Moral Myopia: The New York Review and the New York Intellectuals
Lessard, Suzannah
Moral Myopia: ‘The NewYorkReview’ and theNewYork Intellectuals bv Suzannah Lessard Money-wanting it and making it-is something most Americans can talk about with candor. The...
...Not by Midge Decter, but by people clearly within the movement...
...It was...
...I find it curious that, as with many detractors of the Review group, Kostelanetz’s anger seems to be fired to greatest heights by their success, particularly their entrepreneurial success, as though this kind of clcverness were evidence in itself of corrupt, self-promo ting nio tives...
...And then, of course, there is a material risk involved in becoming known as something less than a right-on sister...
...Kostelanetz rightly scores such “lopsided toutsheets” which parade as impartial, serious evaluations of all participants, and he goes right to the heart of their purpose...
...The reasons given in a spot survey of rejectors included quality, but, equally, comment that the subject wasn’t “important” and that the material amounted to little more than gossip...
...The complexities they raise can make relevant, realistic criticism of the “literary” world seem an almost impossible project to undertake without bogging down into hairsplitting qualifications, acknowledgments of the good work many of the principals have done, and recognition of the difficulties faced by anyone who tries to promote quality in a crude, commercial world...
...But the ideas are left flying...
...Resistance to that truth runs very deep...
...When the books came out, their jackets would carry blurbs from other Nesbit authors...
...in order to depart from it one has to be prepared to be regarded as a traitor, never a very pleasant prospect...
...A year later, Katherine Anne Porter’s list of the “best” of postWorld War I1 fiction informs us that only those from south of the MasonDixon line have access to Olympus: Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Eudora Welty , Flannery O’Connor, James Purdy, Truman Capote, etc., etc...
...The inside stories on how the decision was made all suggest it happened rather flippantly-the drawing was lovely, and they forgot to ask what it meant, failed to see that they were showing the kids on 1 1 th Street how...
...But the statistics also tell a lot about group politics in its more negative forms...
...Thus he charges that highly successful literary agent Lynn Nesbit regularly got contracts for her authors with editors David Segal (Harper & Row) and Hal Sharlatt (Random House, now at Dutton...
...Far from bending to the rigors of fair-mindedness, he attributes the worst motives to all people at all times...
...The Review’s treatment of the militant New Left all along was marred by a preoccupation with melodrama (for example, publishing transcripts of the Chicago Seven trial, including parts where some of their own stars testified) and personalities (such as Jerry Rubin, of all unlikely heroes of the intelligentsia) at the expense of scrutinizing New Left ideas or asking questions about where, in real life, those ideas led...
...Three out of four reviews of Random House books were favorable...
...from the middle leaves (total 36), George Plimpton (editor of The Paris Review), Mary McCarthy, Richard Kluger (editor, critic), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and from the outer leaves (total Sl), the late W. H. Auden, Tom Hayden, Richard Poirier (critic), Martin Duberman (New York Times Book Review...
...But the fact that all of them turned it down adds up to something more than a consensus on its quality...
...The dangers of this sort of thing are difficult to demonstrate without getting into elaborate critiques of content, and cvcn thcn one can only speculate on what caused what effect...
...generation as they are to anyone else.1 To me, the key observation in this book, the starting point for thinking about the patterns, is Kostelanetz’s treatment of the smaller “schools” or clubs of the recent past in which the present establishment has its roots...
...Early Chauvinism, Collective Fortune But why should we care about all this?To Kostelanetz the answer is easy: we must care because the people in power are ersatz intellectuals committed only to capitalizing on their own brand of pseudo-culture and not to the meaty stuff of what he pompously refers to as “intellectual history...
...His examples of this kind of chauvinism are so final they are almost funny...
...None of the political writing, to my knowledge, is a fraud in this sense...
...Since this group had no overt seal of superior sensibility-in fact, have always liked to deny that they constitute a group at all-one cannot isolate promotional favoritism as easily as with the small groups of the past...
...Kostelanetz’s background material is a bit thin here, but his point is well taken to this extent: a relatively new, unknown writer who wants to get published regularly in the prestigious publications would be well advised to make himself aware of the constellations around his editorial contacts, to discover the patterns of allegiance and try not to violate them...
...By successfully promoting the superiority or just the uniqueness of a particular brand of sensibility, the groups achieved the situation in which any work stamped with their particular seal-“A great Southern book‘-stood a far greater chance of success than if it had to stand alone on its own merits...
...Some times such exchanges are more vicarious, with members of a clique picking up the gauntlet or bestowing the laurels on each other...
...Now that the New Left has dimmed, I don’t see a great influx of young blood malng its mark, and while this has to be taken in part as a .comment on the new blood, I think there is a certain generational complacency blocking them...
...For example, close (and often mob-powerful) friends often give each other boosts in the publications of their own fiefdoms...
...Now that the bloom has faded from these labels, it’s easy to see how they could become promotional devices, and how individuals could be imprisoned by them One can also see how legitimate bonds and a genuine sense of fraternity would obscure the spurious, entangling elements in this kind of group identity, and how the subversive sense of collective fortune would go unnoticed because of a genuine sense of purpose...
...The fact that heavy criticism didn’t bring this pattern to a rapid halt is an indication of how unconcerned the literary world is with its own integrity, how the “superior” nature of the work somehow bestows an immunity, when at the same time the same people think that lesser creatures, engaged in similar conflicts of interest, ought to be sent packing to Leavenworth...
...The real source of the pressure, as always, was that identification with this elite crowd became a tremendous personal asset, which automatically translated not only into a kind of higher literarysocial standing, but also into higher advances for your book, and more people eager to buy it...
...Some examples from the inner, middle, and outer leaves: inner leaves (26 members altogether), Roger Straus, Jr...
...On other occasions enemies massacre each other...
...Editorial policy, personalities, and business practices thus get rolled into one big firebomb of evidence...
...An unexamined sense of selfimportance, oddly enough, can cause people to forget that what they are doing is actually serious, involving responsibility in real life...
...Teary-eyed, he says we must care because the mob is out to suppress new ideas-those of the young (that aging group to which Kostelanetz and I belong) and the avant garde-presumably the serious stuff of intellectual history...
...The point is that the pressure inevitably is there and exerts its influence, setting in motion a whole range of adjustments...
...The point isn’t that mutual promotion dominates, as Kostelanetz would have it...
...When the Review appeared, names from all the little clubs appeared in it, writing, at the start, for free...
...When exchanges are noticed they usually provoke little more than a cynical chuckle at a bit of parochial gossip...
...And finally, though the currency may be “ideas,” there is a great deal of regular old cash involved . Nevertheless, there has been very little written about the practices of the literary world...
...Nonetheless, a large and influential group was born, and inevitably group promotional politics followed, generating a set of pressures...
...In fact, just like everyone else in America, the amount he pulls in is very likely to be looked upon by his peers as one reliable index of his importance or worth-gauged, of course, in terms of those high social, artistic, or intellectual values which set his group Suzannah Lessard is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...and so forth...
...Making It, incidentally, is one of the few candid descriptions of power structures, class labels, and mutual promotion in the literary world...
...and because badminton through the review pages is completely accepted...
...And members of the group, the best along with the middling, are inclined to bend over backwards to make their work fit the brand name: if he knows what’s good for him, a Southern writer had better stay away from the urban experience, a “Jewish” writer had better stick to it, and a “WASP” writer had better hover close to New England and leave the juleps and magnolias alone...
...This new club chose, or became known by, the non-denominational label, “the New York intellectuals,” and its ascendency was dramatically marked by the appearance of The New Yorlc Review of Books...
...the Bobby Kennedyesque cult of unscrupulous (pragmatic) political tactics for a good cause...
...Muggings take place when people don’t go along with the relevant mini-mob...
...Richard Kostelanetz...
...But evidently, the editors of the Review didn’t particularly care about what the real Stravinsky might have to tell us, and thought that Stravinsky the creation of a younger, far less interesting person was better, because it made an entertaining read...
...KostelanetZ s central contention is that The New York Review favors Random House (and especially P Epstein’s) authors in the following ways: by reviewing proportionately more of their books than books published by similar houses, by commissioning large numbers of them to write in the Review (thereby publicizing them and hence their books) and often to write reviews of other Random House authors...
...The Core of the Onion Kostelanetz speculates that the Nesbit mini-mob ceased to function because its members weren’t vicious enough with non-cooperators, which brings us to a third category of mobs and mob practices, which he calls “literary muggings...
...Is it any wonder, then, that three out of four of the 1969 Random House reviews were favorable...
...The difference between having and not having a celebrity-making machine behind you might mean the difference between $2,000 to $1 5,000 for three years of work and sums like $50,000 right on up to $1 million...
...But just as you can’t legislate effectively against Watergate, you can’t enforce integrity in the literary world...
...All this fraud really accomplished was false puffery...
...Unlike the New York Review situation, where members denied their group’s existence, the women’s phalanx is proudly selfproclaimed and wields its seal of approval quite openly...
...But unlike Kostelanetz, I think the question of why does one care is more difficult to answer because in my judgment the members of the present establishment are pretty good keepers...
...Here Kostelanetz goes off the deep end and we suddenly havc not only a group, but shrewd, self-serving villains, ingeniously manipulating the innocent writers drawn into their web, into serving their power structure, much as innocents were duped into collusion whcn the CIA infiltrated intellectual magazines...
...because, as Kostelanetz points out, the practice is to have eminences review equal eminences, which means writer and reviewer are highly likely to have had a long association with each other on the playing fields...
...The winning combination which, for example, catapulted Noam Chomsky, a tedious Johnny one-note, to fame is not something to be trifled with...
...The Fruits of Belonging My purpose here has not been to present a full-scale critique of any one group or publication but to look for the common denominator that may help explain a wide range of situations...
...One of the detrimental ways this sliows up in the Review’s content is in the lack of references to the touchstone of firsthand experience...
...the questions made the editors seem extraordinarily knowledgeable and acute on the subject of contemporary music, and the answers made Stravinsky come off as a charming, eclectic parlor wit, which was true in neither case...
...A limited survey of our own, of the issues from June through December, 1972, produced the following statistics: Of- 41 reviews of single books, only five were Random House conglomerate books and none were written by authors whose books had been published by one of the Random House publishing companies...
...I can’t really address his claims of suppression of the avant garde of theater, poetry, and fiction because I haven’t been involved with it...
...There is also the problem of believing in that self-important image, of becoming too confident, and simply of forgetting to ask questions...
...The thesis is well documented...
...The End of Intelligent Writing was rejected by 30 publishers before it found a home at Sheed and Ward, which happens to operate out of Kansas...
...Kostelanetz’s righteous self-pity and blanket rejection of his elders as philistines serve only as blinds to the real issues implicit in his material, issues which are as pertinent to his and my...
...After all, he-not Robert Craft-was the person with the experience and accomplishment that made readers want to know what he had to say in the first place...
...Star Making, Star Breaking Kostelanetz’s theory is that in the early sixties the anatomy of the literary world changed from a pluralistic structure, in which several clubs competed in promoting themselves, to a monopolistic structure consisting of one big club which draws allegiance from the members of all the little clubs whose edges were beginning to fray...
...Since they had skated over thin ice without looking down for some time, it’s not surprising that on the day the Molotov cocktail diagram was okayed they didn’t have anyone around to say, “Are you crazy...
...The concept that writers should automatically disqualify themselves from reviewing books in cases where their objectivity is likely to be in jeopardy seems impractical-because “every body knows everybody else...
...Random House holds up its part of the deal by buying disproportionate amounts of advertising...
...I think there is an extraordinary volume of high-quality books, I thmk the people involved are truly dedicated to their work (which doesn’t mean they aren’t susceptible to blindness or the lures of success), and I think mob platforms like The New York Reviewof Books show a vitality, courage, and standard of excellence which, however infuriating it may be to those left out, cannot be denied...
...Rather than nitpiclung at this book I would like to try to isolate what I see as those genuine issues raised in the course of the tirade...
...His onion simply describes a loosely concentric pattern of group influence and coordination held together through the unimpeachable connections of friendship, likemindedness, and mutual respect...
...Twenty-five per cent of New York Review reviewers that year had Random House books in print, and 37 per cent of that group reviewed other Random House authors...
...tification, or less well-known people who stand to gain a tremendous amount by receiving the seal of approval...
...Armchair Moralizing One doesn’t need a theory of group politics to scope the Random House-Review statistics...
...On the one hand he opposes the supremacy of money (and its handmaidens, success and power) as the’guiding values of American life and has dedicated himself to promoting higher values-whether social, intellectual, or artistic...
...Up to then the only powerful reviewing medium on the scene was The New Yorlc Times Book Review, which was run by an aging military buff who thought that the best reviewing policy was to praise everything...
...The result is a book infested with fallacies and distortions, but through his crash approach, Kostelanetz manages to flush out some very significant issues that otherwise would have remained hidden in the thickets of complexity...
...In doing so you might be amazed to discover some common ground with our favorite targets, but that in itself-recognizing personally how those perversions of values can creep into one’s life-can only lead to better, truer intellectual exchange (touching on experience) about perversion of values and eorruption in the big bad world of business and politics...
...Yet these 10 other quality houses together published six times more books than Random House that year...
...This was more attention than was given to Viking, Grove Press, Holt, Harper, Houghton Mifflin, Oxford, Doubleday, Macmillan, Harvard, and Princeton combined...
...Mini-mobs show on an easily comprehensible scale how the big mob works...
...There were 46 essays, 10 by I. F. Stone and only two others by Random House authors...
...above the rest of his countrymen...
...Sheed and Ward, $10...
...Of 10 writers publishing two or more essays, nine were Random House authors, and so forth...
...The urbane humanist, however-that person who has somehow positioned himself as the keeper of values as a writer or publisher through association with universities, foundations, or hightoned publications or as active worker for reform-has trouble expressing personal feelings on the subject without raising the specter of hypocrisy...
...Kostelanetz also outlines “minimobs” within the onion-small groups with strategically placed members who coordinate to promote each other...
...For example, second-rate talents are received as first-rate by a public blinded by the promotional ruse of the sensibility seal...
...This is created by the market (which favors the extreme) as well as by the membership mentality...
...Given the book’s quality, no one publisher can be impeached for his decision...
...One might quibble with some of his placements, or, more seriously, object that this tells only a tiny part of the story...
...Whatever sociological or geographic badge of identity these cadres assumed, they promoted that badge as the exclusive credential for greatness,” as the brand of sensibility which was carrying the torch of art and enlightenment into the future...
...Of about 221 books reviewed (four issues were missing), only 19 were published by Random House...
...An example that might balance the Review situation is the group psychology in the writing arm of the feminist movement...
...A situation thus develops in which it takes courage to depart from the party line-to deflate brand-name reputations which are undeserved, to acclaim a writer who comes from outside the group, and certainly to seriously question the legitimacy of the group label or to criticize group practices...
...This may have been an event in the history of image making, but it wasn’t much use for anyone interested in what Stravinsky might actually have had to say, however clumsily...
...The Random-Review statistics appear to be a shocking indication of favoritism toward the company, but their real meaning, I think, is simply that the members of the group tended to go to Jason Epstein for contracts, and that Epstein published the people that he (and often the Review) was interested in...
...These tenets create enormous pressure to keep within the party line...
...Motives are particularly veiled in the literary world, however, because the admission that success and money are powerful lures seems in itself an admission of moral turpitude to someone who has set himself up as dedicated to preserving and promoting the highest values...
...At its core the club is much like self-promo ting literary cliques, or “schools” of the past, such as the “Southern” writers, the “Jewish” writers, or the Partisan Review crowd, except that it has achieved unchallenged dominance...
...Such a paradigm would rarely tell the full story, and alone would inevitably distort the truth, but it provides information which goes a long way toward illuminating why the story works out the way it does...
...However strongly one may believe in the principles of feminism, one cannot avoid the fact that these practices will inevitably result in the suppression of the free flow of ideas, a closing of the circuits, and a cultivation of a dangerous intellectual immunity, all in order to allow the free flow of propaganda...
...by publishing more favorable than unfavorable reviews of Random House books, and by regularly giving such pieces either about or by Random House authors extra prominence, either on the cover, or by isolating single books for review rather than putting them in bunches...
...Thus we have a lot of Chomsky-like moralizing from library armchairs and practically no trips to the Pentagon or the White House to inquire how real human beings come to create horrors like Vietnam...
...A more serious cost is the deterioration of thoughtful change, and the unchecked propagation of really bad, even dangerous, ideas like those that encourage hatred of husbands, fathers, brothers, and lovers as therapeutic and reinforcing...
...Kostelanetz does not imply that everyone on the list is either a slave or a conspirator...
...But on reflection it occurs to me that Kostelanetz’s Sodom and Gomorrah approach is probably the only way a writer could propel himself through *The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America...
...But in rejecting thc book for these reasons critics avoided dealing with the fact that Podhoretz had also truthfully analyzed how the literary world works...
...The idea that out-of-town readers (who do not have privileged knowledge of mob interrelationships and therefore take such reviews at face value) are entitled to something more objective doesn’t occur...
...Yet they clearly do have a collective responsibility, because together they control what will be read...
...The review is either cut, and the reviewer no longer gets jobs from that publication and/or subsequently finds his own book either ignored or massacred in publications within that mini-mob’s jurisdiction...
...It was generally rejected as a crass bid for status, as tasteless, and even pathetic...
...These people may have temporary spats with each other, but they are fundamentally in collusion, as are competing Mafia capos...
...For certainly as far as political books were concerned, the RandomReview combination was, as Kostelanetz puts it, a “celebrity-making machine...
...For example, both stars and big targets are important ingredients in maintaining group identity, and so a subterranean pressure builds up for cooperative action in star-making and star-breaking along with a group reflex against aberrations...
...Neither concepts holds water: as with everybody else in America, corruption grows from those invisible hobbles that we allow to entangle us and that imperceptibly prevent us from following-or even identifying-our best instincts...
...Whether you go for the big conspiracy or not, these kinds of alliances unquestionably exist...
...In The End of Intelligent Writing,” however, Richard Kostelanetz has given us a full, shocking picture of power structures and malpractice in the literary world...
...This is an extension of the practice of having enemies review each other’s books...
...A machine can be a smo 0th working coordination between individuals strategically placed in several large institutions, or even a free-floating collection of people identified by a publicly recognized idea like women’s liberation or a badge of sensibility like “the new journalists...
...Other professions have developed codes covering the broader areas where personal gain and professional duty conflict, and I think the literary world would do well to develop similar standards...
...Literary Badminton To start with some of the raw material, Kostelanetz’s thesis is that an exclusive Mafia-like club exercises monopolistic control over the country’s channels of communication...
...An independent survey by Terry Pristin of /Move/ for 1972 would indicate that there has been a dramatic decline in at least this aspect of collusion...
...The latter is part of the thought that allows quite remarkable travesties to go unnoticed in the literary world: the idea that the adversary is so mighty and we are so small that in a way our conflicts of interest are our only defenses, the only way we can hope to prevail in an antagonistic world...
...Under these circumstances, Kostelanetz points out, a number of distortions inevitably take place...
...What beneficiary would want to damage such a machine by running down another beneficiary or risk excommunication by aggravating either phalanx-the publisher (or more accurately, Epstein) by knocking another Random House book, or the Review by knocking one of its regular contributors, so often one and the same...
...The membership is much more loosely defined, it is connected to an activist movement, and the quality of the output is astonishingly uneven...
...As always, this pressure could easily parade under other banners, such as the need to show solidarity where controversial political views are concerned...
...The pressures talked about here can also work on an individual not associated with any group at all who simply wants to do well, and, like a freshman congressman, he may discover that in order to do his own good work he must learn the ropes, learn the pet interests and prejudices of the established powers, and tiptoe around them, gving a little here in order to get a little there...
...The same applies when one is reviewing, for signs of disloyalty may in the future block access to the magic carpet...
...That’s enough to make a backbone far stronger than Jeb Magruder’s weaken...
...Always the promotion of quality or an idea will be a powerful, indisputably legitimate factor behind the organism...
...It simply won’t do for Epstein to deny that he has any influence with the Review because nobody believes him, and even if those involved know in their hearts that the figures represent a coincidence (Random House publishes many high quality books, etc...
...Unfortunately, a radical philosophy, like literary sensibility, does not automatically create immunity to the lures of cash and celebrity...
...Celebrity-making arrangements are by no means located in clear conflict of interest situations like the RandomReview example...
...However, of the 153 pieces total (including poems, reviews, and essays), 6 1 were written by authors with Random House conglomerate books in print...
...Only if you come out dramatically opposed to the party line, as did Midge Decter in The New Chastity, does financial suicide cease to loom...
...Kostelanetz does not record how many of the books reviewed in that year were Random House books, however...
...Neither of these influences can be perceived as particularly constructive, but a third is far more serious: Having launched themselves on one raft, and having made their brand name a ticket to commercial success, members of the group encounter heavy pressures to promote each other, because the success of one is the success of another, not in terms of the quality of their work, but in terms of cash and fame...
...The collective of high-class book publishers, periodical editors, reviewers, and writers concentrated in New York is a case in point...
...Thus a member of that group (particularly a marginal or potential member of the group) intuitively would have known that he would not be aiding his fortunes by ripping apart one of the current stars in a non-brand name forum, like, say, the pages of the old Saturday Review...
...The group psychology, however, creates a situation in which people are particularly anesthetized to the sense of slippage...
...I unearth it now because the mistake arose from the inflated self-confidence (and perhaps a distraction with image) which prevented the editors from asking questions about substance...
...To roughly sketch his paradigm: at the center Kostelanetz locates five people-Midge Decter (ex-editor of Harper’s, now at Saturday Review/ World), Jason Epstein (vice-president of Random House, key founder of The New Yorlc Review of Books), Irving Howe (editor of Dissent), Norman Podhoretz (editor of Commentary), and Robert Silvers (editor of The New York Review of Books...
...Or, a writer directly criticizes important mob powers in print and later finds that an enduring grudge is at work trying to squeeze him out of print or even out of employment...
...At the same time, some group leaders openly state that mutual criticism will only weaken movement self-confidence, that solidarity above all else must be shown in public, thus guaranteeing the gist of mutual revie wing...
...Think what this means...
...So what the figures really show is not an effort to make Random House profits higher, but a personal membership list and a celebritymaking machine...
...He presents all his evidence of nefarious practices as proof of their cynical use of culturemongering to achieve undeserved fame and money for themselves...
...The real danger in this is not just the absence of a necessary dimension, but the development of a kind of absentmindedness which can lead people to fail to recognize when they or their own are on thin ice-or even going over a waterfall...
...This sort of idea ought to be shot out of the sky immediately...
...This is the point at which identification with the group becomes an invisible hobble on intellectual freedom and exchange, weakening a person’s connection with his best, most honest instincts and imprisoning individuals in cowardice just the way the fear of lost security imprisons a bureaucrat into going along -when he should speak up...
...One can only conclude from the figures that being both a Random House author and a New Yorlc Review contributor constituted a kind of super-privileged membership, and that not only were super-privileged members aware of each other’s status in reviewing each other, but each one stood to gain more than usual from-or was unusually indebted to-the group mechanism...
...Other writers may not include them in their own tracts, but they don’t come out and attack them face on...
...The axis of collusion in this instance is between the super-firm, Random House (including subsidiaries Knopf and Pantheon), with Vice President Jason Epstein, and super-prestigious mob organ The New York Review of Books, which Epstein founded...
...Kostelanetz’s piece de resistance is taken from the core of his onion...
...This sort of knowledge doesn’t result in a strict rule of bchavior...
...These figures would seem to indicate that while the imbalance has been corrected to some extent, a symbiotic relationship between Random House and the Review continues to flourish...
...this material from beginning to end...
...You don’t have to dig here for the symptoms either-in many instances the symptoms have actually been institutionalized as group doctrines...
...For example, quoting from Harry Smith’s Newsletter, Kostelanetz records that in 1968, 17 of 73 books (over 23 per cent) singled out for individual review were published by Random House...
...The group has also put across the idea that only accredited members may review each other-and has done this so successfully that even The New York Times Book Review accepts the principle, at least halfway, just as it quasi-accepted the idea that only accredited militant blacks are qualified to pass comment on black literature...
...Just as whole generations felt their time had finally come when Kennedy became President and the Eisenhower Administration was relegated to the past, so a whole chorus of writers and intellectuals saw The New Yorlc Review as “their” magazine...
...The review, of coupe, was a puff...
...For example, the Review has made few really ghastly mistakes for a magazine willing to go out on a controversial limb, but the day they decided to print the how-tomakeit diagram of a Molotov cocktail on the cover, their guardian angel must have been on a holiday...
...Moral Myopia: ‘The NewYorkReview’ and theNewYork Intellectuals bv Suzannah Lessard Money-wanting it and making it-is something most Americans can talk about with candor...
...Get Along, Go Along Literary and intellectual groups are a very natural and in many ways constructive phenomenon...
...Although it has nothing to do with politics, one of the most striking examples of this is the Review’s series of “conversations with Stravinsky” which purported to be the editors’ interviews with the composer but were actually concocted in toto by Stravinsky’s assistant, Robert Craft...
...In one of the most brilliant observations in the book, he writes: “A literary lobby is united not only by personal friendships and fairly similar artistic attitudes, but also, and most important, by a sense of collective fortune...
...Thus he tells how Willie Morris, then editor-in-chief at Harper’s, ran a pre-publication excerpt from Norman Podhoretz’s Making It (Podhoretz being a friend of Morris as well as husband of Morris’ Harper’s colleague, Midge Decter...
...Generally the danger is that the group psychology can create a closed circuit of ideas, a too-cozy, .too self-assured atmosphere in which it is easy to be seduced by your own image into forgetting to ask questions about substance...
...and “equally sharp dismissals of Mary McCarthy, John Updike, Dwight Macdonald, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O‘Hara, Jack Kerouac...
...In describing the groups of the past, like the Southern writers, the Jewish writers, and the cliquish relics of the WASP literary establishment which once reigned supreme, Kostelanetz remarks on the incredibly selfenclosed chauvinism cultivated by these groups...
...Mutual discovery, after all, must have been a heady thing: as Kostelanetz points out, Mencken’s description of the South as the “Sahara of the Bozart” reflected a general attitude, and the Jewish experience simply didn’t exist in American literature until the “Jewish writers” stormed the WASP palace with their banner...
...On the other hand, Norman Podhoretz’s Doings and Undoings, a collection of essays and reviews published in 1965, contains, according to Kostelanetz’s scorecard, “pointed praise for Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Paul Goodman, Nathaniel West, Bernard Malamud, Isaac Rosenfeld, Herman Kahn, and Norman Mailer...
...There he finds all his patterns of collusion on a massive scale...
...In other words, the situation is no longer pluralistic...
...The cash and celebrity-making advantages that group membership offers is, I think, the clinchcr, although there are many other motivations to adjust, such as the pleasant aspects of belonging, of group approval, and of working with friends in an atmosphere of success...
...He seems to confuse critical success with financial security, completely ignoring the fact that running an independent operation like the Review is a life and death struggle for survival and is certainly nothing anybody in his right mind would see as a way to fill the coffers...
...They will also, inevitably, generate the sorts of pressures discussed here, particularly when the public perceives them as a group and thus makes an entwining of professional fortunes inescapable...
...They not only produce the books, but they tell the world at large which of those books are worthwhile...
...dismisses Joan Didion as, alas, just another ordinary slave of a sexist culture, while a seventh-rate talent like Jill Johnston whizzes to stardom on the magic carpet of kosher “liberatedness...
...But on top of this there is, once again, the powerful lure of a celebrity-making machine-which the movement, inevitably, has become...
...Most of the pieces are written from private libraries...
...I do agree that the present establishment is a little like the Israeli parliament, whose average age 20 years ago was 43 and is now 63...
...Thus Kostelanetz quotes Podhoretz’s explanation of a bad review of his own book by Edgar Z. Friedenberg in The New Yorlc Review as the natural splenetic result of Commentary’s recent rejection of a Friedenberg piece...
...But all across the group scene the kicker that makes such mechanisms pinch is the wildly arbitrary way in which books make money...
...Secondly, the way in which this work is done would seem on the face of it to raise the most pressing issue of conflict of interest...
...e., to be pure we must purge our lives of the most minute participation in the Vietnam war-and in another moment ordinary ethics are the hallmark of the naive (weak)-i,e...
...But too much of it is secondhandwriting from papers-without checking in with the difficult taskmaster, experience...
...The line between solidarity in order to overcome resistance to your beliefs and solidarity (or collusion) because your own fame and success is hitched to a group is very difficult to discern...
...This allows Kostelanetz to hold up the Review’s survival tactics, such as forming money-making subsidiaries or using gimmicks like the sale of David Levine reproductions, as evidence of ulterior motives, and to talk about “stockholders” and members of the “board of directors” as though he were discussing General Motors...
...When the book comes out this month it will probably also be discredited as stale, hardly the author’s fault under the circumstances...
...Kostelanetz’s book, imbalanced as it is, can make you stop musing on what the rich and the mighty should care about and ponder what you should care about instead...
...They will always exist and members of them will always, by definition, be partial to each other...
...Kostelanetz’s own, far less complete, survey of issues from July, 1971 to June, 1972, finds that of 37 publishers having books singled out for review, 16 were published by the Random House conglomerate-while the nearest competitor had three...
...These might, for example, enjoin writers to disqualify themselves from reviewing close friends and colleagues, or censure close connection between review publications and publishing houses...
...Whatever other lofty motives may have been involved each step of the way, this was indisputably true...
...With thinly disguised personal rancor he welds conspiracy onto conspiracy, pointing with abandon to blood, dead bodies, and faceless hordes of refugee writers camped in anonymity outside the g&tes of acceptance...
...Worse, every’ one knows everyone else...
...On the other hand, not only are success and power vital factors in his elite world (after thing) but substantial sums of money, now more than ever before, are sloshing around within his reach...
...The thought gets lost in his emotional treatment of the present, but it still applies, perhaps with even greater force...
...This is the creation of another generation and is in most aspects completely dissimilar to the Review group...
...The most effective defense against this kind of slippage in values is recognition of the pressures behind the slippage-identification of the priorities that allow it to happen...
...At the very least this kind of standard would formally acknowledge the danger in such practices, which currently are considered normal...
...The Pristin survey unfortunately does not enumerate Random House authors reviewing, Random House books isolated for review, or Random House authors writing essays, all highly relevant statistics in such a query...
...It is also not the first time such lists have been presented: Norman Podhoretz’s book, Making It, is a rich source of names and class labels...
...Thus Ms...
...Examples of villainous collusion, of course, are necessary if such patterns of connection are to have any significance, and Kostelanetz has them marshaled to make his point...
...And all together they became the new group...
...And of course everybody also knew at the time that Podhoretz and Epstein were having a feud, and so it was expected that Epstein’s fiefdom, the Review, would publish a massacre-a lot of people probably looked forward to the good fun...
...More than half of the essays published that year were by Random House authors...
...But the Random House statistics, like litmus paper, show up not only memberships but also inclusion with a double bind...
...there is very little emphasis placed on thc value of being therc, or even of talking to the people who were there, particularly in government...
...He overcomes the scruples that have discouraged more timid souls by simply realizing the fears behind them in all their glory, as he assaults the subject with the kind of paranoid abandon Hunter Thompson might reserve for ITT...
...To begin with, if they think of themselves as a professional group at all, it is as “the literary world”-a term that connotes cocktail parties rather than a sense of collective responsibility, in the way that doctors, for example, think of themselves as collectively responsible for the health of the nation...
...But most people familiar with the literary world would agree that the exercise Kostelanetz has undertaken is in itself legitimate, just as it would be legitimate in describing social power in a suburban town (theore tically egalitarian) or, say, a pattern of relationships in the legal community whose members interchangeably occupy Wall Street and the Justice Department...
...The people who feel the pressure are not so much the Joan Didions (although even here, praise from an accredited source would undoubtedly boost sales), but people whose reputations are built entirely on group iden...
...On first reading, my reaction was one of regret that a better, more judicious writer hadn’t shouldered this task...
...Anyone setting out to write a book of feminist subjects knows that moderate departure from the party line may well cost not just the seal of approval and the esteem of the group, but quite a lot of cash and fame as well...
...shortly afterwards Podhoretz reviewed his friend Morris’ book in his own publication, Commentary (the review appearing alongside an ad for Making It...
...The situation doesn’t really seem to raise issues of responsibility because the cozy, closed-circuit that does not push minds to think through to the underlying realities makes the ideas seem harmless...
...This is just one result of a generally confused, paradoxical concept of integrity on the Left: in one moment purity is unattainable-i...
...A carefully picked reviewer, for instance, innocently gives the wrong kind of review...
...and Theodore Solatoroff (book editors), Dwight Macdonald (critic), Willie Morris...
...The former-purity is unattainablemakes us think the cause is hopeless and therefore not worth pursuing in the real world...
...An anthology of “Best Short Stories from The Paris Review,” published in 1959, includes only one Jewish writer out of 14, and a Harper’s anthology of 90 pieces put out in the same year, includes only three Jewish contributors (Oscar Levant, Betty Friedan, and Sigmund Freud) out of a total of 90...
...the appearancc is so bad and it casts such doubt on the integrity of the editors, that for this reason alone it ought to be (and to some degree has been) checked...
...I don’t believe for a minute that Review writers or editors would adjust their views just because a book was published by Random House (for example, Review regular Mary McCarthy recently slammed Random’s book of the year, The Best and the Brightest, in the Review).The adjustment, or predisposition to be favorable, would crop up only when the book was written by one of Epstein’s authors, who would also, in all likelihood, be a member of the gang...
...The reason is that there are plenty of rejoinders to such statements about cash in publishing, and a fair-minded person would have to admit that most of the defenses are at least partially true...
...Potential Naders have found their momentum further slowed by the unpleasant sense of self-righteousness implicit in an attack on one’s earnest peers, the fear that one will have to distort and exaggerate obscure conspiracies to make any point at all, and the suspicion that the topic amounts to little more than in-group gossip...
...Nesbit’s husband, Richard Gilman, literary editor of The New Republic, would see that they were favorably reviewed in his magazine (often by other Nesbit authors) while n e i g h b o r- f ri e n d Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a Times book revicw editor, would see they got a boost in his domain...
...Rather than competing with each other, these groups have arranged themselves around a powerful center in what Kostelanetz describes as an onion-like pattern of leaves, or leveled groupings arranged hierarchically and cooperatively at varying distances around a center...
...The specialties are not segregated: there is nothing to stop a productive member of this group from putting on the three hats of writer, editor, and reviewer (manufacturer, inspector, and consumer reporter) in the same day...
...This is an old incident which at the time earned the Review much richly deserved abuse...
...1 think this is true...
...Thus only a saint would not in some small part of his soul desire to remain a part of the group, and also to perpetuate it...
...And Random House bought twice as much advertising as anyone else...
...In fact, self-promotion and team identification go hand in glove to create the invisible slippage in values...
...In fact, at a certain point the pressure begins to push towards extremism in thc opposite direction, perhaps accounting for the overly antagonistic tone that blurs the better ideas in this book...
...Therefore, the professional help that individuals render each other is based upon a sense of entwined professional investment...
Vol. 5 • November 1973 • No. 9
