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Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsburg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer
Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer -- all are ex-friends of Norman Podhoretz, the renowned editor and critic and leading member of the group of New York intellectuals who came to be known as "the Family." As only a family member could, Podhoretz tells the story of these friendships, once central to his life, and shows how the political and cultural struggles of the past fifty years made them impossible to sustain. With wit, piercing insight, and startling honesty, we are introduced as never before to a type of person for whom ideas were often matters of life and death, and whose passing from the scene has left so large a gap in American culture. Podhoretz was the trailblazer of the now-famous journey of a number of his fellow intellectuals from radicalism to conservatism -- a journey through which they came to exercise both cultural and political influence far beyond their number. With this fascinating account of his once happy and finally troubled relations with these cultural icons, Podhoretz helps us understand why that journey was undertaken and just how consequential it became. In the process we get a brilliantly illuminating picture of the writers and intellectuals who have done so much to shape our world. Combining a personal memoir with literary, social, and political history, this unique gallery of stern and affectionate portraits is as entertaining as a novel and at the same time more instructive about postwar American culture than a formal scholarly study. Interwoven with these tales of some of the most quixotic and scintillating of contemporary American thinkers are themes that are introduced, developed, and redeveloped in a variety of contexts, with each appearance enriching the others, like a fugue in music. It is all the perversity of brilliance; the misuse of the mind; the benightedness of people usually considered especially enlightened; their human foibles and olympian detachment; the rigors to be endured and the prizes to be won and the prices to be paid for the reflective life. Most people live their lives in a very different way, and at one point, in a defiantly provocative defense of the indifference shown to the things by which intellectuals are obsessed, Norman Podhoretz says that Socrates' assertion that the unexamined life was not worth living was one of the biggest lies ever propagated by a philosopher. And yet, one comes away from Ex-Friends feeling wistful for a day when ideas really mattered and when there were people around who cared more deeply about them than about anything else. Reading of a time when the finest minds of a generation regularly gathered in New York living rooms to debate one another with an articulateness, a passion, and a level of erudition almost extinct, we come to realize how enviable it can be to live a life as poignantly and purposefully examined as Norman Podhoretz's is in Ex-Friends.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
12 people are currently reading
187 people want to read
About the author
Norman Podhoretz
34 books27 followersNorman Podhoretz is an American neoconservative writer and editor.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 8, 2012
This book is a shameless account of the author's boundless self-interest and compulsive back-stabbing. He left the "Left" because he'd betrayed everyone in it. I did, however, enjoy his writing. His reasoning was erroneous and his lack of self-awareness distasteful; but the writing was okay.
May 18, 2017
Ex-Friends is Norman Podhoretz’s account of why he hates people, very specific people. He used to be friends with these people, but he is going to tell us why they did not live up to hs standards. Fiirst there is Allen Ginsberg, who was a co-student of Podhoretz’s at Columbia. (He tells us this a number of times.) They ceased to be friends, and Norman didn’t like Kerouac, Ferlingehtti, Peter Oblov, or William Burroughs either. Furthermore he doesn’t like Southerners such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren or anybody who called themelves an “Agrarian.
You think that’s bad? He hates Ginsberg’s poetry and he hates homosexuals and those dirty things they do to one another. He also hates Lionel Trilling who was his teacher at the C–word university. And Diana Trilling, who was his professor’s wife. And his other teacher at the other C-word university F.R. Leavis, and that old fraud (according to him) C.P. Snow. Understand that there is culture and there in non-culture, and whatever Norman Podhretz says, that’s what you should believe. He will also tell you about Philip Rahv and Norman O. Brown and every editor of every obscure publication in the ‘fifties.
However, if these names don’t mean much to you, you are not alone. But Podhoretz has been stewing for over fifty years why he doesn’t like these people. See, he’s a critic, and he himself writes that this is the best part of America’s literature, the criticism. But he’s also a social critic who although he once upon a time thought a socialist thought, he quickly decided Joe McCarthy was right and those Commies were wrong as were the ‘sixties radicals. Oh, and he hates Jane Fonda, too. Not to forget Mary McCarthy. And Pete Seeger. Stalinists and Trotskyites ---all of them.
Lillian Hellman, yep! She, as he points out is a Southern girl, who didn’t know anything. Also a Commie. And even as a Jew, she is anti-Semite. Plus she wrote horrible plays and movies. Oh, and Dorothy Parker is also an anti-Semite, too, although Dorothy was only half a Jew. He didn’t care for Hellman’s long time companion Dashell Hammet, either. In fact, he says Hellman’s writing was an imitation of Hammett’s imitation of Hemingway. Thus, if you know your Platonism….
And don’t get him started on Hannah Arendt, she was one of those German Jews, and you know how they are ---all of them. And here’s what I should have said to her. No, there is no end to the bleakness, even after he accepts Ronald Reagan as his Lord and Savior. In the Arendt section he promulgates some of his most dangerous dogma.
Then he wants to tell us about Norman Mailer, whom he always called “Mailer,” even though Mailer called him Norman. You get the idea. The world is full of anti-Semites, Commies, perverts, and no talent people. At least according to NP.
This is a bitter failed book by a bitter old failed man.
You think that’s bad? He hates Ginsberg’s poetry and he hates homosexuals and those dirty things they do to one another. He also hates Lionel Trilling who was his teacher at the C–word university. And Diana Trilling, who was his professor’s wife. And his other teacher at the other C-word university F.R. Leavis, and that old fraud (according to him) C.P. Snow. Understand that there is culture and there in non-culture, and whatever Norman Podhretz says, that’s what you should believe. He will also tell you about Philip Rahv and Norman O. Brown and every editor of every obscure publication in the ‘fifties.
However, if these names don’t mean much to you, you are not alone. But Podhoretz has been stewing for over fifty years why he doesn’t like these people. See, he’s a critic, and he himself writes that this is the best part of America’s literature, the criticism. But he’s also a social critic who although he once upon a time thought a socialist thought, he quickly decided Joe McCarthy was right and those Commies were wrong as were the ‘sixties radicals. Oh, and he hates Jane Fonda, too. Not to forget Mary McCarthy. And Pete Seeger. Stalinists and Trotskyites ---all of them.
Lillian Hellman, yep! She, as he points out is a Southern girl, who didn’t know anything. Also a Commie. And even as a Jew, she is anti-Semite. Plus she wrote horrible plays and movies. Oh, and Dorothy Parker is also an anti-Semite, too, although Dorothy was only half a Jew. He didn’t care for Hellman’s long time companion Dashell Hammet, either. In fact, he says Hellman’s writing was an imitation of Hammett’s imitation of Hemingway. Thus, if you know your Platonism….
And don’t get him started on Hannah Arendt, she was one of those German Jews, and you know how they are ---all of them. And here’s what I should have said to her. No, there is no end to the bleakness, even after he accepts Ronald Reagan as his Lord and Savior. In the Arendt section he promulgates some of his most dangerous dogma.
Then he wants to tell us about Norman Mailer, whom he always called “Mailer,” even though Mailer called him Norman. You get the idea. The world is full of anti-Semites, Commies, perverts, and no talent people. At least according to NP.
This is a bitter failed book by a bitter old failed man.
May 23, 2008
This was a very interesting book by a man who began as a prodigy of literary criticism, forsook literature and most of his friends and went on to become a founder of the movement that is, today, most commonly called “Neo-Conservatism” – those ghoulish, and influential, “Neocons” you hear so much about. But Podhoretz is, by his own constant admission, so much smarter than those who would unfavorably judge him that by the end of his life, just like at the end of this book, things will have worked out mostly for the better.
This book, part of a Podhoretz genre, is a combination between a memoir and a collection of essays on larger themes. It’s something like an intellectual’s version of participatory journalism. This book is about literary creatures and intellectuals and the intersection of the two. In reading Ex-Friends, one is tempted to put in Podhoretz’s mouth words like: “Poets should stick to poetry and novelists to novels; these folks have a great and entertaining gift and it is decidedly not in matters political or intellectual.”
But since Podhoretz himself is something of a reinvention, he can’t well make this assertion. Instead he goes about razing the intellectual pretensions of literary movements and figures like the Beat poets. Some of this is fair, and some of it isn’t entirely fair.
See, Podhoretz knows the importance that moment and celebrity had for folks like Allen Ginsburg and Norman Mailer. He knows that their ilk would gladly trade words that are intelligible in a hundred years for being called geniuses this afternoon. As lamentable as ideas like Haight-Ashbury were, at the time they had the moment. The most thinkers like Podhoretz could say was, “This is a very stupid idea, but only time will convince you of its fatuity.”
Years later, these folks don’t wish to be held accountable for all the bad ideas they had. Instead they want to erect monuments to the persecution they suffered when adults used the legislative and executive branches of government to stop them. They’re mostly forgotten by their own design; once they weren’t famous any longer, they didn’t much like living with the weight of their dumb ideas either.
Finally, though, what’s most striking about this book is how certain literary and intellectual sets obsess over dinner parties. Despite ultimately seeing most of these folks for what they were, Podhoretz still longs for invitations to the season’s hottest party – the one with the most authors celebrating one another.
At the end of Ex-Friends, Podhoretz suspects these sorts of parties no longer happen, else he’d hear rumors of them. Anyone who’s read a book review in the New York Times, though, has to suspect these silly gatherings do still happen – and being invited to them is still very important to some tragically empowered folks.
But to see where all this ends up, one ought to pick up a copy of Ex-Friends or read its subtitle. If you don’t recognize more than half the names, you’re well on your way to having proper perspective on dinner parties and the value of their habitués.
This book, part of a Podhoretz genre, is a combination between a memoir and a collection of essays on larger themes. It’s something like an intellectual’s version of participatory journalism. This book is about literary creatures and intellectuals and the intersection of the two. In reading Ex-Friends, one is tempted to put in Podhoretz’s mouth words like: “Poets should stick to poetry and novelists to novels; these folks have a great and entertaining gift and it is decidedly not in matters political or intellectual.”
But since Podhoretz himself is something of a reinvention, he can’t well make this assertion. Instead he goes about razing the intellectual pretensions of literary movements and figures like the Beat poets. Some of this is fair, and some of it isn’t entirely fair.
See, Podhoretz knows the importance that moment and celebrity had for folks like Allen Ginsburg and Norman Mailer. He knows that their ilk would gladly trade words that are intelligible in a hundred years for being called geniuses this afternoon. As lamentable as ideas like Haight-Ashbury were, at the time they had the moment. The most thinkers like Podhoretz could say was, “This is a very stupid idea, but only time will convince you of its fatuity.”
Years later, these folks don’t wish to be held accountable for all the bad ideas they had. Instead they want to erect monuments to the persecution they suffered when adults used the legislative and executive branches of government to stop them. They’re mostly forgotten by their own design; once they weren’t famous any longer, they didn’t much like living with the weight of their dumb ideas either.
Finally, though, what’s most striking about this book is how certain literary and intellectual sets obsess over dinner parties. Despite ultimately seeing most of these folks for what they were, Podhoretz still longs for invitations to the season’s hottest party – the one with the most authors celebrating one another.
At the end of Ex-Friends, Podhoretz suspects these sorts of parties no longer happen, else he’d hear rumors of them. Anyone who’s read a book review in the New York Times, though, has to suspect these silly gatherings do still happen – and being invited to them is still very important to some tragically empowered folks.
But to see where all this ends up, one ought to pick up a copy of Ex-Friends or read its subtitle. If you don’t recognize more than half the names, you’re well on your way to having proper perspective on dinner parties and the value of their habitués.
July 20, 2013
Although he is quick to criticize and tear apart his ex-friends and their beliefs, he never really gets to the crux of why he changed his mind so completely and reversed course in his political views. His adoration of Reagan is nauseating, as is his belief that the "military-industrial complex" is not a problem, but Communism is. His ideas sound so dated, this man has most certainly outlived the validity of his beliefs but is too old and crotchety to see it or admit it.
I for one am very glad this man was not ever my "friend" since it's obvious from this book that although using people for jobs and status, he never truly was a friend to any of them.
I for one am very glad this man was not ever my "friend" since it's obvious from this book that although using people for jobs and status, he never truly was a friend to any of them.
August 14, 2019
The scathing-yet-obtuse reviews of Podhoretz's book ("Ex-Friends is Norman Podhoretz’s account of why he hates people, very specific people") often say more about the social-political leanings of the reviewer than the book itself.
Not being sufficiently acquainted with the likes of Lillian Hellman or Lionel Trilling or Norman Mailer, a few chapters I'll admit really failed to hold my interest.
Still, the opening memories of Podhoretz's critical engagement with Allen Ginsburg and his happenstance meeting with Jack Kerouac ("disconcertingly, as likeable in the flesh as he was repellent in print") was immensely enjoyable. While Podhoretz is sharply critical of Keroac's alcoholism and bohemianism, I have to wonder if he might have modified his opinion of him, had he been better acquainted not with his impressions derived from Keroac's writing but rather Keroac's increasing conservative and religiously Catholic bent in his later years -- coupled with a falling out with (none other than) Allen Ginsberg over the very matter of what he termed the bohemian beatniks .
Likewise, I also appreciated Podhoretz's account of his friendship with (and depiction of) Hannah Arendt, together with his appreciation of The Origins of Totalitarianism and perceptive criticism of Eichmann in Jerusalem .
Ultimately, to suggest this is a book about "why Podhoretz hates people" is incredibly misleading -- in fact, I found this a telling depiction of one belonging to an intellectual community and circle of New York friends and colleagues for whom ideas really mattered: who squabbled, deliberated, fought and fell out with each other in the pages of Partisan Review and Commentary and the New York Review of Books. Even if you disagree with Podhoretz, you can certainly appreciate the fact that he remains a man of stubborn opinions and firm convictions -- and yet, at the same time humble enough to hold his positions to constant evaluation and reconsideration (precisely through is engagements with said "ex-friends").
Three stars -- if only on account of my own unfamiliarity (and thus failure to be captivated by) his falling out with Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman or the Trillings.
Not being sufficiently acquainted with the likes of Lillian Hellman or Lionel Trilling or Norman Mailer, a few chapters I'll admit really failed to hold my interest.
Still, the opening memories of Podhoretz's critical engagement with Allen Ginsburg and his happenstance meeting with Jack Kerouac ("disconcertingly, as likeable in the flesh as he was repellent in print") was immensely enjoyable. While Podhoretz is sharply critical of Keroac's alcoholism and bohemianism, I have to wonder if he might have modified his opinion of him, had he been better acquainted not with his impressions derived from Keroac's writing but rather Keroac's increasing conservative and religiously Catholic bent in his later years -- coupled with a falling out with (none other than) Allen Ginsberg over the very matter of what he termed the bohemian beatniks .
Likewise, I also appreciated Podhoretz's account of his friendship with (and depiction of) Hannah Arendt, together with his appreciation of The Origins of Totalitarianism and perceptive criticism of Eichmann in Jerusalem .
Ultimately, to suggest this is a book about "why Podhoretz hates people" is incredibly misleading -- in fact, I found this a telling depiction of one belonging to an intellectual community and circle of New York friends and colleagues for whom ideas really mattered: who squabbled, deliberated, fought and fell out with each other in the pages of Partisan Review and Commentary and the New York Review of Books. Even if you disagree with Podhoretz, you can certainly appreciate the fact that he remains a man of stubborn opinions and firm convictions -- and yet, at the same time humble enough to hold his positions to constant evaluation and reconsideration (precisely through is engagements with said "ex-friends").
Three stars -- if only on account of my own unfamiliarity (and thus failure to be captivated by) his falling out with Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman or the Trillings.
December 2, 2023
I’m not sure how to rate this book. Did I enjoy it? Yes! Would I recommend it? To a circle of people. Is it lifechanging? To a much smaller people.
At times it seems insular and naval-gazing, but that’s in the details. On a macro-level, it reminds me of the Cerulean sweater speech in The Devil Wears Prada.
The ideological conversations Podhoretz had with his ex-friends may seem sectarian (as he notes himself) and pointless, but as the ideas trickle down out of literary and intellectual circles, they eventually reach everyone.
So, I will give it a 3 or 3.5. A solid, enjoyable book which I will ruminate on.
At times it seems insular and naval-gazing, but that’s in the details. On a macro-level, it reminds me of the Cerulean sweater speech in The Devil Wears Prada.
The ideological conversations Podhoretz had with his ex-friends may seem sectarian (as he notes himself) and pointless, but as the ideas trickle down out of literary and intellectual circles, they eventually reach everyone.
So, I will give it a 3 or 3.5. A solid, enjoyable book which I will ruminate on.
March 7, 2022
Nobody wants to be friends with Norman.
February 15, 2012
This book could have been so much more. An account of a leading conservative fighting with his liberal friends, all of them household names (if your household is made up of eggheads) could have been riveting. Instead it is about as unilluminating as it is possible for such a book to get. Podhoretz's account is far too general and abstract to be interesting: he almost never cites a specific argument or incident which led to a falling out, merely giving us a hindsight harangue about how much he always disliked so and so. By the end of it, it felt like I'd endured a long and dreary trudge through sleet and snow with a querulous bulldog.
March 31, 2024
What can I say about this book? It is really, really well-written, highly entertaining, and I would say well worth the time and effort but it goes by really quickly and is effortless to read. Each of the ex-friends he writes about shows another facet of the intricacies of Podhoretz's breaks with the culture, politics, though not aesthetics, of the New York Intellectuals that he refers to as "The Family." Best is probably the chapter on the Trillings and its discussion of literature and literary criticism in the decades after T. S. Eliot, the New Critics, and the F.R. Leavis created the basis of the English department.
What it is not is a primer in how to maintain relationships with people who you disagree with. There is a sense in which people who took ideas this seriously couldn't have remained friends. Or even friendly. Not when they came to disagree so fundamentally. But for all that, it is even touching at times because he could do no other than to give up what he had.
But perhaps it is also a story of how what he had couldn't have lasted anyway, how a robust intellectual culture of argumentative sparring, political independence, and aesthetic seriousness, free of the worst obscurities of academicism, was doomed to dissolution and could not have lasted long past the 1960s, even if he had not broken with his past self and all those others. The best part of the book lies in the introduction, to which I need to go back and reread. It concerns the peculiar sociology of intellectual life in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s when few had college degrees and even fewer cared about the ideas and the arts that these intellectuals cared about so passionately. It seems that the small scale of the community led not to an insularity, as you might expect, but to greater critical acumen due to the mutual dependence that kept these people together by necessity, many of whom didn't even like each other personally. The growing ranks of college graduates and other outlets for their work and debates led to a greater audience and a greater range of interlocutors but, because of this, also a dispersion of energies and a weakening of the kind of intellectual life that that comes with being forced into propinquity, forced to interact with people you don't like or agree with (though of course agreeing on the larger things like anti-Stalinism and aesthetic modernism). A good balance of homogeneity and heterogeneity in these circles led to an intellectual vitality that has not since been close to equaled.
On a final note, Podhoretz is still alive, outlasting his wife Midge Decter who recently passed away. I haven’t heard of anything he’s done in recent years. But as many of the remaining neoconservatives today move back into the Democratic Party (though not his son, John, who is a Never Trump conservative), it is interesting to ask whether they were always basically just the conservative wing of liberalism. From a world historical vantage point, this is undoubtedly the case. But, look, whatever you want to say about them and their journey from left to right, neoconservatives took ideas seriously.
What it is not is a primer in how to maintain relationships with people who you disagree with. There is a sense in which people who took ideas this seriously couldn't have remained friends. Or even friendly. Not when they came to disagree so fundamentally. But for all that, it is even touching at times because he could do no other than to give up what he had.
But perhaps it is also a story of how what he had couldn't have lasted anyway, how a robust intellectual culture of argumentative sparring, political independence, and aesthetic seriousness, free of the worst obscurities of academicism, was doomed to dissolution and could not have lasted long past the 1960s, even if he had not broken with his past self and all those others. The best part of the book lies in the introduction, to which I need to go back and reread. It concerns the peculiar sociology of intellectual life in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s when few had college degrees and even fewer cared about the ideas and the arts that these intellectuals cared about so passionately. It seems that the small scale of the community led not to an insularity, as you might expect, but to greater critical acumen due to the mutual dependence that kept these people together by necessity, many of whom didn't even like each other personally. The growing ranks of college graduates and other outlets for their work and debates led to a greater audience and a greater range of interlocutors but, because of this, also a dispersion of energies and a weakening of the kind of intellectual life that that comes with being forced into propinquity, forced to interact with people you don't like or agree with (though of course agreeing on the larger things like anti-Stalinism and aesthetic modernism). A good balance of homogeneity and heterogeneity in these circles led to an intellectual vitality that has not since been close to equaled.
On a final note, Podhoretz is still alive, outlasting his wife Midge Decter who recently passed away. I haven’t heard of anything he’s done in recent years. But as many of the remaining neoconservatives today move back into the Democratic Party (though not his son, John, who is a Never Trump conservative), it is interesting to ask whether they were always basically just the conservative wing of liberalism. From a world historical vantage point, this is undoubtedly the case. But, look, whatever you want to say about them and their journey from left to right, neoconservatives took ideas seriously.
September 25, 2021
This is a great book in a number of ways. First, it’s gossipy and fun, but in a smart way. Second, it’s sort of a “New York intellectuals of the 1940s-1960s for dummies,” laying out a lot of the basic terrain which, after applying a corrective lens, is quite useful. Third, it’s not necessary to agree with Podhoretz’s thinking to get a lot out of the book. (Although, to be fair, given his ideological journey, you probably agreed with him at some point.) If a lot of his fallings-out seem petty and unnecessary, than so be it.
The ideological nature of his friendships sadly presage the current polarization of the country. He hates the women’s movement (and his wife, the formidable Midge Dector, is never mentioned by name even when alluded to), “The Personal Is Political” could easily have been his slogan as much as theirs. Reading this book and his coming down hard (sometimes justifiably) on the Left for its moral blind spots and failure to always oppose totalitarianism, as well as the 1960s lowering cultural standards in his eyes, I thought, “he must really hate Trumpism.” But of course unlike many neoconservatives, he loves Trump, with all its attendant know-nothingism, anti-Reaganism, and anti-semitism. So it may be time for another set of ex-friends. But dishing on George Will probably wouldn’t be as interesting a read.
The ideological nature of his friendships sadly presage the current polarization of the country. He hates the women’s movement (and his wife, the formidable Midge Dector, is never mentioned by name even when alluded to), “The Personal Is Political” could easily have been his slogan as much as theirs. Reading this book and his coming down hard (sometimes justifiably) on the Left for its moral blind spots and failure to always oppose totalitarianism, as well as the 1960s lowering cultural standards in his eyes, I thought, “he must really hate Trumpism.” But of course unlike many neoconservatives, he loves Trump, with all its attendant know-nothingism, anti-Reaganism, and anti-semitism. So it may be time for another set of ex-friends. But dishing on George Will probably wouldn’t be as interesting a read.
March 3, 2013
[Reviewed in 1999]
The quickest test of whether or not Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Ex-Friends might appeal to you is by your level of interest in the controversy that erupted over Elia Kazan’s honorary Oscar at last year’s Academy Awards. If you were intrigued by the rancorous political arguments that resurfaced after 50 years, then Podhoretz’s memoir will undoubtedly feel like a front-row ticket to the bickering of a half-century ago.
Podhoretz is today a staunch political conservative; he was one of the most visible and outspoken of the Reagan-era “neoconservatives” during the 1980s as editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine. Over the years his politics shifted dramatically. From the 1940s to the late-60s, he was a solid member of the Leftist literary establishment centered in New York City. Ex-Friends, at its best, is an eloquent elegy for a bygone era in our cultural history when politics was the passionate concern of writers, artists, and intellectuals. But it is at its “worst” that Ex-Friends is the most fun to read. Podhoretz has written a catty, self-indulgent, back-stabbing portrait of his former friends on the Left: Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.
Mailer is the only individual on this elite list who is still living, but that doesn’t stop Podhoretz from portraying him as a buffoon. Admittedly, Mailer is an easy target in this regard, and the anecdotes in the book are hilarious, but he’s a far more interesting writer and cultural presence that Podhoretz allows. We’re treated to Mailer the loud-mouthed 1960s libertine encouraging Podhoretz to loosen up with pot and amphetamines and sex orgies. The orgy scene in Ex-Friends promises more than it delivers, however, sort of like Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut with Podhoretz cast in the Tom Cruise role of the innocent outsider. “I was simply not up for it,” he writes, “and it turned out to be a total and humiliating disaster for me.”
He first met Allen Ginsberg when they were undergraduates at Columbia University in 1946 and both aspiring writers. By 1958, Ginsberg had gained notoriety along with Jack Kerouac as founders of the Beat literary movement, while Podhoretz, who was well-established as a critic by this time, penned a disdainful essay in Partisan Review titled “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” Thus began a long-standing feud between Ginsberg and Podhoretz that continued for many years, right up through Ginsberg’s death in 1997. And Podhoretz still hasn’t let up. Ginsberg’s poetry is, in his judgment, “pornographic” and “anti-American.”
The 1960s counterculture was “a new kind of plague” in Podhoretz’s opinion, from Ginsberg and Kerouac to Bob Dylan and Abbie Hoffman. “What they all had in common was a fierce hatred of America,” we are told matter-of-factly in Ex-Friends. The book is laughable whenever Podhoretz talks about the 60s. Words fail him and he falls back on mindless generalities about the “America haters” who were seducing young people with drugs and rock music and promiscuous sex.
Fortunately, Podhoretz writes with considerably more insight about the 1940s and 50s. All the factious left-wing debates of the era are detailed here, all the arcane labels deciphered and differentiated: communists, fellow-travelers, Stalinists, Trotskyites, socialists, cold-war liberals. Podhoretz doesn’t just throw these terms around, he gives them context and meaning within the lives of the personalities for whom so much was felt to be at stake.
He is particularly hard on Lillian Hellman for what Podhoretz and others over the years have considered her disingenuous and self-aggrandizing memoirs about the McCarthy era and her appearance before the HUAC hearings. Podhoretz flat out accuses her of “deliberate lies.” There appears to be some accuracy to several of his charges, but he clearly has his own ideological bias, not to mention a disregard for Hellman’s writing style, which he finds cheaply derivative of Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway.
The warmest memories in Ex-Friends are reserved for Lionel Trilling, who was one of Podhoretz’s professors at Columbia and “the most intelligent person I have ever known.” Little read today, Trilling was an influential literary critic and author for many years, and while he was a model liberal and supporter of left-wing causes, he was also the kind of anti-communist that Podhoretz can admire in retrospect. (Even though Trilling’s wife and fellow-writer Diana had “a wacky sense of reality,” in Podhoretz’s estimation.)
Without question, the finest chapter in Ex-Friends involves Hannah Arendt and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (in which the phrase “the banality of evil” was famously coined), an account of Adolf Eichmann’s Nazi war-crimes trial in Israel in the early 60s. In tracing the origins of the Nazi atrocities committed against Jews during the Second World War, Arendt arrived at some disturbing conclusions which suggested that Jews were themselves partly complicit in the fate that befell them. Podhoretz was among many intellectuals who took issue with Arendt’s opinions at the time, and his detailed recounting of this debate in Ex-Friends is superb.
The quickest test of whether or not Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Ex-Friends might appeal to you is by your level of interest in the controversy that erupted over Elia Kazan’s honorary Oscar at last year’s Academy Awards. If you were intrigued by the rancorous political arguments that resurfaced after 50 years, then Podhoretz’s memoir will undoubtedly feel like a front-row ticket to the bickering of a half-century ago.
Podhoretz is today a staunch political conservative; he was one of the most visible and outspoken of the Reagan-era “neoconservatives” during the 1980s as editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine. Over the years his politics shifted dramatically. From the 1940s to the late-60s, he was a solid member of the Leftist literary establishment centered in New York City. Ex-Friends, at its best, is an eloquent elegy for a bygone era in our cultural history when politics was the passionate concern of writers, artists, and intellectuals. But it is at its “worst” that Ex-Friends is the most fun to read. Podhoretz has written a catty, self-indulgent, back-stabbing portrait of his former friends on the Left: Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.
Mailer is the only individual on this elite list who is still living, but that doesn’t stop Podhoretz from portraying him as a buffoon. Admittedly, Mailer is an easy target in this regard, and the anecdotes in the book are hilarious, but he’s a far more interesting writer and cultural presence that Podhoretz allows. We’re treated to Mailer the loud-mouthed 1960s libertine encouraging Podhoretz to loosen up with pot and amphetamines and sex orgies. The orgy scene in Ex-Friends promises more than it delivers, however, sort of like Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut with Podhoretz cast in the Tom Cruise role of the innocent outsider. “I was simply not up for it,” he writes, “and it turned out to be a total and humiliating disaster for me.”
He first met Allen Ginsberg when they were undergraduates at Columbia University in 1946 and both aspiring writers. By 1958, Ginsberg had gained notoriety along with Jack Kerouac as founders of the Beat literary movement, while Podhoretz, who was well-established as a critic by this time, penned a disdainful essay in Partisan Review titled “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” Thus began a long-standing feud between Ginsberg and Podhoretz that continued for many years, right up through Ginsberg’s death in 1997. And Podhoretz still hasn’t let up. Ginsberg’s poetry is, in his judgment, “pornographic” and “anti-American.”
The 1960s counterculture was “a new kind of plague” in Podhoretz’s opinion, from Ginsberg and Kerouac to Bob Dylan and Abbie Hoffman. “What they all had in common was a fierce hatred of America,” we are told matter-of-factly in Ex-Friends. The book is laughable whenever Podhoretz talks about the 60s. Words fail him and he falls back on mindless generalities about the “America haters” who were seducing young people with drugs and rock music and promiscuous sex.
Fortunately, Podhoretz writes with considerably more insight about the 1940s and 50s. All the factious left-wing debates of the era are detailed here, all the arcane labels deciphered and differentiated: communists, fellow-travelers, Stalinists, Trotskyites, socialists, cold-war liberals. Podhoretz doesn’t just throw these terms around, he gives them context and meaning within the lives of the personalities for whom so much was felt to be at stake.
He is particularly hard on Lillian Hellman for what Podhoretz and others over the years have considered her disingenuous and self-aggrandizing memoirs about the McCarthy era and her appearance before the HUAC hearings. Podhoretz flat out accuses her of “deliberate lies.” There appears to be some accuracy to several of his charges, but he clearly has his own ideological bias, not to mention a disregard for Hellman’s writing style, which he finds cheaply derivative of Dashiell Hammett and Ernest Hemingway.
The warmest memories in Ex-Friends are reserved for Lionel Trilling, who was one of Podhoretz’s professors at Columbia and “the most intelligent person I have ever known.” Little read today, Trilling was an influential literary critic and author for many years, and while he was a model liberal and supporter of left-wing causes, he was also the kind of anti-communist that Podhoretz can admire in retrospect. (Even though Trilling’s wife and fellow-writer Diana had “a wacky sense of reality,” in Podhoretz’s estimation.)
Without question, the finest chapter in Ex-Friends involves Hannah Arendt and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (in which the phrase “the banality of evil” was famously coined), an account of Adolf Eichmann’s Nazi war-crimes trial in Israel in the early 60s. In tracing the origins of the Nazi atrocities committed against Jews during the Second World War, Arendt arrived at some disturbing conclusions which suggested that Jews were themselves partly complicit in the fate that befell them. Podhoretz was among many intellectuals who took issue with Arendt’s opinions at the time, and his detailed recounting of this debate in Ex-Friends is superb.
February 3, 2018
Jewish New York midcentury intellectuals as Malcom McClarens in Great Mental Swindle of America.
Fun Read.
Fun Read.
May 29, 2017
An interesting account of the political divergence of a group of New York, mainly-Jewish intellectuals from a common bond of liberalism in the 1940's to personal grudges and stark political differences. Perhaps the book's most important contribution is the extent to which it strips the mantel of sainthood off of Lillian Hellman and portrays her as a mediocre intellect whose main contribution to literature came through the considerable writing skill of her drunken-sot of a boy friend, Dashiel Hammett. It also exposes the extent to which she got in over head with her attacks on Diane Trilling and discredits her charges of "scoundrel time."
Much too self serving, however.
Much too self serving, however.
June 10, 2022
I have begun reading Podhoretz' new biography and I (of course) came across a few references to this work. So...
I it is an easy and quick read -Podhoretz's prose is among the best I've come across- and full of wonderful details about Lionel Trilling (first time I'd heard of him...), Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt (completely changed my idea of her) and Norman Mailer (justified my disregard for both the man and his writing).
One of the best aspects of this book, for me, is the insight I gained into the "Jewish Intellectual Circle" of writers and critics. I also came away with a much better conception of the distinctions between High-brow, Middle-brow and Low-brow literature.
I it is an easy and quick read -Podhoretz's prose is among the best I've come across- and full of wonderful details about Lionel Trilling (first time I'd heard of him...), Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt (completely changed my idea of her) and Norman Mailer (justified my disregard for both the man and his writing).
One of the best aspects of this book, for me, is the insight I gained into the "Jewish Intellectual Circle" of writers and critics. I also came away with a much better conception of the distinctions between High-brow, Middle-brow and Low-brow literature.
August 12, 2011
Amazed that as a 60s teenager I knew who these people were he wrote about, the triumph of The Saturday Review and library I suppose. The perspective is certainly New York City Jewish from Columbia to the literary/political world that circled around various influencers. Saw an archive CSPAN interview of Podhoretz.
April 27, 2024
Podhoretz is an insufferable bore in this truckling, name-dropping piece of self-adulatory puffery.
Out of all the celebrity writers I know of, Podhoretz is one that I would never want to meet in person. I may be aligned with him politically, but that's really a shame, since he sounds like such a pretentious jerk.
Out of all the celebrity writers I know of, Podhoretz is one that I would never want to meet in person. I may be aligned with him politically, but that's really a shame, since he sounds like such a pretentious jerk.
November 13, 2011
As one of those perfectly normal, boring low to middlebrow people with whom Podhoretz doesn't deign to associate, I enjoyed this window into the stories of people in whom I have only a purient interest. I was less enamored with his moralistic struggles of who deserves credit or blame for what.
June 9, 2013
too much old-fashioned sniping
October 10, 2008
Revealing look into the minds of the Jewish intelligentsia in NY. Helps assess neocon behaviour...
Want to read
August 21, 2014The author seems so insufferable I might just have to read this.
April 11, 2017
Ahead of the reissue of Podhoretz's "Making It" - which I've read much about, but have never read (I will upon its reissue) - I dipped into this and learned as much or more about the author's ex-friends as I did about him. The book sheds additional light on Podhoretz's pre-neocon life, and the many reasons he took the turn he did. Invaluable.
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