Eminences/Making It Final
Ferguson, Andrew
Making It Final by Andrew Ferguson 6 6 n0 e of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan," Norman Podhoretz wrote in the famous opening to his memoir, Making It....
...Fortunately for him, and for us all, the American Jewish Committee interceded in 1960 by offering him the editorship of Commentary, and it became quickly apparent that he was professionally ambidextrous—that rarest of birds, the gifted writer who is at the same time a gifted editor...
...even Freud had once defined the artist as someone who eschews the pursuit of women, money, and fame for the sake of his art, by which he hopes to gain women, money, and fame...
...The memoir's unblinking candor has been noted often, and even now, thirty years later, it has the capacity to unnerve any reader who blunders into it unawares...
...Within months he had restored the magazine to the eminence it had enjoyed in the decade after the war, and enjoys still...
...It is a firstperson study of the lust for success—a lust shared, Podhoretz wanted to demonstrate, even by the most disaffected intellectuals (whose ranks, by the mid-sixties, were beginning to swell...
...Intellectuals, the best ones, are the sworn enemies ofsentimentality, and the Pierre was swarming with intellectuals...
...By the end of the 1980s, Commentary shared the hostility...
...Dismissing Updike, extolling the early Mailer, puzzling over Bellow, Podhoretz sees things most other critics wouldn't see, and magnifies them for us in the most emphatic, vigorous prose...
...CI The American Spectator July 1995 45...
...And then Podhoretz made a turn even more revealing of his time: the critic consumed by literature moved on to politics, for by then the age was consumed by politics—an affliction from which it has never recovered...
...Making It traces "alienation" back to the irresolvable 44 The American Spectator July 1995 contraction at its source...
...But his account was so unabashed, and rendered with such relish and literary skill, that most of his fellow intellectuals could never forgive him...
...And it seems even longer when you consider its specific origin and most recent terminus: from the Brownsville slums of his youth to the ballroom of the Pierre Hotel on Central Park, where hundreds of friends and admirers assembled, on a rainy night in early May, to mark the occasion of Podhoretz's retirement after thirty-five years as editor of Commentary...
...It's one thing (and no mean feat) to be your generation's Edmund Wilson when your generation is offering up Dos Passos and Fitzgerald and Hemingway...
...Podhoretz's indictment wasn't necessarily original...
...The tone of the evening was instead celebratory and congratulatory, and even, at the odd moment, combative—a reminder that along with the courage and the commitment, the quality that distinguishes Podhoretz's life is a zest for combat, a love for the clash of ideas, a willingness (to borrow a trope from Our President) to get up every day prepared to fight...
...The problem was that by 1960, less and less literature was being produced that was worth being deadly serious about...
...The original neoconservative had at last dropped the qualifying prefix...
...and didn't...
...The conclusion of this line of reasoning was so treasonous that even Podhoretz seems to flinch from it, for Making It implies that liberalism, at its essence, is a flight from human nature itself...
...The "longest journey" he mentions in Making It was only the first, and he made it fairly early on, arriving in the intellectual-literary world of postwar Manhattan with the blessings of his teachers Lionel Trilling and F.R...
...By his mid-twenties he was already established as a distinguished literary critic, pleasingly contrary, with a gift for plain speaking...
...But he has been something almost without precedent, an American intellectual who didn't just tolerate his country but gloried in it, and rolled out his formidable artillery, and that of his colleagues at Commentary, in its defense...
...p ublished in 1967, Making It was the pivot in Podhoretz's career, and it would have guaranteed his place in American literature no matter what he wrote or edited before or after...
...Leavis...
...But no one at the Pierre was so disposed, which is just as well...
...p odhoretz remained an intellectual, of course—the "foremost intellectual of his time," as more than one speaker at the Pierre said...
...For the fight goes on...
...Much of Podhoretz's criticism from those years was collected in 1964 in Doings and Undoings, and it's starAndrew Ferguson is a senior writer for the Washingtonian...
...What grips the reader is the memoirist's unfolding awareness of how disconnected the culture of liberal American intellectuals is from ordinary American life, and how willful and stubborn the disconnection is...
...The essays are a testament to his deadly seriousness about the high calling of literature...
...tling, as you read the book today, how few whiskers this literary journalism has grown...
...Out in the country they call it pointy-headed...
...As a moral position, this is what an intellectual might call problematic...
...It's a kind of synecdoche of American intellectual history, containing within it all the nervy advances and uncomfortable zigzags of Cold War argument...
...But he didn't—and probably, to tell the truth, couldn't have...
...This sullen realization colors every other page of Doings and Undoings, and Podhoretz respondedas any reasonable man would...
...Guided as it was by enormous personal courage and a steady commitment to the truth, the trajectory of this career is inspiring at the least and, if you're so disposed (as I am), immensely moving...
...Podhoretz's career arcs through the middle and late years of the century, at once exemplary of its time and utterly singular...
...But the fascination the book holds for the second- or third-time reader comes from something more enduring...
...Toward the climax of the Cold War he turned his writerly attentions to public affairs, more narrowly defined—and particularly to foreign policy...
...Podhoretz, after all, wasn't just talking about himself, he was talking about them, about the hermetic, self-satisfied world in which they lived and moved and had their being...
...He got writer's block...
...While intellectuals, says Podhoretz, succumb to the same "low" motive that drives their countrymen in the commercial republic—the hunger for fame, money, the trappings of success—they define themselves by professing disdain for it and them...
...the distance between himself and his former left-wing comrades grew, and he drew closer to mainline American conservatism, the mustiest, least fashionable precincts of all, where anti-Communism had always been joined with a hostility to the welfarestate...
...Under such conditions, Podhoretz later wrote, "criticism could only shrivel into academicism or take on [a] kind of strident negativism...
...The break that began with Making It had a kind of inexorable interior logic...
...In a toast at the Pierre, Irving Kristol noted that in the late fifties, his contemporaries assumed that Podhoretz would someday "replace Edmund Wilson in our pantheon, as indeed he would have...
...quite another when it's tossing off Jack Kerouac and Donald Barthelme...
...Making It is the slow-motion account of a partisan joining the side he is on...
...In the great divide between the left-wing intellectual pose and the daily grind of middle-class American life, Podhoretz sided with the latter, found virtue in it, and in the end embraced it—on the important condition that he not have to leave the Upper West Side...
Vol. 28 • July 1995 • No. 7
