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| BEAUTIFUL RAGE | |
 March 18, 1999 
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ROGER ROSENBLATT: The odd thing about New York intellectuals of the 1950's and 1960's-- I should say one of the million odd things -- is that they took ideas more seriously than they took themselves. And they took themselves as seriously as the grave. Norman Podhoretz, the brilliant and infuriating long-time editor of Commentary, has brought the group to life most recently in a new book, "Ex-Friends," or falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Helman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. Among others in this fast-disappearing congregation of fierce and brooding minds were the writers, Paul Goodman, Mary McCarthy, and Dwight MacDonald; the monumental literary critics and historians, Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin; the philosopher, Sidney Hook, and those who were glittering fusions of all of the above: Irving Kristol, Irving Howe, and Nathan Glazer. Children of a literary age, they worshipped writers whose ideas they hated, and embraced a communism that hated them. Then they changed their minds, or they clung to them, with a devout tenacity that suggested that ideas were gods. Podhoretz was the wunderkind and gadfly of this group. He was known as the life of the party, not the communist, a description that seems preposterous to himself and to others today, when he usually appears as merry as the Department of Commerce. Yet there was a bellicose charm to this group. They always stood ready to blow their impressive top. A book that revives these people is immensely important, because it recreates a world that is fast going out of modern memory and American life. Podhoretz focuses on his former friends in order to say something about himself -- that he was mostly right, of course -- and about the vagaries of friendship. But the main thing he does, fittingly in a book, is to paint a life in which words counted. The "Partisan Review," the "Kenyon Review," these magazines were this group's bibles. As sophisticated as they could be in argument, they were childlike in their trust that words affect action. They ranted about politics, but they were not political thinkers; they were literary thinkers interested in politics. Words gave them access to the greater world. Jews from poor neighborhoods in the Bronx and Brooklyn were in the thrall of aristocratic Southerners like Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, and patricians like T.S. Eliot, and even outright anti-Semites like Ezra Pound. Thoughts mattered more than appearances. None of this group would have made it on television. They were public intellectuals, but not like those of today, who do appear on television as sound bite experts, microwave historians, stove-top critics, and, yes, Minute-Rice essayists. Many of today's public intellectuals come from think tanks, whose ideas are used solely for political purposes. The old crowd would have laughed this new breed off the stage, if they could ever have mustered a laugh. Yet, the old crowd mattered. Aided by the hysteria of the new left, they brought back an intelligent love of country. And those who remained on the left confirmed the best of liberalism. They mattered especially to writers of my age who, though we often wanted to strangle them, revered them and their world, which is soon to be gone. What will be left of it is a wall full of books like these, written by people driven by love of language and a beautiful rage. I'm Roger Rosenblatt. |
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