Little Norman

MAKING IT by Norman Podhoretz. 360 pages. Random House. $6.95.

In most outward respects, Norman Podhoretz, the 38-year-old literary critic, social commentator and editor of the highbrow monthly Commentary, fits a familiar pattern. Brainy son of Jewish European immigrants, his ambition fired by memories of a boyhood spent in the Brooklyn slums, he worked his way up from smartest kid in the class to a position of influence and prestige in New York intellectual circles.

Those circles, though, do not seem big enough to contain Podhoretz' ferocious and expanding ambition. Making It is his official declaration of independence. It is his self-proclaimed bid for "literary distinction, fame, and money all in one package."

Can Podhoretz buy all that with a loose conglomerate of confessional, autobiography and social criticism? Can he really manage to interest enough people in his introspective explanation of why it took him so long to decide that it is better to have money, power and fame than not to have them? He is asking a lot.

Star Student. Podhoretz attributes his belated decision to what he sees as a contradiction in the American ethos: it commands men to seek an abundance of worldly goods, he says, at the same time that it warns them that the search will corrupt their souls. When he majored in English literature at Columbia University, for example, he remembers being confronted by the cult of failure that imbued most of his fellow students. They felt that while sex was a natural and admirable passion, a hunger for worldly success was ignoble. For a star student who wanted to be a great and famous poet, that attitude quite naturally caused some troubling guilt feelings.

Success of a sort came anyway. As a fellowship winner, Podhoretz attended Clare College at Cambridge University, had a piece of criticism published in F. R. Leavis' formidable literary organ, Scrutiny, and was immediately initiated into a privileged class. Although he knew by then that he would never be a poet, he was flattered to be "magically transformed overnight from a Brooklyn 'barbarian' into 'one of the young gentlemen from America.' "

Home in New York, his Scrutiny byline and his impressive set of academic credentials opened the doors of literary society, a demiworld about which Podhoretz writes entertainingly and knowledgeably. He sees that society as characterized by its resemblance to a modern, Americanized Jewish family. Though he is quick to note the names of such important gentile members as Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, James Baldwin, and such "kissing cousins" as Robert Lowell and Ralph Ellison, Podhoretz insists that "the term 'Jewish' can be allowed to stand by clear majority rule and by various peculiarities of temper." The term family, he says, derives from "the fact that these were people who by virtue of their tastes, ideas and general concerns found themselves stuck with one another against the rest of the world whether they like it or not (and most did not), preoccupied with one another to the point of obsession, and intense in their attachments and hostilities as only a family is capable of being."

His first taste of hostility came when he wrote an unfavorable Commentary review of The Adventures of Angle March, the 1953 novel by Family Favorite Saul Bellow. According to Podhoretz, Bellow's friends were apparently persuaded that the review was part of a subtle plot to discredit him. Three years later, a well-known American poet (the reader is never told who) accosted the young critic at a party and drunkenly threatened: "We'll get you for that review if it takes ten years." The book is everywhere littered with the hairs of such neighborhood cat fights, most of them long forgotten by everyone but the author.

Up & Down. For all its unpleasantness, the Bellow affair brought Podhoretz the attention he craved. He got review assignments from The New Yorker and Partisan Review, which enhanced his club membership. And like many other members, he carefully cultivated his status. Every morning, he would scan the invisible "stockmarket report" on reputations and measure the gains and losses. By implication, he suggests that other members did the same. "Did so-and-so have dinner at Jacqueline Kennedy's apartment last night? Up five points. Was so-and-so not invited by the Lowells to meet the latest visiting Russian poet? Down one-eighth. Did so-and-so's book get nominated for the National Book Award? Up two and five-eighths. Did Partisan Review neglect to ask so-and-so to participate in a symposium? Down two."

Does Podhoretz ever convince the reader that his story is worth telling? Not really. By paying so much attention to the sociology of himself, he withholds those elements that could have bound reader and writer. He tells of strong feelings, of friendship and feuds, but in the end those experiences only lead to the naive discovery that intelligent people can be hypocrites.

Nine years ago, Podhoretz' friend and literary confidant, Norman Mailer, brashly announced in Advertisements for Myself that he was embarking on "a revolution in the consciousness of our time." He predicted that his writing would have "the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years." Like Podhoretz, he was asking too much, but he has at least gained the fame and riches that his friend is still seeking. Lacking Mailer's style, his sense of irony and his skill at infighting, Podhoretz has several more books and years of exhibitionism to go.

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