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 mentor and patron--but with a difference about which he was explicit in "Doings and Undoings," his collection of essays from 1953 to 1964. (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.)
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.
Random things, and yet not: Fascinated 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; tossing it over to go off to war; 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.
In the beginning, the young critic was not as critical as he would later wish he had been. To read "Doings and Undoings" today is to recognize that, indeed, "two or possibly three" young men had written the essays. "The sighing and the suing," as Gilbert and Sullivan would say, went on. But that was to be the invariable path of Norman Podhoretz's life. And there would be more young men, more Norman Podhoretzes, to come. Well, at least two more.
First was the young radical, carrying on the high tradition that had developed among the largely Jewish intellectual community of New York. It was a complex fate, in that nothing was ever quite what it seemed or quite what it had been.
