MAKING IT
2.041
since works of this sort are rare - all the uncharted and spooky perils
of uprooting a hundred established complacencies in a hundred real
places. The perils may be no worse in reality than offending a few
thousand readers by a novel, but one doesn't know, there is a point of
no return implicit in such an endeavor. Moreover, one is presenting a
personality which will be better or worse than one's own, and people will
react to it with the same love or hate they reserve for characters in a
novel. One is advancing and endangering one's career by writing the
book, the book is now a protagonist in the progress of one's success.
Self-interest naturally slants a word here, literary honesty bends it back
there. One does not know whether to tell the little lie or shrive oneself.
An overload of choices descends on the brain of any ambitious man
engaged in giving a contentious portrait of himself. Yet that is not even
the worst of the difficulty. The real woe is that one is forced to examine
oneself existentially, perceive oneself in the act of perceiving, (but
worse, far worse - through the act of perceiving, perceive a Self who
may manage to represent the separate warring selves by a Style). It
is
necessary to voyage through the fluorescent underground of the mind,
that arena of self-consciousness where Sartre grappled with the
pour-soi
and the
en-soi;
intellections consuming flesh, consciousness the negation,
yes, the very consumption of being. One is digesting one's own gut in
such an endeavor.
3.
This ulcerous claim check now stamped, let us take up an existential
hypothesis:
the
Norman Podhoretz in the book called
Making It
is, we
will assume, a fictional character, an editor of a well-established maga–
zine, well regarded, etc., etc. He is not yet forty, not by several years,
but is tormented out of the sum of all vectors of ambition, caution,
desire, fear, honesty, horror, honor, courage, and personal dissatisfaction
to write a book about himself, Why? He thinks (that is, the character
thinks) it is because he has a major thesis, something new to say about
success and the ambiguities of its state, the relation of others to his
success. He has even a thesis in his mind as he begins his book. We can
quote from it:
For taking my career as seriously as I do in this book, I will
no doubt be accused of self-inflation and therefore of taste–
lessness. So be it. There was a time when to talk candidly about
sex was similarly regarded as tasteless - a betrayal of what D. H.
Lawrence once called "the dirty little secret." For many of us,
of course, this is no longer the case. But judging by the embarrass-
