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feeling that they are in important respects irrelevant and unfair. He is,
for one thing, an exceptionally knowledgeable man in the learned and
artistic areas he seldom chooses to discuss in his writing, and, for another,
his education at Columbia, the Seminary College of Jewish Studies, and
Cambridge University was
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schooling in precisely the kinds of intensive
analysis of texts and documents which he finds still useful but merely
prepatory to the larger arguments he wants to make. I know of few
books in which the author is less satisfied merely with exercising the
talents he has mastered or in which there is a more anxious attempt to
escape the limitations of response that he thinks can result from such
exercise. In declarations of independence from Lionel Trilling and F. R.
Leavis, in efforts to separate himself from "liberal revisionism"-the
celebration, in a revulsion from Stalinism, of the values of the American
middle-class spirit-in his farewell to Edmund Wilson, and in his
critical, but beautifully detailed reminiscenses of his childhood and youth,
especially in "My Negro Problem-and Ours"-Podhoretz is in all these
nostalgic repudiations and reassessments refusing to settle for the range
of choices with which his life seems ready to surround him. He is trying
to do what he praises Paul Goodman for doing and criticises Dwight
Macdonald for failing to do: he wants, in discussing a book or a
problem, to move outside the terms in which they present themselves,
and he wants to imagine alternatives other than those enclosed in any
given subject, whether it be race or
Catch
22.
He therefore rejects any
so-called New Critical reading of politics or literature. It is both con–
sistent and admirable that he should end the book referring, in a phrase
William James would have admired, to "the man I now have a duty
to
be."
No one who reads this book with an eye to the conflicts going on in
it can help but admire the portrait it offers of Podhoretz. He emerges
less as a pontificator or a categorizer than as a man struggling to define
some representative significance for himself, even as he argues against
many of the convenient definitions and habits with which his experience
and his associations have endowed
him.
One evidence of struggle is in
the disparity between his detailed and personally involved scrutiny of a
problem, such as the white man's hatred of the Negro, and a concluding
solution to it, namely miscegenation, the more impertinent and abstract
by virtue of the self-lacerating honesty with which he locates the problem
within his own personal history. And in the literary essays-those on
Mailer, Heller, and Bellow are exceptionally acute--there is the same
effort, usually more successful than in the political or sociological pieces,
