included many readers who subscribed out of a pietistic gesture toward Jewishness or toward intellect and culture and were frequently angered or puzzled by particular articles...

...It occurs to me that I don't know, and never thought to find out, who took care of children of Jewish mothers and black fathers...

...Every one of the editors in my time had credentials at least as familiar in universities as in publishing, and several went on to join faculties...

...He sat quietly for a minute, eyes down, head leaning on his fingers, then said, "Morris, you're forgetting we're a family magazine...

...My army classification scores were so high, I was assigned as a clerk to headquarters...

...Elliot had great respect for professional social work, which I shared, and I concluded that he finally felt there must be some very good, if arcane professional reasons for not plainly revealing well-established philosophies and practices...

...And not long after that, on a dazzlingly sunlit morning, I got a telephone call from New York that he had committed suicide by putting a plastic bag over his head...

...A number of years later, after Marty himself held the editorship briefly, Norman came back as editor...

...Later, he joined the faculties at Berkeley and Harvard...

...Occasionally, I would suggest that we carry some editor's name as co-author for an article on which the editor's work was more in the nature of collaboration than editing, and Marty would vigorously demur, insisting that the first creator, however unshaped or misshapen the original product, must be given full and exclusive credit...

...Don't you know the Giants are in town...

...One of the magazine's common modes has been that of Talmudic pilpul, tight reasoning, close analysis of text or argument, careful sifting of evidence, but with minimal casuistry...

...Early in Commentary's history, before its substantive character had quite become known in New York's publishing world, a New Yorker editor at a cocktail party complimented Warshow on the high quality of the magazine...

...By contrast, my essay on Camp Ramah, the summer camp run by the Jewish Theological Seminary for young people who speak only Hebrew while at camp and practice full daily religious services, was received by the leaders of the Seminary and of the camp with thanks for the perspective offered...

...An editor of the magazine was always with him...

...Later journals like Encounter, the Public Interest (edited by Commentary alumni), and the New York Review of Books reflect not only Commentary's pioneering efforts in sustained intellectual journalism and reflection but its list of contributors over the years...

...The office was surprisingly free of rancorous gossip, however tightly we analyzed and judged manuscripts...

...The leader of the young men turned out to have Nazi banners, reading matter, helmets, and German army weapons in his room...

...He had a special respect for public relations in the large social sense and was proud of having been responsible for instituting the daily pollen count issued by the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital...

...He enjoyed reminiscing about his graduate school days at Yale, where one of his fellow students had been Marjorie Nicolson, under whom I did my doctorate...

...As writer and editor, I found the atmosphere in the office more that of a campus than of an editorial enterprise...

...A bemusing fact I uncovered during the research for my article on Manischewitz kosher wine was that it was enormously popular with blacks, both in large cities and in the rural South...

...In my free-lance magazine writing, for Commentary and other publications, I had interviewed celebrities in science, medicine, and entertainment...

...Minimal gesture over the years was made to return maximum profit...

...In the agency's view, an Orthodox couple, however suitable otherwise, had a poorer chance to be given an infant than a more secular or a more religiously centrist couple...

...I remember I said hello to Jason and Barbara Epstein on the sidewalk outside, then walked downtown...

...Norman Podhoretz, its present editor, had just begun writing for Commentary when I was on the staff...

...The magazine, I would say, reflected the character and concerns of the editors more than it did those of the publisher, a circumstance that further contributed to its uniqueness...

...Frances Green, the business manager during my time, would report tidbits to us from her office, like the information that Bernard Berenson had renewed his latest subscription for only one year instead of his customary three years...

...At least two editors read every word every issue...

...His generation had things cleared away for them...

...Phillip Roth's work also caused difficulty, of the sort that Roth himself recorded in his short novel, The Ghost Writer, when the protagonist, a young Jewish writer, is charged by his family and friends with contributing to anti-Semitism through his less than idyllic portrayal of a relative...

...One day, Jimmy Baldwin, sitting in my office, recounted his unhappy adventures over a weekend with Paris police and a Paris judge, which had nothing to do with his being black and which reminded me of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London...

...He is now Professor of English at the University of Maryland...

...I continued to write for Commentary a while from New Mexico, but I drifted more and more into reading and writing for purely academic journals and attending more and more strictly to a professorial career...

...Elliot was given to megalo-maniacal and gloomy pronouncements...

...he asked...

...Commentary was a peculiarly New York phenomenon...

...Bob had long been having a problem, he thought, with his digestion...

...He once spoke sadly about the young men and women sitting in his office and staring longingly in silent envy at him and his surroundings...