The Bloody Crossroads

...Podhoretz rates Henry Kissinger's memoirs next to, say, those of Grant or 1'alleyrand or Churchill . One would like to hear him discuss in greater detail hi s willingness to dismiss Solzhenitsyn a s a major novelist on the basis o f reputedly bad translations from the original Russian...

...Podhoretz says at one point in his essay "An Open Let-ter to Milan Kundera," "I would b e obligated at this juncture to show how The Book of Laughter and Forgetting achieves this marvelous result .") When Mr...

...Pod-horetz's first book, an exceptionally astute collection of critical essays calle d Doings and Undoings: The Fifties an d After in American Writing, know that neoconservatism's gain was criticism's loss...

...I believe," Mr...

...Podhoretz, lest we forget, is a neoconservative, and his criti-cal perspectives are necessarily a prod-uct of the left-liberal milieu in whic h he was reared...

...But about some things I have not changed my mind at all . I still believe now, as I did in the late fifties an d early sixties, that it is possible for a criti c to speak openly from a particular perspec -tive and to make political judgment s without permitting such judgments t o replace or obscure literary values as such . The critical sentiments expressed here are, of course, admirable...

...Judged by these critical stan-dards, The Bloody Crossroads is brilliantly successful . To be sure, Mr...

...But certain other essays in The Bloody Crossroads are too short to accommodate fully their powerful initiat ing ideas, too willing to settle for sug gestive assertion over meticulous dem-onstration . ("If I were still a practicing literary critic," Mr...

...Podhoretz describes Camus's Th e Plague as "clenched and ungiving, " one wants to know more about the rea-soning behind this intriguing conclu-sion...

...It is no secret," he says, that I have changed my mind about man y things since the days when I wrote mostly about literature...

...For these are at least as in -teresting as any specific thing he has to say about any specific work of liter-ary art...

...So is Norman Podhoretz, who began reviewing books for Commentary over thirty years ago and ended up as editor of the maga-zine, an unprecedented development which has enhanced the fantasy lives of countless frustrated critics ever since...

...F. R. Leavis, one of Norman Pod-horetz's teachers, said in the preface t o The Great Tradition that the best way to promote profitable discus-sion is to be as clear as possible with onesel f about what one sees and judges, to try and establish the essential discriminations in th e given field of interest, and to state them a s clearly as one can (for disagreement if necessary) . Mr...

...So it is at once a surprise and a pleasure to note the publication of The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Poli-tics Meet, Mr...

...Most of all, one would like to have a longer and more explicit discussio n of the underlying critical assumption s of The Bloody Crossroads than is sup-plied in Mr...

...Podhoretz's three-page in-troduction...

...In "Kissinger Recon-sidered " he simultaneously advances the case for White House Years and Years of Upheaval as "one of the great works of our time" and rejects Kis-singer's diplomatic strategies as "very brilliant but for the most part wrong " ; in "The Terrible Question of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn" he dismisses Solzhenit-syn's novels as "dead from beginning to end" while praising The Gulag Arch-ipelago and The Oak and the Calf as "among the very greatest books of th e age...

...Podhoretz's new book , which brings together between hard covers the literary essays which he ha s been publishing at increasingly freTerry Teachout, an assistant editor of Harper's, is a frequent contributor to Commentary, National Review, and The American Spectator...

...Podhoretz to have ex-panded two or three of these nine essays after the fact to a more substan-tial length, in the familiar manner of Edmund Wilson, and to have thereby addressed some of the questions which compression has forced him to leave hanging...

...Podhoretz does seem from time to time to chafe against th e journalistic constraints under which h e works...

...Box 280 Babylon . Nev York 1170 2 S9.95 plus S1 50 postage/handlin g NY state residents add 70' sales tax . Allow 3-4 weeks delivery Volum e discounts . schools . groups etc quent intervals in Commentary and th e New Criterion since 1982 . Mr...

...His field of interest is worthy, his discriminations central, his argument s stated with the greatest possible clari-ty...

...Podhoretz is at obvious pains in Th e Bloody Crossroads to show that he ca n do exactly that...

...Podhoretz has learned this lesso n well...

...But good cases make bad law, and most o f the cases in The Bloody Crossroads are gilt-edged...

...Podhoretz has omitted the darknes s both from his title and from the in-troduction in which he explains it s meaning, and one cannot help but sus-pect that the omission is deliberate . Fo r Norman Podhoretz, there is nothing dark about that bloody crossroads . The spotlight is aimed, the villain plain t o see: [M]ost of the writers I discuss . . . are former Communists driven by the compul -sion to warn the democratic world agains t the threat of an evil that few of them woul d hesitate to describe as absolute...

...SOUTH AFRICA : TIME OUT FOR REALISM . TH E STORY THE MEDIA REFUSES T O REVEAL uncovers where facts ar e withheld . . .reporters silent . An eye -opening audio cassette that plays o n your home stereo, automobile deck or Walkman headset . Hear the famil-iar story of South Africa in an unfa-miliar ligh t Make checks payabl e Peregrine Media Group, Inc . PO...

...One would like to hear how Mr...

...Why do they persistent-ly fail to recognize the manifes t superiority of capitalism to socialism...

...Most of these essays were writ -ten for magazines, and none has bee n revised "beyond the merely cosmetic . " In many cases, of course, revision wa s neither necessary nor desirable...

...And Mr...

...Yet on th e whole these ex-Communists are no more en -thusiastic about the democratic world , especially as embodied in the United States, the most powerful of all the democracies , than are Adams and Leavis and the many like-minded intellectuals whose attitudes are analyzed in [the essay] "The Adversar y Culture and the New Class...

...His subject matter is diverse : George Orwell, Henry Kissinger, F. R. Leavis, Milan Kundera, Henry Adams , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn . The perfect ti-tle comes from a Lionel Trilling essay, "Reality in America," in whic h memorable reference is made to "th e dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet . " Mr...

...The temptation to any man wh o is interested in ideas and primarily i n literature, to put literature into the cor-ner until he cleans up the whole coun-try first," as T. S. Eliot said of Mat-thew Arnold, "is almost irresistible...

...Podhoretz, judging by his introduction , must surely think so, and one would very much like to hear about them from his own mouth . q THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1986...

...Can such authors exist...

...Podhoretz says in the introduction, "that a critic can talk about literature in a way that respects its autonomy without denying or suppressing a con-cern with other values...

...The essay on Kissinger's memoirs is only a gesture in this direc-tion...

...The Bloody Crossroads, then, is a study of intellectual inconsistency . Wh y do those authors who know and abho r totalitarianism so often fail to recog-nize that the United States is thei r spiritual ally...

...Podhoretz's book is "an attemp t to merge the political issues that have largely concerned me as a writer dur-ing the past twenty years with my originally overriding interest in litera-ture...

...The result is a coherent view of literature with which one may disagre e violently but which one must never-theless take very seriously indeed . (Witness, for instance, the recent Hugh Kenner-Tod Lindberg dispute over Th e Bloody Crossroads in the Washington Times...

...THE BLOODY CROSSROADS : WHERE POLITICS AND LITERATURE MEE T Norman Podhoretz/Simon and Schuster/$16.9 5 Terry Teachou t Some writers treat literary criticism as an end, others as a means...

...H e therefore argues that if Orwell were alive today the force of events woul d have made him a neoconservative, re-pudiates Henry Adams for "encourag-ing a bigoted contempt for this coun-try" and "subtly denigrating and devaluing the life of the mind," chide s Milan Kundera in an open letter fo r "cooperating" with the liberal critics "who have kidnapped your work ." But The Bloody Crossroads is more than a neoconservative syllabus of left-wing political error: it is also a work of critical discrimination...

...Henry Adams: The 'Powerless' Intellectual i n America" is equally fine in its dissec-tion of Adams as a literary archetyp e for New Class political attitudes...

...One would like, in short, for Mr...

...Podhoretz's New Criterion essay on F. R. Leavis is easily the finest short discussion of Leavis's significance as a critic that has seen print...

...But those who remember Mr...

...Podhoretz believes that these ques-tions should be addressed logically...

...WHY DOES THE MEDIA , HIDE SO MANY FACTS ABOUT SOUTH AFRICA ? What are we not being told on th e evening news...

...George Will, formerly book editor of National Review and currently ABC's right-win g media idol in residence, is a classic ex-ample of the latter type...

...What one would really like to hear is how Norman Podhoretz deals with a bad case: an author of noxious politics or morals whom he nonetheless regards as indisputabl y great...