MAKING IT
245
note - a faint hint of the stricken in describing that literary establish–
ment of New York which Podhoretz calls The Family. There is despite
all criticisms well-taken, all ongoing analyses of The Family's desires
and prejudices, obsessiveness, cannibalism (of reputations, not flesh - so
far as we know) there is still a hint of the one weakness which is fatal
to the young novelist: flattery. The mouthful of pastrami sandwich in
Rahv's mouth persists in being too small. So do all the other mouthfuls.
Wherever there is a personal or professional reference to Dwight Mac–
donald, Mary McCarthy, F. W. Dupee, John Thompson, Lionel Trilling,
Diana Trilling, Paul Goodman, Robert Warshow, Elliot Cohen, Hannah
Arendt, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, Steven Marcus, Rahv,
Phillips, Jason Epstein, Plimpton, Mailer, Bob Silvers, Lillian Hellman,
Sherry Abel, W. H. Auden, Leslie Fiedler, Alfred Kazin, Dan Moynihan,
Richard Goodwin, Harold Rosenberg, Isaac Rosenfeld, Arthur Schle–
singer, Delmore Schwartz, Susan Sontag, Murray Kempton, Mike Har–
rington, and a number of others - the index to the book suggests we
are reading Main Currents of New York Thought-you may be certain
the reference is invariably as attractive as the sort of remark one makes
when giving a reference to a Foundation for a friend. The kindness
palls. It is the one mark of timorousness in the book. Only Saul Bellow
and Baldwin are shown in any kind of unattractive light and then
with care and preparation of context in order to strike no undue
foul blow.
It
is deadening. It saps the book, downs it not because we have been
expecting an expose of everything low, dirty, 'and vulpine in the New
York literary establishment, nothing in the tone of the book has offered
such an expectation, no, the disappointment is organic to the needs of
the undeclared novel. We are being offered a restrained muted limited
account of a young provincial, a modest example when all is said of a
Julian Sorel who is making his way up in the world. Not, of course,
through a judicious mixture of sexual and social audacity, but by an
uncomfortable sometimes self-torturing accommodation between the power
of his ambition versus his irrepressible demands for an integrity to his
expression. What more fascinating event, after half a book's worth of
the best preparation, to see our latter-day Sorel make it and lose it
and make it again with the Family, that peculiar colony, aviary and roo
of the most ferocious, idealistic, egotistic, narcissistic, cultivated, con–
stipated, brilliant, sensitive, brutally insensitive, half-productive and near–
sterile gang of the best and worst literary court ever to rise right out of
the immigrant ranks of a nation. The comic and tragic aspects of such
a gang take one's novelistic breath away - the satiric possibilities put
it back.
