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PARTISAN REVIEW
expanded list will surely not please everyone, nor was it meant to. My
point is simply that things have grown too complicated for prophets of
the Adams-Du Bois sort; and that this realization comes with the terri–
tory of our new century.
There was a time, Norman Podhoretz points out in the opening pages
of
Making It
(1967),
when sex was "the dirty little secret" of proper
late-Victorians. The memorable phrase belongs to D. H. Lawrence, and
small wonder that he came to feel it necessary to smash the artificial
walls of social convention if candor were at last to speak. Adams sug–
gests much the same thing when he takes American culture to task for
its puritanical fear of sex and of the force that women represent in the
potent emblem of the Virgin. Nowhere was this conflict between the Self
and Society more pronounced than in the life-choking silence both writ–
ers felt had long surrounded sex. Lawrence's unflinching modernism
was a recipe for what he regarded as a healthy sexual liberation.
In
1967,
the year
Making It
was published, Podhoretz used the book
to
admit, or confess, that "success" was the dirty little secret of his day:
on the face of it, nothing seems simpler than the notion that it would be
better
to
be a success than a failure and better to be rich than to be poor.
But at one time in the America of the last century, if you happened (or
aspired)
to
be an intellectual or a writer, living above the poverty line
was a sure-fire mark of the philistine, and too much success placed you
squarely in the camp of the bourgeoisie.
Today most writers, with certain notable exceptions (one thinks of
reclusives such as
J.
D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon), grit their teeth
and develop good manners when on a book tour, and most intellectu–
als are only too happy
to
chat about ideas on
Nightline
or
The Charlie
Rose Show.
No doubt those who shake their heads at such behavior
still regard SUCCESS as the "bitch goddess" William James thought it
was, but they are in a tiny minority, one usually dismissed as green with
jealousy.
Success, in short, is no longer the dirty little secret that Podhoretz
once set out to expose. The question, then, is this: Is there another dirty
little secret for our time? When a student put this poser before me-and
smack in the middle of a class on
Making It-I
was rather taken aback.
My first inclination (which I kept to myself as I pleaded for a professo–
rial "extension") was to say "no"-because we are so awash in tell-all
confessions, between hard covers and on daytime television, that I have
a difficult time imagining if anything, anything at all, could now be con–
sidered "tasteless." Indeed, tastelessness threatens to become our taste.
Henry David Thoreau once argued that the mass of people live "lives of
