The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The ideal of socialism has become a problematic one, but the problem of socialism remains an abiding ideal.

  But if one turns from the immediate political struggle to a kind of socio-cultural speculation by means of which certain trends are projected into an indefinite future, there may be some reason for anticipating a society ruled by benevolent Grand Inquisitors, a society of non-terroristic and bureaucratic authoritarianism, on top of which will flourish an efficient political-technical elite—a society, in short, that makes Huxley’s prophecy seem more accurate than Orwell’s, except insofar, perhaps, as Orwell’s passion and eloquence helped invalidate his own prophecy.

  Whatever these two sentences may mean, their vocabulary, at least, suggests that we are in the presence of an intellectual—a radical intellectual, of the sort that was identified in the thirties with such “little journals” as Partisan Review. And as an intellectual of the thirties Irving Howe has become, if not an interesting critic, at least an interesting criticism of the predicament of letters in the sixties—particularly in the little journals, to which he is a frequent contributor. Most of these journals were born of the depression and defended underdogs, who seemed at the time to fall into two broad categories—the artists and the poor. After the Second World War, old issues began to cloud, old protégés made good, and expository writers with a low tolerance for complexities were at a loss. A good part of the thirties’ poor had become the fifties’ bourgeoisie; most genuine depression artists had become the culture heroes of an age of affluence. Whom to defend? A stalwart revolutionary, Mr. Howe seemed to find himself without a cause, a comrade, or an enemy. He soon started a magazine of vaguely Socialist persuasion, called Dissent, and the dissenting position he has taken is a paradoxical one. He has turned upon old protégés to begrudge them the successes that time has brought. He now assails the former underdog, now part of the post-depression middle class, for everything—its new comforts, its tastes, and its morals. He now wishes to bar from “the raids of mass culture,” and from the “contamination” of the “middle-brow,” the “serious culture” that the radicals sought in the thirties to bring to the people. At the same time, he wants to bar to the artists and intellectuals the success—“this rise in social status”—that he sought in the thirties to help them achieve. If only, he seems to be saying, the middle class and the artists might become befriendably poor again:

  Today, in a sense, the danger is that the serious artists are not scorned enough.

  Suppose, then, that the goal of moderate material satisfaction is reached….What would the intellectuals say?…[They would be like Christ, facing the Grand Inquisitor.] He has nothing to say….[His] kiss is a kiss of despair, and He retreats, forever, in silence.

  In short, now that the revolution of the thirties has begun to bear fruit, Mr. Howe has come to distrust the notion of progress, and he seeks in literature (or imposes upon literature) that aversion to the modern which he himself feels. Lacking a new direction for his liberalism, he dissents; he seems to bear his banner proudly backward toward the thirties and the “world more attractive” those years represent for him.

  · · ·

  An editor of Commentary and a regular reviewer for Show, Norman Podhoretz inhabits a middle ground between the tame Sunday newspapers of Arthur Mizener and the radical little journals of Irving Howe. He is, in fact, one of those writers for little journals who have of late been assimilated almost en bloc into the magazines of broader circulation, and his adjustment, as a thirties liberal, to the sixties is a highly pragmatic, even a classic one. The rebel whose cause has succeeded traditionally develops a concern with personal power, and the title of Mr. Podhoretz’s collection of critical essays, Doings and Undoings, implies a faith in the power of the critic to affect, or even determine, the fate of authors and literary works—“to correct,” in Mr. Podhoretz’s phrase, “what he considers to be an egregious error in the prevailing estimate of a book or a literary reputation.”

  Doings and Undoings is not, Mr. Podhoretz points out, a unified collection. “How many people wrote it, then? Two, I think, or possibly three.” The first estimate seems accurate; there are two distinct personalities at work in this book—one a literary critic far more canny than Mr. Mizener, the other a post-revolutionary, extra-literary polemicist far more effective than Mr. Howe. Essays on Faulkner, Edmund Wilson, and Nathanael West seem to reflect the first personality; essays on Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, and John Updike, among others, seem to reflect the second. Since the second personality—the author, one supposes, of “Undoings”—is the more recent chronologically, and since his work clearly dominates the collection, it might be well to begin with his position, as Mr. Podhoretz defines it in the piece entitled “Book Reviewing and Everyone I Know.” In praise of contributors to a new periodical, The New York Review of Books, Mr. Podhoretz remarks:

  All these reviewers inhabit much the same intellectual milieu, and what they have in common, apart from talent and intelligence, is an attitude toward books and an idea about the proper way to discuss them. This attitude might be characterized as one of great suspiciousness: a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent—and not many do….The major premise behind such suspiciousness is that books are enormously important events, far too important to be confronted lightly, and certainly too important to permit of charitable indulgence.

  The argument that a sign of a book’s importance is that it should be “assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent” is a curious one, since our whole legal system rests upon the opposite premise—that the sign of an individual’s importance is that he should be assumed innocent until he is proved guilty. But Mr. Podhoretz conceives of this position of “great suspiciousness” as an antidote to the “bland and uncritical” reviewing columns of the Sundays newspapers (so much for Mr. Mizener) and as a solution (here he agrees with Mr. Howe) to “the problems of mass culture…and…the need for an embattled struggle against the deterioration of literary and intellectual standards.” Finally, he pinpoints what he considers the salient quality of The New York Review reviewers: “A book for them is, quite simply, an occasion to do some writing of their own.” And he adds that if only “The New York Review were to succeed in establishing itself on a permanent footing…everyone I know would certainly be happy.”

  There are several remarkable things about this essay and the point of view it represents. First, “everyone I know” occurs fourteen times (aside from its appearance in the title), and “someone I know,” “no one I know,” “someone I don’t know,” and “everyone they know” make one appearance each. Although it must be admitted that repetition is a rhetorical device of which, in any case, Mr. Podhoretz has always been inordinately fond (“what really happened in the thirties” occurs nine times in another essay, and “tells us nothing about the nature of totalitarianism” several times in a third), it seems quite safe to say that “Book Reviewing and Everyone I Know” is pervaded by a sense of comradeship and solidarity; Mr. Podhoretz clearly does not consider himself a speaker in isolation. On the other hand, such terms as “embattled,” “struggle,” and “suspiciousness” seem to indicate, on behalf of the group, a feeling of beleaguered hostility. Moreover, such unembarrassed statements as “Among our most talented literary intellectuals (including just about everyone I know) reviewing is regarded as a job for young men on the make” and “A book for them is, quite simply, an occasion to do some writing of their own” imply that the New Reviewers regard criticism less as a sympathetic response to literature than as an opportunity for an assertion of personality. (One conclusion is inescapable here: A book is going to have an exceedingly difficult time “proving itself innocent” if the reviewer “assumes” it “guilty” and then uses it, “quite simply,” as “an occasion to do some writing of [his] own.”) Finally, a glowing nostalgic reference to “the back files of magazines like Partisan Review and Commentary,” combined with an expression of despair over the presen
t (“But except for Dwight Macdonald and one or two others, everyone I know—indeed, everyone who writes—is often afflicted with the feeling that all he is doing is dropping stone after stone down the bottomless well of American culture. Who listens? Who cares?”), seems to complete a picture, a philosophical adjustment, an answer to the predicament of Mr. Howe. The radical child of the thirties, the contributor to the back files of little journals, finding himself at present directionless, embattled, and perhaps even unheeded, achieves a solidarity in numbers in the security of “everyone I know.” The political fervor of the ex-revolutionary is not lost; it is simply redirected into literary channels, where it appears as a certain hostility toward books (“assumed guilty”), a pronounced defensiveness toward presumptive readers (“the bottomless well of American culture”), and an attitude toward the job at hand—reviewing—as an opportunity to assert personal ambition (“young men on the make…do some writing of their own”). In short, the rebellion has succeeded, the junta is in power, and it is now the era of the purge.

  To interpret a whole collection on the basis of a single essay would be, of course, to oversimplify, and Mr. Podhoretz is a more complicated and interesting writer than this single essay might suggest. But “Book Reviewing and Everyone I Know” does announce a group, a program, and perhaps even the emergence of a new critical school, and since Mr. Podhoretz is a singularly articulate spokesman for that school, it might be well to explore his program as it recurs in some of the other essays in Doings and Undoings, and in the work of other New Reviewers—those who share what Mr. Podhoretz calls “the same intellectual milieu.”

  · · ·

  Mr. Podhoretz, to begin with, clearly regards reviewing as a continuous dialogue, and he devotes, in his reviews, considerable attention to the opinions of previous reviewers. In the essay “In Defense of James Baldwin,” he writes:

  With few exceptions, the major reviewing media were very hard on Another Country. It was patronized by Paul Goodman in The New York Times Book Review, ridiculed by Stanley Edgar Hyman in The New Leader, worried over…by Elizabeth Hardwick in Harper’s, summarily dismissed by Time’s anonymous critic, loftily pitied by Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker, and indignantly attacked by Saul Maloff in The Nation.

  And in “A Dissent on Updike” he cites not only written opinions but spoken ones as well:

  When his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, came out in 1958, I remember arguing about it at great length with Mary McCarthy….

  I cannot for the life of me understand what there is about him that so impresses people like Mary McCarthy, Arthur Mizener, and Stanley Edgar Hyman—to mention only three critics who…

  The “Defense” in one case and the “Dissent” in the other might seem to require such a roll call, but it is Mr. Podhoretz’s method throughout the collection to orient his point of view in terms of what he calls “the prevailing estimate of a book or a literary reputation.” And he is not the only one to do so. There is a kind of reciprocity along the reviewing circuit that, while it occasionally imparts a pleasing continuity to critical discussion (the reader who suspects that the reviewer does not do justice to the book under consideration may be consoled by the knowledge that the reviewer has read at least all previous reviews of it), more often resembles nothing so much as a ticker-tape compendium or a caucus in an airless convention hall. “Irving Howe and I discussed this tendency some time ago, and wrote…” says Lewis Coser in Partisan Review. “The last time I remember talking about the novel was a year ago last June or July,” Norman Mailer writes in Esquire, “and it was in a conversation with Gore Vidal.” “Even Norman Mailer,” Alfred Chester writes in a review of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, “unpredictably mislaid himself long enough to write: ‘Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.’ ” “It was from Sartre that I first heard of Jean Genet,” Lionel Abel writes in The New York Review; and “These have been duly underscored by her critics,” says another contributor to the same periodical, “notably Lionel Abel, in a long and trenchant essay in…” “I have only once had the privilege of meeting Paul Goodman,” George Steiner remarks in Commentary. “I stress ‘privilege.’ There is no one whose encounter flatters in a more exacting way.”

  This elaborate system of cross-references is one to which Mr. Podhoretz—at least in Undoings—subscribes, and when he feels he must disagree with what he frequently calls “the serious critics,” he does so warily. His essay on James Baldwin continues:

  Three of these reviewers—Goodman, Hardwick, and Hyman—are first-rate critics, and I therefore find it hard to believe that their wrongheaded appraisals of Another Country can be ascribed to a simple lapse of literary judgment. How could anyone as sensible and knowledgeable as Elizabeth Hardwick have been led so astray…? How could a man of Stanley Edgar Hyman’s sophistication have been so fooled…? How could Paul Goodman, who most assuredly knows better, have taken…

  Mr. Podhoretz is not, of course, the only reviewer to feel so bewildered by his own divergence from the mainstream of critical opinion that he must temper his remarks with “sensitive,” “sophistication,” and “knows better.” Occasionally, such differences are bridged with the elaborate courtesy of a junior executive introducing his immediate superior at a Rotary banquet. “This collection of essays…reflects the amazing catholicity of Mr. Schlesinger’s tastes and interests,” Lewis Coser begins his attack on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. “His range is wide indeed.” And Frank Kermode, concluding an ambivalent review of Mary McCarthy’s essays, concedes himself “aware that one is incomparably less honest, as well as less clever, than she,” and adds, “I can think of no writer whose silence would be more damaging to our moral and intellectual hygiene.” A more relaxed approach, along the reviewing circuit, to the moment of painful dissent is manifest in the use of first names: Norman Mailer, in attacking Nelson Algren, calls him “Nelson”; Alfred Chester, in disparaging Henry Miller, calls him “Henry”; Paul Goodman, in disagreeing with Harold Rosenberg, calls him “Harold”; and Lionel Abel, in discussing the misdeeds of the ghetto leader Chaim Rumkowski, refers to him familiarly as “Chaim.” Mr. Podhoretz is more formal. “On the other hand, Macdonald, Rahv, and Kazin,” he concludes his summary dismissal of their essays, “even in their perfunctory moments, have more to say than most of us when we are trying hard.” The apparent source of such affectionate concern with the opinions of other reviewers is a conviction that the value of an opinion can be defined by the admiration one feels for the holder of that opinion. “Not which idea but whose?” the reviewer seems to ask himself. The original judgments of respected critics quickly acquire an aura not only of self-evidence but of finality (they at least are assumed innocent until they are proved guilty): “I admire [Edmund] Wilson greatly,” Lionel Abel writes, in an essay on Alfred Kazin, “from which it will be seen that I do not…” And, says another reviewer, “As a conscious artist, O’Neill was stiff and crude, as Mary McCarthy has established.” The New Reviewers hastily stand up to be counted, and reviewing becomes not merely a circuit but a cartel.

  Apart from the group orientation of Doings and Undoings, the book is interesting primarily for its arguments. In his introduction, Mr. Podhoretz establishes the premises on which his critical arguments are based:

  Most often the event [that produced these essays] was the appearance of a new book that seemed to me to raise important issues…and almost always it was the issues rather than the book itself that I really cared about. Is that a damaging admission for a literary critic to make?…We may be looking in the wrong place for the achievements of the creative literary imagination when we look for them only where they were last seen—in novels and poems and plays….These may all be of great interest to me as a student of literature, and they may be of some interest to me as an habitual reader. But they are of no interest to me as a man living in a particular place at a particular time and beset by problems of a particular kind.

  This
position is a consistent and audacious one, and Mr. Podhoretz adopts it with full awareness of its implications. But, again, particularly in his lapse of faith in pure fiction, he does not speak entirely in isolation. “I wonder, who reads short stories?” writes John Thompson in Partisan Review. “When you pick up a magazine, do you turn to the short story? What is it doing there, anyway? It looks as boring as a poem, and probably it is. Maybe if you yourself write short stories, yes, you take a quick slice at it, to see who’s doing it now, is he one up on you or not, what’s he copying…” “The novel is having a hard time,” Alfred Chester remarks in Commentary; and in Show Kenneth Lamott observes, “People who care about such things have agreed for as long as I can remember that the novel is in a bad way.” “Her book is memorable to me,” Julian Moynahan writes of Brigid Brophy in The New York Review, “only because halfway through reading it I was seized by a cramping suspicion that the novel as a viable literary form might after three hundred years of life be ready for burial.” And, referring to a statement made by Paul Goodman, a reviewer writes, “Such an observation calls into question the validity of fiction itself.”

  Mr. Podhoretz, however, does not go quite so far; he does not discount fiction altogether. He has simply, in his words, “lost my piety toward the form in its own right, which means that I do not feel an automatic sympathy for the enterprise of novel-writing,” and he continues:

  A large class of readers…has found itself responding more enthusiastically to…non-fiction (and especially to magazine articles and even book reviews) than to current fiction….And what the novel has abdicated has been taken over by discursive writers. Imagination has not died (how could it?) but it has gone into other channels….What I have in mind—and I cheerfully admit that the suggestion sounds preposterous—is magazine articles.