Making It

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By Norman Podhoretz & Terry Teachout

Publisher Description

A controversial memoir about American intellectual life and academia and the relationship between politics, money, and education.

Norman Podhoretz, the son of Jewish immigrants, grew up in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, attended Columbia University on a scholarship, and later received degrees from the Jewish Theological Seminary and Cambridge University. Making It is his blistering account of fighting his way out of Brooklyn and into, then out of, the Ivory Tower, of his military service, and finally of his induction into the ranks of what he calls “the Family,” the small group of left-wing and largely Jewish critics and writers whose opinions came to dominate and increasingly politicize the American literary scene in the fifties and sixties. It is a Balzacian story of raw talent and relentless and ruthless ambition. It is also a closely observed and in many ways still-pertinent analysis of the tense and more than a little duplicitous relationship that exists in America between intellect and imagination, money, social status, and power.

The Family responded to the book with outrage, and Podhoretz soon turned no less angrily on them, becoming the fierce neoconservative he remains to this day. Fifty years after its first publication, this controversial and legendary book remains a riveting autobiography, a book that can be painfully revealing about the complex convictions and needs of a complicated man as well as a fascinating and essential document of mid-century American cultural life.

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2 Reviews

4.0

Sam

Created about 2 years ago

don Bart

Created over 16 years ago

“Once he gets done reading us his high school and college transcripts, Norman Podhoretz does an admirable job of taking us into the literary world of the 1950s. He uses an autobiographical approach to explore universal ideas – but as a result (something he wouldn’t have anticipated) his book is best when it is not about him. Now back to those annoying academic transcripts. About 80 of Making It’s first 100 pages are not enjoyable. For all the insight that Podhoretz would eventually show in his criticism of Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March – that so much of its prose and story is “willed” – Podhoretz spends at least a quarter of his own book willing literary greatness on himself. Most of the first part of the book effectively says this: “Would you believe a person with my GPA hasn’t produced great work since graduating from college 15 years ago? You’re right; I can’t believe it either!” Eventually, mercifully, Podhoretz begins getting choice assignments in literary criticism. He writes for The New Yorker and Partisan Review and Commentary. All of this is quite important to “the family” – and if you don’t know who that is, if names like Trilling and Cohen don’t inform your every literary taste, well, where have you been? “The family” must have been preternaturally important in its day, as young Podhoretz – a prodigy, he’s happy to remind you unfailingly throughout the book – wanted nothing more than to attain invitations to “the family’s” dinner parties. Much of this is done with irony. Much of Podhoretz’s autobiographical work is a caricature of a self portrait. He presents his monstrous ambition as exactly that – probably exaggerating it some. He uses his own weakness for power and fame to plumb literary types’ actual motivations. He concludes by blessing Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself as a work of authenticity and genuine literary merit. Again, 40 years after its publication, Making It is no longer relevant for the people whom young Podhoretz once impressed (many are no longer even in print). But it is absolutely relevant for what it reveals about the motivations that inform literary decisions. Chief among which is pettiness. It is a bizarre world, this literary one, that sees persons define their identities by what others opine of their tastes. It is a miracle that any actual literature ever gets produced. But then, does it ever really get produced by the cocktail set? For this reason, young Podhoretz rightfully praised young Mailer. For once an ambitious writer was anxiously participating in the spoils of his fame. Mailer wasn’t furrowing his brow and worrying about what the assistant junior editor of the new anti-anti-Communist magazine (and magazines with circulations of 1,000 or so were what these literary folks were endlessly conspiring to produce) thought of his loud personality. Mailer was too busy living the life of a careless rogue – before going home and producing 700-page works. Meanwhile the rest of them, and Podhoretz too at times, were too busy cultivating their images as “people who write” to find time for actual writing.”

About Norman Podhoretz

Norman Podhoretz is an author, editor, and political and cultural critic. He was the editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995 and has written twelve books, including World War IV, The Prophets, Ex-Friends, and most recently Why Are Jews Liberals? He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.

Terry Teachout is the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large for Commentary. He has written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, Duke Ellington, and H. L. Mencken; the libretti for three operas by Paul Moravec; and a play, Satchmo at the Waldorf, that has been produced off-Broadway and throughout America.