Norman wins the heart of the fanatical Leavis as he had won those of his predecessors at Columbia. He is older (twenty-one) and “no longer so unformed as to be capable of an effortless imitation of the master’s style in the papers I wrote.” But his more subtle fawning succeeds beyond his dreams: Leavis invites him to write for Scrutiny, and prints the piece.
Norman can’t help being Norman. Here as throughout the book Podhoretz writes about his hero with a finely judged mixture of affection and mockery. He knows as well as his critics that Norman’s ambitiousness verges on the insane. But such is the power of Podhoretz’s storytelling that we continue to want to follow the fortunes of his peculiar hero even as our sense of his peculiarity grows.
To complicate matters, Podhoretz has encased the story of Norman’s feverish strivings—the way chocolate encases the soft center of a bonbon—in a rather puzzling polemic about a social problem that not many readers will recognize as such, much less want to carry on about. His idea is that American culture is dominated by a doctrine of “anti-success” that keeps successful people in a perpetual state of nervous guilt over the “corruption of spirit” that underlies their power, riches, and fame. “On the one hand,” he writes, “our culture teaches us to shape our lives in accordance with the hunger for worldly things; on the other hand, it spitefully contrives to make us ashamed of the presence of those hungers in ourselves and to deprive us as far as possible of any pleasure in their satisfaction.”
* * *
This said—and how well he says it—Podhoretz goes on to describe his hero’s conquest of literary New York as anything but the angst-ridden experience we would expect it to be, given his thesis. We follow Norman’s campaign to gain acceptance into “the family”—the mostly but by no means exclusively Jewish intellectuals associated with Partisan Review—with the sort of interest we reserve for favorite sports teams. We are rooting for him even as (with Podhoretz’s good-natured permission) we are laughing at him. Commentary gave him his start, assigning him monthly book reviews. “What I wanted was to see my name in print, to be praised, and above all to attract attention.” But
it was the attention of the family I most dreamed of arousing.… There was nothing I loved better than to sit around with [Robert] Warshow or [Clement] Greenberg and listen (my wide-eyed worshipful fascination egging them on) to tales of the patriarchal past: how “Mary” had left “Philip” to marry Edmund Wilson … how “Dwight” had once organized nude swimming parties at the Cape, how “William” had really felt about “Delmore,” and how “Isaac” really felt about “Saul.” Oh to be granted the right to say “William” and “Philip” and “Dwight,” as I could already say “Bob” and “Clem” and “Nat.”
The right was granted in due course. When Norman’s negative review of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March appeared in Commentary, the Partisan Review people took special notice. His dislike of the book, against the prevalent view that it was great, turned out to be the view that a lot of the family secretly held. There is a mordant account of a party at Philip Rahv’s apartment that Norman characterized as the bar mitzvah ceremony that admitted him into the family. He got very drunk. “I remember hearing my voice pronounce an incredulous, ‘You mean Alfred Kazin?’ or ‘You mean Dwight Macdonald?’ or ‘You mean Mary McCarthy?’ as Rahv and a woman who was present treated me to my first horrified experience of true family-style gossip.” After the party Norman stood out on the street violently throwing up. “And yet in the very midst of all that misery, I knew that I had never been so happy in my life.”
A few months later Norman was drafted into the army and didn’t enjoy basic training, but it was only after his release from the army that he became “more unhappy than I had ever been in my life” in a job as an editor at Commentary that had been promised to him by Elliot Cohen before he left for Fort Dix. By the time Norman came to claim the job, Commentary was no longer the place he had known when he had hung out with the editors and heard about Dwight’s nude swimming parties. Cohen had had a nervous collapse and was in a mental institution. All of its former subeditors were gone except for two men who now jointly ran the journal and did not welcome Norman into their midst. They undermined and bullied him.
Podhoretz does not name the men but combines them into a character called “The Boss.” “One of the reasons I was so miserable at Commentary during my time there under The Boss was that it had become practically the only place in the world where the sun still failed to shine on my fortunate young head,” Norman reflects. His book reviews—in Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New Yorker—had made him into what he calls a “minor literary celebrity.” At Commentary, under “The Boss,” he was made to feel like a pathetic incompetent.
Finally he couldn’t take it anymore and quit the job, but not before stopping into the offices of the American Jewish Council—the organization that owned Commentary—and telling the head of its personnel department why he was quitting. The result was a great upheaval that ended the autocratic reign of “The Boss” and allowed Norman to continue in the job as one of three equal editors. Norman asks himself: “In thus committing the prime crime of American boyhood, snitching to the authorities, did I feel guilty? A little, but mostly I felt pleased with myself for having acted so selflessly, so nobly.” Here as elsewhere Norman keeps the reader on his side by telling the story on himself. He has no illusions about the dirtiness of what he did. We helplessly admire his honesty, as the women in his childhood
marveled at my cleverness, quoting my bright sayings to one another and even back to me (“You remember what you said that time when I was here last? Let me hear you say it again.”). They called me adorable, they called me delicious, they called me a genius, and predicted a great future for me: a doctor at the very least I would be.
They probably would not have predicted his politics. Soon after writing Making It Podhoretz veered sharply right (until then he was a regular lefty like most of the rest of the family) and has grown ever more firmly committed to right-wing causes. He has written numerous books about his extreme conservative beliefs. Perhaps more than any other of the leakages from life that give autobiography its wobbly ontological status, Podhoretz’s radical post-publication politics hover over the book he wrote when he was an innocuous liberal. My attempt to seal it off from its author’s later career, and to write as if I didn’t know what I know—and what everyone who hears the name Norman Podhoretz knows—was made in the name of the New Critical ideal of textual fidelity: don’t muddy the waters with stuff surrounding the text. In the case of Making It, however, the mud clinging to the tale of the strange ambitious boy may be crucial to its discreet charm.
The New York Review of Books, 2018
_________________
Making It, by Norman Podhoretz, with an introduction by Terry Teachout
NOTES
Performance Artist
1. As it appeared in The New Yorker of September 5, 2016.
Special Needs
1. “A Tale of Two Moralities,” The New York Times, January 13, 2011.
2. “Dancing with the Scars,” The New York Observer, November 30, 2010.
Socks
1. In correspondence with the writer.
2. The reader should not be misled into thinking that I know Russian. A Russian speaker kindly supplied these words.
3. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, introduction by Mona Simpson, translated by Constance Garnett, translation revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (Modern Library, 2000).
4. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Marian Schwartz, edited and with an introduction by Gary Saul Morson (Yale University Press, 2014).
The Master Writer of the City
1. See the posthumous “Days in the Branch,” The New Yorker, December 1, 2014, part of an unfinished memoir.
ALSO BY JANET MALCOLM
Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers
Iphigenia
in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial
Burdock
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey
The Crime of Sheila McGough
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings
The Journalist and the Murderer
In the Freud Archives
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Janet Malcolm is the author of many books, including In the Freud Archives; The Journalist and the Murderer; Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, which won the 2008 PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography; and Forty-One False Starts, which was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. She is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. In 2017, Malcolm received the Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
PART I
Nobody’s Looking at You
Performance Artist
Three Sisters
The Émigré
The Storyteller
PART II
The Art of Testifying
Special Needs
Comedy Central on the Mall
Pandora’s Click
PART III
Dreams and Anna Karenina
Socks
The Master Writer of the City
Women at War: A Case of Sexual Harassment
It Happened in Milwaukee
Sisters, Lovers, Tarts, and Friends
“A Very Sadistic Man”
Remember the Ladies
“I Should Have Made Him for a Dentist”
Notes
Also By Janet Malcolm
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2019 by Janet Malcolm
All rights reserved
First edition, 2019
The essays in this volume originally appeared in the following publications: The New York Review of Books: “Special Needs,” “Comedy Central on the Mall” (NYR Daily), “Pandora’s Click,” “Dreams and Anna Karenina,” “Socks,” “The Master Writer of the City,” “It Happened in Milwaukee,” “Sisters, Lovers, Tarts, and Friends,” “‘A Very Sadistic Man,’” “Remember the Ladies,” “‘I Should Have Made Him for a Dentist’”; The New Yorker: “Nobody’s Looking at You,” “Performance Artist,” “Three Sisters,” “The “Émigré,” “The Storyteller,” “The Art of Testifying,” “Women at War: A Case of Sexual Harassment.”
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