Making It, by Norman Podhoretz; North Toward Home, by Willie Morris; Stop Time, by Frank Conroy
Chase, Edward
MAxzNC IT, by Norman Podhoretz. New York: Random House. 360 pp. $6.95. NORTH TOWARD HOME, by Willie Morris. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 438 pp. $5.95. STOP TIME, by Frank Conroy. New...
...Certainly one cannot imagine him taunting death on a 100 m.p.h...
...He allows as how he himself has attained success, indeed in its closing words that his autobiography itself may be a path to fame, literary distinction, and money, all at once...
...Somehow he never raises any as interesting as Podhoretz's or Conroy's...
...at 115 m.p.h...
...The information is relayed in Making It that it may take $60,000 a year to live in New York City decently, presumably as befits a celebrated intellectual...
...On the other hand, down through the centuries the mystical principle that one gains one's life by losing it has been the sustaining rationale for impoverished scholars and poets as well as religious martyrs —also for plain masochists, whose number nowadays appear to be legion...
...Yes, Kristol and Bell are meliorists who may irritate Podhoretz as indeed at times they do us all...
...It is no pose...
...The cottoning up to, the lionizing of the gods and goddesses of the popular arts and of miscellaneous careerists by intellectuals and Presidents, for instance, may be a step up from the kind of snobbery that high-brows used to indulge, which made them often quite provincial...
...THE LITERATI'S SCHADENFREUDE over reviews of Norman Podhoretz's autobiography certifies Making It as the most provocative book so far in 1968...
...Sidney Hook once formulated it very precisely: "the unalienated man is the creative man, any man engaged in significant or meaningful work voluntarily assumed as a means toward self-realization...
...On the first question, though, the big one, the order of success of his becoming Com mentary's editor, here I would say Podhoretz is about right...
...Now this is fair enough...
...The risks here, that the reader may be stupefied with feverish and irrelevant anecdote—too often the curse of the "old" Harper's—strike me as very high indeed...
...He recreates his consciousness...
...We feel the impulse to communicate in this way rather than in the objective mode...
...On a much more demanding and interesting level than Willie Morris's autobiography, it is sharply responsive to what goes on in the real world...
...Even novelists and the malevolent should accept this...
...He has too much difficulty isolating his article from the publicity that attended it to see it in proper perspective...
...Sixty grand is a depressingly steep admission price to the good life...
...THE ANSWERS to these questions are not simple, and certainly the frenzied attacks on Podhoretz do not address themselves to such matters...
...The free-swinging essays that distinguish Commentary are the best of their kind published any where today...
...He reflects that he felt alienated from his country because "as an intellectual I was as ghettoized as my ancestors in Eastern Europe had been as Jews"— at least till President Kennedy changed the scene...
...It isn't that easy to break out of the practice of writing primarily just for the others in the intellectual establishment, an admirable principle but one, at least up till now, at odds with material success...
...I did not find it very daring, though, really not much like Norman Mailer's work...
...We dwell on 'who-I-am.' The implied appeal to the reader is: 'This is the way it has been with me...
...Podhoretz manages at once to cast doubt on this belief—by asserting the indispensability of the extrinsic rewards of achievement—and yet to accommodate it—by stressing over and over again the revelation that has come to him late and strangely strong that worldly achievement is by no means invariably incompatible with the intrinsic variety, quite the contrary in fact...
...Yet the kind of hard attention and close respect they pay implicitly to the complex realities of government practice, of technological change, of manpower policy, new concepts of social accounting and of economic practice, as well as political theory —this kind of responsibility seems underrated or missing from Podhoretz's concern...
...Michael De Bakey perhaps...
...And if it did pioneer in exposing certain burdensome liberal senti BOOKS mentalities, it invoked a few new ones of its own...
...This may be the key, then, to what makes one most uncomfortable with Making It...
...But what are the questions...
...This is "the art form of our time...
...If it is not, then to a measurable degree the book is awry, possibly even an embarrassment...
...And as for "making it," his chances of one-upping them both are pretty fair because the day should come when his fiction will be celebrated in their magazines' critical columns...
...The fact is that Podhoretz does himself disservice throughout Making It...
...I cannot believe that his telling of his journey from boyhood is not engrossing for fellow intellectuals...
...It is actually a bit apologetic—nor is the style as poetic or penetrating as one might have expected in so ambitious a book...
...So in the end Podhoretz forces upon us the task of making a fundamental judgment about both his work and his value system: on the evidence of his autobiography, does his claim to success stand up, is it commensurate with reality...
...It is alarming, in this connection, to hear both Podhoretz and Harper's editor-in-chief, Willie Morris, in a recent symposium, agree that what's needed today to please the readers of their magazines is "the personal essay...
...Hasn't it been that way with you?'" Podhoretz feels that "testimony flowers when there is no very widely shared set of assumptions...
...The price of literary and intellectual excellence remains about as Richard Hofstadter evaluated it five years ago, eternal vigilance, and if not by mortally suspicious intellectuals, then by whom...
...This is partly so because his book is a chronicle, a memoir of considerable poignancy and unfailing intelligence, but not an analytical account of making it nor an evocation of one's innermost emotional life...
...Conroy writes of himself without a trace of affectation...
...piercing in its evocation of life in America in the 40's and 50's and thus, one senses, a surer guide to the reality of America than either Podhoretz's or Morris's...
...The main reason, though, is that Morris confronts political and social problems that are of such heroically unsubtle dimensions—the incredible caricatures of Southern and Northern racists, colorful Texas Neanderthal politicians—that the reader's response is confined to amusement or horror...
...It isn't...
...But in the post-industrial society, the society which gives rise to the new class—Coleridge's "clerisy," evolving beyond what Galbraith used to call the consumption society (a society that has mastered the production problem)—one has assumed that the new idiom of success is membership in an elite who find self-fulfillment...
...We find this in conversation more and more...
...Why do so many hate to admit it...
...For all his savoring of literary-circle politicizing and gossip, he does assume the ascendancy of the life of the mind, naturally, like breathing...
...In John Dewey's phrase, it is those for whom "earning one's living is at the same time living one's life," like Norman Mailer or Bart Starr or Dr...
...They would hardly be so provoked if Podhoretz's "dirty little secret" didn't really cut through to some painful truth, he might say...
...Indeed, its outlook is conservative, somewhat out of touch with the spirit of elan, the young's sense of gut commitment characteristic of the 1960's, as compared with the funky, silent Eisenhower 1950's...
...He is a sensible man, a born winner, a certain survivor, with the ingratiating qualities common to winners, such as an amiable old-American frontier-Southern sense of humor-by exaggeration...
...By God, he has made it—though it would have become both him and his sense of reality if he would concede more to luck's role...
...It is true that in the old American Puritan Calvinist tradition material success was considered the sign of election...
...So the unvarying posture of protective self-mockery throughout the book and its oc casional naivetes and gaucheries (so quickly pounced upon) should not be allowed to ob scure the fact that Podhoretz enjoys, by merit and circumstance, a wonderful job...
...But this polarization of roles is a bit self-serving...
...At 31 Conroy has produced a unique book, totally private as Podhoretz's is in a way totally public...
...He has a great feel for the colorful in people and events, and a remarkable gift as a raconteur that allows him to endow the slightest anecdote with interest...
...in his Jaguar "driving in the wrong lane, cutting corners on the wrong side of the pylon, mounting the sidewalks, missing red lights—anything at all to keep the speed, to maintain the speed and streak through the dark world...
...To witness the daily outrages and little tragedies in publishing or in the popular arts, for example, where under the relentless dictates of the market the excellent gets the axe or the shortest shrift and the commercial, the least-common-denominator-entertaining, gets the money and the prizes, or to work with huge corporations, as I have, and witness the wasteful absorption of great talent in ignoble or petty tasks—these experiences make a man wary of Podhoretz's relish of success...
...New York: Random House...
...As for Conroy, his is another America altogether from theirs...
...Let me tell you who I am...
...The crucial stage it marked in his inner life, so assiduously recorded in his autobiography, hardly helps him arrive at a cool estimate of its true worth...
...FOR ALL THE UNIQUE HONORS and positions earned by its young author, Willie Morris's autobiography, North Toward Home, seems extremely conventional after Conroy or for that matter after Podhoretz...
...Understandably enough, Podhoretz is at a loss when the President asks him what to do...
...I do not find the book itself an act of any identifiable commitment except a strictly private one...
...streak through the dark world...
...For all their common involvement in the New York literary scene and their friendships and collaborations, Podhoretz and Morris seem to be on utterly different wave lengths...
...This very fact might be said to attest to the validity of Podhoretz's theme: that nothing counts quite so much among intellectuals as fame and its accouterments...
...No young man's autobiography in recent memory approaches it in artistry, but of course it is relatively unknown and its sales predictably modest...
...To judge from conversation in the intellectual kibbutz of Manhattan's Upper West Side, or throughout most of the Midtown publishing community for that matter, Podhoretz has faltered and for some has offended...
...320 pp...
...And Podhoretz's insights and comment about the evolving radical groupings of the 50's and 60's is shrewd, sophisticated, and frequently downright brilliant...
...This, I take it, is the new badge of success in America, at least among the most promising of the new generation...
...Yet it is consistently impressive...
...What can I say to you except how I feel...
...I would bet in the future, though, BOOKS that in our ever more specialized world, ever sterner standards of hard-headed, substantive expertise will be needed for the magazine to retain its leadership...
...For all his implied fascination with the type, Podhoretz eschews being an egghead "operator...
...There is an untold secret, more than a hint of menace in BOOKS Conroy's world: the book opens and ends with his speeding home from London at 3 A.M...
...More and more of this kind of writing should be done...
...He sees his mission as confined to making critical analyses and understanding problems thoroughly, not as "manipulating" or "affecting" them...
...It is emerging as the central form," states Podhoretz, because "we tend to testify personally today...
...Every inch a novelist, Conroy persuades one that he has captured the quintessence of his boyhood and adolescent experience, not narrating it but expressing it in passages of extraordinary sensibility...
...His fellow autobiographer, Morris, agrees: "No longer is the sophisticated reader satisfied to be informed and instructed...
...STOP TIME BY FRANK CONROY may serve as an example...
...He associates moods with events, often inexplicable moods, but they seem inevitable, exactly right, and so his book carries a stamp of authenticity like successful lyric poetry...
...For if "honest testimony" is the essence of the "art form of our time," Conroy is clearly an artist of the very first rank...
...The sober question arises, is the editorship of Commentary at 30 so grand a deal...
...Because despite all its candid self-congratula tion, Making It rather disguises the fact that he is a superb editor...
...But the book's merits will, alas, elude more thousands of the generality than it will entertain, and thereby will not make Podhoretz a fortune, by his lights...
...Commentary is an indispensable journal, and the prerequisites it gives the editor-in-chief are formidable, no mistake about it...
...His great gift, as I say, is as a story teller and he realizes this gift quite beautifully in remembering Yazoo City, Mississippi...
...After all, Galbraith and Schlesinger, for examples, are intellectuals who have "made it," bigger than Podhoretz I would judge by his own point system, and, along with Pat Moynihan, their mastering of the concrete particulars of public affairs has not notably debased their intellectual performances...
...Nor does it quite do for Podhoretz to patronize Irving Kristol's and Dan Bell's magazine, The Public Interest, as a glorified "suggestion box...
...What is it "about...
...He is on the right side of every question as we follow him from boyhood in Mississippi, college in Texas and Oxford, editorship of the Texas Observer, the final move to "The Big Cave," New York City, and editorship of Harper's Magazine...
...I think all of us crave it—the honest testimony...
...This is not to say, however, that his book is a work of very great distinction...
...Well, it is about Conroy from childhood to young manhood, mostly his relationships with his bizarre Danish-born mother and those in their lives like his roguish stepfather (his wealthy, insane, alcoholic, cancerridden father is dead at the outset), with the scene shifting from Florida to New York, to Connecticut, Europe, from school to running away, to jobs, discoveries of treachery, friendship, sex—very special experiences in Conroy's case yet somehow made to seem common to us all...
...Nonetheless the writing is always clear, strong, supple, and very often arresting...
...But this love feast of intellectuals and "celebrities" is exacerbating the public confusion over what is worthy and what's meretricious...
...Making It reveals no single episode in Podhoretz's rather sheltered life when he was engaged in commerce, say like book publishing or television, except for an inconsequential interlude as a potential juveniles publisher...
...He remains profoundly personal always yet somehow suggests a kind of self-restraint that is terribly winning, a balanced appraisal of self and the world and never any explicit avowal of whatever his "dirty little secret" might be...
...He wants to be challenged, enraged, and involved...
...One is entertained, but not gripped...
...Is "My Negro Problem And Ours"—by his admittance the best thing he ever wrote—of very substantial importance...
...it is on a high order of intelligence...
...it is wonderfully alert to nuance...
...IT is WHEN Podhoretz provokes thoughts on the ancient question of the relationship between intellection and action, ideas and conduct, that he gives one real pause...
...New York: Viking...
...Boston: Houghton Mifflin...
...The presumption was that one did not deserve the good life if he didn't earn the material wherewithal, and vice versa...
...Taking the second question first, as one who much admires Podhoretz's work, I doubt if the Negro problem piece is his best...
...His first impressions of the New York literary scene are acute enough, but predictable...
...Apart from the fact that these three books evidence literary achievement among men in their thirties, there could hardly be a more hybrid threesome...
Vol. 15 • May 1968 • No. 3
