The 60s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  The suggestion does not sound preposterous at all, particularly in a passage pointing out the literary takeover by “discursive writers.” (It explains, for one thing, why reviewers pay so much attention to other reviewers, and it attempts to explain, for another, why Mr. Podhoretz’s magazine articles should have been published in book form.) One result, however, of a conviction that imagination has been diverted from fiction into expository writing is that the expository writer, particularly the reviewer, is often tempted to press his own imagination upon the work of fiction, to prescribe for the novelist the kind of work that the reviewer thinks he ought to have written. Thus, Mr. Podhoretz berates John Updike for having written about old age, and not having written a reminiscence of childhood, in The Poorhouse Fair:

  …In any case there was something that gave me the creeps about the way he had deliberately set out to reverse the usual portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man pattern of the first novel.

  And he further instructs the novelist (as though Mr. Podhoretz’s pains necessarily resembled Updike’s, and as though Mr. Podhoretz himself were writing a novel including a description of them):

  Severe pain in one part of the body does not travel through the system, either on wet wings or dry; on the contrary, after the first flash of burning sensation, its effect is actually to focus one’s entire consciousness on the hurt spot…Consequently the appropriate images for rendering such an experience…would be…

  He reproaches Saul Bellow for the ending of a novel (“If, however, Bellow had been ruthless in following out the emotional logic of Seize the Day, it would almost certainly have been murder—and Seize the Day would almost certainly have been a great book”), and he suggests his own ending for Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. He even rebukes Harry Truman for not “admitting” in his autobiography that he was the “ambitious, perhaps lonely boy who dreamed of greatness” that Mr. Podhoretz thinks he must have been. In his conviction that it is the business of criticism to prescribe for literature, Mr. Podhoretz is again not quite alone: “It is the Orestes-Iphigenia story, we see here, that Salinger all along had been trying to rewrite,” Leslie Fiedler (himself much occupied with myth) prescribes for Salinger, “the account of a Fury-haunted brother redeemed by his priestess-sister.” “He could become the best of our literary novelists,” Norman Mailer prescribes for another author (as opposed, one wonders, to our non-literary novelists?), “if he could forget about style and go deeper into the literature of sex.” (A “forgetting” and a “going deeper” that, bien entendu, Mailer himself has managed to achieve.)

  A difficulty, however, in pitting the reviewer’s imagination against the author’s, in assuming that critics have an obligation to correct not merely, in Mr. Podhoretz’s words, “the prevailing estimate of a book or a literary reputation” but the book itself, is that the relationship between writer and reviewer soon becomes a contest—and a contest, occasionally, of a highly personal sort. The book under review is not written as the reviewer would have written it; he begins to speculate as to what personal deficiency in the author could possibly account for this lapse. If the author has received widespread public recognition, the line of personal attack is clear: he has been corrupted by success in the mass media—and New Reviewers will go to enormous lengths to ferret out references to the author in Life, Time, Newsweek, best-seller lists, and so on, in order to establish some kind of guilt by non-obscurity. More commonly, however, the reviewer’s attack upon an author is quite direct—an allegation that his personality, particularly in its sexual and moral attitudes, must be somehow diseased. Alfred Chester, for example, confidently impugns Henry Miller’s sexual prowess: “Miller, in fact, never makes his reader raise more than a blush and, more often than not, the blush is for Henry’s delusions of grandeur.” Leslie Fiedler, on the other hand, attempts psychoanalysis: “Finally, like his characters, Salinger is reconciled with everything but sex….” And Edzia Weisberg impugns the personal competence not of the author but of previous reviewers: “Except for Middleton Murry, who for reasons all too transparent found Aaron’s Rod ‘the greatest of Lawrence’s novels,’ and F. R. Leavis, who for reasons almost as transparent is extremely indulgent toward the novel, no one has ever considered either Aaron’s Rod or Kangaroo successful.” (To Miss Weisberg, perhaps, the reasons are transparent; the reader scarcely dares admit that he finds them opaque.) The reviewer hastens, however, to assure the reader that his own house is sexually and morally in order. “I just don’t want to give up my skin,” a reviewer informs us, in a rather tangential comment on a book under review. “It feels so good, especially in the sun or in the woods or in the sea or against another.” And Mr. Podhoretz himself, in the essay “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” while he admits that his own moral stand is not irreproachable, excludes the possibility that most other right-thinking people can be better off. Having outlined the violent and unhappy childhood that left him, to his dismay, with a residual fear and envy of Negroes, he begins to claim for his feelings a certain universality:

  This, then, is where I am; it is not exactly where I think all other white liberals are, but it cannot be so very far away either.

  The pervasiveness, assurance, and self-congratulation of that “I” in Doings and Undoings and in the works of other New Reviewers lead occasionally to a highhandedness that is almost grotesque. Alfred Chester writes:

  I think I am precisely the man for whom serious modern novels are written, since I am one of the men they are written about. Look at four of the most influential novelists of the last twenty years….By influential I mean, of course, that which has impact on the thinking of those capable of thinking, and this, at least in France, is without reference to sales or to the behavior patterns of beatniks and college students.

  Having excluded “sales” (i.e., the buyers of books) and “college students” (i.e., some of the most avid readers of them) from the category of “those capable of thinking,” Mr. Chester is naturally left with himself, the reviewer, as the man for and about whom “serious modern novels” are written. But one danger in the assumption that it is the reviewer who occupies the center of the literary universe is that he begins to regard everything about himself, however tangential to the book under review, as of universal interest and importance. “Nearly everyone I know would rather see a movie than read a book…” Mr. Chester writes. “And I count among my friends…” (And he counts among his friends, we may safely assume, Leslie Fiedler, whom Podhoretz notes as having said that “the sight of a group of new novels stimulates in him ‘a desperate desire to sneak out to a movie.’ ”) Despite this tendency to express in criticism all the reviewer’s little feelings and preferences—his delight in movies, the predilections of his friends, the situations in which his skin feels good—New Reviewing personalities are not, in general, so idiosyncratic that a reader cannot find one quality they have in common:

  Yet the truth is that the great national “debates” that the New York Times daily calls upon us to consider are invariably puerile from an intellectual point of view and far beneath the consideration of any sophisticated mind.

  Showing up their weaknesses is child’s play for a sophisticated critic.

  Granted that painters and actors need not—indeed should not—be capable of discussing their respective arts with genuine sophistication, is it really necessary…

  He is in the presence of a writer who is very sophisticated indeed and who therefore cannot possibly be as callow and sentimental…

  Now, this black-and-white account, with the traditional symbolisms reversed, is not the kind of picture that seems persuasive to the sophisticated modern sensibility—the sensibility that has been trained by Dostoyevski and Freud, by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, by Eliot and Yeats, to see moral ambiguity everywhere, to be bored by melodrama, to distrust the idea of innocence.

  On the other hand, of course, there are equally sophisticated critics like Robert Brustein and Kenneth Tynan who have arrived at opposite conclusions, finding
[Lenny] Bruce not…

  Those who find Bergman profound and sophisticated (as if the artist who could move them deeply had to be a deep thinker) are very likely to find Satyajit Ray rather too simple.

  Apart from its truth, I find this very refreshing indeed, because most of us are too sophisticated to have written it or thought it….We all believe and know these things, but we fear that to say them out loud would be to evoke the superior smile.

  What these passages (the first five by Mr. Podhoretz, the remaining three by assorted contributors to Partisan Review and Commentary) have in common is a keynote of sophistication—or, at any rate, the mention of the word. Sophistication, one gathers, is a quality lacking in Times editorial writers, illusory in Bergman films, absent in artists and actors talking about their work, present in Robert Brustein and Kenneth Tynan, and conditioned by Dostoevski, Freud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Eliot, and Yeats (although in what sense Dostoevski can be said to train the modern sensibility to be bored by melodrama, or Nietzsche to see moral ambiguity everywhere, or Yeats to distrust the idea of innocence, is something that Mr. Podhoretz is too sophisticated to explain). Richard Chase points out the sophisticate’s fear of evoking “the superior smile.” The definite article is puzzling. The smile? Whose smile? Why, the communal smile of Norman Podhoretz, Alfred Chester, Lionel Abel, and the rest—the collective smile of the New Reviewing school.

  And the stimulus for that sophisticated, perhaps not altogether winning smile is, when it is not the author of a literary work, none other than the reader, who is allowed occasionally to believe that he is in on an exclusive circuit secret but more often is reminded that he is hopelessly out—a child permitted to eavesdrop on the nocturnal conversation of his elders. No opportunity is lost to cast aspersions on the mind and the behavior of that child. “Who listens? Who cares?” Mr. Podhoretz inquires rhetorically, and he deplores the dwindling of “a reading public literate enough to understand a complicated exposition.” Concern, in fact, about the mental calibre of a hypothetical reader slurred as middle-class, middle-brow—indeed, middle-everything—is so widespread that Fiedler professes himself disappointed because he cannot find a novel “which might have caught once and for all the pathos and silliness of middle-class, middle-brow intellectual aspiration”; and even the publisher of Esquire feels impelled to announce in his column that “ ‘The mindless dictatorship of the audience’ was the most provocative single sentence uttered at Princeton during the entire Response Weekend.” (Calling “the mindless dictatorship of the audience” a “sentence” is but one indication of the publisher’s concern. In his anxiety over mindlessness, he neglects to parse.) “Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one?” Frank Kermode inquires in Partisan Review, and he answers with a ringing New Reviewing anti-Everyman cliché: “It would seem so, since most people appear to be wrong most of the time.” “People like to think Eichmann mediocre,” says Lionel Abel. “I think they also like the idea of Miss Arendt, implied by her subtitle, that evil can be banal. Perhaps they are flattered to believe that in the ordinary and dulling conduct of their lives they are at the very least doing something wrong.” Here Mr. Abel delivers a threefold vote of no confidence in readers: with the carelessness of his grammar (“Miss Arendt” for “Miss Arendt’s”); with the shakiness of his assumption (that the reader’s conduct is any more “ordinary and dulling” than Mr. Abel’s own); and with the injustice of his insinuation (that the reader would accept the invalid-conversion fallacy—evil is banal, therefore banality is evil, as one might say all dogs are animals, therefore all animals are dogs—which Mr. Abel permits himself). Not merely readers, however—everything is on the wane. A New Reviewing Cassandra seems to have issued an encyclical announcing that the sky is falling—a conclusion that has travelled ever since, in slightly diluted form (as in the childhood game of “Whisper”), around the whole reviewing circle. “Is ‘the sickness of our time’ a literary hoax?” Benjamin DeMott inquires in Harper’s. “Are the writers who call the present age a cesspool mistaking personal whiffiness for objective truth?” The questions are purely rhetorical; Mr. DeMott’s answer, needless to say, is No.

  The multiplication of commodities and the false standard of living, on the one hand, the complication of the economic and technical structure in which one can work at a job, on the other hand, and the lack of direct relationship between the two have by now made a great part of external life morally meaningless.

  Thus, knotting unintelligibly together a few strands of defeatist cliché, George Steiner exemplifies both a prose style and a world view: Everything is bad, science and technology advance, moral values are in permanent eclipse, and there is no hope. (There is no syntax, either—only jargon to express the futility of it all.) “I…suppose, they talk about plot and character, style and setting,” John Thompson speculates mournfully of the universities. “Maybe it is just too late.”

  This generalized cultural alarmism has created among the New Reviewers a forensic device that we might call not name- but catastrophe-dropping. Whenever a reviewer’s exposition is in danger of disintegration, he simply mentions a calamity to distract the reader’s attention (much as a member of a debating society might cry “Fire!” in a crowded auditorium when his argument is going badly). In his discussion of his Negro problem Mr. Podhoretz makes repeated reference to the violence of his feelings, as if in evidence of their universality. And Norman Mailer, inveighing querulously against modern architecture, has a comparable inspiration:

  That rough beast is a shapeless force, an obdurate emptiness, an annihilation of possibilities. It is totalitarianism: that totalitarianism which has haunted the twentieth century, haunted the efforts of intellectuals to define it, of politicians to withstand it, and of rebels to find a field of war where it could be given battle.

  Totalitarianism. Haunted. Annihilation. Beast. The reader gasps. What has the analogy to do with modern architecture? Nothing. But Mr. Mailer is ready with another gambit: “Our modern architecture reminds me a little of cancer cells. Because the healthy cells of the lung have one appearance and those in the liver another. But if both are cancerous they tend to look a little more alike.” What has cancer to do with architecture? What “sameness” is there between, say, Edward Stone and Le Corbusier? None. But the reader is meant to agree, in a state of typographical shock.

  “I write the sentence, six million innocent people were slaughtered,” Irving Howe writes in Commentary, “and for a person of adequate sensibilities may it not be as affecting as an embodiment in a conventional narrative?” Well, no, Mr. Howe, but it may give the illusion of shoring up a sickly argument. “It is dead. It is evil, like racial prejudice,” Alfred Chester writes of the comedy of Vladimir Nabokov. “Less evil…were the Eichmann jokes making the rounds last year which mocked and trivialized the death of six million Jews—and which, nonetheless, even I and other Jews could laugh at.” Racial prejudice. Dead. Evil. Eichmann. What relevance have they to the comedy of Vladimir Nabokov? None. They are simply a reviewer’s form of literary demagoguery. Other devices on the same order are the frequent use of obscenity and a kind of strident excremental prose that masquerades as a perpetual assertion of manliness. Norman Mailer, for example, writes in a review, “A bad maggoty novel. Four or five half-great short stories were buried like pullulating organs in a corpse of fecal matter”; and Alfred Chester, addressing the author of a book on homosexuality, barks, “Better cut out all that ceaseless groping, Jack, and get down to work!”

  Mr. Podhoretz, however, is seldom coarse or shrill. On the contrary, he seeks, by his own account, “a language in which it is possible to talk sensibly and with due proportion about new books.” Here is Mr. Podhoretz arguing “sensibly and with due proportion” about the works of John Updike:

  His short stories—which I usually find myself throwing away in disgust before I can get to the end—strike me as all windup and no delivery.

  How Mr. Podhoretz can detect the “delivery”
if he throws stories away “before I can get to the end” is a problem that he seems not to have posed himself. Nor need he bother to pose it, for although there may be considerable discussion among those in the milieu, there is little dialectic, and arguments of extraordinary inventiveness are permitted to flourish unchallenged. The warm, permissive climate of the New Reviewing is sealed protectively against all intellectual discipline, and it has managed to foster in comfort a whole new genre of fallacy. Lionel Abel, for example, in disagreeing with Hannah Arendt about Adolf Eichmann, takes an argument of Miss Arendt’s own, treats it as his, and arrives at a new form of argument altogether, a kind of preemptive bid—agreement-as-refutation: “Is there any contradiction between being morally monstrous and also comical?” he asks. “I am inclined to think that there is none, that anyone who considers the comical traits of Iago and Richard III must be of my opinion.” Precisely, and of Miss Arendt’s as well—but one must concede Mr. Abel the novelty of his argument; he simply restates, in less subtle terms, what Miss Arendt has said, and expects her to cry “Touchée!”

  “On the subject of Trotsky,” Lionel Abel writes, in another article, “Mr. Kazin exhibits a harshness, intemperateness, and insensitivity which he does not show at all in responding to Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab. And this is all the more striking to me since everything Mr. Kazin has to say against Trotsky could be said with equal or greater force against Melville’s hero.” This appears to be some sort of art/reality interchange, whereby everything that can be said against Mr. Abel can probably be said with equal or greater force against Dogberry. We might call it, perhaps, the argument-from-socio-critical-ineptitude.

  Alfred Chester, on the other hand, touches all the forensic bases, and doffs his cap at every one: