256
pages, Pocket Books, ISBN-13: 978-0684855943
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 50 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 here: 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 articulateness,
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.
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