436
PARTISAN REVIEW
reading the book today, I find it clifEcult to understand what the fuss was
about.
For all that Podhoretz had been warned that
Making It
would create a
scandal, if only because of its pushy way of exposing a "clirty little secret"
(which wasn't one, really) to the effect that he and other Family members
were not ethereal creatures and had ambitions, inclucling material ambi–
tions, like everyone else, he was deeply wounded by the virulence of his
critics. And yet, characteristically, there was never any question of backing
down; he has continued to assert the outrageous idea that success is prefer–
able to failure and self-interest to self-immolation-propositions so
obvious to ordinary people that (to paraphrase a remark he loves to quote
from Orwell) only the intelligentsia could be dumb enough to deny it. Of
course there is Family humor in all this, convoluted in the Yiddish man–
ner, but at bottom Podhoretz is quite serious about it, as he has told us
repeatedly, perhaps most memorably in the article he wrote on the rela–
tions of blacks and Jews after a quarrel with James Baldwin. Other things
being equal, he insists, the best way to clear the air in a society like ours is
to understand and openly declare our self- and group interests. This is not
to reduce the moral law and human motivation to a caricature, or to
exclude a concern for others, but simply to think seriously about these
matters as Podhoretz must have done at the Jewish Theological Seminary
where he studied at night for five years (while simultaneously attending
Columbia by day). "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" said
Rabbi Hillel-the same Hillel who taught that the essence of Torah, the
commandment which included all the commandments, was to deal with
our neighbors as we would be dealt with. The New York intellectuals who
gave Podhoretz such a hard time over
Making It
had (like me) little Torah
and less Talmud. They were the intelligentsia-defined, he liked to say at
that time, as "people who live by, for, and off ideas."
The quotation, he tells us, is from one of many ex-friends who figure
here in suborclinate roles, the sociologist Nathan Glazer, a member of the
brilliant pleiad who worked for Elliot Cohen's
Commentary
in the early
days-inclucling staff members like Clement Greenberg, Robert Warshow,
and Irving Kristol; and contributors like Harold Rosenberg, Hannah
Arendt, Leslie Fiedler, Sidney Hook, Alfred Kazin, Saul Bellow, Isaac
Rosenfeld, Mary McCarthy, and others also destined to playa role in the
culture wars which, having begun in the thirties, would go through phase
after phase in the ensuing decades, now smoldering, now flaring up again,
with new combatants to replace the fallen from year to year, and the battle–
field shifting from New York and Washington to the entire country and
then to the rest of the world. This will help to explain why, although he
lives now in "reclusive dotage," or so he claims, a French publisher recently
