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PARTISAN REVIEW
Crossroads
fifteen years ago, which included his brilliant studies of Camus,
Orwell, Leavis and Henry Adams.
Not that, for the author of these studies, literary criticism has ever
meant or could ever mean anything reminiscent of the New Criticism, or
any other form of textual analysis excluding or scanting the social, moral,
or poli tical factors which form the living magma-so Podhoretz has always
insisted-out of which literature and art are fashioned. This was the all–
but-unanimous view of what he calls the Family of New York intellectuals
among whom he found his earliest mentors and models-during his years
of apprenticeship with the gentle Lionel Trilling at Columbia and the
ferocious
F.
R. Leavis at Cambridge, and ever since. The Family, as it
emerged from the Great Depression, was famously modernist in the arts
and radical (meaning Marxist, albeit increasingly anti-Communist) in pol–
itics-a combination which immediately appealed to the young
Podhoretz. He was very poor, very bright, and very Jewish; and the litera–
ture he loved not only for its own sake but also because it promised to take
him so far was necessarily something more than a canon, a collection of
great texts-it was a social activity, and therefore a public discourse. It
would always involve conversation, not to say argument, and it would
engage him so totally that there could never be any question of reducing
it to aesthetic analysis or even (in the broader French conception) to
expli–
cation. de texte.
In this view of life and letters there would be nuances and variations,
some of them important, but the effect of it for Norman Podhoretz was
that the former has tended to eat up the latter. He has lived perforce
through "interesting times," and his political passions have tended to
monopolize his attention, so that his Work rarely shows him at work on
contemporary literature or among the monuments of the past through
which our lives are contemplated, savored and-excuse the expression–
ennobled. And this is why I find this little book so entrancing. He is
speaking as an insider, exercising his wit, dishing out gossip not only about
the people listed in his subtitle but also about Jackie Kennedy, Ronald
Reagan, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, William Phillips, Philip
Rahv, and too many others to mention here; and all the while he is find–
ing his way back to an earlier time, when he dreamed of becoming a
distinguished writer and "making it," which required first that he assimi–
late the great books of our language and literature, and those of other dead
white European males as well, and then learn the ways and gain the esteem
of those glamorous people in Manhattan. The latter were mostly Jews of
Eastern European origin like himself, but-unlike himself-as disaffected
wi th the Jewi sh communi ty and its heri tage as they were wi th the America
of the depression; and of course there was a considerable sprinkling of
