Making It (NYRB Classics)

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Making It, NYRB Classics has revived Podhoretz’s battle-scarred memoir with an innocuous new introduction by Terry Teachout, Commentary’s critic at large, who isn’t about to jeopardise his post by saying anything too jazzy or impolitic here. Given the long history of gangland strife between Commentary and the New York Review of Books, it’s gracious show more of its reprint house to include Making It in its classics line. It’s more of a curiosity today than a classic, too lacking in novelistic redolence and vivid characterisation, too pocked with deadwood phrases of punditry (‘it would seem’, ‘which is to say’, ‘to be sure’), to rank with Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Willie Morris’s North toward Home, and other urban romances of the ardent outsider whose eyes are on the prize. Still, it’s handy to have it back in print after its long stay in limbo, for documentary purposes. show less

In the brief acknowledgments section, Podhoretz thanks Lionel Trilling, who, he says, “has taught me more than he or I ever realized—though not, I fear, precisely what he would have wanted me to learn.” This reads pretty clearly as a suggestion that Trilling, too, was a suck-up who wrote literary criticism in the hope of getting invited to a party with Jackie Kennedy. You can see why show more Trilling was not eager for Podhoretz’s memoir to see the light of day.

And not only Trilling. “Making It” is a book about what Podhoretz, borrowing the term from Murray Kempton, calls the Family—the writers and editors, mostly but not exclusively Jewish, who dominated the New York intellectual scene in the decades after the war. It is as their proud product that Podhoretz presents himself, and he obviously hoped to retain the approval of these people, as he had done so often in the past, by daring to write something they were afraid to write. He believed that they would admire his courage, recognize the justice of his account, forgive any indiscretions he may have committed, and, freed at last from a stifling hypocrisy, embrace him and the book. Many writers have tried this kind of thing. It never works. show less

Podhoretz wants you to focus on him, on his mind, on the things he has to say. And he does not cheat. He never makes himself good or—more cleverly—interestingly bad. Perhaps unconsciously, he has been tougher on himself than is really fair. With scarcely a trace of human warmth he has drawn the portrait of someone, surely not himself, who is an intellectual nebbish. And after writing a show more book that is not commercial, not dangerous, not ambitious, but is, in fact, in rather good taste by today's standards, he stretches out his neck on the platter of that last paragraph—for a crime he never committed. So let us give him the due he does not give himself. show less