WITH THE PUBLICATION of "Ex-Friends," Norman Podhoretz has performed a near to thrilling intellectual feat. 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. Together they mark the range of intellectual life in New York City in the 1960s and, of course, far beyond. As a coda to "Breaking Ranks," Podhoretz's wonderful 1979 volume of memoirs, "Ex-Friends" will be with us a long while.

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. 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. (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 be had at Columbia University and Clare College, Cambridge.) 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. And this has made all the difference.

Podhoretz saw himself as first of all a literary critic--Trilling had been and remained his

A literary critic ought--or so they tell me--to regard literature as an end in itself; otherwise he has no business being a literary critic. For better or worse, however, I do not regard literature as an end in itself. (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.) . . . 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.

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