EX-FRIENDLY FIRE

...Podhoretz took some delight in the observation that the extent of Tammany boss Carmine DeSapio's ideology could be had from an address to a Holy Name Society breakfast in which he laid it down that "There is no Mother's Day behind the Iron Curtain...

...For better or worse, however, I do not regard literature as an end in itself...

...And this has made all the difference...

...I would try to explain whenever you asked me, but it was all so complicated and you were just too young to take it in...

...All your conscious life you've known me as an opponent of the New Left and the counterculture and their various descendants in the liberal culture...

...There's the tale of the night he met with the Beat poet Allen Gins-berg—who began by trying to persuade Podhoretz to support him in his effort to undo American mores and ended by screaming at Podhoretz, "We will get you through your children...

...Even in a recycled mode...

...However much Podhoretz admired Arendt's brilliance, he could never accept what he perceived to be her lack of support for Israel, and they quarreled and separated...

...For there had been a time when Pod-horetz really did believe "all that stuff...

...In January 1960, at the age of thirty, Norman Podhoretz was appointed editor of the influential monthly journal Commentary, a post at which he served, for thirty-five years, until his retirement in 1995...

...As Podhoretz relates in his—did I mention absorbing?—Ex-Friends, this is the sequence by which the young editor grew ever closer to the ever more strident causes of the Left, Old and New...

...As a condition of accepting the offer from the American Jewish Committee, the publisher of Commentary, he had stipulated that the journal would move beyond its previous primary interest in Jewish affairs to a more general engagement with the American culture...

...Ex-Friends relates five such...

...That is as it should be...

...May we hope for yet another volume of memoirs from Norman Podhoretz...

...It is not even past...

...There came in the years before her death in 1975, a reconciliation of sorts, but, Podhoretz relates, "we had grown too far apart on too many other important matters for us ever to become friends again...

...tossing it over to go off to war...

...The journey into and out of that world took a decade...

...And neither do those young men who are responsible for some of the dated pieces in this collection— which is one of the things, at least, I still have in common with them...

...There followed a calm of sorts...

...EX-FRIENDLY FIRE Norman Podhoretz on the New York Intellectuals By Daniel Patrick Moynihan With the publication of Ex-Friends, Norman Podhoretz has performed a near to thrilling intellectual feat...

...American support was indispens-able—and yet on the American Left, a nascent anti-Semitism had begun to appear...

...Then the 1960s dawned, and the radical critique of American society revived...

...As a coda to Breaking Ranks, Podhoretz's wonderful 1979 volume of memoirs, Ex-Friends will be with us a long while...

...Commentary once published an article by the theologian Emil Facken-heim, "who argued that a new commandment, the 614th, had been added by the experience of Auschwitz to the traditional 613...

...The Communists and fellow travelers of the preceding decades were more pro-Soviet than anti-American...

...The Partisan Review proved to have not much of a future, but oh what a past: begun in 1934 as an organ of the John Reed Clubs...

...The essays, he allowed in the introduction, did not seem the work of a single person: In the course of his development, "Two, I think, or possibly three" different Norman Podhoretzes had produced them...

...What I mean, then, in saying that for me literature is not an end in itself is that I look upon it as a mode of public discourse that either illuminates or fails to illuminate the common ground on which we live...

...One thinks of the character in Disraeli's Sybil, "distinguished for ignorance, as he had but one idea and that was wrong...

...Well, at least two more...

...The protracted ideological mobilization of World War II and then the Cold War was being questioned, if only because it was, well, there...

...In the beginning, the young critic was not as critical as he would later wish he had been...

...Reed, we now know, took a million or so dollars in Kremlin gold back home to get the party going...

...The Partisan Review was the archetypal journal of those New York intellectuals Podhoretz calls "The Family," though the journal itself was in something of a passive phase when he began his meteoric rise...

...Young people learned to detest "Amerika"—which was something a man who had left Cambridge University, a world of refinement and privilege, to join a wartime United States Army could not long abide...

...Areader—and still very much a friend—might offer but one quiet reservation: Surely Lionel Trilling and his wife Diana were never truly ex-friends...

...There are more such now than in Disraeli's time...

...But that was to be the invariable path of Norman Podhoretz's life...

...What happened...

...And so we never did...

...be had at Columbia University and Clare College, Cambridge...

...If you broke with Stalin, it was to ally with Trotsky...

...The volume begins with a letter to his son: The other day, reminded by some passing remark that I used to be a radical—indeed that I visibly and enthusiastically participated in the swing to radicalism in the early 1960s—you asked me with astonishment in your voice whether I had ever really believed "all that stuff...

...In Ex-Friends, Podhoretz relates all this in the painful chapter "Hannah Arendt's Jewish Problem—and Mine...

...You're a little less young now, however, and maybe the time has come for a fully detailed account...

...Hilton Kramer has recently recalled a phrase of Erederick Crews describing one of the former editors of Partisan Review as having become a "born-again Leninist...

...A literary critic ought—or so they tell me—to regard literature as an end in itself...

...The image of standing post—like a sentry—is surely appropriate, for in the history of American letters hardly anyone has stood a watch as prolonged, as perilous, and, in the end, as unflinchingly as he...

...And then there's the invitation to join an orgy offered to Pod-horetz by Norman Mailer—who once accused Podhoretz of being a "foulweather friend," only bothering to stand beside a friend when that friend was in trouble...

...so also ER...

...The thought of your father in connection with "all that stuff" evidently strikes you as a contradiction in terms...

...It would be a joy to read Pod-horetz's picks for today...

...First, of course, there was the intense anti-Americanism that developed on the Left...

...Podhoretz talks of those days in Breaking Ranks—his previous memoir, in which he records his transition from Left to Right...

...There was also the possibility of teaching in England...

...He chose instead to go home and be drafted—only to be sent back to Europe rather than Korea...

...In one sense, there is nothing much more to this than that as a new editor he needed new voices...

...There's playwright Lillian Hellman gathering up the movie director William Wyler and dropping by Podhoretz's apartment unannounced—to wow an obscure young political science professor from Syracuse who was visiting that evening...

...returning to make his way as a young writer amidst the political battles and the then-intensifying Kulturkampf that ever waxes and wanes in New York...

...Each of the figures he takes up in memory and judgment—Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer—is a prototype of sorts...

...No wonder...

...To read Doings and Undoings today is to recognize that, indeed, "two or possibly three" young men had written the essays...

...Nothing entirely new, but never before seen with such ferocity...

...But in the 1960s it was different...

...otherwise he has no business being a literary critic...

...As William Faulkner said, "The past is never dead...

...First was the young radical, carrying on the high tradition that had developed among the largely Jewish intellectual community of New York...

...But the politics remained within the diaspora...

...In its course he made deep commitments and attachments to any number of grand intellectuals, writers, and activists of every kind on the Left...

...The sighing and the suing," as Gilbert and Sullivan would say, went on...

...Then his views began to change, Commentary began to change— and so did his commitments and attachments...

...Together they mark the range of intellectual life in New York City in the 1960s and, of course, far beyond...

...To declare my interest, in 1961 he would also publish a long essay of mine on the class and ethnic basis of the battle then raging between the "bosses" and the "reformers" in the New York Democratic party...

...It was more cultural than political at first: Norman Podhoretz began his long tenure at Commentary by publishing the sociologist Paul Goodman on the problem of children in America "growing up absurd...

...This, he continued, is what Blake meant when he commented that Milton in Paradise Lost was really of the Devil's party...

...Indeed in the closing paragraph of the chapter on Trilling, he records, "I think about him a lot, always with admiration, gratitude, and indeed love...

...Leavis at Cambridge, who evidently had "not found a single novel or poem written in the last twenty years or so that could satisfy his critical standards—not a single one...

...Podhoretz had been a student of Leavis's at Cambridge in the early 1950s, where he had commenced a doctoral dissertation on the political novels of Benjamin Disraeli, thinking it might "land me a job in the Columbia English Department...

...And there would be more young men, more Norman Pod-horetzes, to come...

...Podhoretz saw himself as first of all a literary critic—Trilling had been and remained his mentor and patron— but with a difference about which he was explicit in Doings and Undoings, his collection of essays from 1953 to 1964...

...It was a complex fate, in that nothing was ever quite what it seemed or quite what it had been...

...Positively the 614th commandment proclaimed that 'there shall be Jews' "—neither better nor worse than others, but a people in their own right whose existence was never to be put in question...

...It was at the time of the Six-Day War in 1967— the bombings, the boycotts—that for the first time American Jews were able to grasp the peril of Israel, a new nation hanging on from crisis to crisis...

...There is one thing more, however, and Podhoretz is not the least averse to bringing it forward: Israel...

...stern Stalinists all, writing about literature in a milieu with more than its share of spies...

...Eor all your precocity you could never fully understand why I always seemed to be against everything everyone else in the world— your teachers, your classmates, your friends—seemed to be for...

...But there was more...

...Lighter moments, too, made up the friendships, and Podhoretz fills the pages of Ex-Friends with marvelous vignettes...

...Random things, and yet not: Easci-nated by Disraeli, that nineteenth-century Jewish prime minister and novelist, who led his party of High Church Tories to some grasp of the national divisions—the "two nations"—in which Britons then lived...

...As the 1930s wore on, the Stalinist faith faltered...

...And he didn't long abide it...

...Some future biographer will surely want to know that Podhoretz was once "Soldier of the Month" in his battalion in occupied Germany: Discipline and training matters, and not just that to Daniel Patrick Moynihan is the senior United States senator from New York...

...May we hope for a return to those political novels of Disraeli...