RICHARD POIRIER
to connect detailed judgments of perfonnance with the "issues" he
discovers in a book.
To see in these essays the agitation beneath the assurance is to
understand why Podhoretz admires in contemporary literature some
indication of an equivalent degree of struggle within any book he is
reading. When he praises Lippman it is in part because Lippman's
images generate "a rich rhetorical drama," and when he tries to sum–
marize what attracts him to Mailer he uses the phrase "embattled
vision." And he uses it with brilliantly clarifying effect, going on
to
show, in tones of severely qualified sympathy, how Mailer discovers in
the act of writing "what he did not know he knew," the discoveries
resulting from the resistance of the novelist in Mailer to the theoretician.
Understandably, these essays are most critical of writers, like Updike,
whose works do not reveal a pressure of something that wants, at the
expense of fonn or style, to be brought to consciousness. This standard
can take us back, of course, to the most compelling aspects of Melville,
of Mark Twain in that disrupted and "embattled" novel
Huckleberry
Finn,
and, though few care to discover this,
to
the essays of Emerson.
Never concerning himself with these derivations, Podhoretz can without
embarrassment impose such a standard, applicable to literature only of
the noblest ambition, on contemporary works that ought to be treated
much more lightly, unless, of course, one chooses to consider them a kind
of symptom. When the criteria derived from his admiration for an
"embattled vision" are combined with his insistence that writers should
concern themselves with the "issues" of our time--as he defines them–
Podhoretz's criticism can become nearly presumptuous. Thus he can
suggest that the malaise which afflicts the characters in Bellow should be
more "political" than Bellow, with what seems to me the authority of
genius, wants them to be; or he can tell Alan Morehead that in
Callipoli
he should have argued what is implicit throughout the book anyway–
that the campaign seems "quixotic and meaningless in this new universe."
Nor does his evaluation of Mary McCarthy's
The Croup,
convincing as
it is, justify his basilisk-eyed insistence that because she is supposed
to
be what he says her experience ought to have made her, she could have
attended to the trivia in her novel-there are many not uncommendable
reasons for her having done so--only by "having wilfully blinded herself
to the spirit of moral ambition and the dream of self-transcendence"
which are said to have originally produced and beautified her.
The essays are best when they show Podhoretz himself making the
effort of "self-transcendence" which he praises or finds lacking in others.
His essay on Hannah Arendt is the most passionate in the book, a
