Ex Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer [Paperback]

Norman Podhoretz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2000

Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Hanna Arendt, Norman Mailer, and Lillian Hellman -among the other things these writers and intellectuals all had in common is Norman Podhoretz. With them Podhoretz was part of "The Family," as the core group of New York intellectuals of the 50s and 60s came to be known. And in Ex-Friends, he has written the intellectual equivalent of a family history- a sparkling chronicle of affection and jealousy, generosity and betrayal, breakdowns and reconciliations, and ultimately of dysfunctions impossible to cure. Ex-Friends is filled with brilliant portraits of some of the cultural icons who defined our time. Yet anyone who has followed Norman Podhoretz's career as a writer and editor and above all one of the leading controversialists of our time will expect more than just another fond memoir of literary alliances and quarrels, brilliant talk and bruised egos. Indeed, while Ex-Friends has some of the elements of a personal diary, it is also a journal de combat describing the intellectual and social turbulence of the 60s and 70s and showing how the literary living room was transformed into a political battleground where the meaning of America was fought night by night. Against this backdrop, Podhoretz tells how he left The Family and undertook a trailblazing journey from radical to conservative, a journey that helped redefine America's intellectual landscape in the last quarter of the 20th century and caused his old friends to become ex-friends. If there is a nostalgia in Ex-Friends, it is not only for lost friendships but also for a time of wit, erudition, and passionate argumentation. Norman Podhoretz bodies forth a world when people still believed that what they thought and wrote and said could change the world.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"If you like gossip, you'll adore Ex-Friends," columnist Liz Smith has said. And, boy, does archconservative Norman Podhoretz's account of his bitter splits with important American intellectuals rollick. See Norman Mailer, whom critic Podhoretz gave a crucial early boost, get naked and attempt a three-way with his girlfriend and Podhoretz! (Podhoretz tried orgies, pot, and speed, but hated them as much as Kerouac's and Bellow's novels). Hear Mailer's tale after he stabbed his wife almost to death and ran straight to Podhoretz's place! Thrill as critic Allen Tate challenges editor William Barrett to a death-duel over Ezra Pound's Bollingen Award! As Woody Allen said of the literati Podhoretz calls "the Family," "They only kill their own."

Ex-Friends is a nifty if one-sided sketch of the intellectual gang wars, and it captures people more two-faced than does a Cubist painting. After ideas, writes Podhoretz, the Family's second passion was "gossiping with the wittiest possible malice about anyone who had the misfortune not to be present." Podhoretz only discovered Hannah Arendt's faked friendship by reading the published letters of Arendt and Mary McCarthy, and he nails her for her German chauvinism and impenetrable arrogance. He trashes Allen Ginsberg, who published Podhoretz's first poem, for Ginsberg's outrageous grandstanding, and because homosexuality outrages him. He liked Lillian Hellman partly because she gave glamorous parties, and stomps her for loyalty to Stalin's party and her prose ("an imitation of Hammett's imitation of Hemingway"). He skewers many besides the celebs in his subtitle, including Joseph Heller, whose Catch-22 he helped make a hit. He won Jackie Onassis's affection by returning her put-down with a quick "F--- you," like the Brooklyn street tough he was and remains. Mailer betrayed him for not getting him invited to Jackie's party.

The Family had big ideas--and, as Podhoretz proves, egos as big as thin-skinned dodo eggs. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The subtitle is an impressive list, and in the process of recalling his quarrels, most of which naturally revolved around matters political and literary, Podhoretz sheds a great deal of light on relationships within "the Family"?that is, the mostly Jewish New York intellectual establishment of the 1950s and '60s. Podhoretz, even before he became editor of Commentary in 1958, was very much a part of the group and at first shared many of its radical ideas. As he became a family man (lower case), the Cold War heated up and the '60s youth rebellion turned many of his newly acquired values on their head. He moved rapidly to the right, to the point where he is now mockingly referred to by many on the left as "the Frother." Still, pace his many critics, he remains a lively writer, and these accounts of relationships gone awry are a fine blend of polemics and sharp character sketches. If it is difficult to imagine today's Podhoretz wandering the midnight streets in a haze of alcoholic good fellowship with Jack Kerouac or helping Mailer hide from the police after he had stabbed his wife, he assures us that these events took place. Podhoretz's position throughout is that, although he always began in admiration of his friends' imagination and vitality, their moral, political or aesthetic excesses eventually forced a rift. In Podhoretz's view, he had "finally come to my senses after a decade of experimenting with radical ideas that were proving dangerous to me and destructive to America." Although he concludes that "I much prefer who I am to what I was," Podhoretz concedes, elegiacally, that he misses the sense of shared community and excitement he once knew with so many notable ex-friends.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 233 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (July 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893554171
• ISBN-13: 978-1893554177
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,351,414 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #19 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( A ) > Arendt, Hannah

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Demolishing Ginsberg, September 2, 2000

By 

Stan Smith (Mid-Missouri) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer (Hardcover)

I've been waiting for this book for years. I am in my early thirties, and have lived enough life to know that people like Ginsberg did perhaps irreparable damage to this country. I know for a fact that his literary ilk made an impression on me, as a young man. I had the miserable experience, in fact, of trying to be a liberal for far too many years. The "antinomianism" that Podhoretz talks about in his chapter on Ginsberg is appealing, dangerously so, in the very fact that it allows for a complete break-down of discipline, whether that be discipline in art or in the way one lives one's life. President Clinton is a perfect example of this. Most of the people in my generation take antinomianism one step further--integrating the undisciplined elements with elements of what appear to be a "normalcy" (tattoos, piercings, promiscuous sexual encounters and profanity are de rigueur at most places of work inhabited by my generation. But contrary to popular imagination, my generation works quite hard, as I suppose, does Clinton). We have reached an age when MTV shows middle-teens in the midst of soft-porn "undressing."

The attendent nihilism that goes along with this break-down of mores and loss of virtue is far, far worse than someone like Podhoretz could imagine, I think, as he did not inherit these things. Nonetheless, his job at hand was to speak of his ex-friends, and he does so without pulling any punches. Allen Ginsburg is hit hardest, and deservedly so. Surely, it was the fame of men like Ginsburg who helped set the trend toward perversity in literature and in the media in general. Once nasty stuff like this makes its way into the vernacular, Pandora's Box is opened. As far as base human instincts are concerned, what is more appealing, anyway: instant gratification, sexual deviance and anarchy, or discipline, gentlemanly behavior, and patriotism? Yes, he "got" Podhoretz's generation through their children. Ginsburg's ilk also did a pretty good job of damaging my generation, too. Evil stuff. And, even scarier, institutionalized stuff.

I remember viewing a documentary about Berkeley, in the final throes of my sorry liberalism, watching Ronald Reagan excoriate the faculty about the way in which students had taken over the University. The next frame shows Ginsburg banging cymbals together. And then we see student radicals trying to block entrance into the draft board offices in Oakland. Unfortunately, most people in my generation would scoff at Reagan, cheer for Ginsburg, and look with dumbfounded amazement at the draft-board fracas. Likewise, I believe most would scoff at Podhoretz, if not for his perceived prudishness, as much as for the fact that most of the people he was writing about are dead and gone. There is no such thing as the "Family" anymore. The issues they were fighting over have been replaced with arguably more complicated issues, at least on the geo-political scene. Nonetheless, what many of us can and should see is that we have fallen into a moral abyss that will be very difficult to climb out of. Gertrude Himmelfarb speaks of "two cultures." I have seen both, and, thank-you Norman, I now understand why I arrived on your side for once and for all.

14 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great But WIsh It Could Have Been Longer, February 1, 2000

By 

D. Leybman "Dima" (Fort Wayne, IN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer (Hardcover)

This book reads like one of those "steamy novels." There is everything here. Sex, drugs, poetry, homosexuality. You name it, you got it. The book basically is Norman Podhoretz and he basically devotes each chapter to a person or people in a group known as "The Family." The list of characters includes Hannah Arendt, Allen Ginsberg, Lionel Trilling and Diane Trilling, Lillian Hellman, and some other ones. Podhoretz basically tells us their personalities and how come he finally realized that liberalism is "wrong." The book is his personal "memoir" on how to became disenchanted with the left. One of the good parts of the book is the fact that it shows such admired figures such as Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer in a light that hasn't been bestowed on them. The majority of the works on these people almost always paint them as geniuses. But Podhoretz shows us much more in the process. This book will be good 100 years from now to establish fact from fiction on characters. People such as Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg who are considered geniuses who fight for what they believe in are portrayed in a different light. The book shows more of their "dark sides" than other books. Podhoretz writes in a very good way. His voice seems to come of the book and you can actually hear him talking to you. I do wish it could have been longer and in some parts he could have been more sensitive but all in all it was good. This book tells a lot about the generation that made up the intellectual sixties and fifties.

20 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ex-Friends: An expose of the lunacy of the Left, March 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt and Norman Mailer (Hardcover)

Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends is a fascinating look into the Culture Wars that have rumbled across our intellectual landscape for the past 50 or 60 years. Podhoretz has been in the trenches throughout, though his alliances changed radically as he came to see, with more and more acuity, the destructiveness of leftist thought. He reveals a great deal about the characters he called friends--and then ex-friends--as he made his own journey from the left to the right. "Rigid ideologue" he may be, but only someone reading this book with the "left side" of his brain would claim that the subjects of his study are enlightened and tolerant. How else to explain the vitriolic attacks on Podhoretz for having honest questions about the motives and tactics of the liberal establishment? Is Norman Podhoretz a "paranoid little bigot" as one (no doubt open minded) reviewer claims? Only if love of country and the desire to see true democracy flourish are malignant ideas. As it stands, Ex-Friends is a brilliant expose of the lunacy of the left, an often thinly veiled totalitarianism passing itself off as progressivism. (The chapters on Ginsberg and Mailer are sufficient to illustrate this point.) Podhoretz's contribution to this discussion is invaluable, and only a recalcitrant liberal would call it "amusing garbage." I only hope, Mr. Podhoretz, that there is more where this came from.