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jflflivs and reviews
The New York intellectuals, then and now
by Joseph Cohen
The story of that remarkable
“herd of independent minds,” the
famed group of writers and thinkers
known as the New York Intellec
tuals (with a capital I) has been
told, in all of its ramifications,
diversities and complexities by
Alexander Bloom in his compel
ling. highly readable social history
"Prodigal Son: The New York In
tellectuals and Their World” (Ox
ford University Press, $24.95). A
large cast of characters, Bloom
introduces them in sequence, de
scribing the immigrant socialist
Jewish milieu from which they
came. Among those of the first
generation were Philip Rahv (died
1973). William Phillips (the family
name was Litvinsky), Sidney Hook,
Mary McCarthy (no Brownsville
immigrant daughter, she), Lionel
Trilling (one of the two great Amer
ican iiterary critics of our time,
died 1975), his wife, Diana (nee
Rubin), Meyer Schapiro, Clement
Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg (died
1978), Dwight Macdonald (died
1982) and Elliot Cohen (curiously
from Mobile, Ala., a Yale gradu
ate, he was the brilliant first editor
of Commentary, died by his own
hand in 1959).
The second generation consisted
of Irving Howe, Irving Kristol,
Daniel Bell, Delmore Schwartz
(died 1956), Leslie Fiedler, Sey
mour Martin Lipset, Nathan Glazer,
Alfred Kazin, Robert Warshow
(died 1955), Melvin Laskv. Isaac
Rosenfeld (died 1956) and Saul
Bellow. A third generation includes
Lionel Trilling’s student, Norman
Podhoretz, his wife. Midge Decter,
and Steven Marcus.
lo follow the progress of the
New York Intellectuals in polictics
and literature is to retrace Ameri
can history from the 1930s to the
present. Though they began as
Marxists, they ran the gamut in
their political persuasions, moving
from a pro-Stalinist position to an
anti-Stalinist one, commenting on
Roosevelt’s New Deal policies,
playing footsie for a time with
I rotsky, endorsing proletarian lit
erature, then turning from it to
modernism, essaying the roles of
Eliot, Pound, Kafka and Joyce,
welding connections between poli
tics and literature, arguing that the
goals of the political polemicist
and the literary critic were parallel
•n shaping the thinking of both the
masses and the elite. Through the
Partisan Review, and, subsequent
ly, Commentary, Dissent—one can’t
help being reminded of Woody
Allen’s waggish observation that it
those two journals merged they
could call the successor “Dysen
tery”— and the New York Review
°i Books, they did indeed mold
public opinion to the extent that by
the 1950s the pages of the New
York Times, the Washington Post
and other prestigious papers and
lournals were open to them
Rarely in agreement and fre
quently at war with one another,
they had something cogent to say
about every important issue and
event of our times, the Second
World War, the Cold War, the
McCarthy investigations, Jewish
identity and alienation, the Jewish
literary renaissance, making it in
America, postwar liberalism, the
civil disorders of the 1960s and the
counterculture, Allen Ginsberg and
the Beats, the “New Left," Hannah
Arendt’s theories of totalitarian
ism, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
and the Alger Hiss Case, and the
emergence of neo-conservatism w ith
its swing in recent years to the
Reagan right, in this latter con
text, Bloom explores at length the
emergence of Norman Podhoretz
as the controversial King of the
Mountain, recalling the dismay with
which his friends and associates
tried to dissuade him from publish
ing “Making It” (1968), the first
volume of his autobiography which
announced with consummate bad
taste his capitulation to fame and
success in America. To many read
ers, it appeared to be a sellout of
principle.
In retropsective, “Making It”
merely confirms that Podhoretz
was headed toward the right all
along. That’s OK, but the fact that
he has moved Commentary com
pletely into his own corner has in
censed so many contemporary A-
merican intellectuals they have now
established a new liberal journal,
entitled Tikkun, to replace the now
lost formally broad-visioned re
ceptivity of Commentary.
Bloom's “Prodigal Sons” pays
attention to the closely intertwined
personal lives of its subjects, relat
ing them to their professional
activities. The cast of characters is
always alive, as people as well as
intellectual demigods. This makes
a study that is already engaging,
erudite without being pedantic, and
symphonically rich, even more
satisfying and fulfilling.
You’re just the type.
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PAGE 25 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE September 19, 1986