Books: Settling Old Scores

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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."