BOOKS
A GENERAliON OF ISSUES
DOINGS AND UNDOINGoS : THE FIFTIES AND AFTER IN AMERICAN
WRITING. By Normon Podhoretz. Forror, S+rous ond Compony. $4.95.
"Almost always it was the issues rather than the book itself
that I really cared about." This admission, like a certain number of
others in
Doings and Undoings
(see especially "Book Reviewing and
Everyone I Know" or "Jewish Culture and the Intellectuals") shows off
the flashy side of a mind that is otherwise critically penetrating
not only about books and events but even more about Norman Pod–
horetz. That side of him seized on by his critics (and to me the least
significant) which is given to rather blithe self-advertisements helps
explain why Podhoretz has himself become an "issue," as does the kind of
remark, which did not amuse several people
I
know, in "A Dissent on
Updike": "when his first novel,
The Poorhouse Fair,
came out in 1958,
I remember arguing about it at great length with Mary McCarthy
and concluding after an hour or so of earnest give and take that one
of us must be crazy." One hears in this the tones of a young man who
has expected others to be perhaps a little too happy with his early
eminence and to accept chic literary society not so much as a fringe
benefit for having something to say but as nearly the prerequisite.
Given such lapses, it isn't surprising that the reviewer in
The New York
Review of Books
should have made an "issue" of Podhoretz by saying
that he shows many of the characteristics of "Manhattan's literary man–
of-all-work," and that his work is debilitated by his "sense of member–
ship" in a New York cotorie. It isn't surprising either that the review,
in trying to make the charge stick, should become discomfited and in–
coherent. The book itself and Podhoretz simply won't be cramped within
any such "issue."
Nor should it be surprising that
The Nation's
reviewer called Pod–
horetz a specie of has-been, resorting to the argument-by-generations of
which Podhoretz has himself, at thirty-four, become the old master.
Podhoretz, it is alleged, has nothing to say to "the new breed of younger
