“We had an intellectually coherent thing. The American people knew
what the rules were and then we did whatever.” The year was 1993,
and a newly installed William Jefferson Clinton was unburdening
himself to The Washington Post about the difficulties of
fashioning a coherent foreign policy in a post-Berlin Wall world.
Clinton joked that he “missed the Cold War” because of the easy
distinction between good and evil that had made things easier for
his predecessors.
The Norman Podhoretz Reader,[1]
a generous selection of
writings from the distinguished critic and
editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, reminds us that the distinctions
so wistfully longed for by Mr. Clinton were in their own day not
made as easily as he remembers. Nor did it start with Vietnam.
Podhoretz recounts the happiness Mary McCarthy said
she felt when “she suddenly realized one day that she cared about
the outcome of the war, that she wanted the United States to
win”—the point surely being that there were those who never did
come around to that realization. Picking up on this note,
Podhoretz cites a symposium in Partisan Review a few years
later called “Our Country and Our Culture,” whose most radical
aspect was the reference to America as “our” country.
In some senses this is the undercurrent that runs through the
entire Reader: That the fundamental distinctions that ought to
have been easy (and which were easy to ordinary Americans)
nonetheless eluded many members of the class whose lives were
spent thinking about them. Though Podhoretz does not address Bill
Clinton’s self-serving nostalgia for the Cold War, as one
who served on the front lines he would surely see in Mr. Clinton
confirmation of all his misgivings: How a leader who took such
self-conscious inspiration from having been asked to bear any
burden would ultimately end up persuading himself that no burden
in history had ever been quite so large
as his.
“One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from
Brooklyn to Manhattan.” With this line Podhoretz begins Making
It (1967), the first of a trilogy of works chronicling his ascent to,
dissent with, and life apart from the New York intellectual
community. The piece is included here, along with segments from
Breaking Ranks (1979) and Ex-Friends (1999). Yet though these works are all
filtered through an overtly first-person prism, none are, at
least in the ordinary sense, memoirs or autobiographies.
Something similar can be said of all of Podhoretz’s essays, which
tend to feature their author without shading into autobiography.
Which makes definition something of a challenge. In a brief
introduction to the Reader, the British historian Paul Johnson
sets Podhoretz against the backdrop of the postwar New York
intellectual, hailing him as “both the archetype and sui generis.”
The archetype: Brooklyn-born, Jewish, educated in New York public
schools in their heyday, following on to Columbia College, with
aspirations to literary criticism and a career that was
spent writing for small but influential magazines.
But Podhoretz was original for reasons both intellectual and
personal. In terms of profession, as Johnson notes, unlike
contemporaries who were more easily pigeon-holed by
profession—Lionel Trilling (professor); Mary McCarthy or Norman
Mailer (novelist); Allen Ginsberg (poet); Daniel Patrick Moynihan
(professor turned politician); Jacques Barzun (historian),
etc.—Podhoretz is a polymath, a writing editor whose pen has
engaged everything from the fate of the novel to the Old
Testament Prophets. Yet with regard to his work, what set
Podhoretz apart relatively early on was not just his catholic
interests but also a style that he has elsewhere described as
“auto case-history.” It is not a felicitous wording, and he has
yet to find anything better, but it gets to his insistence on
measuring abstract ideas against the yardstick of personal
experience.
This dichotomy between comfortable liberal abstractions and lived
realities appears early on. In “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” an
early essay that gained him some notoriety, he gets right into it
by noting the dichotomy between the world presented to him in
print and film and the world he knew from Brownsville:
[F]or a long time I was puzzled to think that Jews were supposed
to be rich when the only Jews I knew were poor, and that Negroes
were supposed to be persecuted when it was the Negroes who were
doing the only persecuting I knew about—and doing it, moreover,
to me.
As he goes on to explain, in the world in which he grew up it
“was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes,
not the other way around.” Never mind that the proscription he
offered at the end—intermarriage—was, as he soon admitted, no
solution at all. The defining characteristic of this essay was an
unwillingness to look the other way at uncomfortable facts, even
about himself. It also helps explain why, when his ideas changed,
so did his friends.
Johnson tweaks him gently here, attributing the tumult created
by these splits an American (and continental) intellectual
environment that “plays for keeps.” He
contrasts this with the
arrangement that prevails in his native Britain, where, he says,
his own noisy departure from the Labor Party in the 1970s “did
not sever a single old friendship.” Sir Isaiah Berlin makes a
related point when Podhoretz asks how he squared his Zionism with
his continued appearance in a publication (The New York Review
of Books) that regularly published enemies of Israel such as
Noam Chomsky and I. F. Stone. Berlin’s responded with a witticism.
“I see,” he responded. “You are accusing
me of being a
fellow-traveler of a fellow-traveler.”
No doubt some of this has to do with Cardinal Newman’s definition
of Toryism as loyalty to persons over ideology, a disposition
that surely has its pluses for civilized discourse. Yet it
invites the question whether even a virtue may at some point
become a vice. In Sir Isaiah’s case, it is to suggest that this point
may have been reached when, after Guy Burgess had revealed
himself to be a Soviet agent, Berlin nonetheless pressed a
journalist who would be visiting Moscow to convey “his warmest
love” to Burgess and assure him that his former acquaintances
back in England were shunning another intellectual whose crime
really did put him behind the pale: a tabloid exposé of Burgess’s
libertinism.
It may be intellectual conceit itself to profess to detect in
this Reader any kind of consistency in essays that span a half
century and range on topics from Saul Bellow and Simone de Beauvoir
to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the resurrection of faith
in an age of science. That many were written at times when
Podhoretz’s social, political, and cultural sympathies were strongly
at odds with what they are today adds a further complication. And
yet I find three strong threads. The first is a concern for what
we mean by America. The second is what we mean (or, equally
often, what others mean) by being a Jew. And the third is what
human nature has to tell us about both these things.
The first has its origins in the alienation with American life in
that defined literary orthodoxy in Podhoretz’s formative years, from Ezra
Pound on the right to Edmund Wilson on the left. A half-century
later the interest culminated in a book celebrating his
“love affair” with America. Likewise the concern for all things
Jewish accounts not only for his spirited defense of the state of
Israel but also a study of the Prophets.
Overall, though, it is the obsession with the nature of things that runs through this
Reader like a golden thread. While acknowledging, for example, the
brilliance of Hannah Arendt’s argument for Nazi ordinariness in
Eichman in Jerusalem, he writes that it “violates the Nature of
Man, and therefore the Nature of Totalitarianism must go hang.”
On the very next page he again locates the seeds of ideological
confusions in competing views of “human nature,” with
totalitarianism substituting “for the naïve liberal idea of the
infinite perfectibility of man the equally naïve idea of
the infinite malleability of man.” In the selection from
Breaking Ranks, he advises his son that “there can be no more
radical refusal of self-acceptance than the repudiation of one’s
own biological nature,” and declares that it is “this
identification of sterility with vitality [that] links the new
narcissism of the Me Decade to Women’s Lib and the gay-rights
movement, and it was links of them to the radicalism of the
sixties.”
In the very last essay, on the failure of science to abolish
religion, he suggests again that there exists a nature whose
fullness cannot be captured by the microscope. He even quotes
F. R. Leavis—his great mentor at Cambridge—as saying this held
true for art as well, citing “loyalty to the dictates of [the
work’s] own nature” as the precondition for a great work of art.
Professor Thomas J. Jeffers, who has helped assemble the Reader,
includes an introduction to each section, which is marked by
decades. In the lead-in to the 1970s, Jeffers cites Podhoretz’s
overriding belief that “there exists an unchanging nature of
things to which we are best off submitting” and that most of the
misery of the last fifty years has been the rebellion of our
thinking classes from it.
Podhoretz
is disinclined to indulge in the cheap despair of those who
see globalization as
“a metastasizing plague.” When his grandson in
Israel proudly informs him of the arrival of a (non-kosher)
McDonald’s in the Promised Land, Podhoretz suggests that what
McDonald’s really symbolizes is the “universality of human
nature.” And it is not just human nature that absorbs him. It is
impossible to appreciate Podhoretz’s treatment of either the
Mideast conflict or the Cold War without comprehending, as he
insists in his essay on Kissinger, that the fatal flaw of
ignoring ideology is that “in any negotiation between a party
with limited aims and a party with unlimited aims, the party with
limited aims is bound to lose in the very nature of things.”
Which is why the détente that was sold on the basis of
restraining the Soviet Union ended up restraining only Washington
instead of Moscow.
No doubt it was this Brownsville rootedness that accounts for the
lack of attraction Communism held for him even at his most green
and idealistic. In his own description, having started out a Cold
War liberal along the lines of Lionel Trilling, he soon moved
sharply to Trilling’s left and ultimately ended up on Trilling’s
right. That flirtation with the New Left is alluded to here and
there with profound regret, and there is nothing that leads me
not to believe him. But from the earliest there is a whiff of the
apostate in Podhoretz’s early liberalism, whether it be his
suspicion of the dangerous primitivism celebrated by the Beats,
his concerns with black criminality, or his insistence that the
novel had to deal with reality as it was and not as novelists
would have it.
From this remove, Podhoretz’s embrace of the New Left at the
stage in his life when he assumed the editorship of Commentary
strikes me more as the holding of the conventional
wisdom of the crowd in which he ran, rather like someone who has
grown up in a church and learned his catechism without ever
really subjecting it to hard questioning. No doubt there are
things that he wrote that would mortify him today, but his real
regrets appear to have more to do with his role in publishing and
promoting writers such as Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, and James
Baldwin. In terms of his thinking, however, even in his most
leftist phases he does not come across as a true believer. And
the disgust he feels for the debilitating effects of the
counterculture seem more pronounced when the subject is
literature than politics.
Many of the same complications hold true for neoconservatism, a
movement in which he enjoys Founding Father status but which has
never been sufficiently defined in positive terms. Negative
definitions abound, from those on the right who see it as a
Trojan Horse for liberalism to those on the left who see it as a
conservatism with a friendlier face (not to mention those who use
it as a crude euphemism for “Jewish”). Positive definitions have
been more difficult to supply,
and not only because
neoconservatism is probably most frequently deployed as a
pejorative. In its actual manifestations, it has not really been
a creed along the lines of the cultural conservatism of the
Russell Kirks, the libertarian consistency of a Hayek, or even
the fusionism of a William F. Buckley, Jr. To my mind, the
Reader confirms that neoconservatism is more a disposition that
divided those on the left who adjusted their theories to
reality from those who did
vice versa.
Ultimately it proved a critical disposition for the future of
America, because it manifested itself at a critical juncture in
international relations. Probably neoconservatism didn’t have
much to do with Reagan’s own beliefs—this was a man, after all,
who read National
Review, could quote Milton Friedman, and
had given a speech for Goldwater back when Podhoretz was
still shucking off his New Left credentials—but in its arguments
neoconservatism did help Reagan soften the harder edges of
Goldwaterism. To call it narrow because its interests and
passions were so peculiarly New York is to miss the point. What
the Podhoretz-led movement did was to open the war Reagan was
fighting on a much broader front and in so doing lay claim to
territory that had more or less been permanently conceded to the
Left.
Those coming to Podhoretz for the first time—and even those more
familiar with his later years—might be surprised to see how much
of the Reader is devoted to literature. They are in for a pleasant
surprise. But this is not such a discontinuity as might first
appear. Early on Podhoretz had impressed on him that
“radicals who seek as earnestly to transform themselves as to
transform society have generally been hostile to literature.”
Which may be the key to understanding how the Columbia-educated son
of a Brownsville milkman started out his career worried about
the integrity of the modern novel and ended up realizing this was but
one front in a much wider war.
William McGurn
is the chief editorial writer
for The Wall Street Journal.
