MAKING IT
235
label it great, was nonetheless - all horrors of hazing in evidence–
was nonetheless kinder to Podhoretz than the first kiss of the clan.
If
Time
and
Newsweek
(career men naked in their own homeland)"
hated
Making It,
why the
Times
was there on daily and Sunday to give
it a good respectful word, so was
Life
-
grace of the guest reviewer,
John Aldridge.
The Nation, The New Republic,
and
The New Leader
spit (no doubt to show the very balls of integrity in daring
to
attack
the editor of
Commentary-who
was there to say they were a veritable
gang of undescended testes?)
The Wall Street Journal
was mild and
Waspy, avuncular in its gentle sting - so was
Sat R c>view. The Progres–
sive
came in swell.
Book World
was bitchy and bright, the
National
Observer
offered objective notes of praise, the
Washington Post
was
vitriolic: "egregiously phony" it said.
The Plain Dealer
called
Making It
fine reading.
Women's Wear
picked up its skirts and wooed with both
feet in the air - "fascinating and appalling" her verdict.
If
the
Los
Angeles Times
was whipping the heads off flowers, "sophomoric, humor–
less . . . constricted, shallow, contrived," the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
called
Making It
"a book, and a good one at tl1at." Even the
New York
Review
was left at the end of its long tether in bemusement: "we may
surely hope that successive volumes will permit us to follow the career of
this remarkable, still young man. And they may be more mellow; some–
times as we age, memory softens our perceptions of reality. In
Podhoretz
Returns
and
Son of Podhoretz,
the monster may tum out
to
have a
heart of gold." That was about the way it went. No, then
it
went
worse! All the reviews were surpassed at the end by a draft-horse of a
review in
Esquire,
ten thousand words and more by the fiction editor
of the
Saturday Evening Post,
America's own Rust Hills, a prodigious
many-nostrilled neigh of a report, here fair, there foul, often full of hay,
designed to prove that Podhoretz was an enemy of the novel and Hills
its first defender, the whole dominated by a series of nine caricatures
of Podhoretz by David Levine so connotative of old nightmares in the
pages of
Der Sturmer
that one was finally obliged to wonder what occult
species was Levine and how ammonia-odored was the hand which held
the drawing pen of such a crotch - did the fingers stink of crap or bat
or pigeon's piss?
Well, no vast joy
to
be found in such reviews for the writer of a
book, particularly when it is his first full-length book, and was written
with high ambition and in the teeth of the shaking ague of confronting
the highest literary standards all packed like blood-oaths and covenants
in himself - one does not acquire love for literature at the feet of the
Trillings and pay no price in outsize awe. Nor does one practice as an
honorable literary critic for years, doing one's best by one's lights to
