Bard of Barbs: RIP Christopher Hitchens
Rather than wade into the legend, the myth, the Iraq War supporter, I’d like to share what was unimpeachably good about Christopher Hitchens: masterful take downs of worthy targets. In this case — oh my — that target is Norman Podhoretz.
Unsurprisingly, you could apply a lot of this to Norman’s son and current editor of Commentary, John — also known as Twitter’s resident bore.
This essay was taken from what is likely his best collection, and the one Hitchens once claimed to be proud of most, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in The Public Sphere.
Not to be moist but I’ll miss him.
REVIEW: Ex-Friends, by Norman Podhoretz. The Free Press. 256 pages. $25.
Evelyn Waugh, discoursing on the etiquette of book reviewing, observed that one must always give favorable treatment to the work of close friends. Quite apart from anything else, he explained, it was the height of bad manners to give a poor review to a book one had not read. Waugh’s remark may have been cynical, but it had a certain lightness and paradox to it. Whereas Norman Podhoretz has no levity—unbearable heaviness is his preferred metier—and never strays into paradox,and gives a series of chiefly posthumous but always spiteful reviews to several authors whom he may have read but certainly has not understood. This is bad manners cubed, boorishness wrenched almost into a literary form.
True, the former editor of the supposedly solemn Commentary magazine has always himself sought to ease the life of the book reviewer. He does this small but welcome favor by making all his faults crashingly apparent from the very first page, sometimes even from the opening paragraph. Here are the initial two sentences of Ex-Friends:
I have often said that if I wish to namedrop, I have only to list my ex-friends. This remark always gets a laugh, but, in addition to being funny, it has the advantage of being true.
If he does say so himself. To be invariably witty and unfailingly truthful is a claim many of us might wish to make or perhaps (shall we hint?) to have made on our behalf. To reduce the claim to an assertion, frequently advanced-as we are assured by the author himself and no less often mirthfully received, is to force the question: Who is the audience for this sapient gag? How often does it meet, and where? Who pays for the dinner? Then again, if Podhoretz stands alone in a forest, and falls over as a result of laughing at his own mordant humor, and there is nobody to hear or to see, does he still look and sound such a fool?
But seriously, folks, Norman doesn’t want you to think that he is a mere Catskills jester, nor yet a pure and ascetic intellectual. Let us proceed, drying our eyes, to page two, where it is confided with perfect gravity that:
It will seem even stranger to my more recent acquaintances that in my younger years I was also full of fun, as Norman Mailer confirmed when he said that I was “merrier” in the “old days.” The same word was once used by Max Lerner, the historian and columnist (now among the almost forgotten), who after spending a few days in my company described me (to general agreement) as “the merry madcap” of the group.
Must have been quite a party. Norman setting the table on a roar and bearing Lerner on his back to the land of infinite jest. In the comer, perhaps, Irving Kristol screaming, “Stop! You’re killing me!” But as I contemplated this lugubrious fiesta, the image of Yorick faded from my mind to be deposed by that of Polonius himself, endlessly finger-wagging to the young and making himself useful around the court.He gave way in turn to Justice Shallow, cackling senescently about the chimes of midnight and the tales he might have told of a laddish youth.
A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realization that you can’t make old friends. This is redeemed somewhat by the possibility of making new ones, and in his late maturity—some might say that like the medlar fruit he went rotten before becoming ripe—Podhoretz has found companionship and solidarity with some new chums. He mentions them shyly, as if he were back in his lonely childhood and his mother had secretly bribed them to play with him.
Here, in what is for me a rare submission to the principles of affirmative action, which dictate that I should strive to achieve greater name-dropping “diversity,” I will single out Henry Kissinger and William F. Buckley, Jr. In spite of our failure to form ourselves into a cohesive family, we have managed to join forces as a dissenting minority of “heretical” intellectuals who are trying to break the virtual monopoly that the worst ideas of my ex-friends hold (even from beyond the grave) over the cultural institutions of this country.
The purpose of recruiting these new chums is clear: to enlist them in the urgent task of pissing on the graves of the old ones. This makes them more like cronies, or accomplices, than actual friends. But perhaps that’s better than nothing. Is it Henry and Bill, perhaps, who get together and agree to laugh at Norman’s jokes? Whatever the case, the man who can describe this gleesome threesome as a trio of heretical dissenters is certainly eager to please.
For the purposes of comparison, here’s what happens when Podhoretz encounters an authentic dissident:
When on a visit of my own to Prague in 19881 was taken to meet Vaclav Havel, … the first thing that hit my eye upon entering his apartment was a huge poster of John Lennon hanging on the wall. Disconcerted, I tried to persuade Havel that the counterculture in the West was no friend of anti-Communists like himself, but I made even less of a “dent” on him than Ginsberg had made on me thirty years earlier.
Good of Podhoretz to have spared so much time to put Havel straight. But that’s the sort of guy he is—always willing to oblige. Also, the fact that Havel was under house arrest may have helped both men to concentrate.
The above anecdote occurs in the chapter on Allen Ginsberg, the most recently dead of Podhoretz’s exes. (As a literary critic, he rather resembles an undertaker scanning the obits for trade.) You can take whatever view you like of Ginsberg’s poetry, or of his vague teachings about hedonism, or of his fierce commitment to penetratio per anum. Podhoretz thinks that Ginsberg was a serious and gifted poet, that his views on family and society were destructive, and that (great wailing walls of glossy video in every heterosexual porn shop notwithstanding) anal sex is something that fascinates only homosexuals. The last point is an obsessive one in the neoconservative school, incidentally, and requires professional attention from someone better qualified than the present author. But the fact remains that the two men were once friends, and that they quarreled bitterly over Vietnam and the war on drugs and everything else, and that the cruelest words in the dispute were probably uttered—if only because he had the superior command of language—by Allen Ginsberg. In 1986, however, Ginsberg began to speak more softly about his old antagonist:
He then followed up—I forget exactly when—with a handwritten note very warmly inviting me to a seminar…. This invitation, unlike the one some thirty years earlier to his apartment in the Village, I unhesitatingly declined, knowing that the new Ginsberg’s lovingkindness would put me even more uncomfortably on the defensive than the young Ginsberg’s rage had done.
On Ginsberg’s seventieth birthday, he gave an interview in which he again sought to repair the breach:
Another invitation then arrived, not from Ginsberg himself but from a television producer who wanted to put us on the air together. But once more I passed up a chance to see him again. Six months later he was dead.
So let us recapitulate. At Columbia, Ginsberg had published Podhoretz’s long poem about the prophet Jeremiah in the college literary magazine. Podhoretz had later written favorably about Ginsberg and compared him to Pound and Whitman. Then there was, for intelligible reasons, a major falling-out. And then, not once but twice, Ginsberg extended the hand of reconciliation, and Podhoretz, writing for the first time since his former friend’s funeral, takes an obvious pride—a pride in his own integrity—in having slapped that hand away. Small wonder, then, that when he needs a friend these days he has to rely on Henry Kissinger, who probably bills him for meetings.
The Russian exile writer Vassily Aksyonov—another example of the real as opposed to the bogus dissident—once wrote that Podhoretz reminded him of all the things he had left the Soviet Union to escape. He had, said Aksyonov, the mentality of a cultural commissar. As the Ginsberg essay demonstrates, he has the soul of one as well. And the literary sensitivity and imagination: most of the chapters here are regurgitated in great chunks from previous jeremiads such as Making It and Breaking Ranks. Here is what Podhoretz wrote about Norman Mailer in Making It in 1967:
Like most famous writers, he was surrounded by courtiers and sycophants, but with this difference: he allowed them into his life not to flatter him but to give his radically egalitarian imagination a constant workout. He had the true novelist’s curiosity about people unlike himself—you could see him getting hooked ten times a night by strangers at a party…. He would look into the empty eyes of some vapid upper-class girl and announce to her that she could be the madam of a Mexican whorehouse.
If you consult page 193 of the present offering, for which The Free Press is charging a tidy sum, you will be informed that:
Like many famous people, Mailer liked to surround himself with a crowd of courtiers, many of whom had nothing to recommend them that I could see other than their worshipful attitude toward him…. [H]e could be positively intolerable—posing, showing off, bumping heads (another of his favorite sports), bullying, ordering about, and, underneath it all, flattering.
The flattering was especially in evidence with women, not only or even primarily as a means of seduction but mainly as a way of romanticizing and thereby inflating the significance of everything that came into his life. He would inform some perfectly ordinary and uninteresting girl that she could have been a great madam running the best whorehouse in town.
This is not just boring and tenth-rate. It is sinister. Like Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s literary enforcer, Podhoretz doesn’t content himself with saying that a certain novelist is no longer in favor or no longer any good. That would be banal. No, it must be shown that he never was any good, that he always harbored the germs of anti-party feeling, that he was a rank rodent from the get-go. Then comes the airbrush, the rewritten entry in the encyclopedia, the memory hole. But even some of Zhdanov’s hacks would have made the effort to employ some new phrases and new disclosures. I once noticed a column in the London Spectator, written by someone named Taki Theodoracopulos and devoted to a hysterical attack on anal sex borrowed whole cloth from an earlier diatribe by Norman Podhoretz in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. I wrote a letter to the editor of the Spectator, asking if no more elevated source for plagiarism could be found. I now feel I owe Theodoracopulos an apology. Podhoretz, in stealing from himself, has found a real mug for a victim. He’s also found some real new friends for reviewers—William F. Buckley Jr., writing, or typing, in the New York Post, now compares the congealed regurgitations of Podhoretz to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians.
The other essays, on Hellman and Trilling and so forth, are also sterile reworkings and recyclings of ancient grudges, and you should go to the library to reread them, if you must, and not reward The FreePress for its marketing of old rope. For old hands, there is the occasional and unmistakable Podhoretz touch, like the knot of imperfection in an inauthentic Turkish rug. “Having reportedly spent eighteen years in psychoanalysis,” he slyly says of Diana Trilling, as if unable to make an unambiguous assertion to her face, even now. “Reportedly.” That’s a fine word. Nor is it the only breastplate of courage donned by our critic. Indeed, his instinct for a place of safety is something that he still can’t resist delineating in detail. Faced with a conflict between two of his early patrons—F. R. Leavis and C. P. Snow—he decided that Lionel Trilling should be his human shield:
As an additional bonus, since the article would be coming from America’s leading critic, I would not be held responsible (as I would have been if I had commissioned a lesser writer) for anything he might say that would offend either of the two warring parties.
But it didn’t work out, because all parties to the dispute decided that Podhoretz had acted in a surreptitious manner, and so we are treated to staves of self-pity and recrimination, as if the sentence just quoted did not already manifest the cowardice of its own convictions.
There is such a thing as a disagreement on fundamentals between old friends. Fallings-out do occur in real life. One way of measuring the depth and intensity of such divisions is intuitive but sound: Does either party maintain that there was no real comradeship to begin with? Or does either party repudiate, with glacial attitudes masquerading as principles, a genuine attempt at a later composition of the quarrel? There’s a relevant instance in this very book. Podhoretz parodies the views of the late Irving Howe, who generally sought for civilized relations with his former City College associates, many of whom had traded up and become apostles of the market, “free” or otherwise, and of the military-industrial complex, however defined. Yet for saying what was perfectly true about Irving Kristol—that in 1952 he had written in highly euphemistic terms of Senator Joseph McCarthy—Howe is indicted for taking a cheap shot. This may not be “the politics of personal destruction,” as Mr. Clinton’s many hired slanderers refer to arguments that go against them, but it is certainly the reduction of essential dispute to petty rancor.
A suggestive counterexample is touched upon in this book but is skated over, in a single paragraph, as if it had not really occurred. When Joseph Heller published Catch-22 in the early 1960s, Podhoretz rushed to praise it in a glossy sheet called Show. As a consequence, Heller and he became social friends. But as the years passed, and as Podhoretz began to fawn more openly on Richard Nixon and the Israeli general staff (as if rehearsing for the engulfing, mandible-straining blow job that he would later bestow on Ronald Reagan), Heller hauled off and dealt him a sock in the jaw in a letter to The Nation. He rammed this home, as it were, with a sprightly caricature of our Norman in his novel Good as Gold. One can now see the cruelty of Heller’s tactic. He not only repudiated his old friend but stabbed him in the front! And he did so at a time when the tide was running in Podhoretz’s favor. I ran into Heller, by a happy chance, while I was cogitating this review. “Yeah,” he said. “I never gave him the chance to dump me.”
What Heller saw coming is what we now term “neo-conservatism.” This is a protean and slippery definition, and very inexact as a category, but not all that hard to parse. If you take the version offered by its acolytes, you discover a group of New York Jewish intellectuals who decided that duty, honor, and country were superior, morally and mentally, to the bleeding-heart allegiances of their boy- and girlhoods. If you take the version offered by its critics, you stumble on an old Anglo-Saxon definition of the upper crust: “A load of crumbs held together by dough.” They just might have set out to do good, but there is no question that they ended up doing well. Podhoretz, of all the old gang, is in the weakest position to rebut this charge. His book Making It is perhaps the most vulgar paean to pure and simple arrivism that has ever been penned. He still broods over the yellowing reviews that made sport of him, in particular over the shudder of distaste that both Trillings evinced at the sheer crumminess of his aspirations. Norman Mailer, if you will credit this, told Podhoretz to his face that he quite liked the book, and then trashed it in the pages of Partisan Review. Treachery defined! Yet Podhoretz calmly tells us that he stayed on good terms with Lillian Hellman in just the same way, so as to remain on her party list. When, in the 1980s, the country-club Republicans found that there were tame New York intellectuals to be had for the asking, and from places like Brooklyn College at that, their polite surprise was evident. They had not been paying attention to the many attention-getting rehearsals, at which these old tarts had been dropping veils as if they were going out of style.
Podhoretz is accidentally right, as it happens, in maintaining that there is also a special ad hominem venom on the left, and an extreme willingness to attribute the very lowest motives to those who transgress its codes. Not long ago, having had a series of public disagreements with an old political friend, I clinched matters by making public something that, although it was public business, could have been described as privately held. Immediately, all evidence of my own strictly private shortcomings was placed on view by former comrades, an operation that I am half-ashamed to say required the spilling of much ink. Having come across this syndrome more than once, I have learned to regard it with resignation, as yet one more aspect of radical impotence in America. But the sufferers from said syndrome can acquire no worthwhile lessons from a crass power worshiper whose only regrets are for himself, and who can conceive of no cause larger than his own esteem. “The sweet solipsism of youth,” says the poet. The solipsism of embittered old age is a lot harder to bear, if not for the writer then at least for the reader.
RIP Christopher Hitchens
