Talking It Up

...Podhoretz was undergoing a writer's block...

...When he consistently tilts at poor work he must incur hostility...

...He felt oppressed and unwanted...

...Now, this was a master stroke and an audacious gesture...

...It may be objected that this notion is not new...

...that he wishes to present his accomplishments, not theirs, and to do so fearlessly...

...The Half-Boss got his comeuppance: "a generous severance arrangement" and the blame "for the decline of the magazine...

...And they're still talking about his prowess, thank God...

...An ethos is connected with a gift for writing rather than with the critical faculties...

...He likes o) course...

...Two other editors had temporary charge...

...From the tutorship of Lionel Trilling, Andrew Chiappe, and F W. Dupee, he moved on across the Atlantic to Clare College, Cambridge, and thence to Downing, "the college of F. R. Leavis, the greatest critic in England, by whom the "ultimate accolade was bestowed upon me: he invited me to write for Scrutiny...

...but his mother's friends were "nearly as proud as she was of the high grades I was getting at school and the prizes I was always winning...

...In the third place, these critics are probably biassed by knowing him personally...

...Such critics are themselves despicable...

...My own praise for the book has to do with its language...

...The AJC begged Podhoretz not to resign, fired the older half of The Boss, and hired a new man...

...Having learned to date literature by the decade, if not the year, Podhoretz went on to apply this method of detection...

...I wish they would ask me...

...Thus it was that at the age of 21 and in the notoriously hardest to crack of all the magazines of its kind in the world, I made my first appearance in print as a professional literary critic...

...He had marveled at hearing Leavis "inductively arrive at a judgment as to why a particular stanza or a particular paragraph containing no substantive clue to its date of composition could only have been written around 1730 or 1910...

...In his first chapter Podhoretz looks back at the awesome cultural divide he has traversed, and at the "immense transformation I had to work on myself in order to become what I have become...

...A review of this kind rebukes the author in question for his moral ignorance in not taking account of the reviewer's "ethos...

...Categories are available to any reviewer in textbooks, whereas an ethos has to be dreamed up...

...A lady schoolteacher who tried to play Hig-gins to his Eliza Doolittle deplored his lack of social graces...

...If he has not made it to the top of the career pile, who has...

...Not villains, only people trying to make it, much as he was...

...He is not what he considers a snob, a noun he charmingly misuses in the accepted fashion...

...The most modish people in New York ask him to their parties...

...Under his guidance, the magazine has increased its circulation...

...Thus, at 30, an old soldier of the peacetime Army, various literary skirmishes, and a full-scale office war, Podhoretz found success...

...He needed that Commentary job...

...Cohen subsequently took over the magazine again, but the Half-Boss cravenly made no attempt to pull off the coup, or a half-coup...

...This made it possible for me to use the book review in true family style as a vehicle for all my ideas about the subject in question: to show off, in short, how much I knew about this, that, and the other thing...

...they were after Podhoretz or nobody...

...When young he may have worn the clothes of a junior Brownsville hoodlum, but he sounded distinctive: "Without any conscious effort on my part, my speech had largely lost the characteristic neighborhood accent and was well on its way to becoming as neutrally American as 1 gather it now is...

...He mentions people who furthered or actually fathered his success, and he finds them all either great or the greatest...

...But beyond the title's sexual pun is a virile act of writing, a career expressed as a matchless, 360-page ejaculation...

...he heard celebrities spoken of by their first names...

...In the second place, when Podhoretz does seem to brag he is really endeavoring to arouse healthy controversy about himself and his years as an unflinching reviewer...

...And here Podhoretz comes clean and tells us what we have surmised for 155 pages, thanks to his refusal to indulge in false modesty: He "had been chosen for a role [he] seemed practically born to play...

...The shock had dried up his well springs...

...Authoritative but not dogmatic...

...he has actually been a guest at the home of Philip Rahv...

...It is no wonder—though it was a great and glorious wonder to me then—that A+s (an unusual grade at Columbia outside courses in the sciences) should have begun appearing on my record almost as regularly as As...

...When he writes, "Bellow was not one of the family's own only because he was a Jewish intellectual, he switches the not around so that his grammar cleverly contradicts his sense...

...He invents or helps to give currency to quielistic, ethnicity, particularistic, and disreputability...

...He wrote unfavorably about Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March and "was virtually the only reviewer of the book who was able to see and understand it, even if very imperfectly," as "a willed and empty affirmation" of Bellow's claim to be an American as well as a Jew...

...The triumvirate functioned uneasily...

...Placing a work in its time lends the discussion of it an air of importance...

...And some time before that Shakespeare s Mark Antony called ambition "the soldier's virtue...

...but he says little about their accomplishments that is not already known or could not be guessed at...

...Podhoretz got it up and made it come, over and over, with one fruitful ethos after another...

...Returning to this country, he was told by Trilling's wife that "with my talent, there was no telling how far I might go...

...At college, where he was "utterly open, limitlessly impressionable, possessed of something like total recall, and a great gift for intellectual mimicry," Podhoretz ingeniously composed papers that imitated the different styles of his professors...

...He does not scorn such homely phrases as in terms of, in the context of, and in the sense that, nor such friendly words as relevant, concept, levels, and dimensions...

...Cohen was ill and away from the office...

...For the good of America's soul, as an act of communal purification, he will uncover this loathsome sore and pick at it...

...He is as fond of puzzlement as was Oscar Hammerstein's King of Siam...

...But no writer could have attained to Podhoretz's success by a display of linguistic skills alone...

...He had met some of the authors whose work he was bravely cutting down to size...

...he proved to be "the first and possibly the only young literary man ever to be invited to write both for Partisan Review and the New Yorker in the course of a single week...

...To spare them the embarrassment of being publicly named, Podhoretz refers to them in the singular as The Boss...

...Their casual inquiry blossomed into an urgent request...

...A further objection that might be raised is that Podhoretz hardly deals with the passing scenery of his career...

...He improves on the verb dismiss by lengthening it to be dismissive of, much as President Kennedy took the uninteresting to hope and dressed it up as to be hopeful that...

...as it happened, Cohen even had the temerity and unwisdom to begin "siding regularly with him...

...Some critics will claim that his enemies do not envy him...

...So unsure that he rejected some of Podhoretz's ideas and so compelled him to resign and revert to free-lancing until Cohen committed suicide...

...In dissenting from an article by Philip Roth, Podhoretz locates (another of his favorite words) a discussion of the fiction of Bellow, Herbert Gold, William Styron, and Roth himself within its religious, historical, and mythological perspective, dimension, and horizons, but he leads off with a typically unassertive surely: "Surely what is involved here is an idea about America—the idea that whatever may be wrong with our society is to be understood as the incarnation in modern dress of the flaw in the universe that originated with the expulsion of man from Eden...

...For him barriers did not truly exist...

...worse, if Cohen ever came back The Boss was planning to make life so miserable for him that the return would last only long enough to induce a relapse and set the stage for a coup...

...Fortunately, the ajc had had enough of mediocrities...

...of given periods is assisting at the burial of that colorless and therefore discredited word category...

...At last, unwanted beyond endurance, he went to the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the sponsors of Commentary, and told them that "The Boss was running the magazine in a spirit altogether alien to the way in which it had been run by Cohen...

...his paragraphs on Columbia and Cambridge, on living as an American in Europe, on writing and being unable to write, on the Virgils and Dantes of book-reviewing who are his intimates, are banal in the extreme...

...In Leavis' classes Podhoretz had been "not, perhaps the most ardent of his young epigoni but, in all truth, the others being a singularly dreary and humorless lot, the most adept...

...In fact, so closely connected in some obscure way [again the fascinating but cautious qualifier] are the two phenomena, with the ability to write resembling the feeling of a ready sexual potency and the inability to write resembling the experience of sexual impotence, that many men have a strong impulse to masturbate when they are about to start on a piece of writing, as though to persuade themselves that they are in control, that they can get it up and make it come...

...Cohen assigned him some book reviews...

...The / think and the as it were testify to the reviewer's caution in hazarding a general theory of book eras...

...I have not had that honor, and I give page space to these sourballs and backbiters only to sustain the cheerful controversy...

...Robert Warshow, his mentor at Commentary, said of the offer from the New Yorker, "You lucky bastard...

...As he sensibly asks, "were magazines thrown up for grabs every day of the week that so extraordinary an opportunity should be tossed away with such smug complacency...

...As he reveals his qualifications, however, we see that he is writing pen in cheek...

...They "marveled at my cleverness, quoting my bright sayings to one another and even back to me...

...Not for Podhoretz the "superstition, cant, and hypocrisy" of avoiding "a frank discussion of one's feelings about one's own success...

...Podhoretz rightly puts this hostility down to envy of his success...

...Five flourishing years after he assumed high office at Commentary, Podhoretz "experienced an astonishing revelation: it is better to be a success than a failure...

...After a couple of lunches at private clubs, Podhoretz was forced to "reconsider...

...Podhoretz's second technique carried his essay-reviews further in the same direction: "They attempted to relate an aesthetic judgment of the book to some social or cultural or literary issue outside the book itself—the strengths and deficiencies of the work being assumed to mean something more than that the author was operating at the top of his bent here and nodding, as even Homer occasionally does, there...

...What were they...

...Now he has done it again...

...They did not praise his work...

...In Germany he "received a bulletin from Warshow telling me that my less than reverential attitude toward Faulkner had provoked the pious ire of several members of the family...

...the new man had to play verbal intermediary between Podhoretz and the remaining Half-Boss...

...Today we are hardened to the sentence that bobs up toward the end of a review of an autobiography, to the effect that "there is more at stake here than a mere memoir by a trashy writer" or "we now unavoidably confront an issue that is more serious/ crucial/central/salient"—all of these being adjectives that Podhoretz has a taste for...

...they merely dislike him because he is a braggart...

...The White House was alerted by his essay, "My Negro Problem—And Ours," consulted him in person, and now has a program for tackling Podhoretz's Negro problem...

...We are all grateful to learn from Making It that success is no handicap in the 1960s...

...His Army stint completed, he took on the editor's job he had been promised at Commentary...

...But, as Podhoretz would quickly point out, these were not American sentiments...

...Looking back at his collection of reviews published in 1964, Doings and Undoings, one finds that he created two striking techniques that have been, and are still being, widely imitated...

...To this charge Podhoretz can gently retort that he is not writing about others...

...Trilling recommended him to the late Elliot Cohen, who was editing Commentary at the time (1953...

...A man who reviews books for a living performs one of society's most valuable and intrepid tasks...

...He delights in ethos...

...The perspicacious reader will have noticed by now that what Doings and Undoings is dazzlingly doing (and undoing) with its ethoses (or ethoi...

...One expects a document by a rich, famous, and powerful editor to be free of the sociologese that does service in specialized journals and in the "news analysis" columns of the New York Times...

...Podhoretz neatly confounds expectations...

...In response to a casual inquiry, I indicated that I was not interested in the job...

...And I cannot stop myself from reproducing one of his many felicitous long sentences: "The New York Review [of Books) was edited by a veteran of that most post-middlebrow of all literary magazines, The Paris Review, Robert Silvers, and by Barbara Epstein, the wife of the Columbus of the post-middlebrow reading public, and it was financed by a group of wealthy patrician wasps whose willingness to back such a venture in itself constituted a measure of the extent to which the influence of the family had spread and the degree to which the traditions of its intellectual style had become chic...

...They're still talking about me, I said to myself, thank God...

...it turns a review into an "essay...

...In the first two-thirds of the 1950s, when Podhoretz was most actively in print, the "ethos" was McCarthyism or mid-Eisen-howerism, or "what Irving Howe was later to call 'The Age of Conformity' and I myself—somewhat more accurately, as I still believe—called 'The Age of Revisionist Liberalism.' " Not only somewhat more accurately—somewhat more musically, too...

...In spite of his generous disclaimer about handling a book review "in true family style, I will come right out and affirm that it was Podhoretz's genius, more than anybody else's, to enlarge—or, as an envious critic might say, to inflate—the review into a statement of lasting political and philosophical consequence...

...The first of these is what might be called the Zeitgeist analysis...

...Of Faulkner's A Fable he observes, "I think this book marks conclusively, and as it were officially, the end of an era...

...This success which, for him, meant the acquisition of power, money, and fame, constitutes the book's melody fine or rather, its haunting refrain...

...In Beyond the Fringe a character proclaimed, "I would rather have the trappings of luxury than the trappings of poverty...

...More: He wanted it...

...In his reviews he rarely begrudges the reader an opportunity to regard a novel or book of nonfiction as a product of a second or third generation of immigrants, or of one "ethos" or another...

...Then, "with the keenest anticipation," Podhoretz "watched the mounting signs that the ajc was seriously considering me as a candidate...

...It consists of treating a work as representative (or unrepresentative) of its historical setting...

...In the first place, they envy him his success...

...Although the Army snatched Podhoretz away for two years, he continued to write for Commentary...

...By now Cohen was "a shrunken, shaken man in his late fifties who was pitifully unsure of himself...

...After the piece appeared Podhoretz glided into the intellectual circles he calls "the family...

...In Making It (Random House, 360 pp., $6.95) he chronicles his rise from Brooklyn schoolboy and son of a milkman all the way up to editor of Commentary...

...Notice the transference of the italicized only so that it now modifies the verb and not the date: another instance of Podhoretz's disinclination to write stuffily...

...Podhoretz's description of how a passage of writing takes shape is a magnificent exposition: "What, according to Saint Augustine, the penis is to the body the act of writing is to the mind...