The Commentary Man
As quarrelsome as they were prolific, as brittle as they were brilliant, the circle known as New York Intellectuals of the mid–20th century has enjoyed a disproportionate number of historical studies. First came the paeans, then the attacks, and more recently the full–scale treatments of stellar individuals from their ranks: Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Richard Hofstadter.
The newest member of the so-called “family” to rate a biography is Norman Podhoretz, the hyper–confident former editor of Commentary, who in the 1960s and 1970s made the American Jewish Committee’s once thoughtfully provocative periodical into a must-read for an emergent cadre of political cognoscenti sharply critical of the established order. Podhoretz’s significance to recent history is indisputable. With the exception of William F. Buckley, no intellectual journalist on the right mattered more over the last half century. No writer better embodied the midlife conversion to conservatism of a notable minority of American Jews. No editor better gave voice to the scathing critiques of liberal thinking about race, sex and culture that emerged from the 1960s.
Norman Podhoretz: A Biography by Thomas L. Jeffers, a professor of English at Marquette University, will surely please its subject. Based on new interviews and extensive research in Podhoretz’s correspondence, it’s a strident defense of the ever–embattled Podhoretz—its perspective so tightly aligned with its subject that it fatally undermines Jeffers’ reliability as a guide. Unfortunately, Jeffers seems not to appreciate that Podhoretz, a master of defending the maneuvers that have marked his own ambitious career—he has written four memoirs of his own—needs no apologias on his behalf from anyone else.
Indeed, the elder icon of neoconservatism is probably better served by another new biography, Running Commentary, a sharply critical but fair-minded history of the magazine by Benjamin Balint, a former editor there, which is breezier and less deeply researched than Jeffers’ book yet far more intellectually shrewd and tonally astute. In recounting the relationship between Podhoretz and Hannah Arendt, for example, Balint deftly moves, in just a few pages, from dryly describing a “mash note” that the young Podhoretz wrote to Arendt in 1958 to smartly pinpointing the mix of personal and principled motives that led to their falling out, following Podhoretz’s evisceration of Eichmann in Jerusalem in the pages of Commentary. For Balint, Podhoretz’s evolution from Vietnam War opponent and supporter of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign to Medal of Freedom winner under George W. Bush is a tale fraught with ironies. For Jeffers, it is merely a story of enlightenment.
Although much of Podhoretz’s life story will be familiar to readers of either his memoirs or the stacks of group biographies, these two books are valuable because they definitively establish Podhoretz’s place as one of the most intriguing figures of both the New York intellectual cohort and its neoconservative offshoot. Indeed, as one of the few men to figure centrally in the histories of both groups, Podhoretz merits attention for his journey from one milieu to the other—his ideological passage from left to right (an oft–told story) but also, just as interestingly, the evolution from a literary life to a political one.
Among the intellectual foot soldiers of the Reagan Revolution, Podhoretz always stood out from the pack with his erudition and his deftness of prose. That may be because he began his adulthood as a student of literature, a protégé of Lionel Trilling at Columbia and F.R. Leavis at Cambridge. His apprenticeship in journalism came at a time that starred Commentary’s influential, literary–minded art critic, Clement Greenberg, and Robert Warshow, the magazine’s powerful and insightful managing editor whose premature passing in 1955 was widely mourned. Podhoretz’s earliest feuds, too, were literary in nature—with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow and others.
While still in his twenties, Podhoretz earned a place in the New Yorker’s reviewers’ stable. At 30 he was named Commentary editor. From that perch he turned Paul Goodman and Norman O. Brown into countercultural gurus of the revolutionary self–awareness epoch while hanging out with James Baldwin and Norman Mailer. Observing his former student’s new associates, Trilling wryly hailed the Norman Invasion.
For all his literary inclinations, though, Podhoretz could never suppress an urgent concern with politics. Even at Cambridge, he devoted his thesis to the politics of Benjamin Disraeli’s fiction. Feeling perpetually besieged, he seemed always to need to rise to the defense of some set of values that were ?under threat. A controversial essay on the Beats, for example, faulted them for celebrating a primitivism that recalled the century’s uglier anti–liberal ideologies. A trenchant critique that zeroes in on Kerouac’s fatal flaw—the misplaced belief that creativity and insight were to be found in raw experience and not in dedicated study—the essay is nonetheless frustrating for its equally single-minded indifference to the author’s aesthetic virtues. If culture enriched Podhoretz’s understanding of politics, it seemed, politics too often flattened his appreciation of culture.
His other newsworthy essays from this early phase likewise showed him simultaneously at his best and his worst. His 1963 essay, “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” and his memoir, Making It (1967), daringly traded upon shameful personal admissions—the one about Podhoretz’s own racial prejudices, the other about his lust for fame—to highlight uncomfortable truths about the white liberal intelligentsia. Yet this work, like the essay on the Beats, fell short because it sprang not, as might be supposed, from some special reservoir of self-awareness or humility that Podhoretz possessed but, unfortunately, from a dearth of those qualities. Podhoretz didn’t seem to grasp that his attention-getting truth-telling, however brave—and however effective as a literary move—didn’t absolve him of the shortcomings to which he mischievously confessed.
Given to provocation, and possessing both an instinct for the jugular and a thin skin, Podhoretz soon fell out with many “family” members. (Ex-Friends is the title of one memoir.) Exacerbating these sundry feuds were widening political differences between him and his erstwhile peers, most of whom continued to tilt leftward. (Another memoir is Breaking Ranks.) The faithful Jeffers attempts to breathe new life into many of Podhoretz’s old attacks on his personal or ideological enemies. Unfortunately, however, Podhoretz’s stylistic deftness eludes Jeffers, and his barbs—such as calling the late feminist congresswoman Bella Abzug a “Stalinoid leftist”—land with a thud, not a chuckle.
The events that drove Podhoretz rightward are well–known: the rise of race-consciousness and identity politics within liberal circles; liberals’ growing preference for negotiation over escalation as a way to end the cold war; the left’s mounting hostility toward the state of Israel. To these external factors, Jeffers adds a personal “epiphany” that Podhoretz had in 1970. After wrestling with a drinking problem and writer’s block at the Yaddo writers’ colony, Jeffers writes, he experienced a vision on a hill that led him to embrace his Judaism more robustly.
Curiously, though, this epiphany wasn’t a clean break with the left so much as one of many steps along a road that turned sharply right. Podhoretz actually clung to aspects of his liberalism into the 1970s. Only in the 1980s did Podhoretz abandon any pretense of being on the left, taking up residence with the bloc of the Republican right that favored a militarily aggressive American global posture unflagging in support of its values. He supported Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and New York mayor and presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani.
In his later decades, Podhoretz focused ever more narrowly on a small cluster of issues dearest to his heart: foreign policy, the Jewish people and Israel. These issues were always prominent in the news and frequently interconnected—first during the cold war’s waning years and again amid America’s battles against fundamentalist Islamism. Ever vigilant about threats to the Jews and to Western values in general, Podhoretz still wrote cutting prose, and at times—as when he took on Gore Vidal or Pat Buchanan for their anti-Semitism—his pugnacity could make even liberals cheer. But as time passed his essays took on a rote quality, as he wearily outlined yet again the reasons—which, alas, bore repeating—why the world’s ostracism of Israel violated basic liberal principles. His diminishing forays into literature, meanwhile, typically evaluated authors on their anti–communist or pro–American credentials: Was it good for the team?
At the end of his biography, Jeffers quotes Podhoretz on his regrets for “the price I’ve had to pay to do the things I felt I had to do.” His readers, whether friendly or hostile, might well express a similar disappointment. By forsaking a broad intellectual life in favor of a narrow political mission, Podhoretz diminished much of the remaining interest in his own ideas beyond a certain political circle. In so doing, he deprived himself—and the wider world of American letters—of a talent that might have flowered in exciting and unpredictable ways.
David Greenberg is a professor of history at Rutgers University and the author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image, among other books.
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