The appearance in 1967 of Making It, Norman Podhoretz’s tale of coming to maturity in the world of the New York intellectuals—and of the naked ambition for fame and prestige that drove both him and them—created no small amount of controversy. Friends and mentors had discouraged him from publishing it in the first place, warm relationships turned cold, and the book met with decidedly harsh reviews. Yet reading Making It a half-century later—it has just been re-released by the publishing arm of the New York Review of Books, which had been among the journals to pan the first edition—Scott Johnson finds this reaction difficult to understand. The book itself, he reports, is no less compelling now than then:
Making It might have been titled The Education of Norman Podhoretz. The author traces his education from public school in the tough and impoverished Brownsville section of Brooklyn to college as a scholarship student at Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Columbia set his “brain on fire.” He became the star student of the great literary critic Lionel Trilling and other prominent members of Columbia’s dazzling faculty. . . .
The book offers the enthralling coming-of-age story of Podhoretz’s rise to success in the heavily Jewish world of New York intellectuals of the 1950s and 1960s—the lost world of [what Murray Kempton called the] “Family.” The Family was born in part from the break of Partisan Review—the legendary intellectual review whose founding editors were Philip Rahv and William Phillips—from the Communist party. The Partisan Review crowd married a commitment to left-wing anti-Stalinist politics with a devotion to modernist art and literature. Podhoretz joined the Family as a precocious member of its third and final generation. At just thirty in 1960, he was named Elliot Cohen’s successor as editor of Commentary, the magazine then sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. . . .
Visiting Making It for the first time, or returning to it after many years, readers will find it evocative of another lost world, too—that of the Yiddish-speaking, East European immigrant Jews, which included Podhoretz’s literal family. He himself grew up speaking both Yiddish and heavily accented English. In the first chapter of Making It, Podhoretz describes the unforgettable Mrs. K., the high-school English teacher “who took it upon herself to polish me to as high a sheen as she could manage and I would permit.”
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