H.J. KAPLAN
437
quizzed me earnestly about his
position
with respect to our current distem–
pers in Washington. Like Raymond Aron, he has been-from the Cold War
through Vietnam and civil rights to Bill Clinton's sex life-a
spectateur engage
of our foreign and domestic problems; and these have preoccupied people
everywhere, not merely because of our sheer bulk and power as a nation
but also because they involved ideas articulated by the friends and ex–
friends of Norman Podhoretz.
* * *
Remarks are not literature, as Gertrude Stein remarked to Ernest
Hemingway; but this book with its beautifully textured prose is so
enlivened by great
obiter dicta-instant
portraits, vignettes, jokes, insights
into the way the world works, the sort of stuff a reviewer knows he will
never have room for but jots down in his reading notes anyway because it
is so striking, sharp, funny, or wise-that one is reminded that our oracu–
lar Gertrude often talked through her hat. Literature is not only poetry and
fiction, or some other as yet uninvented form of art, as she and her coterie
might have wished. It is also (for example) Montaigne. My father's house
has many mansions.
I was in Vietnam when
Making It
was published, and never caught up
with the uproar it provoked until it was out of print. In any event, the scan–
dal seemed attributable to Family inhibi tions and dissensions rather than to
the book itself. By the time I was back reading
Commentary
again, it had
ceased, as far as I can recall, to evince a culpable infatuation wi th the
"Movement." But how could Norman Podhoretz, without even the
excuse of a love affair, have maintained so close and affectionate relation–
ship with Lillian Hellman that he blinked at her Stalinism, her
prevarications, her anti-Semitism and her Amerika-phobia-even going to
the point of pretending to admire her writing and, worse, making a gener–
al principle of it? "It is a truth universally acknowledged in the literary
world that the only way to remain on good terms with a writer whose
work one does not admire is to pretend to admire it." So he tells us in
Ex–
Friends;
a joke, alas, from which he hastens to distance himself-but the
damage is done. All this makes me groan, and so does the news that he
once took Staughton Lynd's views on the Cold War seriously and played a
key role (with the help of ex-friend Jason Epstein) in foisting the loopy
pedagogy of Paul Goodman and the "polymorphous perversi
ty"
of
Norman
0.
Brown on the children of our country, including mine.
So it is only now, thanks
to
Ex-Friends,
that I realize that we too would
surely have come to a parting of the ways (perish the thought!) were it not
for the fact that we lived so far from each other and were in different lines
