Family Man - Review

National Review, Feb 8, 1999 by Jeffrey Hart

When I visited him in the hospital [where he was ill with cancer] for what turned out to be our very last meeting, I mentioned that I had been rereading Thomas Mann, that I had been especially bowled over by Doctor Faustus, and that I had come to the conclusion that Mann might well be the greatest novelist of the 20th century. . . . From his bed of excruciating pain Lionel smiled a sweet smile and said (as best as I can remember his words), "How very interesting. You know we always found it hard to forgive him for becoming something of a Stalinist in the Forties, and probably we underrated him because of it. But what you say about him now is so intriguing that I would love to take another look at him myself."

Compared with Lionel Trilling, the other intellectuals described here are pretty small change. For all their "brilliant" talk about politics, as well as about everything else, the Family really did not grapple with actual politics much at all. To borrow William Barrett's phrase, they were truants from reality. Podhoretz broke with Lillian Hellman (news: she was good company and an exquisite cook) over her hatred of America, her duplicity, and her Communism. He broke with Arendt over her deep hostility to Israel and her weird lack of sympathy for the murdered Jews of Europe. He broke with Mailer, of whom he had hoped for much as a novelist, over his anti-Americanism and his wacky admiration for "existential" criminality.

Serious politics has to do with actual and almost always imperfect choices. When Podhoretz and other former Democrats (Kristol, Kirkpatrick, Perle, Abrams, Bennett, Nisbet, Berns, et al.) moved toward the Republicans and became "neoconservatives," they made a choice that the Family could not abide. For their choice they were rewarded with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet empire, to which results they had made serious contributions.

Podhoretz, breaking on principle with former friends, had put away childish things. Now, as time moves on, the Family grows still smaller in its historical importance. Who reads Philip Rahv anymore? Delmore Schwartz was supposed to be The Poet, but turned out to be decidedly less than that. To anyone who can distinguish between ambition and achievement, Mailer has come to nothing as a novelist. Mary McCarthy's fiction was always arid and unreadable. Dwight Macdonald? Nice prose, but otherwise give us a break. Clement Greenberg wrote astutely about art, but over a very narrow range. "See, they depart, and we go with them."

In the final reckoning, the Family-fun while it lasted-may have generated within itself only two works of lasting interest: Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination (1950) and Norman Podhoretz's Ex- Friends (1999).