James Wolcott reviews . Kazin, a Commentary contributor going back to 1. It should be noted that the party was held two weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, such boozy antics somewhat dissonant in what was for most Americans a joyless holiday season.
Yet what appears to have peeved Kazin was something closer to home: the crass spectacle of chums and colleagues gloating over their ascendant glory. And no one was busting his buttons more than the man at the top of Commentary’s masthead. That evening proved to be a preview of coming attractions, an ethos in embryo.
Four years later, Norman Podhoretz published a memoir entitled, yes, Making It, a book that would live in notoriety, which at least beats total obscurity. It was, and is, that rarity, a thesis- driven memoir. Its thesis was that success had replaced sex as the Lawrentian . They scorned vulgar go- getters. He wasn’t the first to examine .
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In 1. 95. 9 the critic and provocateur Seymour Krim published a confessional entitled, you guessed it, . From such personal narratives are book deals made. A winner’s tale is always an easier sell. In Making It, Podhoretz spun his local- boy- makes- good story as a Brooklyn lad who apprenticed under Trilling, F. R. Leavis and the polemical fight club of Partisan Review into a living endorsement of the American Dream, taking a victory lap around his precocious career as a hotshot critic, magazine editor and merchant of ideas (what we would call today, if we hadn’t any shame, a thought leader). Putting extra pep into Podhoretz’s trot is the beaming knowledge that his success transcends that of mere mortal scribblers and red pencillers. To borrow from a popular song of the period, the 1.
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Podhoretz is . Podhoretz was even invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball of 1. There could have been no greater confirmation of his having . The book was certainly stagecrafted that way. If so, he misjudged the composition of the audience and the sales appeal of his candour. Numerous interventionists attempted to save him from himself. His agent didn’t want to handle the book. His original publisher rejected the manuscript.
His friend and fellow editor Jason Epstein advised him to throw it in the river. Even Lionel Trilling, seldom stirred to intervene in the affairs of mortals, urged him not to publish the book, and Gandalf is never wrong. But Podhoretz persevered, stuck his chin out, and boy did he get creamed. He was pelted with reviews that were not only scathing but mocking, jeering (. Not all the reviews were disparaging, but the positive notices weren’t as tart and well written, their praise couched in conventional reviewerese, and so the spitballers carried the day.
For a man with no sense of humour about himself this was the worst possible fate. Podhoretz was traumatised, as any sensitive brute would be, and felt socially stigmatised. He was no longer in with the in- crowd, the hovering embarrassment of failure demoting him from the A- list into nebulous terrain. Most heinous of all was the backstabbing betrayal by his friend and idol Norman Mailer, whose collection Advertisements for Myself (1.
Making It. Few authors had spilled their guts as grandiloquently as Mailer had in Advertisements, especially in the italicised interchapters, where he introduced us to the personal demons prodding his appetites and anxieties with hot pokers. The two Normans had much in common. How To Watch The Full Battle Scars (2017) Movie. Both were Brooklyn boys; both Jewish; both were ladled with mother- love as sons, Mailer fussed over as . In Mailer, Podhoretz found a blue- eyed soul brother, the gladiator stud muffin he aspired to be. He was also a dependable, standup guy.
It was Podhoretz whom he leaned on for support and counsel in the hungover days following the awful night he stabbed his second wife, Adele, with a penknife at the bitter conclusion of a party punctuated with scuffles and screaming matches. Unlike Mailer, Podhoretz wasn’t in the meaty thick of the action. He had a wife, kids, a day job, a heavy load of administrative work, a bourgeois structure. His doubts, fears and typewriter dramas were more standard issue: he wasn’t popping benzedrine and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day while staring down the barrel of a rewrite deadline, as Mailer had done with The Deer Park, pushing liver and kidneys to the limit. Mailer, more important, had been a national sensation and magnet for attention ever since the publication of The Naked and the Dead in 1. However swollen his hat size, Podhoretz remained an East Coast coterie egghead. With Making It, Podhoretz was stepping up into Mailer’s heavyweight division, only to get KO’d by the champ himself – sucker- punched.
Mailer read the book in galley and told Podhoretz he liked it. It was Podhoretz’s hope after the volley of abuse from nearly every quarter that Mailer would ride to the cavalry rescue. But when Mailer’s essay on Making It, ! They’ve all got it in for me!’ (Carry on Cleo) – that eventually severed their friendship and sent Podhoretz into a year- long depression to lick his wounds.
He would keep licking them for decades, nursing his grievances into a fine kettle of vendettas. Meanwhile, Making It would go down in legend and out of print, a sunken landmark of sorts.*To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Making It, NYRB Classics has revived Podhoretz’s battle- scarred memoir with an innocuous new introduction by Terry Teachout, Commentary’s critic at large, who isn’t about to jeopardise his post by saying anything too jazzy or impolitic here. Given the long history of gangland strife between Commentary and the New York Review of Books, it’s gracious of its reprint house to include Making It in its classics line. Romantic Horror Movies 13 Hours (2016). It’s more of a curiosity today than a classic, too lacking in novelistic redolence and vivid characterisation, too pocked with deadwood phrases of punditry (. Still, it’s handy to have it back in print after its long stay in limbo, for documentary purposes. It gives virgin readers an opportunity to see what all the original fuss was about, what provoked a normally cool customer such as Wilfrid Sheed to bring down the hammer (. It also has something going for it now that it didn’t have then: nostalgia.
It’s a time capsule from the Mad Men 1. Sexual Revolution in its early frisky phase thrummed. Hedonism hadn’t yet slid into sleazedom and the culture wasn’t uniformly outfitted with ironic smirks. Panning the skyline, Making It evokes a city and an era that are misty monochrome memories of the way we were: . The tribal differences between the boroughs have dissolved. To be a Brooklyn native in the new millennium is to belong to the bearded heart of bourgeois hipsterville surrounded by local landmarks from Lena Dunham’s Girls, enlightened by Martin Amis sightings. Back then, baby, Brooklyn was badass and more than a trifle d.
To come from Brooklyn – . This underdog cockiness persisted for decades, serving as the driver of John Travolta’s sidewalk strut in 1.
Saturday Night Fever, where disco prince Tony Manero eventually tires of Bay Ridge Brooklyn and his mooky friends as the magic spires of Manhattan beckon. A product of the jukebox era, Podhoretz belonged to an older school of neighbourhood punk, dressing like a juvenile delinquent auditioning for the Jets or the Sharks, but beneath that greaser exterior burned a bookworm yearning for learning. A teacher called Mrs K.
It isn’t Harvard he attends, but Columbia, where he refines the knack of pleasing and parroting his elders. Leavis and his wife, Queenie, reign with a far scalier hand over their student disciples than the Trillings, Lionel being far more steeped in ambiguity, dialectical subtleties and flickering equivocations (Diana was another story) than the cocksure Leavises. Every Saturday on their lawn the Leavises conduct an informal seminar in which to evaluate literature and vent their grievances, deploring T. S. Eliot as a simpering turncoat and accusing the .