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Norman Podhoretz: The Universal Man
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15019 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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9 / 1988 |
5,070 Words |
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.
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A good literary critic, even more than a good man, is hard to find, and so there is cause for regret when the genuine article dies, or retires--or finds something else to do. Having had occasion recently to reread the literary criticism of Norman Podhoretz--most of it accomplished by the early sixties and anthologized in Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After in American Writings--I experienced such a pang. Although Podhoretz continues to keep his hand in by reviewing a work of the imagination now and again, his commitment to literary criticism as an end in itself--to "seeing the object as in itself it really is," as Matthew Arnold expressed it--has worn thin; nowadays, when the editor of Commentary chooses to write about fiction, his paramount concern is for a work's broader political context, though usually his focus does not prevent him from including an aesthetic appreciation.
Never, even in youth, an aesthete, Podhoretz has always believed "it is possible for a critic to speak openly from a particular political perspective and to make political judgments without permitting such judgments to replace or obscure literary values as such." He has insisted, moreover, on doing so, to the extent at least of relating a given work of literature to the surrounding climate of literary opinion. For the most part, however, Podhoretz, as a literary man, has been content to develop his considerable abilities for discerning how so-called creative writers think and how works of fiction actually work. In Making It he perceptively notes that "writing is among the most mysterious of human activities. No one … knows the laws by which it moves or refuses to move." In "Fitzgerald in Perspective" (Doings and Undoings), we find the almost magisterial assertions that "a writer who is being as straight with himself as he can possibly be will always write with assurance, authority, and economy," and that a "profound self-awareness…more than anything else marks the really great writer, the writer of genius." Doings is aglitter with frequently accurate and nearly always perceptive assessments of those qualities that permit one novel to succeed and force another to fail; of the attributes of style, manner, and ambition that result in what Evelyn Waugh called "a good taste book"; and of the flaws in judgment or in the egregious overreaching that invariably produce a work of pretentiousness, vulgarity, or banality.
A Critic's Education
In the fifties (an era Randall Jarrell dubbed "the age of criticism"), Podhoretz was a young, talented, and ambitious product of the Columbia critics--Lionel Trilling and others--and of F.R. Leavis of Cambridge, and was intent on making a bid for fame (and perhaps, in a modest way, fortune) among the literary lights of Gotham. Thirty years later, he is (and has been for many years) the editor of a periodical primarily sociopolitical in its orientation and the author of a syndicated newspaper column. He and his wife are aggressive political organizers and fund-raisers and cofounders of the Committee for the Free World. In Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir, Podhoretz has described how he evolved from a New Leftish critic of America and the West into a neoconservative supporter of both. Of equal interest, perhaps, is his parallel transition from a literary figure to an essentially political commentator and activist.
We find a tentative explanation for this transition in Making It and Breaking
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