A Jittery Outsidedness

...He had been Lionel Trilling's favorite student at Columbia College and received a grade of A+ in the course in Romantics and Victorians...

...The novelist George P. Elliott perhaps overshot the mark when in an early '60s essay in the Nation citing the instances above, he proposed the question, "Who Is We...

...He did become an ex-friend, perhaps I should add, but only because he died a couple of years ago...

...As a Jew this troubled me...

...Uncertainty...

...Hudson Review, said Podhoretz in Making It, certainly echoing his crowd, was engaged in dark backlash references to the existence of a Jewish Establishment —in other words, it was anti-Semitic...

...Is it a repeated need for self-justification, considering where he began and where he has ended up...

...Near the end of Ex-Friends he says, "what made the Family special for me in particular was the regular contact I had with it"—a statement that is either perfectly banal or is a wonderfully eloquent testament to something basic beyond ideas in themselves, and positions...

...In his three autobiographical works, beginning with Making It, he has remarked on his wonder that once he was younger than anyone and was petted by everyone...

...I had published a lengthy essay there on Saul Bellow that mainly stressed his social thinking, or so I thought...

...At Cambridge, age 21, he was invited by F. R. Leavis to write for Scrutiny...

...Breaking Ranks begins as a letter to his son, and in that respect does exactly imitate The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin...

...The book was a belated Jewish-immigrant novel, much, say, like Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky, if without the irony...

...Threescore and 10 is a crisis, and Podhoretz, born in 1930, is just about there...

...But in Making It he really and obviously was telling the story of the rise of Norman Podhoretz, a lower-class Jewish boy from Brownsville where they wouldn't know Partisan Review from Romanian pastrami, into a place of prestige and authority as acknowledged, whether truly or not, by important real Americans, whether truly that or not...

...Nostalgia...

...Podhoretz is quite convincing about that...

...Nevertheless, there is no reason to doubt Podhoretz when he says he regrets the loss of the circle of friends...

...As a former occasional contributor to Kenyon Review, I was distressed to learn that...

...Maybe it is all quite simple...

...It is further noted, eyebrows raised, that Hannah Arendt was a very "womanly woman...

...But Making It, where the 35-year-old Podhoretz recorded his success by the age of 35, was pitched as a case study of the lust for success in America...

...Kenyon Review, it was said, was narrowly pedantic in a New-Critical way, never getting beyond its insistence on the autonomy of art...

...And so we became even faster friends than we already were...

...The new work's uncertainty of purpose is reflected in its very prose and tone...

...Podhoretz' various memoirs testify finally that he was different from those he took to be his Family, not only because he went neocon.Making It already marked the difference...

...Lillian Hellman, he says, "may well have resented the fact that, unlike some of the other young men in her entourage, I never once made a pass at her...

...It was crowing and vulgar and convincing (moving, even) in the claim of its hero to pride of achievement...

...There is a narrowing in the present work, but with no resulting intensity...

...Yet on still another hand, if there was, and is, pretension in this kind of self-regard, it should be said to Podhoretz' credit that he has carried it off less easily than other members of his old clique...

...Twenty years ago, in Breaking Ranks, he told essentially the same story, naming the same names, with the same objective: to explain (or maybe to defend, or at any rate to trace) his journey from "liberal," as he says, to "radical" to neocon...

...Against that reckoning of losses Podhoretz does name current friends—seven, exactly, including Irving Kristol, as one would expect, and William F. Buckley Jr...

...Actually, there is not much in the way of self-justifying argument either here or in Breaking Ranks...

...By that evidence alone, no doubt they provided him with something he no longer has...

...To Jackie O. he once said, "F— you, Jackie," because she had made a condescending remark about his clothing...

...I remember Lionel Trilling telling a bunch of us hanging around his classroom door to just quit, there was no future in literature, and go into the State Department...

...As for tone, Podhoretz tells us on page 2 that once (in the late 1960s, approaching the age of 40) he had been a fellow merry and "full of fun," but then that turns out to be the period he is writing about, and in retrospect he goes from sad to wistful to bitter to sneering-defensive...

...As the years passed we were in more and more of a hole, because academic jobs were hard to come by and there was no other use for an advanced degree in English...

...Lionel Trilling, when the crunch came in the form of the '60s student revolt at Columbia, was a coward...

...The root story of Making It was that while in his 20s he "made it" into the circle some would label the New York Intellectuals— which, significantly enough, Podhoretz would designate as the "Family...

...He was well-liked and brash and, yes, attractive to women...

...Sequences, narrative or logical, are promised and then skitter off distractedly...

...For one thing Podhoretz seems to have been more deeply, studiously and attachedly Jewish than any of the members of his new Family...

...Diana Trilling, who early on was a "fanatic" (as an anti-Communist), later on had a "wacky" sense of reality and "kept insisting...

...On the other hand, it is insisted throughout the three autobiographical books that the personal was not merely personal, that there were broad social, cultural and political implications in the rise of Norman Podhoretz and in what followed...

...His own proper family was back in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and he was frank in announcing his separation from it...

...Here the principal "exfriends," at the rate of a chapter apiece, are Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Tailing (one chapter but separate cases), Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer...

...The subsequent books constitute a record of his difficulties with the old clique...

...To be young and a Certified Intellectual, invited to all the parties, sought for prose by Partisan Review (and The New Leader), not to speak of the editorship of Commentary—that was pure bliss...

...It was like many of the immigrant novels, too, in that the hero was to be seen as not without guilt about the past he had left behind...

...He has the evidence...

...Podhoretz has been recording his breaking with those friends, old and young, for a much longer period of time than he had them as friends...

...In both, the main story is, rather, the failings of the others—this time despite the fact that all but one of them are dead...

...The repetition of his story itself provides confirmation, and besides, simple arithmetic would seem to do the same...

...Podhoretz several times repeats the story of a New Yorker editor who asked him if over there at Partisan Review they had a special typewriter key marked "alienation...

...25.00...

...Norman Mailer's wife Adele, the one who was the stabbee, "all but openly dare[d] me to go to bed with her," he reports...

...The book in any event was composed of raw material that remained largely uncooked, and the Family elders were not likely to find it delicious...

...Ginsberg really was a careerist vulgarian...

...Meanwhile, the journals regarded as would-be rivals for power were dismissed in a word...

...Maybe so...

...And in each instance as heretofore, friendship founders exemplifyingly, while from the wreckage Podhoretz rescues literary-cultural-political integrity...

...that she was still, and always had been a liberal, even after that term had long since been hijacked by and become identified with the beliefs of the Leftists and the anti-antiCommunists against whom she had been contending for the past five decades...

...Maybe that was it, not the bromide "alienation" but a jittery outsidedness leading to a style of assertion: presuming, self-congratulating, belligerent, scoffing, lofty, defensive, challenging, and quick and alive...

...Present-day Americans are engaged," he wrote, "in a regular tidal wave of a movement to keep on doing what they're doing and not be we— that is, not to contribute intellectual articles to Partisan Review, etc...

...Who can know...

...The coterie could be maddening, if not comic, in its presumptions of consequentiality combined with its ignorance of the day-to-day and the possible and the practical...

...Young Norman Podhoretz might have been the young Benjamin Franklin, now by his own pen offering himself for imitation...

...Reviewed by Marcus Klein Professor emeritus of English...

...Re Hellman: "The plain truth is that I remain proud of the part I went on to take in the fight against the political ideas and attitudes in whose service she corrupted her work and brought, as I now see it, lasting dishonor upon her name...

...If I may: Once I was a graduate student in the English Department at Columbia, married and very poor of pocketbook like many of my fellow students...

...The dubiety with which it apparently was received by his new friends became and becomes for Podhoretz another social datum, indicating the hypocrisy of the intellectuals and their contempt for American values...

...I had published a number of things in Hudson Review...

...I was never even a Schachtmanite...

...But (as a temporarily transplanted rural Californian teaching at Barnard, living in a sublet on Claremont Avenue near Columbia, chockablock from the Trillings) he had a point...

...Arendt had a "Jewish problem"—and Podhoretz is convincing about that...

...He thinks its members didn't like Making It because it exposed "the dirty little secret" (his words) that everyone wants success (money, glamour, prestige), intellectuals included...

...That Podhoretz was very smart goes without saying (except that he says it...

...With each Podhoretz had a falling-out sometime in the 1960s...

...Although this book features, as it were, six best exfriends, a good many more are mentioned along the way, here and in Breaking Ranks: James Baldwin, Robert Brustein, Jason Epstein, Herbert Gold, Bernard Malamud, Hans J. Morgenthau, Jackie Onassis, Susan Sontag, to name only a few, alphabetically...

...Hellman was dishonest—as indeed many have said...

...They could be infuriating in their smug provincialism, in the universal authority and significance they regularly imputed to their own experiences, ranging from going to the movies (Diana Trilling, The New Leader, May 6,1957) to finding a restaurant in New York (Mary McCarthy, Commentary·, September 1947...

...One of the founding editors became and remained a close friend...

...There were other people out there...

...Why again...

...You have to wonder about Podhoretz' feelings for the friends he has retained...

...Mailer craved acceptance from the "highbrows," and in a notable instance was craven—when he reviewed Podhoretz' first book, Making It, and aligned with what Podhoretz says was the general (highbrow) opinion that the book had problems...

...One of the Partisans," he recalled, "once wrote that nobody who had not been a Communist and then left the party could pretend to understand modern America...

...SUNY/ Buffalo: author, "After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century" You HAVE TO wonder why Norman Podhoretz wrote this book...

...In the meantime they have been dying off, leaving him behind and still quarreling...

...Boy, did I ever feel left out of the swim...

...She liked that so much," Podhoretz recalls, "that I realized how tired she was of the sycophancy with which everyone treated her...