A Partisan's Review (Page 3)

Rereading Breaking Ranks, one becomes indignant. It's not just the grandiose framing device--a letter to his son, John, as Whittaker Chambers in Witness petitioned his children--nor the monochroming of gaudy decades, nor the wholesale character assassination of entire categories of wrong-headed people and opinions (Panthers! Feminists! Gay Pride! Radical Chic! Ozone Layabouts!), nor the contempt for popular culture (how dare Susan Sontag enjoy the Supremes, or Richard Poirier the Beatles, or Leslie Fiedler comic books?), nor the promiscuous analogizing of bad reviews of Norman with Stalinism in the thirties, nor the pernicious reiterations of "party line" and "terror" (always in quotes, like a condom) to explain why anybody disagreed with Norman--as if, like Mayor Rudy Giuliani, his real business were obedience training; as if he came with a built-in balcony, from which to bark our marching orders.

No, one becomes indignant because almost everything he has to say about the sixties and the counterculture is at best innocent of nuance and at worst meretricious. Having served my time at Pacifica Radio, at civil rights protests, in the War on Poverty, among migrant workers and in the antiwar movement, before hopping onto the pogo stick of a New York career, I know for a fact that there were white liberals who felt some personal responsibility for the plight of black people even though the Pod insists that "I have rarely met a single one [sic] who really did experience a sense of guilt over this issue." I know for another fact that what torpedoed the War on Poverty was that all those young lawyers, VISTA volunteers and organizers of communities, tenants' unions and welfare recipients began to upset local and state buddy-system power structures. I also know that the antiwar movement consisted of a whole lot more than Vietcong flags and "scions of...the First Families of American Stalinism"--and what's more, opposition to the war was created by the war itself, not by highbrows in whatever periodical or tank, who had less to do with changing public opinion than network television did.

For that matter, far from being what P. calls "very flimsy," the evidence that Adlai Stevenson in 1960 was "sympathetic to the cause of disarmament" was concrete and obvious to the rest of us--during the 1956 presidential campaign, Adlai had actually proposed a nuclear test-ban treaty, for which he was reviled by Richard Nixon.

One is also indignant at the homophobia that speaks of a "plague" that "rages" "among the kind of women who do not wish to be women and among those men who do not wish to be men.... There can be no more radical refusal of self-acceptance than the repudiation of one's own biological nature; and there can be no abdication of responsibility more fundamental than the refusal of a man to become, and to be, a father, or the refusal of a woman to become, and be, a mother." And there can be no more authoritarian an intellectual than the one who ordains that everybody else in the democratic motley look and behave exactly like him.

Maybe it started at Columbia, where he resented "homosexuals with their supercilious disdain of my lower-class style of dress and my brash and impudent manner," and was "repelled" by Ginsberg's "sexual perversity." In Ex-Friends, he not only doubts that homosexuality is "inborn" but even suspects Ginsberg of "having become a homosexual not out of erotic compulsion but by an act of will and as another way of expressing his contempt for normal life." This is almost as hilarious as the snit that seizes him when the Air Force Academy stages a conference in 1986 to celebrate Joseph Heller's Catch-22--"a book viciously defaming the branch of the very service in which the academy was preparing its students to serve." P. is scrupulous enough to remind us that he praised Catch-22 when he first reviewed it in Show, but that, of course, was before Heller savaged him in Good as Gold.

But by the time we get to Ex-Friends, so much indignation has made us as tired as Lionel Trilling. I don't even want to talk about Hannah Arendt. I met her once myself, in the early seventies, at a dinner party for Nathalie Sarraute to which I had been invited not because of my personality or my prose style but because I was the new editor of the Times Book Review. From where she sat, next to Mary McCarthy, she fixed on me a basilisk eye, and what she said was this: "Young man, we are watching you." Well. This was a lot scarier than Trilling's wondering how anybody serious could even watch television, much less write about it, because at least I got Trilling to admit to an enthusiasm for Kojak. Ginsberg I met for the first time in North Beach in 1956, the summer of Howl, and again in 1968 at the Democratic convention, and he didn't care who any of us were: Om. Everybody went to Hellman's parties, so long as she thought they could do her some good. And I think Mailer was nicer to Making It than, in fact, such an advertisement for splendid self deserved. And none of these luminaries, however condescending they may have been to the latest Young Man from the Provinces, had the least idea of a whole history of Left Coast progressivism picked up on the docks instead of Alcove 1 or Alcove 2 at the City College cafeteria.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that when Podhoretz goes on about the article Arendt wrote in 1957 on school desegregation, an article whose rejection by Commentary caused him to quit his junior-editorial job there, an article subsequently published in Irving Howe's Dissent, he might have mentioned that what was most controversial about that article was its recommendation of miscegenation as the only solution to America's race-relations problem. Since P. does go on about how much trouble he got into later on, with his essay "My Negro Problem--and Ours," which ended with the same recommendation, to omit any note of the resemblance is, shall we say, disingenuous. But P. has decided, after Eichmann in Jerusalem, that Hannah's "brilliance" was perverse, like Ginsberg's sexuality. And, in these pages, only Hellman is disingenuous. As for the rest of them, it's bad faith, false consciousness, failure of nerve and cowardice. Not only does it never occur to Podhoretz that his ex-friends might have been right; it never even occurs to him that they might have been sincere. No wonder he's lonely.

If I die, I forgive you; if I recover, we shall see.
   (Spanish proverb)

It's an old story, and even my own, so let's be brief. Once upon a time you were a Wunderkind, and now, oh so suddenly, you're an old fart. And it turns out that a lot of people you thought were your friends really just wanted you to write something for them, or publish something they had written, or get them a foundation grant, and now they've gone to some other party for Susan Sontag. This is unfair, but no excuse for a Lear-like rage, a howling on the blasted heath. Nor need you, in your failed hopes of a grander finish, have been so quick to junk the whole idea of a better world, of kinder people than the Partisan Reviewers, maybe organizing themselves as they please into co-ops, communes, collectives or jazz bands, someplace where the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all--resolute solidarity and riotous individuality!--and where even the intellectuals know enough to think against their own surprising privilege, on behalf of the powerless and inarticulate.

Marx said somewhere that when the locomotive of history turns a corner, all the thinkers fall off. The Partisan Reviewers, although they could stay up all night drinking Scotch and disputing whether John Dewey had been an agent of the Japanese Mikado or Jay Lovestone was really a Lovestoneite, were never as important as they thought they were. Nobody could be, and intellectuals never are--in a pillbox like a Waco, in Culture Wars of seething sects, full of grudge and doctrine, firing essays instead of bullets, throwing tantrums instead of bombs, killing reputations and also time. What they were, these elders of a vanished tribe (and this is the saddest sidebar to Norman's sob story), were patriarchs who didn't want any children.

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