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PARTISAN REVIEW
The story has been told so many times: at least the gist of it
should be familiar by now.
It
starts in the thirties with the begin–
nings of
Partisan Review,
goes through the achievements and changing
fortunes of the literary and intellectual community - baptized by
Norman Podhoretz as the "family" - and ends up with its dispersal
and the emergence of the neoconservatives. The story involves per–
sonal relations, political arguments, literary ideas - woven into the
larger social fabric of the period. Bloom drapes his narrative around
two main themes: on the one hand, the immigrant origin and Jewish–
ness of most of the
Partisan Review
pioneers, on the other hand, the
drive to "make it" and to adapt to the demands of American society
by the extended "family." With these irresistible forces, Bloom is able
to mount a full-blown scenario into which every twist and turn, per–
sonal as well as political, fits as neatly as in a Dorothy Sayers
mystery. This pattern makes it seem as though we were psychologi–
cally predestined to become radicals in our youth, to have a brief
fling with the communists, to break with them when they became too
constricting, and then gradually to become more and more conser–
vative as we made our mark and began to live off the fat of the land
- and all to a large extent because of being Jewish. A tidy scheme,
and one, it must be admitted, that is made plausible by the popular
myth of the genealogy of success and its irresistible temptations to
"sell out." To be sure, this summary of Bloom's themes makes them
sound more schematic than they appear in his book, which does in–
clude many other factors. But essentially this is the
politicus ex machina
of the material rise and moral fall of the New York intellectuals, of
whom I happened to have been a charter member.
This is not meant as a put-down of the book. For Bloom has at–
tempted a conscientious job of excavation of an admittedly complex
subject, buried in the underground where individual idiosyncrasies
and talents are tangled up with politics and intellectual history.
Much of the book has valuable information; a good deal of it seems
right to me. He has also tried, if not always, at least some of the
time, to be reasonable and balanced. He has, for example, with only
a few notable exceptions, been quite fair, and often generous, in his
portrait of me. But his bias does show through, in his choice of lan–
guage, where, as in Freudian slips, his true feelings are revealed,
and in his characterization of views that do not fit into his political
scheme.
Bloom's bias, so far as I can make out, has a lib-left tinge,
bordering on anti-anticommunism, according to which the Soviet
