Jason Epstein Leftwing Critic in Ny Review of Boks
Why Norman And Jason Aren't Talking
See the commodity in its original context from
March 26, 1972
,
Department SM , Page
34Purchase Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.
Well-nigh the Annal
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times'due south impress annal, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are standing to work to meliorate these archived versions.
JASON EPSTEIN and Norman Podhoretz are both in their early forty'due south, both Jewish, both graduates of Columbia, both editors and occasional writers, and while they were once close friends, they are now sworn enemies. They once agreed on well-nigh everything, in lit erature and in politics; now they hold on most naught, and the arguments between them, in big function because of them, are re peated on every university campus in the United states, besides as in every city and boondocks where people who are intellectuals or think of themselves as intellectuals—and these days who doesn't?—get together.
Norman Podhoretz is editor of Commen tary, which has a apportionment of sixty,000 a month, and, according to a written report called "How and where to Find the Intellectual Elite in the United States," which was published in Public Opinion Quarterly last year, Commentary has more influence on the thinking of intellectuals in this country than all but two other publica tions, 1 of which is The New York Review, of Books, which has a circulation of about 100,000. (The other is The New Yorker.)
Jason Epstein is 1 of the founders of The New York Review; he writes for it now and again, and while he denies having any direct editorial influence on the magazine, his wife Barbara and his friend Robert B. Silvers are the top editors. And those who know all three notice it impossible to believe that they disagree on whatever major outcome apropos the magazine. Jason is as well a vice president and a senior editor of Random House, one of the largest and most prestigious publishing houses in the country. Random Business firm is endemic past RCA, which also owns Alfred A. Knopf and Pantheon Books. The three companies share the same sleek modern building on E 50th Street in New York and found the most powerful book publishing combination in the country today; probably ever.
Some people feel that the disagreement be tween Jason and Norman is of importance only to a coterie of so‐called intellectuals in New York. Ane observer says: "They don't under stand up the remainder of the country and are deeply fearful of it. They accept a sense of the apoca lypse. They feel that the Cossacks come from the steppes, and to them the steppes are Nebraska, Iowa—anything that isn't New York. They don't understand that, apocalypse or no, most people are going to accept their clip juice the next morning."
But there are those who believe that not all the issues in the rift are so apocalyptic, and that friendships in New York literary society wax and wane with less profound events—similar the disheartening review given Norman'south autobio graphical book, "Making It," in a 1968 effect of The New York Review and the similar treatment accorded Jason's book, "The Bang-up Conspiracy Triad," in Commentary last year. It is true that e'er since Edgar Z. Friedenberg's handling of "Making It" in N.Y.R., except for a few common cold hellos at one social gathering or another, Nor homo and Jason take non spoken to i another.
Norman and his wife, Midge Decter, used to be among the dinner guests at the Epstein' apart ment, where Jason occasionally cooks superb meals on a eating house‐sized stove for as many as twoscore guests. Back in the sixties, y'all could take the Podhoretzes to dinner and, say, Mary Mc Carthy and Dwight MacDonald and Hannah Arendt and Lillian Hellman and Hans Morgen thau and Paul Goodman and Delmore Schwartz, all at the same time.
Alas, decease and geography and politics and disheartening book reviews have separated them now. Guest lists in the seventies must be
Photographs past ARNOLD NEWMAN
Some say the quarrel between Norman Podhoretz and Jason Epstein matters only to a coterie of so‐called intellectuals in New York. Others see it as creating— or is it reflecting?— new political alignments. carefully examined to avoid possible pilus‐pulling among the ladies and fisticuffs among the men. Was it the war in Vietnam that did information technology?
The war was certainly cardinal. It be came the central symbol in the argument between Jason and Norman, and between New York Review and Commentary. In essence the disagreement is over whether the Arrangement can or should be salvaged, and to what extent the war is an aberration of the Organisation or characteristic of information technology. And any the personal animosities involved in the break between the two editors, their division is taken seriously as illustrating the division in the country. A writer in the Catholic magazine Commonweal has said of their quarrel:
"What once could be taken as another family squabble amid Manhattan literati looks more and more than like an important indicator of futurity political alignments."
So let united states of america trace the story of the falling out betwixt these ii gatekeepers of the literary institution, as related by the more than 50 members of the "family" I talked to, stopping first to suggest the broad areas of their disagree ment on the war and our society.
THE New York Review was attacking Ameri can involvement in Southeast Asia every bit early as 1965, and in the years since its editors have devoted more space to that subject field than to any other. The essays, many of them written by Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at M.I.T., have been increasingly filled with the rhetoric of revolution. They have argued that the war is feature of the System, that America is to be regarded equally a primarily imperialist nation and that our policymakers are, with few exceptions, totally corrupt. Whether the arguments are sound or not, in that location is no question but that North.Y.R. has contributed more than to the peace movement and to the abound ing disenchantment with the war in the state at large than any other single publication.
Commentary has from fourth dimension to fourth dimension printed a mildly disquisitional essay or edi torial on the discipline of Vietnam, simply it was not until May, 1971, that sociologist Nathan Glazer presented the case for immediate with drawal. In that same issue Norman wrote: "As one who has never believed anything good would ever come for us or for the world from an unambiguous American defeat I now find myself … moving to the side of those who would prefer but such a defeat to a 'Vietnamization' of the war, which calls for the indefinite and unlimited battery by American pilots in Ameri tin planes of every country in that already devastated re gion."
As early as 1966 the writers and editors of N.Y.R. seem to have been convinced that the war was immoral. In dissimilarity, the concluding time I saw Norman he said that, yes, he was against the war, "but I however don't think information technology's evil." He add ed: "I was against military in volvement there from the very beginning; I accept been en tirely consequent in my view since 1962. I haven't modernistic erated my views at all—un like some others. I was confronting the war from the get-go— a position I learned from Hans Morgenthau really —not on moral just on political grounds, that information technology was an illegitimate and unintelligent expansion of the policy of containment. I am withal for the policy of contain ment. … In that location accept been war crimes, but the state of war itself is not a criminal war. It is a tragic fault, and this coun try will pay heavily, internally and in its relations with other countries, because of it."
Given the basic moral disa greement over the state of war, it's not surprising that the ii men detect footling to agree about in American gild either.
Norman believes that we may non alive in the best of all possible worlds, but nosotros are coming shut to that. Information technology is America the Beautiful and don't rock the gunkhole. The dem ocratic process works. Wait around yous. Jason is much more an elitist, a position that is reflected by The New York Review. The feeling seems in full general to exist that those on the top and those on the bot tom of our order, maybe, in whatever club, must join togeth er to push the inert middle. Unless people are threatened with the extreme pcesition of the Panthers, say, nothing will exist done for the blacks.
In this area Norman is addicted of quoting George Orwell, who once said that the greatest danger to democracy would come from "an army of un employed led past millionaires preaching the Sermon on the Mount."
Norman has this to say about the eye class: "Jason and all those other counterculture people go through life hating the conservative, hating bour geois life. … But American politics is really trying to make everybody eye class. … American society is a and so ciety devoted to success, and everybody is in the deed for all practical purposes."
Jason has written: "Amer ica has cypher merely its center course, and if you happen not to belong to information technology, you are no where. … Kids growing upward sense, as some of their elders practice, that the American middle class … is not actually worth the trouble that it takes to get into it and stay in it … if all you take at the end is life on the installment programme."
Since both men thrive on consistency, their class atti tudes creep into their life styles. Jason smokes Monte Cristo cigars from Cuba, when he tin can get them, which is not very oftentimes these days; they cost $1.25 each. In addition, he has from fourth dimension to fourth dimension been seen lighting up something with a distinctly countercul ture scent, inhaling with pleasure.
Norman, who was a 4‐ pack‐a‐day cigarette smoker and who remembers having thirteen martinis at 1 sitting in an airport with Willie Morris, and then editor of Harpers, has in the final two years given up smoking and drinking. Al though he thinks that mari juana should be legalized, he recently wrote a somewhat melodramatic editorial de nouncing it as a "seducer of the innocent" and "the lethal enemy of life itself."
NORMAN and Jason showtime became aware of each other in the late nineteen‐forties when they were students at Columbia. Jason, who grew up In Maine and Boston, was a member of the class of 1949, Norman of the course of 'l. Jason got an K.A. in English in 1950.
Although at that place were only about 2,000 students in Co lumbia College in those days, Jason and Norman were non chfse. A professor who knew them both says, "When they thought nearly information technology, if they did at all, and in any example I'chiliad sure it wasn't very oft, they must have hated the mere thought of each other."
They were alike in so many ways and different in so many others. Both were a little chubby; neither was par ticularly athletic. Both were bookish, although Norman past his own confession had read most aught except "popu lar novels and a few of the standard poets. I had never heard of most of the books we were given to read in Hu manities and Contemporary Civilization." Jason gave the impression that he had read everything, everything worth reading anyway.
Norman in those days was a theoretical socialist, although it is doubtful that he had much fourth dimension to think well-nigh politics, let lonely do anything about it. Those who remem ber Jason doubt that he had any politics at all; he would have considered politics be neath him, somehow vulgar. The group he spent most of his time with were snobbish boys; Jason was the only Jew among them. For some reason most of the others were all either becoming Catholics or becoming un‐Catholic. Information technology is said that they idea of themselves as being the last gasp of the Bloomsbury group. The professor who remembers them said, "They gave the im pression that if you hadn't read Proust in French you might well dwelling house."
A $60‐a‐week milkman's son on a Pulitzer scholarship, Nor human being spent more than ii hours a twenty-four hours traveling past sub way betwixt his dwelling in the Brownsville section of Brook lyn and Morningside Heights. "About of Norman'southward friends were the sons of New Jersey dentists; at to the lowest degree they looked like the sons of dentists. They had coiffure cuts, and they talked near 'breaking Keats' and were all terribly aggressive and got very adept grades. … I believe Norman wore ii‐ toned shoes, dark-brown and white, and he brought his lunch in a spattered brown paper bag."
Jason at Columbia was non rich, but, as he has since re marked, he "had coin." He wore three‐button Brooks Brothers suits, always black, "which gave him the air of someone in perpetual mourning," and would become downtown with his friends for concerts, plays and a meal at one of the fancier midtown restaurants. His style of speaking was then more or less what information technology is at present, his voice rather high‐pitched with a slightly nasal Boston twang. Every bit for Norman, he writes that when he started at Columbia his spoken language had "largely lost the characteristic neighbour hood accent and was on the way to becoming every bit neutrally American equally I gather it is now." True, most of the time in that location is very little Brownsville in Norman'south accent, but I am told that when he gets excited or information technology all back.
BOTH were possessed of monumental ambition, simply Ja son'southward attitude was that he was to a higher place ambition. A human being who has known him for 25 years and observed his rise to emi nence without surprise says, "Jason is professionally lazy. He isn't actually lazy; he merely builds upward the idea that he is, and he would rather dice than appear eager or enthusiastic. … He is a professionally de pressed person; he comes on more than depressed than any torso."
Jason'due south favorite word is "boring"; at least it seems to be the word he uses more than any other. An acquaintance claims that he one time clocked Jason and that he said "bor ing" 32 times in less than half an hour.
Jason denies that he was, ever rude to Willie Morris, who in 1967 became the youngest editor in the history of Har per's and, more than recently, be came the ane with shortest tenure. Simply in "North Toward Domicile," Willie'south account of his journey from Yazoo City, Miss., to Manhattan, he de scribes with considerable acer bity a job‐hunting interview with an unnamed editor who reminds a lot of people of Jason.
In the book, Willie says he told the editor that he would very much similar a chore on his new publication. If Willie's account is to be be lieved, the editor replied: "Not a chance, I'g agape. We blank ly have enough coin for the next number. … What other jobs do you have in heed?"
"I mentioned '2 institu tions, one a mag, the other a big daily newspaper [Harper'southward and The New York Times]. Both had indicated they were interested in me.
"'Those are ii of the most dull publications I know of, he said.
"I mentioned ii execu tives from other publishing firms that I might see.
"'They're not very intelli gent people,' he said.
"At this point I was brainstorm ning to get mad. A tedious Mis sissippi boil was rising north from my guts. … I would not have wished to begin my new life in the city past throwing this footling human being out of a second‐story window into a courtyard. …"
NORMAN at Columbia came on vivid‐eyed (he has blue eyes) and bushy‐tailed, eager, perhaps likewise eager, anx ious to please. He's however a lot like that. His friend Richard Schickel, the book and motion-picture show critic, says, "Norman is similar a Hollywood musician, anx ious to be liked, very cheerful, very upbeat. He has an ap pealing kidlike quality."
Over lunch recently Nor human said: "There are two kinds of people in the, globe those who want to be loved and those who want to be feared. I want to be loved, but I sometimes seem to go out of my style to brand that diffi cult, if not impossible."
In "Maiming it," Norman wrote nearly his college days (he keeps going back to that fourth dimension, both in the volume and in conversation): "… Is it whatsoever wonder that I angry and then much hostility amongst certain Columbia types: the prep schoolhouse, boys, those B students who rarely said any affair in class just who under went such evident agonies over the unseemly displays of pushiness they had to endure from the likes of me; the homosexuals with their super cilious disdain of my lower class style of apparel and my brash and impudent style, and the prissily bred eye class Jews who thought me insufferably rude. All of them were lumped indiscriminately together in my heed equally snobs."
Jason, of grade, was 1 of the snobs, and his enemies —and at that place are more than a few of them around boondocks— fence that he nonetheless is. They brainstorm by mentioning an article that he once wrote for The New York Review about the cost of living in the urban center ("… that outrageous, snotty article, and he claims to be this big radical"). The piece stated:
"Fifty thousand a yr, quite autonomously from capital, will keep a family unit, if not in luxury, at to the lowest degree in reasonable comfort and safety. It is possible to manage on less, perhaps equally lilliputian every bit one-half as much, by living on the West Side, doing with out this or that and thinking more or less always about getting by. Simply to fall below this level is to become non a citizen but a victim of New York, incarcerated with grand sands or millions of others in those miles of flats in Queens or Brooklyn."
Equally a upshot of their differ ent attitudes toward scholar ship, amidst other things, Ja son's grades at Columbia, were gentlemanly but non memora ble, while Norman walked off with the most coveted prize of all, the Kellett Fellowship, besides as a Fulbright, which together gave him three years at Cambridge.
So he went off to England ("… nothing will ever seem so cute to me again as the sight of New Court in the brilliant September sun that was presciently shining over Cambridge on the day that I arrived"). Jason became part of a training plan that had only been started at Doubleday and, before long, came upwards with a revolutionary idea in publishing: He proposed to publish in soft cover skillful books, like Gide's "Lafca dio'due south Adventures," Stendhal's "Charterhouse of Parma" and Edmund Wilson's "To a Fin land Station." He planned to publish them in attractive for mats, selling for $1 a book, maybe $i.25. Up to then, soft‐cover books had been ephemeral; Anchor Books were meant to terminal.
Another employe in the Doubleday offices at the time was Barbara Zimmerman, who was also from Boston and had graduated from Radcliffe in 1949. She was only as vivid and ambitious as Jason, just as things in about businesses were then, and to a big degree nevertheless are, she was a secretarial assistant. She did, however, practise some editorial reading, and, although everybody at Doubleday was against information technology, she wanted to pub lish a book called "The Diary of a Immature Daughter" past Anne Frank.
Barbara was finally told that if she could get Mrs. Roosevelt to write an intro duction for the book, Double day would publish information technology. She got the manuscript to Mrs. Roose velt, who liked information technology, and Barbara wrote an introduction which was signed by Mrs. Roosevelt. The book was published and became a big best seller, too, of course, as a play and a movie.
On Dec. 30, 1953, after An chor Books had been success fully, not to say spectacularly launched, Barbara and Jason were married, and, although Doubleday officially frowned on marriages of two employes, they were so valued that they were given the Doubleday apartment in Paris for a lengthy honeymoon.
While Jason was becom ing the well-nigh talked almost young man in publishing, Nor human being was in the Army, from mid‐Dec, 1953, to mid Dec, 1955. Virtually of those 2 years were spent at an outpost nigh Kassel, Germany, as a lecturer on the differ ences between Communism and commonwealth. 3 days after Norman was discharged he went to piece of work as an assist ant editor of Commentary, and it was during the months that followed that he and Ja son became close friends. Wil liam Phillips, one of the found ers of Partisan Review and all the same its editor, remembers them both from that catamenia: "Norman in those days was bubbling over with enthusi asm, with energy; he wanted to know everything; he was so—I think gorging is the give-and-take. Jason was very much the same, youthful, energetic, eager to know. I think per haps he was more impatient than Norman, mere change able, more temperamental. But at that place was such rapport exist tween them. They were very chummy. … Politically they did not seem very far apart in those days."
At the time Norman at least was a very hard‐line anti Communist. He had to be to survive at Commentary. He has written, "All articles were carefully inspected for a trace of softness on Communism. It was a law-breaking of the listen and graphic symbol which might even give itself away past a unmarried give-and-take. … It [Commentary] could always exist trusted to tell its readers what was correct with American society more what was wrong."
Commentary had been establish ed in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, an organi zation fabricated upward largely of well‐to‐do Jews whose ances tors had emigrated from Ger many before the 20th century. It was edited past Elliot E. Cohen a foreign and hard man who toward the end of his life felt that he was in constant danger of a concrete attack from unnamed Commu nists. In 1959 he committed suicide.
Merely past that time Norman was no longer with the maga zine. He had resigned the year before later enduring two years of in‐fighting among the editors. He had decided to effort to brand his living as a free lance author, a hazardous un dertaking for anyone, but he had a wife and 3 children to support. In 1956 he had mar ried Midge (two of the children came from her previous mar riage and they now take a total of iv), who, similar Barbara Zimmerman at Doubleday, had started out at Commentary equally a secretary; she had gone on to get an editor and after a stint at Harper's is at present managing editor of Norman Cousins' nascent mag, World Review.
UPON leaving Commen tary, Norman was rescued from the perils of freelancing —by Jason, who offered him a parttime chore at Anchor Books. "… $500 more than my total‐fourth dimension job at Commen tary," recalls Norman, "and I would still have four days a calendar week to write."
Unfortunately, although Ja son was editor of Anchor Books and heir‐apparent to the height editorial job at Doubleday, things were withal not going the way he had in mind. No one is willing to talk well-nigh what happened, al though Jason, as the enfant terrible of all publishing, clearly had differences with the Doubleday "organisation." Whatever the reasons, he left the company and, after a brief, abortive endeavour to purchase Penguin Books in London with Barney Russet, the maverick who founded Grove Press and Evergreen Review, Jason joined Random House, where he has been for 12 years.
Norman had only been at Doubleday iii weeks when Jason left, and he was of fered Jason's job at far more money than Jason had been getting. He refused it, and left Doubleday. In his ain account of the mat ter, Norman says he didn't want the Job. Others dis agree. "Norman feels that he performed the ultimate human action of friendship past refusing Jason's job," said publisher Harold Steinberg of Chelsea Press. "A few years later, when he'd finished his book, be felt that Jason should reciprocate by giving his wholehearted endorsement to the book. Jason didn't, and Norman felt that he had been betrayed."
But in those earlier days who would have guessed that Norman and Jason would always be less than friends. They were immature, and and so was the earth, and every bit Jason once wrote, "… one'southward conquest of New York seemed inevitable: less a challenge than a natu ral right, and ane never ex pected to abound old."
For a time Norman and Jason worked together at Random House on a project called Looking Glass Library, which proposed to publish for children the same kind of good books, that Ballast had brought out for their parents, but although they published several titles, the project never really got off the, ground. Somewhen, Norman resigned and returned to Commentary, against the ad vice of anybody he knew ("Jason Epstein said that Commentary was played out, through, and wondered how I could even consider getting involved with a irksome Jew ish magazine"), this time equally editor.
"My ideological strategy for the 'new Commentary' … was to say expert‐by … to the hard‐line anti‐Communism and to celebrations, nevertheless repose, of American virtue."
Just 30 and the editor of a prestigious periodical, Norman looked ahead and saw a sharp leftward lurch amongst writers and intellectuals. "It won't exist socialism and it won't be A. D. A. liberalism," he said at the time." This left motility volition be a moral criticism of all be ing social institutions. There's going to ‐be a greater readi ness to arraign our society for the fact that it is hard to arrange to — rather than blaming people for not advert justing."
Ane of Norman's first edi torial coups was the dis covery of a manuscript which he says had been turned down past nineteen publishers but was exactly what he had in mind for the "new Commen tary." He published large ex cerpts of Paul Goodman'southward "Growing Upwardly Absurd" in the first iii issues nether his editorship.
Norman too called Jason about the manuscript ("Practiced man?… that has‐been?"). Ja son read it, liked it, and under his editorship Random House published information technology it has been a long‐fourth dimension best seller, and Goodman, who is now thought of equally a kind of lit erary Norman Thomas, is yet one of Jason's writers, one of the lucky few who still manage to contribute to both Commentary and New York Review.
"Growing Up Cool" now seems mild indeed as a criti cism of American society, but, nevertheless, it seems unlikely that Norman would publish the Goodman pieces today. A good deal of Commentary these days, a picayune more than 10 years after Norman took over, is devoted to hardly tranquility celebrations of Ameri can life; the enemies are not united nations‐Americans as they were a decade ago, they are anti Americans, and chief among them are, in Norman's words, the "WASP patriciate" back ers and the. "radical intellec tuals of Jewish origin who run The New York Review and whose radicalism, such as it is, consists entirely of preserving and enlarging the heritage of hatred for America."
And more recently he wrote: "… any the instance may accept been yesterday, and any the case may be tomorrow, the case today is that the most active ene mies of the Jews are located not in the precincts of the ideological Right but in the ideological precincts of the radical Left. … Jews should recognize the ideology of the radical Left for what information technology is: an enemy of liberal values and a threat to the Jewish position."
Only Norman took over at Commentary during happier, less‐ quarrelsome times, 1960. What a aureate year it seems in hindsight. Just to begin with, there was Jason's cruiser. He had' bought it the year before, and at that place are still those who volition never for requite him for that: "A sailboat might exist all correct for some body in publishing, but to have a cruiser with a heated cabin. Oh, no."
Jason himself was perhaps too cocky‐conscious near own ing information technology. He made a signal of never speaking in nautical terms about it. He spoke of "parking information technology on 79th Street" or of "going uptown in it," and it was always "upstairs" instead of "topside."
Nivertheless, on a summertime evening what could have been more pleasant than a cooling cruise with a common cold supper in the larder, a few drinks be fore dinner, perhaps some vino with dinner, and the skilful conversation of four one-time friends — Norman and Midge, Barbara and Jason?
Those were too the days when the guests at the Ep stein' dinner parties were notwithstanding nodding in agreement and Jason was performing with virtuoso skill in the role of chef. (One reason that Jason eats then much at home is that, among the many things he finds incorrect with Manhattan, in that location is in his opinion not a decent restau bluster anywhere.) At just such a dinner political party, during the newspaper strike in the win ter of 1962–63, on a night when Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, who is Mrs. Lowell, were having din ner at the Epstein, the idea for The New York Review was born. Or so Jason tells the story.
Such spontaneity would accept surely been unique in the register of publishing, and the more prosaic truth was that Jason had been talking about a new book review for years. As indeed who hadn't? It was impossible to become more than than half a dozen literary types together for cocktails without somebody bringing up the idea.
So it was not surprising that among those with whom Jason had at times discussed the possibility of starting "a serious newsprint paper like The Times Literary Supple ment of London" was Nor human. Norman, in fact, was in the small group that laid plans for the Review, and claims he could have been the editor had he chosen to volunteer himself. ("I had been involved with Jason on two previous enterprises and I had no reason to believe this one would be more suc cessful," he now explains.)
The first outcome of The New York Review was laid out on the Lowells' dining room table, with the help of Silvers, a very private human being who was then an editor of Harper's and had earlier that been on George Plimpton's Paris Re view. About fourscore,000 copies of that first outcome were printed; it was crammed with pub lishing advertising, all that coin that publishers had been unable to spend during the strike, and information technology seemed that everybody who mattered lit erature‐wise in this country and in England was in it, either past, or about, or both. And the response was over whelmingly favorable. And then in the summer of 1963 a second issue was published.
Since then Northward.Y.R. has been appearing twice monthly, backed by an assortment of friends and relatives of the editors and publisher and, re portedly, by several rich "WASP patricians," all of whom are said to exist zealous about noninterference in edi torial matters. In this time, the Review has become, air conditioning cording to its critics, a power ful political journal, dedi cated to the support of the New Left, often leading the manner. One observer said that these days, far from being a book review—the American equivalent of The Times Lit erary Supplement—North.Y.R. is much more than like The New Statesman cease Nation of the 19‐thirties, when Kings ley Martin edited it, follow ing every shift in the Stalinist line:
"Of course, there is no longer a Stalinist line; today it'south the kids. Kids of 25 or more. N.Y.R. reports every move they brand, adoringly. Worshipfully, yous might say."
POLITICALLY, the Review was born in a simpler, brilliant er time. The drab years of the Eisenhower regency were over. The Kennedys, as Midge Decter wrote, had "swamped the national consciousness. Their arrival in the White House in January, 1961, very quickly came to be seen not as a changeover, but a break through of some kind."
"In the early sixties," said Ted Solotaroff, editor of New American Review, "intellectu als were being rewarded; atten tion was being paid to them. There was the thought that and then ciety rewarded those who were bright and enterprising. Louis Kronenberger once said of that fourth dimension, 'People used to sell out at forty. At present they sign on at 25."
Early in the decade Jason and the poet John Thompson were flown to Nigeria, osten sibly to observe out whether the Nigerians could and should gear up a textbook publishing house of their own. The Ni gerians had been buying their textbooks from England.
Something called the Fair field Foundation supposedly picked up the tab merely every body, about everybody any manner, knew it was really the C.I.A. Who in those days ex cept a few soreheads and malcontents objected to the C.I.A.?
A little after Jason and Barbara and Norman and Midge, once more at the ostensible expense of the generous Fairfield Foundation, were flown to Mexico Metropolis to shore upwardly the Mexican cultural scene for our side. But after getting there, Barbara decided she didn't similar the look of the matter and returned to New York. Jason and Norman and Midge flew to Acapulco at the taxpayer's expense, in dulging in various anti‐Com munist cultural activities on the beach. Jason went effectually introducing himself to every one equally an American spy.
But past April, 1967, a great many people, including Ja son, had changed their minds well-nigh those cushy trips. Ja son wrote in New York Re view, "The fault of the C.I.A. was not that it corrupted the innocents but that it tried, in collusion with a group of in siders, to corner a gratuitous mar ket. One sighed to discover still another well‐heeled rack et emerging from the thickets of American public and cor poration life, this fourth dimension, alas, landing on i'due south own door footstep.
"It was, to utilise a term favored by the intellectuals of the fifties, the allrightniks who did the most expensive traveling. … On two occa sions I did some myself."
In a lengthy assault on The New York Review that ap peared in Commentary in November, 1970, the sociolo gist Dennis H. Wrong cited Jason'southward article on the C.I.A. as "a turning point in the relation of the North.Y.R. to the New York intellectual milieu out of which it grew. His indictment of America was
"Today Norman will not say anything about Jason for publication, and Jason will not hash out Wonsan, al though a friend swears Epstein recently 'remarked: 'Norman tin can be very engaging, very charming. After all there was a reason for any being his friend.'" marked past the antibourgeois, esthetic overtones grapheme istic of a sure literary tra dition, as is his stress on the ugliness and pollution of the environment, the inadequa cies of didactics, and the crassness of 'familiar Philis tine expansionism' as the 'centre class grunted its way upwardly."
Some readers of Commen tary felt that Norman wrote a adept deal of the commodity signed past Wrong; they even say that they can indicate out para graphs that have the unmis takable Podhoretz style, simply since Norman is an assiduous, line‐past‐line editor of every thing that goes into the magazine, as meticulous in his way as the late Harold Ross of The New Yorker, information technology would not be surprising if he spent a little extra fourth dimension on something every bit important to him every bit "The Case of The New York Review."
Norman has said: "… these counterculture people seem to feel that this country's bug cannot be dealt with. They give out a feeling of despair rather than trying to deal with the problems. Edmund Wilson wrote about the Scottsboro boys that the Communists didn't want them freed; they wanted them con victed, and it's the same at present with the counterculturists."
Equally has been observed, some feel that Norman'southward increasing rigidity and his lashing out at a good many people who were once his friends could be explained, at least in part, by the reviews of "Making It," a memoir of his progress in New York's literary society.
When I talked to Norman, it was almost every bit if the whole thing had happened yesterday afternoon. None of the sores had scabbed over. I wondered if they ever would. "…the hatred in all those reviews. I am not given to paranoia, but it was a para noid's delight. In the globe in which I live I would guess that 99 per cent of the people hated it. I kept remembering that sometime Jewish saying, 'What did that man practice to me that he didn't say hello to me this morning?"
"Making It" was to take been published past Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which paid Norman a 325,000 advance for it. Only Roger Straus hated the completed manuscript. ("Information technology was as if I had handed him something obscene"). Eventually, it was published by Random House, although Jason disliked information technology, and said so, but not at Random House.
As Norman says, the re views were not kind: in fact, it is doubtful that any non fiction book of the final ten years has received and then many vitriolic reviews. Edgar Z. Friedenberg, whom Norman feels he discovered and who is now one of Jason'south writers at Random House and a kind of house reviewer at Northward.Y.R., was really non equally unkind as most, but he did finish his notice by saying, "… we may surely hope that successive volumes will permit us to follow the career of this re markable still boyfriend. And they may be more than mel low; sometimes, as nosotros age, memory softens our percep tions of reality. In 'Podhoretz Returns' and 'Son of Pod horetz' the monster may turn out to have a center of gold."
But that was mild com pared to what Wilfred Sheed, for instance, wrote in At lantic: "… he has written a book of no literary stardom whatever, pockmarked by cli ches and little mock modes ties and a woefully pedestrian tone. … The volume could just be titled 'America, 1967,' slickness, shallow ness, and the flight from pain and death and art‐‐‐all in one package."
The merely comment of Ja son's that I could rail downwardly, I believe unpublished, was, "Baizac should accept written it, about somebody else."
UNDER the circumstances it is not surprising that when Jason's volume, "The Great Con spiracy Trial," was published in 1970, Norman was, shall we say, waiting for it.
In the autumn and winter of 1969–lxx, Jason spent‐ almost five months commuting to Chicago to embrace the trial of Abbie Hoffman, then i of Epsteiq's writers, and his fellow defendants. Refusing to betray the slightest hint of radical bias, he appeared at the trial in Savile‐Row suits, with his hair at a length that was only a bit left of center. He did attempt to shock the local bourgeoisie, all the same, by lunching during the trial at one of Chicago's posher Jewish men's clubs with hairy defendants Hoff man and Jerry Rubin, amid others, in tow.
Jason wrote a serial of manufactures on the odd events in Judge Julius Hoffman's court room for The New York Re view; his book is a greatly re written and lengthier version of those articles.
When Leon Friedman, who had reviewed the Jessica Mil ford volume on the conspiracy trial of Dr. Spook for Com mentary, asked if he could review Jason's volume for the magazine, Neal Kozodov, the executive editor, said; "Oh, no. We have something special in mind for that book."
And, indeed, the‐treatment accorded "The Great Con spiracy Trial" was special. Most book reviews in Corn mentary are less than a folio or a little more in length. "Judging the Chicago Trial" was the pb article in the January, 1971, upshot, occupy ing nine and a half pages. While Tom Hayden'due south book, "Trial," and J. Anthony Lu kas'south, "The Undiscriminating Epithet and Other Obscenities—Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial," were also considered, the main accent was on Jason's book. The article review was written by Alex ander M. Bickel, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and Legal History at Yale, a fre quent correspondent to Com mentry.
Hayden's book got the worst of it, merely the assail on "The Great Conspiracy Trial" was almost as scathing. Dr. Bickel accused Jason of the sin of pretension, of being less than candid and of being a sloppy ‐ scholar. "The sa vant's encyclopedic knowl edge comes — though often not quite straight—out of an encyclopedia, and the impar tial observer is given to argu ment by insinuation and sleight of pen. … Epstein … does non telephone call people pigs. … Some of his expressions of contempt for the white middle form seem to corporeality to be more than‐social snob bery—vicious and fibroid, to be certain, as only a self‐righteous humanitarian, secure in the knowledge that he loves his swain human, would permit himself to be."
At that place were other less cos mic events than wars and revolutions that served to widen the breach between Ja son and Norman. Ane was the matter of Tom Wolfe's account of the gathering at the Park Artery flat of Leonard and Felicia Bern stein to raise coin for the bond of Black Panther'due south then nether indictment for declared plots to flop various build ings around New York. Wolfe did not invent the term "radi cal chic," only in using it to describe the gatherint, he made it part of the vocabu lary, except perchance among radicals.
Jason himself reviewed Wolfe's book in New York Review. He hated information technology and ap peared not to remember too highly of Wolfe personally: "Unself witting as always, Wolfe missed what must be the heart of the matter. What he calls radical chichi is, in fact, just the unhappy residue of the broken promises and de feated politics of the Ken nedys."
Some other Epstein, Joseph, wrote upward the volume for Com mentary: "The Bernsteins' evening with the Black Pan thers is a subject Torn Wolfe might virtually be said to have been born to write well-nigh."
Joseph Epstein—and from here on it will exist necessary to keep our Epsteins straight —is a frequent contributor to Commentary. While it is un thinkable to suggest that Nor man and Midge would even hint to Epstein, Joseph, how he should handle the book, information technology would be foolish to remember that Epstein, Joseph, wouldn't know that Norman and Midge thought highly of it. Only then the reason people in these concentric circles are friends is that they agree on things. In any case, Epstein, Jo seph, loved Tom Wolfe's book calling information technology, in whole and in part, "a minor comic mas terpiece."
Now Jason and Barbara Epstein were not at the Bernstein party, although Robert B. Silvers, the other peak editor of the New York Review, was. Since neither Silvers nor Mrs. Epstein would talk to me I cannot record what, if anything, was said effectually the office about the Wolfe book or about the Bernstein caper. I simply know what Jason wrote: "Wolfe's sin is a lack of compassion and his intellectual weakness a tendency to panic when he finds himself beyond his depth, frailties that com monly accompany moments of corking personal or public stress…"
Needless to say, Jason and Joseph did not agree nigh the Blackness Panthers either. Jason wrote, "the Pan thers had by this fourth dimension [when they were charged with the flop plot] gained a certain involvement, not to say glamour, as the authentic vocalisation of blackness misery and rage. 1 tended to hear in their vio lent language and the shallow Marxism that accompanied information technology not the sound of revolution but the cry, of pain."
Commentary's position on the Panthers had been made clear time and again, for ex ample in an essay called "A Perspective on the Panthers," written by Tom Milstein, a junior fellow at Columbia: "What is the black Panther party? It is a totalitarian organization of black na tionalists which identifies with braches of world Com munism Information technology is anti‐Semitic, sometimes openly, sometimes past implication and allusion. … It is a racket, just too much more than racket."
No one seems to have emerged every bit a clear victor in The Battle of the Epsteins, although the Panthers some months later were acquitted. I would gauge that had very little to dc with the Wolfe book, the Epstein reviews or, for that matter, the Bernstein gala.
FOR Norman, New York Review's coziness with the Panthers was no doubt fur ther proof of its soft‐minded ness on Jewish matters. Nor man, as i of the legions of bearding observers I talked to said, "regards the effect of any given action on the Jews every bit a touchstone of how the democratic process is func tioning." He himself has writ ten: "I think that Jews must once over again brainstorm to look at proposals and policies from the point of view of Jewish interest, and must in one case again, begin to ask what the conse quences, if any, of any pro posal or policy are likely to exist as far as the Jewish effect is concerned."
There are possibly no bet ter examples of the differ ences between Jason and Norman than the views ex pressed in their respective journals on the two events of the last ten years that Nor human being says have influenced hire more than any others: the six‐day war between Arabs and Israelis, and the New York teachers' strike in the neglect of 1968.
Norman and Jason, and The New York Review and Com mentary, were totally divided on the meaning of the teach ers' strike. To Norman the effect of customs command of the schools in Bedford‐Stay vesant seems to have been less important than the fact that the issue "brought blackness anti‐Semitism into widespread public view … and … information technology ex posed in certain elements of what the blacks themselves like to call the white power structure an credible readi ness to buy civil peace in the United States — I exercise not say social justice—at the direct expense of the Jews." The anti‐Semitism which sur faced during the strike was, in Norman'south view, more often "understood," and more often blamed on the Jews them selves, than information technology was always con demned. And this "caused some of u.s.a. to worry. Were nosotros being paranoid?"
Jason was all for com munity control of the schools, and as for the anti‐Semitism, he wrote: "Undoubtedly there take been expressions of anti‐Semitism on the part of the Due east various black dema gogues, and as the largely Jewish U.F.T. [United Federa tion of Teachers] insists on pitting its force confronting the black community, there will be more. However it seems to have go the policy of the spousal relationship, whenever such slan ders take been committed past the blacks, to amplify them in a way that suggests that the Nuremberg rallies are about to exist resumed in the Abyssinian Baptist Church. It is, to say the least, irrespon sible for the U.F.T. to make full the mails with unsubstantiated anti‐Semitic statements of blackness militants that obscur ing the fact that in the Bounding main Hill‐Brownsville experimental district almost 75 per cent of the teachers are white and more than half of these are Of the six‐day state of war Norman wrote: "What the victory did … for some of us … and per haps for most American Jews, was to reinforce a one thousand fold a new determination we had already tasted as a saving sweetener to the bitter sensa tions of isolation and vulnera bility … It can, I believe, exist understood to have repre sented the recovery, after a long and uncertain convales cence, of the Jewish remnant from the grievous and almost fatal psychic and spiritual wounds … suffered at the hands of the Nazis … The Jews who had so oft vio lated the commandment to choose life now obeyed that commandment. … Information technology was a thing to celebrate."
The New York Review has, so far equally I tin make out, dealt with the six‐day war only once. In August, 1967, L F. Rock, an early and en thusiastic supporter' of the Jewish state and a frequent visitor there as a correspond ent, wrote a long slice on the "holy state of war." At the finish Stone said: "if in this business relationship I have given more than space to the Arab than the Israeli side it is be cause as a Jew, closely leap emotionally with the birth of Israel, I experience honor leap to report the Arab side, es pecially since‐ the U.S. press is so overwhelmingly pro Zionist. For me the Arab Jewish struggle is a tragedy. The essence of tragedy is a struggle of right confronting right …"
Rock did, still, quote Ben‐Gurion as saying: "Israel is the country of the Jews and only of the Jews. Every Arab who lives here has the same rights every bit any minority citizen in any country in the world, but he must admit the fact that he lives in a Jewish state." And Stone added, 'The implication must chill Jews in the exterior world."
As I say, so far every bit I know that is Northward.Y.R.'south just real com ment on the state of war, and there are those who say that the absence of comment is in information technology self a comment. One thing is sure, as one of the anony mous said, with some acer bity, "The New York Review cannot be said to have under scored the Jewish result."
NORMAN'S decision to take on the New Left in all of its to him hideous aspects came in the summer of 1970 when he took three months off from Commentary and holed up in the state to work on his book about the sixties, a decade he finds alarmingly similar to the nineteen ‐ thirties, especially politically. A staff member of the magazine says, "When Norman came back, he was loaded for acquit and, not at all incidentally, for Jason Ep stein and New York Review. He reminded some of usa of Moses coming down front Mt. Sinai, but his commandments were not limited to 10"
Ane matter is sure. If Nor man had made a slight shift to the left when he took over the editorship of Commen tary in 1960, by the time he returned to the magazine in 1970 he had made a shift to the right. To some, fifty-fifty those who admire him about, the shift seems not to take been as corking as Norman himself feels that it was. "Information technology was not a drastic change," says a friend. "It just seems large in Norman's eyes."
Even Norman admits that his infatuation with the New Left was transitory. "Except for about five minutes," he says, "I was unhappy even then [in die early sixties] virtually the. New Left."
Mayhap the deviation is that Norman began speaking for himself in the magazine. In June, 1970, he began to write a monthly essay, "Is sues," sometimes only a page, sometimes more.
A few months after the sociologist Nathan Glazer, who along with Daniel P. Moynihan, is a shut mentor to Norman, appear that having been a "mild radical," he had now become a "balmy bourgeois." Like Norman'due south, Glazer'due south shift was minimal. Back in the fifties at the acme of Senatoz Joseph. Mc Carthy's ability, Glazer was telling the readers of Com mentary that McCarthy wasn't math of a danger to the country'south civil liberties. All the Senator could practise, said Glazer, was to "haul people to Washington for a grill ing." And what was and so frightening about that?
In whatever case, Norman went along with Glazer's "balmy" switch. He wrote that past 1970 "some of us who came a decade earlier to radicalism via the route of ideas rather than the route of personal grievances are convinced that it has become more than important to insist once once again on the liberty of big areas of hu human feel from the power of politics, whether benevplent or malign, than to accede in the surly tyran ny of the activist tempera ment in its presently domi nant forms. It is in this sense that we consider our selves deradicalized, and not out of any sudden lapse into indifference over the remedi able ills which afflict the globe."
The avalanche of attack has continued without interrup tion every calendar month since, and Norman's angers and energies seem in no way to have di minished. Re has said, "I al ways felt I was belongings the line. Now I'm on the offen sive, and Tm positive I'm going to win."
It may be true that the country as a whole is moving to the right, but amongst. Intel lectuals, at least among the intellectuals I have discussed the matter with during the last nine months, Norman's position is a lonely one. Peo ple on the left have even be gun to accuse him of being "fascist." When he speaks with vehemence, as he al ways seems to these days, I am reminded of listening in 1968 to the vehe ment Joseph Alsop defending his equally desolate position Vietnam.
Perhaps nada at all has changed, as Jason himself seems to suggest. The first time he refused to see me he said on the telephone, "The whole idea of writing some thing about Norman and me … is really too boring even to consider. … Others have tried it. Some: galoot from New York magazine tried it, and he didn't come upwards with anything. We went through the same thing in the fifties, and the aforementioned people were on the same side then equally they are now… Information technology is tiresome and tiresome, and I will have no part of it."
But, then, peradventure Jason'due south denials reverberate something that is happening at New York Review. Perhaps, as some people believe, The Review is discovering that the audition for radical rhetoric is grow ing smaller.
After all, the radical kids have quieted down consid erably, and even those who dislike The New York Review virtually feel that it has, also. It certainly seems unlikely that its editors would these days put a diagram showing how to make a Molotov cocktail on the front end page.
That happened in 1967, the year Andrew Kopldnd wrote a piece criticizing Martin Lu ther King every bit an ineffectual do‐gooder, adding, memor ably, "Morality, like politics, starts at the barrel of a gun."
Kopkind, a onetime writer for rime and The New Re public, has since repaired to a commune in Washington, D.C., and Jason when ques tioned about what happened to him is inclined to give the impression that the proper noun is only vaguely familiar. An drew who? "Oh," he has been heard to say, "Andrew Kop kind. He turned out to be a pain in the donkey."
Kopkind, Hayden and Stokeley Carmichael have long since disappeared from the pages of New York Review. Not merely that, but in the Jan. vii outcome last year—a month or and so after the Wrong commodity—Murray Kenipton had some unkind words to say about Hayden and his book, "Trial," economist Wassiiy Leontief wrote about the shortcomings of Cuban eco atomic planning and Eliza beth Hardwick, in tough re views of the films "Trash," "The Groupies" and "Gimme Shelter," declared that "Some thing pitiless and pathological has seeped into youth's love of itself, its trunk, its politics."
The Review, once accused of being a neo‐Castroite pub lication, also printed recently an impassioned letter by the Cuban novelist Jose Yglesias, attacking Castro for inipris oning the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla. Norman, however questioned the motives backside such leftist criticism of Pa dilla's treatment. Referring to a similar protest signed past Jean‐Paul Sartre and some 60 other European intellectuals, he wrote:
"… if the imprisonment of Hubert Matos and so many thousands of other political prisoners could non rouse the libertarian ire of the radical intelligentsia … why should the arrest of Heberto Padilla have washed so? It would be pleasant to think that the answer lies in a new concern for freedom among the radical intellectuals of the Westward. Yet if this were the case, the signers of the protestation would not exist likely to say, as they even so do, that the Castro regime has in the past been exemplary in its respect for the human being. My own guess is that the Padilla af fair has served these in tellectuals as a convenient pretext for jettisoning Castro and the Cuban Revolution, not for the offense of Stalinism (al though the authorities is certainly guilty of that) but for the criminal offence of failure: the failure of Che's effort to foment revolution in other Latin American countries and the concomitant failure to fulfill the, revolution at habitation."
TODAY, Norman will not say anything about Jason for publication, presumably ex cept for publication in Com mentary, and Jason will non hash out Norman, although a friend of Epstein's swears that Jason non too long ago remarked, "Norman can be very engaging, very mannerly. Afterwards all, there was a reason for my existence his friend."
Richard Kostelanetz, a youngish man who describes himself as "a poet, critic and cultural historian," has in the final few years spent a expert deal of time studying what he calls "The New York Lit erary Mob." In a book he is writing, "The Terminate of Intelli gent Writing," Kostelanetz predicts that i day before long Norman and Jason will be come up friends once more: "… be hind their squabbles of the Moment … is … an implicit sense, similar that held by dis puting families inside a unmarried. Mafia, that each knows he volition once once again be doing business concern with the other. The proper noun of their game is not state of war—not even literary state of war— but mo nopoly."
Well, maybe, but I doubt it. The quarrel is real, and it is basic. And if the scars left by the remarkably similar battles of the nineteen‐fifties are any indication, and I recollect they are, it is unlikely that Nor man or Jason will forgive the other for what he considers the outrageous, not to say unsafe, not to say almost traitorous carry of the moment.
Meantime, the contend con tinues everywhere across the country. My, own travels dur Mg the last year, largely on higher campuses, seem to confirm that New York Re view is ahead. It recently air-conditioning quired the list of subscribers to I. F. Stone's Bi‐Weekly, 68,000 in number, and Rock has become an N.Y.R. contrib uting editor. If all of those go on to subscribe to Due north.Y.R., that would bring The Review's circulation up to 153,000, simply and so far nobody seems to know whether that will happen. It hasn't nonetheless.
It is Incommunicable to tell whether Podhoretz and Ep stein assist to create the di visions inside the state or just reflect them. But I doubt that it matters much. Since neither Norman nor Jason takes a pocket-sized view of his place in the catholic scheme of things, both will very likely proceed to lead their armies, however pocket-sized, into battles, however periph eral.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1972/03/26/archives/why-norman-and-jason-arent-talking-why-norman-and-jason-arent.html
Post a Comment for "Jason Epstein Leftwing Critic in Ny Review of Boks"