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 book revealed a young man’s ambition, his lust for power, his straining ego.
The mystery deepens. Podhoretz showed an advance copy of Making It
