Books In Review
"Here I come, my name is Jowett.
If it's knowledge, then I know it.
I am the Master of Balliol College.
If I don't know it, it isn't knowledge."
That ditty was composed by some now-forgotten Oxford wag about the great Oxford classicist Benjamin Jowett; substitute the line "If he's a writer, then I know him," and it might work as an epitaph for Norman Podhoretz. Over the past forty years, Podhoretz has in one way or another managed to meet just about everybody worth meeting in the realm of literature and ideas. Many of these people became his friends. Alas, not all of those friendships lasted.
"I have often said that if I wish to name-drop, I have only to list my ex-friends." It's a funny line, and, as Podhoretz adds, "it has the advantage of being true." In this remarkable book, Podhoretz describes how six of those friendships were born and ended: with Allen Ginsberg, with Lionel and Diana Trilling, with Lillian Hellman, with Hannah Arendt, and with Norman Mailer. "Remarkable" is a much over-used reviewer's compliment, but this book fully deserves it. It is simultaneously a collection of uniquely vivid descriptions of some of the most outsized characters of our time and an oblique autobiography of the describer. Most impressively of all, Podhoretz has managed to tell these old and probably painful stories without bitterness, rancor, or score-settling, while at the same time avoiding the opposite (if lesser) sins of sentimentality and untruthfulness.
Here is Allen Ginsberg, who chose to fix Norman Podhoretz near the center of his paranoid fantasies--there's a line denouncing him in "Howl," Ginsberg's most famous poem--and then mysteriously warmed to him in old age:
I had a very funny experience a couple of years ago when I dropped some Ecstasy...and I suddenly remembered Norman Podhoretz. And I said, Gee, good old Norman, we went to college together... If he weren't there like a wall I can butt my head against, I wouldn't have anybody to hate... But did I ever really hate him or was I just sort of fascinated by him?
The young Podhoretz was in turn fascinated by Ginsberg:
As against the law-abiding life I had chosen of a steady job and marriage and children, he conjured up a world of complete freedom from the limits imposed by such grim responsibilities. It was a world that promised endless erotic possibilities together with the excitements of an expanded consciousness constantly open to new dimensions of being: more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more life.
The two men have a series of bizarre confrontations--the worst being a late night argument in 1958 that began with Ginsberg inviting Podhoretz downtown to hear directly the poet's complaint against an unfavorable review and ended with Ginsberg shouting at the departing Podhoretz from the window of his apartment, "We'll get you through your children!" And it was that line that echoed in Podhoretz's mind as Ginsberg flattered him in the last years of his life. For Ginsberg had gotten--if not Podhoretz's own children--all too many of America's:
Having kept that promise, he decided to be magnanimous in victory and forgive me. But it was because of them, as well as all the others who I feared might be waiting in the wings, that I still could not bring myself to forgive him, not even now that he was dead.
Even more improbable, perhaps, than Podhoretz's weird acquaintance with Ginsberg was his friendship with Lillian Hellman. (She was for almost a decade one of his very closest friends, and catapulted him into a world of movie stars, conductors, and famous writers.) She was the sort of woman who knew where to find the best black bean soup in Puerto Rico, how to make the most perfect iced mint tea, and the private phone number of Leonard Bernstein. She was also an unrepentant Stalinist of the very blackest sort--and in the 1950's, that damaged her reputation and caused her to hunger for the attention and approval of people on the non-Communist left, where Podhoretz then resided. It didn't hurt, too, that he personified the high-brow New York intellectual world that had never much liked her plays and that she hoped to woo through him--the 1950's being pretty much the last time that aesthetics trumped politics in American cultural life and that the opinions of people with demanding aesthetic standards counted for anything at all. And woo Hellman did! She invited Podhoretz to all her glamorous parties, cooked for him, even lent him her summer house to write a book (leaving behind a detailed memo titled "Notes to a Jewish Traveler"; the first item read: "To your left on the wall you will find a circular glass-covered object with numbers on it. This is known as a thermostat").
Alas, the balmy politics of the 1950's heated up tragically quickly into the feverish 1960's and 70's. Hellman's Stalinism flared up again, as did her habit of lying about her past. Her friendship with Podhoretz had been waning since 1970, and when her book Scoundrel Time was published in 1976, Podhoretz commissioned a review by Nathan Glazer that methodically exploded Hellman's myths both about the McCarthy period and her untruths about her own conduct. That was that. The dying friendship lay dead:
Shortly before she died, I saw her yet again, and for the very last time, being carried in the arms of a young man into her building on Park Avenue from a car. The pity of it hit me hard, and I had a powerful impulse to run over and plant a kiss on her forehead. By this time, however, we had become not just estranged friends who retained a lingering fondness for each other, but passionate and bitter enemies, and I had long since forfeited the right to make any such tender offer or affectionate gesture. Besides, I was pretty sure that if I were foolish enough to try, she would have summoned enough strength, even in the moribund condition she was clearly in, to tell me to go f--k myself.
As the Hellman stories suggest, death is this book's great theme: the death of Podhoretz's friends (only one of the people discussed in this book, Norman Mailer, is still alive) and the death of the world they together constituted. The idea that there was a time when novels mattered more than op-eds, when Broadway still existed for the editors of intellectual magazines to look down on, when the intellectual life of the nation was gathered in New York among a comparative handful of people--virtually none of them employed at a university, and a surprising portion of them Jewish--it all now seems as vanished as Ur of the Chaldees.
As editor of Commentary, Podhoretz was for years that world's broker, and in his memoirs he was its best chronicler and publicist: first triumphantly, in Making It, then defiantly, in Breaking Ranks, and now elegiacally. The great quarrel that shattered Podhoretz's world--the civil war among the literary left which drove most into radicalism and a dissident minority into neoconservatism--has talked itself into irrelevance. The left has not vanished of course, but it has ceased to be literary: Barbra Streisand has taken the place of Susan Sontag and Alec Baldwin has replaced Irving Howe. To the extent that books and art matter at all, the values by which they are judged are entirely non-aesthetic: Is the author black/female/gay? Are the characters black/female/gay? Does the book have a positive message about being black/female/gay? The idea that Norman Podhoretz won his early celebrity as a reviewer of novels now seems as incredible as would the idea that Colin Powell began his rise through the military hierarchy as the commander of an observation balloon.
Podhoretz visibly misses that world. He makes plain his discomfort with more regular conservative Republicans, who (he quips) "seemed to conceive of the Soviet Union as one huge regulatory agency, a sort of gigantic Federal Trade Commission with nuclear weapons." And yet, he cannot quite lament his exile from Paradise. As he says at the end of his chapter on Norman Mailer, describing a recent failed attempt at reconciliation, "having spent the last thirty years and more trying to make up for and undo the damage I did in cooperation with Mailer and so many other of my ex-friends, both living and dead, I simply could see no way back to him, or them, ever again."
These sad words must have cost Podhoretz a great deal to write. But let's all be glad he did. In his mood of mingled nostalgia for the past and confidence that he was right to break with that past, he has written a book that is beautiful, generous, and wise; that is sweet, but not too sweet, charitable but still just. And its final message is one that should bring hope to us all--that as a result of doing the right thing, in defiance of every worldly inducement for wrong, even so pugnacious a soul as Norman Podhoretz can work his way through to something that looks suspiciously like serenity.