422
RICHARD POIRIER
television or the movies; nothing in religion, unless, at wits end, one
counts Billy Graham. I am interested not in arguing about a small group
who have been called the "Beat Generation," however, but in illustrating
Podhoretz's anxious effort to make "issues" out of fragments., to find
order of some sort in the disarray which distinguishes cultural life now
from that in which Wilson was able to be a guide. His predilection for
"issues" that can be associated with a book or an event is a genuinely
urgent and honorable search for possible connections among items that
otherwise contribute, in their proliferation, to a kind of disengaged
hopelessness that seems to lurk in Podhoretz's bravado. Podhoretz
obviously wishes there
were
a New York group defined by ideological
commitments rather than by a common vocabulary in which to talk about
the lack of commitments; he wishes there
were
something so alive and
characteristic of himself and his contemporaries that those younger could
respond to it as a generation, even negatively. Who could wish otherwise
or deny him the functioning power that comes from even the illusion that
such things do significantly exist?
Doings and Undoings
is not, then, merely a collection of essays
displaying-as indeed they do-the versatility and acumen of its author.
It
should be read more appropriately as a one-man effort literally to
create a generation to which he can then belong and to define the
subjects this generation should care about. Podhoretz is the only one
of his contemporaries who has made a significant attempt to do this.
Many intellectuals of his age are not persuaded that what is going on
around them can relevantly be discussed in terms of generations; still
others find it intellectually distasteful to transform events or books into
those "issues" by which Podhoretz links them to other books, trends,
and happenings. The terms by which Podhoretz argues are
to
many
of his contemporaries not at all necessary ones, and what he considers
issues of general importance, like "liberal revisionism," are thought to be
applicable only to the relatively special groups in which Podhoretz's ideas
have been formed. Consistent with this objection, which is that there is
a damaging provinciality in Podhoretz's formulations, would be the
complaint that while his book claims to be intensely concerned with
the current state of our culture it has nothing to say about music or the
dance or painting or architecture and little about the literature of the
past. And it seems as
if
these things are ignored only because none of
them, though they figure importantly in the lives of scholarly intellectuals
and academics, offer themselves for translation into sociological and
political issues.
One cannot make such criticisms of Podhoretz, however, without
