'What Mattered Most to Him Was Writing'

A friend wrote first thing Wednesday morning telling me Norman Podhoretz had died at age ninety-five. It was like hearing the last sequoia had fallen. “I read him religiously for 50 years,” my friend added. My observance of Podhoretz’s work was more secular but at least as long-lived. He was among the earliest critics I read as a teenager, along with Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. He helped take reviewing and criticism out of the graduate seminar and put it into the magazines of the day, and into the lives of common readers, where they belong. Among his teachers were Trilling and F.R. Leavis, and the seriousness with which they treated books rubbed off on their apt pupil.

Podhoretz wrote for Commentary and served as its editor-in-chief from 1960 to 1995. His son John Podhoretz, the current editor-in-chief of Commentary, writes on the magazine’s website a brief remembrance of his father:

 

“What you really need to know is that what mattered most to him was writing. Great writing. Good writing. Clear writing. Honest writing. He was the most literate man I have ever known, possessed of an encyclopedic knowledge of the written word in our time and in times past, who found true moral, intellectual, and aesthetic purpose in the act of reading and deciphering and comprehending. And he was himself a prose stylist of magnificence. There is no other word for it, and anyone who says otherwise is judging him not by his sentences but by views he held they do not like. That was a sin against honesty he never committed. There were many writers whose views he abhorred, but whose gifts he would absolutely acknowledge and ruefully refuse to deny.”

  

Consider his review of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and The Subterraneans, “The Know-Nothing Bohemians,” published in the Spring 1958 issue of The Partisan Review.  Podhoretz points out the author’s “simple inability to say anything in words.” He writes of Kerouac’s style, his much-vaunted, nonsensical “spontaneous bop prosody,” in these self-indulgent messes masquerading as novels:

 

“Strictly speaking, spontaneity is a quality of feeling, not of writing. . . . It isn’t the right words he wants (even if he knows what they might be), but the first words, or at any rate the words that most obviously announce themselves as deriving from emotion rather than cerebration, as coming from ‘life’ rather than ‘literature,’ from the guts rather than the brain. (The brain, remember, is the angel of death.)”

 

And this:

 

“Solipsism is precisely what characterizes Kerouac’s novels. [They] are so patently autobiographical in content that they become almost impossible to discuss as novels; if spontaneity were indeed a matter of destroying the distinction between life and literature, these books would unquestionably be It.”

 

Podhoretz’s politics were commonsensical: he loved America, he loved Israel and hated terror and totalitarianism. He was indifferent to or actively opposed the political fashions of the nineteen-sixties, the Hate-America-First bandwagon. He started as a boilerplate liberal and slowly grew up politically, in public. I regret only he hadn't written more about literature, though he was always right about murderous Muslims.

 

Take this from a review Podhoretz wrote of a novel in 1953: “He is trying to put blood into contemporary fiction and break through the hidebound conventions of the well-made novel. This is a herculean job that will have to be done if we are to have a living literature at all.” Sounds like Emerson welcoming Whitman: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

This is from Podhoretz’s review of Saul Bellow’s The Adventure of Augie March in the October 1953 issue of Commentary. Podhoretz was no gusher. The very next line in the review sounds the traditional Podhoretz note: “But our sympathy with Mr. Bellow’s ambition and our admiration for his pioneering spirit should not lead us to confuse the high intention with the realization.” Always cautious, always qualifying his judgment, which is a critic’s obligation.

 

As a young reader I was intoxicated by Bellow’s word-geysers. He was the educated man’s Thomas Wolfe. Podhoretz goes on:

 

“But the feeling conveyed by Mr. Bellow’s exuberance is an overwhelming impulse to get in as many adjectives and details as possible, regardless of considerations of rhythm, modulation, or, for that matter, meaning. Like Milton in Paradise Lost, who was trying to do the near impossible too, Mr. Bellow seems frightened of letting up; a moment’s relaxation might give the game away. The result is that we are far more aware of the words than the objects, of Mr. Bellow than of the world—which is the reverse of how he would like us to respond. His language lacks the suction to draw us into its stream.”

 

It took guts to write and publish this, especially in Commentary. Here are the review’s final sentences: “Mr. Bellow has the very genuine distinction of giving us a sense of what a real American idiom might look like. It is no disgrace to have failed in a pioneer attempt.”