Settling Old Scores

By LANCE MORROW

A friend of mine saw an ad for a restaurant that said, "We treat you like family." My friend remarked, "That bad, eh?"

The columnist Murray Kempton invented the term "the Family" to describe the New York intellectuals--a half-forgotten confraternity of writers and thinkers--clustered roughly around Partisan Review and Commentary. But it was Norman Podhoretz, in his young rooster's memoir, Making It (1968), who gave the term currency. In the Family (Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Irving Howe, Harold Rosenberg, Hannah Arendt and others), Podhoretz played a noisy, precocious younger brother, an irritant who would not stay put ideologically. In recoil against the Eisenhower inertia, Podhoretz had steered to the radical left by the early '60s. But then, appalled at the anti-Americanism and cultural wreckage of the Vietnam era, he headed hard right. In 1960 he became editor in chief of the leftist journal Commentary; after his conversion he repositioned it as a leading organ of neoconservatism.

In the Family, politics defined personalities. If one's politics went wrong, friendships might die unpleasant deaths. In Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (Free Press; 244 pages; $25), Podhoretz, 69, has set down a fierce and gossipy record of his expired relationships. His stories amount to a personal diary of American political ideas from the end of World War II to the present.

Of the ex-friends assembled here, Podhoretz knew Ginsberg the longest, for 50 years, from the time they were students together at Columbia University just after the war. Though Ginsberg's aura toward the end of his life (he died in 1997) suggested Buddhist serenity, Podhoretz remembers him as "arrogant and brash and full of an in-your-face bravado," even a kind of fury. Ginsberg seemed to have a fixation on Podhoretz--possibly because he suspected that Podhoretz had his number as a personality-poet camouflaging mediocrity with an outrageous epater-le-bourgeois program (insanity is sanity; drugs are sacramental; homosexuality is holy; normality is horror). Podhoretz considered Ginsberg's doctrine to be destructive antinomian nonsense, a species of fraud. He even entertained, but rejected, the idea that Ginsberg might have "willed himself" into homosexuality for the same reason that Robert Lowell converted to Catholicism--for the "material."

He is somewhat more tolerant of other old friends. The worst he has to say about Lionel Trilling, whom he considers the most intelligent person he ever met, is that he lacked a certain political courage, taking refuge always in his favorite word, complicated. Everything was complicated, Trilling would insist, his emphasis lingering on the first syllable. Of Hellman, Podhoretz finds surprisingly pleasant things to say--she was a wonderful cook, she was great company, "playful, mischievous, bitchy, earthy, and always up for a laugh." But her extraordinary lies (the "Julia" story, for example) and her habit of self-glorification--herself presented as saint and martyr in the memoirs An Unfinished Woman, Scoundrel Time and elsewhere--were to Podhoretz symptoms of corruption and dishonor. Podhoretz admired Arendt but eventually broke with her over her famous New Yorker articles on the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961 and, as Podhoretz saw it, her seeming lack of sympathy for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

The relationship with Mailer was, as Trilling might have said, complicated. Podhoretz felt that Mailer, like Ginsberg, made an artistic pose of excess--too much of his work being merely a sort of riot against normality. Podhoretz stood up for Mailer after the novelist stabbed his wife Adele in the course of a fight at a party in 1959, but the two men parted company at last because they wound up on different sides of too many cultural and ideological barricades.

In recent years Podhoretz has struck bystanders as dyspeptic and contentious, and in debate as single-minded as a dog with his teeth sunk into a mailman's calf. Mailer has said that in the old days Podhoretz was a merrier man. Perhaps years of contrarian outrage have grimmed down the merriness. But the admirable Podhoretz has always lived by the gospel according to George Orwell: "The fact to which we have got to cling, as to a lifebelt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet to be fully alive."