Ex-Friends is volume three, so to speak, of Norman Podhoretz’s voyage through and out of the world of the New York intellectuals—or “the Family,” as he prefers to call them.[1] Podhoretz did not realize that he was on the road to apostasy when his 1968 memoir, Making It, fomented so much controversy. What caused so much fuss? Well, the book revealed a young man’s ambition, his lust for power, his straining ego —the stuff of novels, not of a serious intellectual who should be concerned not with his position but with principles and ideas. Podhoretz put his personality forward, fusing it with the campaign for literary success shared by a whole generation of writers.

But wasn’t 1968 rather late in the day to be outraged by a New York critic’s confessions? What dirty secrets did he reveal? The greatest poets of the day, starting with Robert Lowell and his Life Studies (1959), were adopting the autobiographical approach. And Norman Mailer had paved the way for literary self-revelation and aggrandizement with Advertisements for Myself (1959). Certainly these forays into the confessional had their critics, but for the more advanced literati (nearly all of them on the Left) Making It could hardly have come as a shock—except it did.

The mystery deepens. Podhoretz showed an advance copy of Making It to Mailer, a friend, who praised it highly. Of course, Podhoretz meant to be provocative. His conception of the intellectual required a style that roiled readers. But the realization that his book could be regarded as shameful or as demeaning to the literary/intellectual world that nurtured him proved quite a blow, as he watched allies like Mailer—who withdrew his endorsement—back away from the book.

Podhoretz chronicled his disenchantment with the Family in volume two of his voyage, Breaking Ranks (1979), another brave book that exposed the bankruptcy of the Left and its literary and political projects. He attacked the hypocrisy and hegemony of a group which deplored American power even as its members jockeyed for position, their hostility to Podhoretz a product not merely of his shift to the Right but of his all-too-knowing rejection of their values. If their animosity towards him seems out of proportion it is because as a member of the Family, coming under its protection and encouragement, contributing to its health and influence, turning on it made Podhoretz, in the Family’s view, an ingrate and an apostate.

The target had to be Podhoretz, not Mailer, for example, who, because of his quirky politics, never fit neatly into the Family anyway. Mailer could be shunned when necessary but never really ostracized, for he occupied several positions at once: he was, as he called himself, a “left-conservative.” Depending on Mailer’s mood and the intellectual fashion of the day, he could be seated just about anywhere. Not so Norman Podhoretz. He took positions and did not waffle. He could change his mind, of course, if persuaded by an argument better than his own. Thus Hannah Arendt invited him to her apartment and spent over five hours trying to get him to withdraw his criticism of her famous argument about Eichman and the “banality of evil.”

Even more curious is the crusade by Allen Ginsberg, not a true member of the Family, to convince Podhoretz of the beauties of the Beats. The two had been first connected as students at Columbia. As editor of The Columbia Review, Ginsberg had printed one of Podhoretz’s poems. But the critic had never warmed up to what he considered the “know-nothing,” anti-intellectual Beats. Ginsberg invited Podhoretz to a consciousness raising session with Jack Kerouac, but the treatment simply did not take. The Ginsberg chapter in Ex-Friends is worth quoting from because it stunningly documents both Podhoretz’s argument that the Family never forgave him, and his contention that it also never stopped trying to reclaim their bad boy. Here is Ginsberg in an interview from 1987, simultaneously condemning and courting Podhoretz:  

So then … Norman realized that … he wasn’t [a poet]. So he had to go some different way for power, and he got very perverse thoughts and started taking revenge on poetry power… . Gee, good old Norman, we went to college together… . And why hate him? He’s part of my world … But did I ever really hate him or was I just sort of fascinated by him? … In fact, he’s more honest than I am because he attacks me openly. So I should really respect him as one of the sacred personae in the drama of my own transitory experience.

The words practically leap off the page: “So he had to go some different way for power.” In the same interview, Ginsberg called Podhoretz his opposite—but in a very special sense: the dirty secret that Podhoretz began to reveal in Making It was just how much Leftist intellectuals cared about power, power per se. Ginsberg accused Podhoretz of grasping for the very thing he too wanted, and it took Ginsberg decades to admit—albeit in a roundabout way—that what revolted him about his old friend was Podhoretz’s very public pronouncements about the necessity, even the desirability, of power. And then what really clinched matters was Podhoretz’s support for Ronald Reagan, who was unembarrassed by the need to exercise American might. Because the American Left—literary and otherwise —never candidly confronted the nature and uses of power, Podhoretz felt he had no choice but to move toward the Right. Of course, conservatives did not always use power wisely but at least they were not ashamed about our democracy’s need for an arsenal. How could Podhoretz remain friends with literary power brokers who acted as though only those outside their realm were concerned about power?

As a student at Columbia, shepherded by the fastidious Lionel Trilling, a literary critic possessed of the most measured cadences, the young Podhoretz was startled by his mentor’s question: What kind of power was he after? Podhoretz remembers piously replying that he “had no interest in power at all.” Trilling scoffed: “Don’t be silly, everyone wants power. The only question is what kind. What kind do you want?” This is the crux for Podhoretz: “Making It was an extended answer to that question which at the same time explored the reasons the whole issue had become the same kind of ‘dirty little secret’ that sex had been to the Victorians.” Trilling taught Podhoretz that both ambition and honesty were admirable values. A faithful student, Podhoretz, more than any other disciple, took his master’s teaching to heart.

Podhoretz does not write as a self-pitying victim or as a moral exemplar pronouncing anathema on his former friends. He regrets, rather, that they were not more open about their motivations; he is amazed when one of them, Allen Ginsberg, indulges in moments of candor. What saddens Podhoretz is that the Left did not strengthen the elements within itself that fought against Stalinism and fellow traveling. Vietnam, in Podhoretz’s view, is an especially sad episode in the history of the Left because the Family adopted a view that promoted moral equivalency between America and the Soviet Union—and worse—and attacked the U.S. for perpetrating some special kind of evil.

Ronald Reagan, Podhoretz points out, not only started out on the Left, he also served as a union president who battled Communists firsthand, experiencing real-world encounters that many intellectuals on the Left could never have. Reagan could sound simplistic, Podhoretz readily admits, but he had a grasp of power and of institutions that members of the Family and of the Left sorely lacked. He compares Reagan to Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign secretary and former union leader. In 1945, Bevin was asked about his trip to Potsdam to negotiate with Stalin. Had it been difficult? “No,” Bevin answered, “I know those Russians; they’re just like the Communists.” Reagan, responding to a concern that perhaps he trusted Gorbachev too much, said: “Oh, don’t worry about that. I still have the scars on my back that I got fighting the Communists back in Hollywood.”

Podhoretz still has his own scars, of course, and he cannot find it in himself to be as affable as the truly remarkable Ronald Reagan. Yet he has good things to say about his ex-friends, many of whom he still holds in tender regard. The relationship was never easy with Ginsberg, yet Podhoretz speaks well of some of his early work and of his great facility as a poet. Lionel Trilling remains a revered figure, and even the tetchy Diana Trilling gets grudging respect for her often passionate involvement with Podhoretz’s early career.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the book is Lillian Hellman. She is an unlikely object of affection. When Podhoretz first met her at the Trillings’, he knew she was a Stalinist and wondered why she was there. The Trillings had defended Whittaker Chambers, and, in addition, Hellman was precisely the kind of middlebrow playwright the Family scorned. But Hellman was a charmer and a master manipulator. She understood all about power. She could fill a room with her sexy, flirtatious personality. She had approached Lionel and Diana, wanting to know them better, implying they should make amends for the political differences that kept them apart. (I know from interviewing Diana Trilling that Hellman bowled her over, that she seemed, at first, exactly the kind of big personality that Diana had been searching for all her life.)

With Podhoretz, timing was everything. Hellman’s overtures to those on the anti-Stalinist Left came just as Khrushchev was attacking Stalin, when it seemed that perhaps Communism could reform itself from within. Perhaps there could be a new Lillian Hellman, too, and she could rewrite history in a series of memoirs largely skirting her own sorry political record until, that is, the publication of her third volume of memoirs, Scoundrel Time (1976), when Hellman’s overweening pride and sense of power overrode her tactical sense. She attacked the Trillings and Partisan Review (bastion of the Family) for not fighting McCarthyism or defending those like herself who found themselves testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Although Podhoretz says he was never taken in by her memoirs, which he deemed written in a degraded Hemingwayese, he certainly fell for Hellman’s charm and admits that he still misses his “playmate.”

For all his criticism of the Family, Podhoretz has written an elegy for its demise. He deplores the current state of the intellectual world, which is dominated by careerist academics mouthing execrable jargon. The Family, however, was a vibrant community of intellectuals who honed their skills by speaking to a literate but general audience. They promoted as many bad ideas as good ones, he avows, yet “without such a community, we lack a center around which we can gather and in which, whether through collaboration or competition, agreement or dissension, we can deepen and refine our thinking.” Such sentences honor a lost kingdom of the intellect, one in which Podhoretz journeyed as a collaborator, competitor, and, finally, a dissenter. “I miss my ex-friends,” he says simply, “[their] major passion in life was ideas and the arts, and [they] could get just as wrought up in an argument over the work of a novelist or painter as they could about political ideologies. And what made the Family special for me in particular was the regular contact I had with it.” We are now without such a Family, and it is the moving distinction of Podhoretz’s memoir that he makes us feel his loss as our own.

Notes
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Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer, by Norman Podhoretz; The Free Press, 256 pages, $25. Go back to the text.

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