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WASPs and other non-Jews among them, e.g., Murray Kempton, who was
the first to designate them as a "Family." They were poets, artists and intel–
lectuals, former Communists, Trotskyists, once and future radicals,
descendants or holdovers from Greenwich Village who sometimes indeed
behaved like the talented, aggrieved, and self-regarding members of a
quarrelsome family; but their quarrels were about literature, art, and ideas,
and this passion was the one thing they had in common.
It
made them a
rather exotic group at that time-"alienated," they liked to say, even
though America was unique among the nations for having been original–
ly founded on ideas. But since the business of our country was supposed
to be business, not ideas, the New York intelligentsia-the very word was
borrowed from Eastern Europe-seemed to be pretty much off in left
field, as they say in Brooklyn.
By him, as Podhoretz's parents and mine might have put it, they were
not off in left field. In fact, they were at the top of the lineup. All his life
he has had an uncanny knack for reading where the country was headed.
So, having won a scholarshi p to Col umbia and another to Cambridge, then
done his military service with our occupation forces in Germany, and had
a brief look around Europe, he was not surprised when he got back to
New York to find that the Family, which had been grouped largely around
Partisan Review, Commentary,
and two or three other "little" magazines, was
already pushing outward into the wider culture. World War 11 had left our
country in a new situation, with new responsibilities; and its business could
no longer simply be business. This meant that the arguments of the New
York intellectuals were no longer so remote from the concerns of ordinary
Americans, and that the channels of communication-the media, the pub–
lishing houses , the universities-would be open to them as never before.
So it was for Podhoretz until he wrote his first memoir, about his
Brooklyn boyhood and how he had joined the Family with undeniable
brio
and effect, publishing a first book of essays, reviewing books for
The New
Yorker
and other prestigious magazines, and editing an increasingly influ–
ential magazine-only to discover, when
Making It
appeared in 1967, that
many if not most members of the Family took the dimmest possible view
of his allegedly "vulgar" pursuit of fame and fortune.
This was a shock; and Norman Podhoretz has never quite gotten over
it. Among other things it led eventually to the end of his friendship with
Mailer, which had been close and important to them both. It led to a break
with Jackie Kennedy, of all people, and a change of publishers, since the
original one refused to bring the book out even though he had provided
an advance for it. It cast a shadow over his relations with Trilling, who had
warned that it would take years to live this thing down; and with
Partisan
Review,
which published Mailer's attack. In short, a shambles-although
