Posted on 03/18/2017 5:06:07 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Mr. Podhoretz, the former editor at Commentary magazine, looks back at the fierce, argumentative parties of New York’s intelligentsia.
“These parties I mentioned,” Norman Podhoretz said the other day, “everybody gave parties. And there was a lot of drinking. Some visiting literary celebrity would show up, Partisan Review would make a party or I would make a party. Everybody came. And it was a really passionate intellectual life. It’s hard to imagine today, but people actually came to blows over literary disagreements.”
It was a cold morning, and Mr. Podhoretz, 87, was recently back from the hospital after minor surgery, recuperating in his Upper East Side apartment, recalling a time in the middle of the last century when a small group of New York intellectuals held the public attention like well-read Kardashians.
“In the case of ‘The Adventures of Augie March,’ I was the one who nearly came to blows,” he said, referring to a 1953 critical review he wrote of Saul Bellow’s breakthrough novel. “Bellow wouldn’t speak to me for years. It was only when he decided he couldn’t stand Alfred Kazin anymore that we became sort of friendly.
“We were sitting together in a meeting, Saul and I, and Kazin was over there, and he said, ‘Look at him, he looks like he just ate a pastrami sandwich out of a stained brown piece of paper.’ To incur Saul Bellow’s wrath was dangerous.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
meh
Wandering memories of drunken intellectual elitists is uninteresting
You need to talk to your idiot son who only got where he got through nepotism.
His books are very good.
Thanks for posting this.
Hee hee. My first thought was something similar, not quite as pointed, though.
“a small group of New York intellectuals held the public attention like well-read Kardashians”
I think that means a single digit percentage of Manhattan residents paid attention to them.
Mr. Podhoretz was a great writer and thinker who contributed greatly by defending President Reagan and the USA.
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