Fair Game

...Indeed so, and that is the way things are today too...

...Bloom recognizes that despite all that bound the group together, the members were decidedly individualists, not to say eccentrics, and have made very estimable careers of their own, particularly in the academy, as social scientists (Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell) or literary critics (Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe...

...Irving Howe persists in calling himself a Democratic Socialist, which, applied to real issues, has come to seem mighty like good old 20th-century U.S...

...soon we were hearing about neoconservatism...

...What it lacks in flash, it makes up in thoroughness...

...When William Phillips rose at the recent International PEN Congress in New York to criticize the strongly anti-American drift, he evoked the anti-Communist spirit of a half century before...

...His critical tone notwithstanding, he seems to agree with those now on the Right who maintain they are still the liberals they were 30 years ago...

...everything passes across the desk of its editor, Norman Podhoretz...

...he takes an agnostic position, for example, on the cases of Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs...

...How important was this handful of testy intellectuals...

...The undiminished strength of old grudges can be glimpsed in such slanging matches as the one several years ago that culminated in thelate Lillian Hellman bringing a libel suit against Marv McCarthy...

...But leaving aside the invidious question of whether another 461 pages on the subject is strictly required, Alexander Bloom's Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World( Oxford, $24.95) is a diligently researched, fairly—if not stylishly—presented treatment that should put at least a temporary halt to the industry...

...Bloom, an assistant professor of history at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, has written an "A" paper...

...He continued, in a passage that was at once a criticism of much of what passed for literary sensibility in the '60s and a championship of the grand old days of the Partisan Review that nourished Howe's generation: "It [the counterculture] is sick of those magnifications of irony that Mann gave us, sick of those visions of entrapment to which Kafka led us, sick of those shufflings of daily horror and grace that Joyce left us...

...Anyone could oppose fascism...

...No kidding...

...He does not go into their personal lives, which is just as well, but bits of their personalities come through, particularly in the incessant feuds, which have always taken on a highly personal cast...

...Subsequent generations purchased the experience of those heady times from idea brokers...

...It despises liberal values, liberal cautions, liberal virtues...

...The living remain as individuals, more widely quoted than ever, attaining heights their first sponsors in the ethnic ghettos could not have envisioned...

...Back to Roots It goes without saying, and yet must be said, that with a very few exceptions, these prodigal sons were Jews...

...In case you came in late, their saga begins with the Partisan Review, which during its great years around World War II championed modernism in literature and anti-Stalinism in politics, in amixthatits contributors hoped would be Left-radical yet democratic, elitist yet open to innovation...

...Among their literary icons were Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Mann, but except for Lionel Trilling, who did not share the zest for battle that marked most of the others, the main emotions of the group were expended on political ideology...

...Howe wrote that the new boys wanted "works of literature—though literature may be the wrong word—that will be absolute as the sun, as unarguable as orgasm, and as delicious as alollipop...

...MacDonald and Trotsky A few of the originals, notably Dwight MacDonald, flirted with Trotsky, and took a plague-on-both-your-houses attitude toward World War II, thereby demonstrating where an intoxication with ideas can lead otherwise intelligent and decent people...

...it took former Marxists to see through Communism...

...It seems safe, then, to reveal that at The New Leader, everything passes across the desk of its editor, Myron Kolatch...

...For the generation that grew up in the alcoves of City College, the political investment was so heavy that the investors are still living on the dividends...

...It breathes contempt for rationality, impatience with mind, and a hostility to the artifices and decorums of high culture...

...Toward the end, Bloom grows elegiac: "The New York intellectuals have gone—passed on to new attachments or passed away altogether...

...He points out that the New York intellectuals "always saved their most strident words for those with whom they competed for territory—Communists and proletarian writers in the 1930s or fellow-traveling academics and anti-anti-Communists in the 1950s...

...This means, I am afraid, that Bloom's is not the last word on the family...

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Wise Men and Wise Alecs When it comes to memoirs, chronicles, reviews, celebrations, debunkings, and retorts, the New York intellectuals must hold some sort of record...

...After the War, the hard anti-Communist line of some of the members of this little establishment, particularly Elliot Cohen, the first editor of Commentary, was complemented by a soft line toward the depredations of Senator Joseph McCarthy...

...Bloom is more comfortable as a chronicler than as an analyst...

...Even if that is wishful thinking, the kicking around of ideas and each other, which the New York intellectuals developed into a kind of American art, remains great fun...

...liberalism...

...Although theold gang is broken up now, the survivors slill share a taste for blood in battle and still take their politics in a very personal way...

...Bloom has given them their due and more...

...How important are they...

...they abound...

...The dead are praised as legends, pathfinders, great teachers...

...Well, they cannot be as important as they seem to believe, but nobody who writes for The New Leader is about to quarrel with the faith that they and the publications of modest size they sustain keep the pot of ideas bubbling—and that one way or another these ideas find their way out to a wider audience, including those with the power to transform them into policy...

...By the 1960s, Irving Kristol, once upon a dim time a Trotskyist, had already declared himself a conservative, and after a bit of flirting with the new-style radicalism, Commentary, under Norman Podhoretz, moved to the Right (or, as he has maintained, stayed put while other intellectuals moved Left...

...Here they all are again, two or three contentious generations of masters of high-level analysis and low-blow polemic—Philip Rahv and William Phillips, Lionel Trilling and Sidney Hook, Dwight MacDonald and Mary McCarthy, 11 v-ing Howe and Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell and Alfred Kazin, Norman Podhoretz and Nathan Glazer, and others...

...He traces the roots of neoconservatism not to "the tumultuous days of the 1960s" but to the 1950s, "the era when these people called themselves liberals...

...It is bored with the past: for the past is a fink...

...Bloom's comment is quite accurate: "Howe's characterization is stunningly harsh, as are the other critiques of the New Left by Bell, Glazer and Kristol...

...Howe and Kafka The book is generous with quotes, many of them so juicy that they call attention to the dryness of Bloom's style...

...Can so many ever have written so much about so few...

...Speaking of editors, Bloom has not been well served by whoever at Oxford University Press should have been on the lookout for typographical errors...

...The issue of anti-Communism versus anti-anti-Communism would run through later debates over Vietnam and can be felt today in the controversy over Nicaragua...

...Yet one detects that he is not wild over the neoconserva-tive drift of recent years...

...Bloom points out that despite their changing labels, their ideas on such matters as preferential quotas and affirmative action programs "bear a close resemblance to those of the 1950s...

...That issue brought the New York intellectuals into confrontation with the Popular Front, and it remains central to the political positions of veterans of the time and their spiritual descendants...

...Bloom writes: "Nothing goes straight from pen to press at Commentary...

...He strives for and in general achieves a respectful dis-passion...

...Bloom notes how their Jewishness comes through in their work, particularly in their later years, a not uncommon response to age, to the unshakable nightmare of the Holocaust and to the parlous condition of Israel...

...That's the way things are in families...

...He is a discerning guide to the responses of "the family" to the big events of its mature years—the upsurge of black protests, the appearance of the New Left, the war in Vietnam...

...The members of the family, even those too young to have taken part in the great battles of the '30s, seem fixated on a period when the enemy was the Left...

...All right...

...Beginning in a wrenching period for the world's Left, as faith in the Russian Revolution faded, the Partisan Review-niks (and New Leaderniks as well) took an anti-Stalinist position that continues to do them credit...

...His disapproval of the neoconserva-tive positions, as represented by Commentary, produces an untypical and odd aside...

...he has rated them pretty much at their own estimate...

...It would be hard to compete, in any case, with Irving Howe's 1968 put-down of the counterculture mentality that seemed to be sneaking into Partisan Review...