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increasingly concentrating our minds; and then an even more radical move–
ment toward the Right in the following decades. In short, ever since 1967,
Podhoretz has been looking at our intellectual history through the prism
of his career, telling his story and ours with remarkable candor, intensity
and wit-and notoriously letting the chips fall where they may.
At sixty-nine, after thirty-five embattled years, Podhoretz has now
turned
Commentary
over to Neal Kozodoy, whom he chose and trained for
the job-and, apart from worrying about his grandchildren's future in
America and Israel, he has nothing to do presumably but cultivate his gar–
den in East Hampton and write at the top of his bent. In
Ex-Friends,
he is
remembering old passions and discovering new ones on what would
appear to be a predictable trajectory. In seven striking books and hundreds
of magazine pieces his work has achieved density and coherence, become
part of our landscape. In
Ex-Friends,
however, the tone has mellowed-and
this is palpable at the outset, in his account of how the "Family" of his
friends and colleagues in New York has broken up. Without diminishing
the clarity of the prose or diluting the liberal (or neo-) conservatism he
defined so memorably in
Breaking Ranks,
he is striking a new note, look–
ing back more in sorrow than in anger. Even the wretched Allen Ginsberg
at his most coprophiliac ends by bemusing him rather than stirring his
wrath; and, if his mood has changed, even verging on the elegiac at times,
I find it hard to believe that it is merely because so many of his interlocu–
tors, friends and ex-friends alike, are dead or departed from the New York
scene. The heritage of the sixties, so-called, has hardly diminished since he
published his essay on the "adversary culture" in
The Bloody Crossroads
in
1986. But the "present danger" seems less threatening, the si tuation in the
Middle East less catastrophic, if no less deplorable; there are new and dif–
ferent intellectual wars raging, as always, some of them being waged by our
children, but they do not seem to call our very survival into question, as
they used to do; and Norman Podhoretz is too lucid not
to
see that all this
must impart a new direction to his life's work, although the latter contin–
ues to be no more nor less than the
apologia pro vita sua
he has been
constructing since he crossed the river from Brooklyn to Manhattan more
than half a century ago.
The "bloody crossroads" was-in the phrase of his teacher, Lionel
Trilling-"where literature and politics meet." And this continues to be
his turf. But now, for the first time in years, his literary side and his per–
sonal feelings come to the fore, since-if he is ever to fill out and retouch
the picture he has given us thus far-the time must be now, before it is too
late. And this, among other things, is what imparts a new and moving qual–
ity to
Ex-Friends,
which should be read and meditated by anyone, friend or
foe, who cares about the life of the mind in our country.
