SHALL WE SOON PRAISE PODHORETZ?
Novak, Michael
SHALL WE SOON PRAISE PODHORETZ? When my colleague in these pages, Peter Steinfels, writes of "the new conservatives" [April 12], he appears to mean precisely five persons. Allusive writers like...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Miehae| Novak (Cont...
...The tone of The New York Review o/ Books today is erudite, somber, philosophical, almost Victorian in its meditative placidity and gracious, ambling periods...
...Robert Heilbroner's Aurelian reflection on the prospect of the human race is a case in point...
...Perhaps it is sentimental to believe in justice...
...Lies, exaggerations, innuendoes, uninvited expressions of contempt, the pure vitriol of hatred--these result in ostracism, laceration, inner shrinking...
...He delights in his maze...
...Peter's symbols, however, are not employed so straightly...
...would import...
...In these conflicts, moreover, casualties are often highly personal...
...A great many persons who began the sixties as conservatives, or as apolitical, became "politicized," "radicalized," or had their "consciousness raised...
...So one might conclude, from external factors alone, that "the dirty little secret" about American letters which Podhoretz broke Puritan taboos to voice must almost certainly be true...
...But literary abuse is crueler still...
...Ever since Making It, Podhoretz has become a symbol around which the most astonishing hatred focuses...
...per capita consumption of oil and most other natural resources is well above world averages...
...Gone, now, is the "new left" that once made the very recitation of their names an exercise of contumely...
...By contrast, Glazer, Kristol, and Podhoretz seem much more comfortable with labor, its needs, its perceptions...
...The social base of these two tendencies on the left is also fairly clear...
...There is not, of course, a necessary conflict between these two tendencies...
...The editorial writers of the Washington Post are striking for a wage of $25,000 per year, a level not shared by more than five percent of the American population...
...The division on the left was deep...
...The symbolic hub is how guilty to consider the United States...
...The good name of the left was (spuriously) appropriated by Rennie Davis and Abbie Hoffman, Robert Scbeer, James Ridgeway, and others...
...So it turns out that Glazer, Kristol, MICHAEL NOVAK and Podhoretz were correct, at least, in diagnosing the new left...
...and domestic affairs in the light of an electoral coalition that would make incremental progress...
...Writers cannot be free to do creative work without money ---often a great deal of money...
...Allusive writers like myself, who love to suggest three or four different things with every metaphor, envy such precision...
...The struggle, I think, is not between "the left" and "new conservatives" but between a tradition of moral reform and a tradition of irony...
...Although Hawkes writes a maze-like work about maze-like reality, he surely does not remain a passive creator...
...In a more quiet time than ours, his polemical thrusts will be granted the honest vision they represent...
...Besides Washington politics, there is also literary politics...
...For some, participation on the left is primarily a moral act, and for others it is primarily a political act...
...In this odd context Podhoretz, Glazer, Kristol et al came to seem "conservative...
...I am, consequently, very grateful to Hawkes...
...The politics of book reviewing is often bitter...
...But what has happened to Podhoretz is far more insidious than tit-for-tat...
...If one reads Michael Harrington and Irving Howe closely, as well as Eugene Genovese and Christopher Lasch, one notes that they have in effect conceded that argument...
...There are, of course, concrete political choices to face: like whom to support for President, how to line up on certain movements or certain kinds of legislation...
...so much of the debate is a matter of tone, posture, personal association, ancient alliances and wrongs, tactical o/~positions...
...The struggle against resentment and recrimination consumes energies...
...Michael Harrington, who has often written well of the need to unite "the new class" with the progressive forces in the labor unions, seems ultimately to place his hopes in the new class...
...Podhoretz already has his gloves on for the next round, and some will hate to see him win again...
...On this, more in a later column...
...Creative powers wither...
...but I am confident that this fiction (about fictions) will continue to enlighten me for a long time...
...There is great vulgarity in American letters...
...In the one world as in the other, perhaps both tendencies on the left can once again join in a common stream...
...Against the great tides of radical chic in the late sixties, Podhoretz charted an unpopular course...
...There are the recurring, brilliant images of water, mirror, and animal...
...There are still important differences on the left...
...In international affairs and in domestic affairs, two quite different tides are moving...
...He shapes it so cunningly that although it resists thematic analysis, it remains a unique construction...
...The effect is rather like that of a highly emotional family feud, in which how everybody appears to everybody else is painfully important...
...An active development of 3 May 1974:222...
...To make such a concession is risky...
...Hawkes writes a philosophical thriller, a dream work which, like the white whale, eludes our rational comprehension...
...Above all, his clear penetration of Puritan cant, which has unleashed upon him a righteousness as old as Salem, singularly exposed the mixed motives of New York literary life today...
...And not all have yet conceded publicly that more often than not Podhoretz was right, substantially...
...Underdeveloped nations, Japan and Western Europe must compete for the additional oil that the U.S...
...True enough, many writers still put them down, use them as rods for their own hostility, proof of their own superior leftishness...
...Many of these nouveaux gauches hated their past and had to expel immense self-hate: Podhoretz, refusing to undergo conversion, bore more than his share from those trying late to be lefter than he...
...I realize that I am unsure of events--the Dutchman continually asks "Who is safe...
...The three --another triangle!--merge so subtly that we cannot at any one "magical" point say: the event is "real...
...In the one world as in the other, justice is in short supply...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 000 CORRESPONDENCE (Continued from page 203) U.S...
...His "new conservatives," I would have thought-Irving Kristoi, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Moynihan, James Q. Wilson, and Norman Podhoretz--are now leaders of a major frontline of the American left...
...Thus, Paul Goodman in his later years...
...oil consumption within its production capacity for crude oil...
...Norman Podhoretz, for example, is one of the most flagrantly wronged persons in American letters...
...The other group diagnoses international affairs in the light of dangers to world order and to individual liberties on the part of other powers, too...
...He is a tough, astringent, unsparing critic, and so, some will say, he deserves to take as well as to give...
...Nothing is more annoying, of course, than a person "right from the start...
...Yet practically everyone who values excellence of intellectual performance, or has internalized the spiritual authority of the great minds of the past, has felt obliged in recent years to adopt standards that have been called (often by others) "conservative...
...It is painful to endure a year or two in jail...
...But I have simplified the special pleasures of this novel...
...But it seems that, in time, Podhoretz will receive a more just and appreciative evaluation of his talent, his insights, and his courage...
...I accept its wise violations...
...then becoming current...
...But they now dominate the field of action...
...they are disturbed by the definition of issues generated by the new class...
...There are many dreams--in one the Dutchman walks across a "field of blood"--which dazzle me...
...He attacked head-on the triumphant counter culture, greening, new populism, and virtually every shibboleth (Continued on page 222) Commonweal: 207 ea ~< ' . [] 1 to me that they are identical.' " I think that this comment--even if it is not really said by his wife---captures the special flavor of the novel...
...Philip Rieff and others...
...National energy policy should encourage conservation through incentives to keep U.S...
...Even Irving Howe and Michael Harrington were regarded by the "radicals" as compromised...
...I appreciate the cleansing anxiety it provokes...
...For the first, moving "rightward" is moral weakness...
...The mystery is thus greater than "simple" murder--it is the ungraspable nature of reality...
...for the second, political judgment means more than moral reputation...
...We find here no clear demarcation between "life," dream, and fiction...
...One group diagnoses international affairs in the light of the imperialism of the United States, and domestic affairs in the light of the evils of the established system...
...After disdaining Making It, Wiifrid Sheed wrote The Hack...
...In reading it I meet "various unfamiliar shadows," "psychic sores," the batlike terrors of sleep...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 9
