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"elitist," particularly since I have been critical of the contempt for
quality and standards rampant these days.
I would like to add one personal note. Podhoretz says he could
not understand and cannot remember what I said to him about
Making It.
I said that his critics were inflating its faults into a
criminal act. But I also said the book was off key in that it made
ambition and the drive for success the whole story. I thought he took
literally Philip Rahv's diatribes and exposes of the grubby motives of
his fellow intellectuals. Rahv was a Marxist in his use of psychology:
he used Marxism to demystify human behavior and reduce it to its
simplest and lowest components. And I said Podhoretz's so-called
" family" was driven more by literary and intellectual ambitions than
by the desire to "make it. " Hence
Making
It
had the wrong emphasis
and tone. In the same way
Breaking Ranks
has the wrong tone. It is
too full of speculations and revelations of people's motives and of
their greedy push to get ahead, and too comfortable with its discovery
of the benign effects of the worship of success in this country.
Sometimes I feel that Podhoretz has been created by the left. His
almost ritualistic conservatism is a response to the foolishness and
irresponsibility of the left-and presumably is justified by it. The
raison d'etre of Podhoretz's an tiradical polemics would disappear if
left-liberals did not feed him with their illusions about Soviet com–
munism, the Third World, or the P.L.O.
Too bad. But events are so unpredictable that Norman and I
might some day find ourselves on the same side again. Who knows?
Norman may move left, or I may move right. In the meantime, I can
only be saddened by the gap between me and one of the two younger
writers, Steven Marcus and Norman Podhoretz, I have been closest to.
In the past, some of my best pieces were written for
Commentary,
and
actually solicited and encouraged by Norman. And when Norman
had to make a decision years ago whether to become editor of
Commentary
or go into academic life, he told me I was one of the few
who supported his decision to stay at
Commentary.
Many people,
including Lionel Trilling, according to Norman, advised him against
it. Now my feelings are mixed up. I am more sentimental and
nostalgic than I usually admit, and my ideas and principles are
constantly in conflict with my feelings. To complicate things further,
there is a basic contradiction between my commitment to change and
my dread of it. For one who believes in the necessities of history, I
must confess I am psychologically drawn to the stability that exists
only outside of history.
