MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH AMERICA:
The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative
By Norman Podhoretz
The Free Press, 248 pages, $25
A PERSONAL ODYSSEY
By Thomas Sowell
The Free Press, 308 pages, $25
Autobiography and memoir writing are senior precincts. The presumption is that having made it over the hill, you’ve had the good view and are willing to describe it for other climbers. No longer active, you have little to lose, less to conceal. Yeats called the process “withering into truth.” Writing about your past is a familiar way of rounding it out. If you’ve done it with style, your readers will make adjustments for geriatric vanity and score-settling. Indeed, they may relish them as revelations of your crusty character.
The Free Press has published the autobiographical memoirs of two stalwarts of the modern conservative movement whose peculiar icon, Ronald Reagan, was peculiarly assessed last year by Edmund Morris. These stalwarts, Norman Podhoretz, longtime editor of Commentary magazine, and Thomas Sowell, a distinguished economist, are intellectuals, and Reagan doesn’t play a central role in their stories, but the success he represents and embodies does. Their life struggles, like his, were, as they tell it, against the grain. Like him, they began on the left; like him, they began poor; like him, they started out far from the centers of power. Now 70, their chief work done, they are senior fellows at conservative think tanks, Podhoretz at the Hudson Institute, Sowell at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
Born in Brooklyn to impoverished Jewish parents, Podhoretz spoke as much Yiddish as English and had so thick an accent that a teacher insisted he take a remedial speech class. For this, as for almost everything he describes, Podhoretz is grateful. The class not only cleared up his accent but opened up the way to fellowships that, he believes, would have otherwise been denied him. It also opened up the wondrous English language with which he has had a lifelong affair, almost as intense as the one that gives title to his book.
Podhoretz was educated at Columbia and Cambridge Universities, and he served in the Army, where he encountered some of the “ordinary guys” who are the “true backbone” of his beloved country. At 30 he was made editor of the magazine whose credo was “that the Jews of Americaall of them and not just the intellectualsbelonged here, they belonged in and to America. They were not living in galut, the Diaspora, waiting to be brought home by the messiah or by David Ben-Gurion: they were home already.”
Sowell, born in North Carolina to poor black parents, was raised in Harlem by a great aunt who, for years, he believed was his mother. His upward struggle was slower and harder than Podhoretz’s. Sowell was tough, intelligent, full of curiosity and ambition, but almost every attempt at realizing himself was blocked by the low expectations and sheer racket around him.
Tenacity and a remarkable, almost arrogant self-reliance saw him through Howard and Harvard Universities and the University of Chicago (the last being the only school he respected). Sowell was drafted into the Marine Corps, where his bristling toughness developed a carapace of rational calculation that, in retrospect, he thinks of as “thinking like an economist.” Like Podhoretz, he has one daughter and a son named John. His favorite editor is Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter; he has written for Podhoretz’s former magazine; and he is cited in Podhoretz’s book. Also like Podhoretz, he regards himself as a hard-nosed, difficult, independent man.
Being admirable and difficult men is one thing; being admirable writers is another. These two autobiographies are cut to the same roughly chronological pattern, and each ends with a litany of thanks for the luck that helped bring its author where he is. Podhoretz thanks America for granting him “the inheritance of the English language,” for sending him to great universities, for letting him “make a modest but decent enough living,” for opening the way for him “to meet and mingle . . . with some of the most interesting people of my time,” for handing him “a magazine of my own to run,” for seeing to it “that I would live in an apartment in Manhattan much like the one in which the affluent parents of some of my classmates at Columbia had lived,” and for having a study with a door that clicks shut unlike the doors of the crowded Brooklyn home in which he grew up. Only the last item has something of the touching individuality that almost everywhere enriches Sowell’s book. “My Love Affair With America” is soft-core Podhoretz. At his best as scrapper and polemicist, his well-known attacks on Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March” and an anti-Semitic essay of Gore Vidal’s were powerful and full of bite. His accounts of them here are toothless; the fights are long over. Only when he writes about his narrow, egocentric relatives and his early days in Brooklyn is there any of the flavor that distinguishes Sowell’s book, though even here the taste is of poorly warmed-up leftovers.
“. . .this teacher, like most of her colleagues, was a middle-aged Catholic woman of Irish ethnicity and (in the lingo of those days) an `old maid.’ Probably representing a majority of the teachers in the elementary division of the New York City public-school system of the 1930s, they were something like (and may have seen themselves as) secular nuns . . . . This was the very height of the age of the `melting pot.’ “
Sowell’s book is better because he does not establish character by proclamation but in action. He’s a storyteller. In some stories, he’s the dupe, in others the duper. So he tells of a Marine Corps boxing match in which he swings wildly, missing his opponent but causing the man to trip and get counted out. In Sowell’s next match, he is beaten to a pulp because, his opponent tells him later, “he dared not let up on me (for) fear of that `one punch’ that could turn the fight around.”
Mostly, it’s Sowell’s crabby stubbornness that’s at the heart of the stories and to no small degree of his life. He can’t bear the lazy study habits of students, masked at Howard by victimization cant and at Cornell University by the contempt of engineering students for unquantified thinking. He ends up resigning from both schools. In the academy and in government, where he works at the Labor Department, he encounters indolence and timidity that prevent him from doing or completing his work. This leads him to swear off government programs, and he resigns from the department.
There are people he admires, often those who’ve taken chances on and believed in him: a foreman at a machine shop, his false mom’s daughter, his real siblings, his University of Chicago teachers George Stigler and Milton Friedman, his beloved children (one of whom, a late talker, becomes the center of his pioneering study of late bloomers) and his second wife.
His final litany of gratitude is a neat summary of his life:
“(I)t now seems in retrospect almost as if someone had decided that there should be a man with all the outward indications of disadvantage, who nevertheless had the key inner advantages needed to advance.”
Two distinguished conservatives, two books, but only one with any claim to distinction. As there is political morality, sexual morality and social morality, so there is aesthetic morality. That’s why Podhoretz’s book not only sullies the character of its author but of two distinguished friends who praise his book so extravagantly that they themselves are demeaned by it. Daniel Patrick Moynihan is quoted on the jacket as saying “Not, surely, since `The Education of Henry Adams’ have we had so profound, yet lively an account of a life of ideas,” and William Buckley says, “Never (that I know) has a single lifetime borne such literary and philosophical fruit.” It would have been a greater act of friendship to have reminded the poetry-loving Podhoretz of the words of William Blake, “Never seek to tell thy love/Love that never told can be.” Thomas Sowell seems to have ingested this injunction.
