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Perspective

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I Allen Ginsberg: "In the

abstract he spoke for freedom
from the oppressions of arbitrary
social constraints, but his own
work made no bones about the
concrete consequences of this free-
dom: they were madness, drugs
and sexual perversity."

1997, Podhoretz reflected, "It came
over me that I had known this man for
a full 50 years — fifty years! — and
ghat for at least 40 of them I had been
at war with him and he with me."
As Podhoretz would have it,
Ginsberg never forgave him for the
1958 article "The Know Nothing
Bohemians," which attacked Beat
Generation writing and values.
One episode of unintended humor
shows Podhoretz and Ginsberg at
their worst. Podhoretz makes a con-
frontation with Ginsberg and Jack
Kerouac in 1958 seem like
Armageddon, a cultural battle
between his super-straightness and
Ginsberg's embrace of homosexuality
and all the other aspects of what was
to become the counterculture.
From a Jewish perspective,
Podhoretz's ex-friendship with
Hannah Arendt is most compelling.
"Because of her," writes Podhoretz,
"I learned something about myself as a
Jew." He maintains that the philoso-
pher and political critic Arendt was
the most brilliant person he has
known. But her study of the
Eichmann trial, Eichmann in
Jerusalem, created a rift between them
that was never mended.
Podhoretz was nor alone in his out-
rage over Arendt's ideas about "the
banality of evil," which professed that
Eichmann was not an anti-Semitic
monster but rather a petty bureaucrat
obsessed with his job. She also argued
that the leadership in many European
Jewish communities was inadvertently
complicit with Nazi genocidal aims.
The American Jewish community
was torn apart over those issues. Lines
were drawn, and sides were taken pas-
sionately supporting or opposing
Arendt's claims.
Podhoretz is at his best in describ-
ing the shades of difference among
Jewish factions in the controversy,
deploring the ignorance about

Judaism even among well-educated
American Jews.
Podhoretz's own extensive Jewish
education "saved me from the cavalier
and philistine attitude of many of my
contemporaries toward Jewishness and
Judaism about which their ignorance
knew no bounds and the vulgarity of
their ideas knew no limits," he writes.
Although his friendship with
Norman Mailer may seems incongru-
ous — the pugnacious, combative,
left-wing author and the respectable,
neo-conservative editor — it was
nonetheless close for many years until
it broke up over politics and what
Podhoretz calls Mailer's hypocrisy over
Podhoretz's writing.
Ex-Friends provides us with fasci-
nating glimpses into the private and
public lives of influential intellectuals,
and it also shows how petty, vain and
self-centered they — including
Podhoretz — can be.
The snobbery, which nearly auto-
matically dismissed the work of com-
mercially successful authors as "mid-
dlebrow," was more a product of envy
than high standards. The belief that
"the Family's" incestuous intellectual
arguments — fought on the battle-
grounds of Partisan Review,
Commentary and Dissent — were of
earth-shaking consequence showed .
their smug pretentiousness.
Podhoretz acknowledges much of
this but still values the existence of
"the Family."
"The record is decidedly mixed. On
balance, however, I remain convinced
that it is good for a country's culture
to have an intellectual community like
the Family,' even if it promotes bad
ideas as often as it does good ones," he
asserts.
Flawed though it may be, Ex-
Friends makes interesting reading,
especially for those who are intrigued
by the intersection of culture, celebrity,
intellectualism and American Jews. Ll

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I Lionel Trilling: "In later life ...

by discovering affinities between
his favorite English poet
(Wordsworth) -and an ancient rab-
binical text (Ethics of our Fathers),
he finally was able to say some-
thing good about being Jewish."

■ Diana Trilling: "... for reasons I

was never to unearth or to under-
stand, Diana changed her mind
about giving Lionel even a watered-
down Jewish funeral. The service
was held in St. Paul's Chapel on the
Columbia campus and was fol-
lowed by a cremation. And neither
in this Christian building nor in
the crematorium did [their son]
Jim recite the Kaddish."

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U Lillian Hellman: ""She never

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denied being Jewish herself, and
when she teased me, as she often
did, about my own Jewishness, it
was usually in a good-natured spir-
it of fun. But she also had a streak
of Jewish anti-Semitism, which
came out (especially when trading
gossip with her great pal Dorothy
Parker, who was only half-Jewish
but twice as anti-Semitic) in cracks
or sardonic comments about the
vulgarity or the tastelessness of
some "kike" or other."

Hannah Arendt: "Along with
many (or, rather, most) émigré
German Jewish intellectuals,
Hannah could never stop regard-
ing America as culturally inferior
to the land of her birth. Not even
the fact that Germany had given
rise to Nazis overrode this feeling."

U Norman Mailer: "Mailer would

spend the rest of his life overcom-
ing the stigma of this reputation
as a 'nice Jewish boy' by doing as
an adult all the hooliganish things
he had failed to do in childhood
and adolescence."

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4/23
1999

Detroit Jewish News

81