"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

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.
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In this memoir, Podhoretz, who edited Commentary for over 35 years, rehashes his political and literary battles with friends turned enemies. Like Sophocles' Creon, the author of Making It (LJ 1/68) and Breaking Ranks (LJ 1/80) seems intent on killing his corpses twice (the still-breathing Norman Mailer excepted). Nevertheless, the tenacity with which Podhoretz clings to his convictions?as well as the clarity of his prose?makes for interesting reading on the fierce ideological wars of his era. For the intellectuals of his generation who lived "by, for, and of ideas," the struggles of the Stalinists and Trotskyites, Communists and anti-Communists, liberals and neoconservatives were not abstract arguments but questions of life and death. Unfortunately, unlike his adversary Allen Ginsberg, Podhoretz's rigid mindset allows him little room for forgiveness.?William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
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Although the portraits in Ex-Friends are laced with rancor, they are also touched by a crusty, almost resisted tenderness.... Formidable though its author may be, Ex-Friends is not only immensely readable but even charming in places. Podhoretz writes a virile, off-hand prose that moves easily between novelistic scene-setting ... and savvy exposition...

Even the title of this collection of short pieces about famous writers he has known demonstrates that former Commentary editor and undying neocon guru Podhoretz (The Bloody Crossroads, 1986, etc.) continues to display the temperament that Shirley MacLaine attributed to Debra Winger: turbulent brilliance. Podhoretz proudly wears his scars from the ideological wars that convulsed the group of mostly Jewish, New York City intellectuals that he dubbed The Family. The quarrels between himself and his former colleagues on the left, he allows, often sound sectarianan apt word to describe the shouting matches, awkward silences, and endless factionalism that rocked The Family every few years over such issues as Soviet expansion, Israel, Vietnam, and gay and womens liberation. (Amazingly enough, the present volume doesnt exhaust Podhoretzs list of ex-friends, since he also says that he has parted company with Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Robert Brustein, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.) Podhoretzs strengths as a polemicist surge from his determination to write from his gut, no matter where that may lead him, as well as from a passionate insistence that politics and the arts matter absolutely. Yet, despite tinges of nostalgia for the loss of the warmth and vitality he felt from his ex-friends, he also writes more frequently (and predictably) with shrill rhetoric. Nor does he seem to understand how strongly affronts to the egos of all cronies concerned figure in the ruptures he now chronicles. Many anecdotes here are unusually rich, including Allen Ginsberg yelling at the bourgeois Podhoretz, We will get you through your children!; in another, Norman Mailer tries to cajole the author into joining an orgy. But Podhoretz tends, tiresomely, to retrace old battlegrounds with recycled stories from previous contentious memoirs (e.g., Making It, 1967). This reminiscence at its best is suffused with wistfulness for the vanishing of intellectual community but suffers from an inability to reconsider as it remembers. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

...it is the individual stories of these falling-outs that make Ex-Friends such a textured intellectual history and lend the book its unusual spiciness.... deliciously gossipy and scintillating recollection of our times. -- The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

...this book is as charming and intelligent and courageous as its author.... Ex-Friends is a gripping account of the drama of one of the great figures of American letters. -- The Wall Street Journal, Conrad Black

Though he judges his subjects as thinkers and people and finds them wanting, he also recollects them with affection and amusement (even amusement at this own expense). -- The New York Times Book Review, Richard Brookhiser

William Kristol editor and publisher, The Weekly Standard First he made it; then he broke ranks; now he looks back, with wit and verve and honesty -- and, yes, with affection. A remarkable account of the lost world of the New York intellectuals, of the 1960s, of the politics of ideas in modern America -- but more than all of these, an extraordinary reflection on the meaning of friendship. Norman Podhoretz has written a memoir that you can't put down and you won't forget. -- Review

[Podhoretz] has set down a fierce and gossipy record of his expired relationships. His stories amount to a personal diary of American political ideas from the end of World War II to the present. -- Time, Lance Morrow

Norman Podhoretz was editor-in-chief of Commentary for 35 years, until he retired in 1995 to devote himself mainly to writing. He remains associated with Commentary as editor-at-large and is now also a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute. His books, of which Ex-Friends is the seventh to appear, have ranged from literary criticism to autobiography to analyses of American foreign policy. He has also published hundreds of articles on an equally wide range of subjects in most of the major magazines and newspapers, and has frequently appeared on radio and television talk shows.