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The Vocation of Norman Podhoretz
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11601 |
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BOOK WORLD
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9 / 1986 |
5,319 Words |
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M.E. Bradford
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THE BLOODY CROSSROADS
Where Literature and Politics Meet
Norman Podhoretz
New York: Simon and Schuster
221 pp., $16.95
Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, describes himself as a New York Jewish intellectual. What that identity signified and what it has done for the content and direction of his career he has been at some pains to tell us in his two volumes of memoirs, Making It (1967) and Breaking Ranks (1979). In a very distinctive milieu, a context created and sustained by a coterie (which Podhoretz has called "the Family") and an audience that has responded to it, he has through several stages and transformations, made his way by what he writes, or encourages others to write, or says as a critic of their work. In his own construction of the segment of modern cultural history stamped by his achievements, he has been inclined to explain the record with reference to his not inconsiderable ambitions and to speak honestly of the desire for fame, influence, and reputation - what Dr. Johnson omitted in his simple formulation about the writer and the cash nexus. But there is another way of taking the evidence of Podhoretz 's distinguished lifetime performance, and the latest addition to it. For Podhoretz has been educated twice over for a priesthood; once in the College of Jewish Theological Seminary for one sort of rabbinate, and then again at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis for another. And perhaps three times, if one considers the even larger influence of Lionel Trilling, that high priest of modern culture, in the nurture and admonition of his youth. Of all three of these novitiates we find direct consequences in The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Polices Meet. For these distinctive educations in the interpretation of texts, in the preservation and application of tradition were not incompatible. I shall attempt to explain why further along in these remarks. But for the moment the point I am making is that New York Jewish intellectuals have always been a clerisy, a partisan community with a gospel to be spread out into the highways and hedges, a point of view - not a remnant hidden away from a world of which they have despaired. In this regard they resemble other American literary coteries - the New England Brahmins of the preceding century and the Southerners who after 1930 stood in some relation to the Agrarian enterprise of that decade.
The overarching theme of Podhoretz 's new book is the one announced in its title, a phrase from Professor Trilling's description of the point where literature and politics come together. A motif subsidiary to this larger concern is the use of culture as a political weapon - to claim the quasi-religious authority of the master spirits of modern art as a sanction for particular political programs. Another is the right of serious writing per se to claim the attention of the literary critic, who has been since world war I, more directly concerned with imaginative creations than with works merely argumentative, discursive, or expository. But if criticism is a catchall term for any writing about literature or culture in general." If Podhoretz has always been a critic of public discourse," concerned with "issues…. Not ordinarily…. Regarded as falling within the competence of a literary critic," then it should not be surprising that he continues to go against the conventional definition of the man of letters and to focus "as a highly interested party" on "the social and political and culture disputes of his day instead of those rare texts that are pure and
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