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S'està carregant… Making It (1967)de Norman Podhoretz
   No hi ha cap discussió a Converses sobre aquesta obra. Sense ressenyes
 To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Making It, NYRB Classics has revived Podhoretz’s battle-scarred memoir with an innocuous new introduction by Terry Teachout, Commentary’s critic at large, who isn’t about to jeopardise his post by saying anything too jazzy or impolitic here. Given the long history of gangland strife between Commentary and the New York Review of Books, it’s gracious of its reprint house to include Making It in its classics line. It’s more of a curiosity today than a classic, too lacking in novelistic redolence and vivid characterisation, too pocked with deadwood phrases of punditry (‘it would seem’, ‘which is to say’, ‘to be sure’), to rank with Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City, Willie Morris’s North toward Home, and other urban romances of the ardent outsider whose eyes are on the prize. Still, it’s handy to have it back in print after its long stay in limbo, for documentary purposes.  In the brief acknowledgments section, Podhoretz thanks Lionel Trilling, who, he says, “has taught me more than he or I ever realized—though not, I fear, precisely what he would have wanted me to learn.” This reads pretty clearly as a suggestion that Trilling, too, was a suck-up who wrote literary criticism in the hope of getting invited to a party with Jackie Kennedy. You can see why Trilling was not eager for Podhoretz’s memoir to see the light of day. And not only Trilling. “Making It” is a book about what Podhoretz, borrowing the term from Murray Kempton, calls the Family—the writers and editors, mostly but not exclusively Jewish, who dominated the New York intellectual scene in the decades after the war. It is as their proud product that Podhoretz presents himself, and he obviously hoped to retain the approval of these people, as he had done so often in the past, by daring to write something they were afraid to write. He believed that they would admire his courage, recognize the justice of his account, forgive any indiscretions he may have committed, and, freed at last from a stifling hypocrisy, embrace him and the book. Many writers have tried this kind of thing. It never works. Podhoretz wants you to focus on him, on his mind, on the things he has to say. And he does not cheat. He never makes himself good or—more cleverly—interestingly bad. Perhaps unconsciously, he has been tougher on himself than is really fair. With scarcely a trace of human warmth he has drawn the portrait of someone, surely not himself, who is an intellectual nebbish. And after writing a book that is not commercial, not dangerous, not ambitious, but is, in fact, in rather good taste by today's standards, he stretches out his neck on the platter of that last paragraph—for a crime he never committed. So let us give him the due he does not give himself. We are being offered a restrained muted limited account of a young provincial, a local example when all is said of a Julien Sorel who is making his way up in the world. Not, of course, through a judicious mixture of sexual and social audacity, but by an uncomfortable sometimes self-torturing accommodation between the power of his ambition versus his irrepressible demands for an integrity to his expression. What more fascinating event, after half a book’s worth of the best preparation, to see our latter-day Sorel make it and lose it and make it again with The Family, that peculiar colony, aviary, and zoo of the most ferocious, idealistic, egotistic, narcissistic, cultivated, constipated, brilliant, sensitive, brutally insensitive, half-productive, and near-sterile gang of the best and worst literary court ever to rise right out of the immigrant ranks of a nation. Making It was reissued last year by New York Review Books as one of its Classics, and the literary world—perhaps because it no longer exists—remained calm. Bookish people didn’t call each other up to exclaim about the scandal. Not many reviews appeared. And yet among those that did were some that in their nastiness might have been written in 1967... The 1967 reviewers were simply wrong when they added bad writing to their list of offenses. Writing as lucid and vital as Podhoretz’s is not often encountered and should have been acknowledged. But the original critics were evidently too irked with the boy wonder to give him an inch. Perhaps more to the point, they could not distinguish between the book’s narrator and its author. When we read a novel narrated in the first person we do not make that mistake. We know that Humbert Humbert and Vladimir Nabokov are not the same person. In the case of autobiography, because author and narrator share a name, we are only too prone to forget that the latter is a literary construct. Pertany a aquestes col·leccions editorials
Norman Podhoretz, the son of Jewish immigrants, grew up in the tough Brownsville section of Brooklyn, and attended Columbia on a scholarship, while also receiving degrees from Jewish Theological Seminary and Cambridge University. Returning to New York, he established himself as a pugnacious critic of literature and politics before becoming editor of Commentarymagazine. Podhoretz was a central figure in the literary and political developments and controversies of the fifties and sixties, very much on the left. Then, in the early seventies, he entirely rejected his earlier positions, becoming a fierce neo-conservative, as he remains to this day. Making Itcame out in 1967, before that change of heart, though the scandal it would provoke helped to bring it about. Making Itis Podhoretz's account of fighting his way from the streets of Brooklyn into and out of the Ivory Tower, of his military service, and finally into the ranks of what he calls oThe Family,o the small group of largely Jewish critics and writers whose opinions had come to dominate and increasingly politicize the American literary scene. 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 not a little duplicitous relationship that exists in America between intellect and imagination, money, social status, and power. The Family responded to Podhoretz's book with savage outrage, and Podhoretz soon turned no less angrily on them. Fifty years later, this controversial and legendary book remains both 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. No s'han trobat descripcions de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — S'està carregant…GèneresClassificació Decimal de Dewey (DDC)818.5Literature English (North America) Authors, American and American miscellany 20th CenturyLCC (Clas. Bibl. Congrés EUA)ValoracióMitjana: (3.56)
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