MAKING IT
243
fact he inhabits; to readers who do, there is a gap between the literal
Norman Podhoretz and the less conscientious fictional presence in
Making It.
That is perhaps the last and most difficult demand of this
special category of fiction - that one must succeed in creating a char–
acter who is not fatally separate to those who know the author and those
who don't.
Nonetheless, after this opening flaw, the character Norman Podhoretz
in this special-category-of-fiction continues well. We move through early
chapters which have the quiet authority of good art, engaging near-tender
accounts of his relation with a snobbish teacher exacerbated into "depths
of loving despair" by the contrast between his intellectual promise and
his red satin Cherokees Social Athletic Club jacket. We continue, through
glimpses of his family, the implicit psychic mechanics -
tastefully
delineated - of his separation from family and neighborhood, his
immersion, or partial immersion, in the subtle intoxications of life at
Columbia (which is to say, the life of the spirit with most intuitions
plucked from the grinds of the subway wheel) and good analysis follows
of the play between open and concealed scholastic ambition.
I can see now, of course, that I must have caused the "snobs" as
much pain as they caused me.
If
I envied them their social com–
posure and their apparent self-assurance, they must have envied
me my freedom from the scruples which governed them and the
consequent torrent of unhindered energy on which I was able to
call. These scruples had nothing to do with morality; they had to
do only with the code of manners governing ambitiousness which
seemed to bind everyone at Columbia but me.
It
was a code which
forbade one to work too hard or to make any effort to impress a
professor or to display the slightest concern over grades. Since most
of the "snobs" in question were serious students, however, the code
hemmed them in, and since most of them were also ridden with
ambition - quite as much, I think, as I - it forced them into
secret transgressions, made them feel guilty, hypocritical, and
ashamed. Yet I, a flagrantly open violator, instead of being punished,
was being rewarded; I would probably even wind up, a "snob"
once bitterly remarked to one of my friends, with Columbia's
choicest prize, a Kellett Fellowship: "Can you imagine
him
at
Oxford or Cambridge? Sammy Glick in the
Agora!"
Which is, in fact, exactly where he succeeds in making it, to Clare
College at Cambridge. Descriptions follow - spare, comprehensive, art–
fully discerning of the differences in education, ambitions, class, and
country. Much good analysis, modest but pertinent, so convincing in the
modesty that even such large remarks as the following
