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brilliantly argued and eloquent piece, precisely because in confronting
her work he is, with no distortions of the subject, exorcising the tendency,
which he has in common with her, of insisting that facts and events
and mysteries can be constituted as an "issue," in this case of "totali–
tarianism." It has even been said that Podhoretz illustrates better than
does Miss Arendt the accusation he makes against her: that she demon–
strates "the intellectual perversity that can result from the pursuit of
brilliance by a mind infatuated with its own agility and bent on generat–
ing dazzle." But "dazzle" isn't really what Podhoretz is after, however
much of it he creates, and it isn't what this book essentially offers. The
engaging quality of his writing, and I mean the word "engaging" in
every sense, is that it reveals a very sceptical intelligence continually
"undoing," by its empiricism, its scrupulousness, its involvement in the
stuff of daily experience the "issues" which are its announced concern.
This effort isn't what Podhoretz seems to mean by his title
Doings and
Undoings,
but it is characteristic that even in the naming of his book
his glibness is confronted with the irreducible urgency of his intention.
Richard Poirier
THE POWER OF POSITIVE SEX
IDIOTS FIRST. By Bernerd Melem'ud. Forrer, Streus end Compeny.
$4,50.
Looking up Malamud in Leslie Fiedler's capacious
Love and
Death in the American Novel
I find that the treatment of him there is
surprisingly brief and unenthusiastic. Given Mr. Fiedler's prepossessions
I should have expected him to award Malamud high marks. Fiedler is
carrying the torch for "mature genital sexuality"-something that he finds
deplorably lacking in the erotic life of the American novel. I have myself
just read, not only the recent
Idiots First,
but all of Malamud's work
that I can find in print; and my conviction is that the sexual norm of
his world is eminently normal, as in fact it would have to be since his
people are mostly too busy establishing themselves and their families in
an elementally hostile world to feel desire in excessive or distorted forms.
True, they often suffer mildly from an
insufficiency
of sex, especially
when they are young. But this suffering is apt to seek relief in the
simpler forms of action, namely in going to bed with the opposite sex, or
trying to. At worst, the sense of deprivation manifests itself in a sexual
