MAKING IT
239
But Podhoretz was ideological, ideological three times over, by
Jewish Theological Seminary, Columbia, and Cambridge; any well–
equipped mind passing through three such separate disciplines could
hardly be expected to encounter future experience free of any set,
liberated from preconceived stance.
To the contrary, Podhoretz like many an intellectual before him
could use as his
cogito, ergo sum:
I cerebrate, therefore I see. No
matter how sensuous the nature, sense experience in such men tends to
become the raw material for the processing mills of new hypotheses.
That is a superb way to do a kind of literary criticism, perhaps the best
kind of literary criticism for which we can ask, since a work confronted
by no critical hypothesis can merely
be
admired or despised, and thereby
open questions of taste, but it cannot improve our mind by allowing us
to consider simultaneously the work in question and the critical approach.
We may enjoy the style of a critic who eschews hypotheses or we may
reject it, but we cannot imbibe that deepening of context (that aware–
ness of the work, the critic, and the world containing them both)
which is the marrow, indeed the very satisfaction, of reading a critic
who lays siege to a work with his hypothesis. The value of an hypothesis
is tha t it can be tested, tested by the evidence of the work, tested by
how much it fails to explain, tested indeed by the fact that it will
remain as the best working hypothesis until a better one comes along
to replace it. That is the most energetic kind of criticism, probably the
most creative, and when done well, certainly the most stimulating to
any reader who like Podhoretz lives in large part for the joy of
cerebration. And Podhoretz is probably as good as any critic in America
at this kind of writing. Indeed his only serious competitors might be
Steven Marcus, John Aldridge and Irving Howe.
Emphasis has been put upon this kind of criticism because it is
so quintessentially part of Podhoretz' way of writing, even his way of
life (since
Commentary
more than any other comparable magazine
attracts articles with hypotheses) that when he came to do a book it was
natural for him to begin with an hypothesis. The only difficulty was that
he was now dealing not with an aesthetic artifact but with himself,
not with literary criticism but a species of narrative fiction which
is
much too quickly thought of as autobiography. That word is appropriate
to use if we are considering what a man writes about himself after his
career is more or less done - he is at that point less than he used to be,
his possibilities are generally consumed, his externals are known, and he
is probably in fair shape
to
see himself as others do, since his old age
itself testifies to the fact that he could live with his legend much in the
