Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer
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List Price: $16.95Amazon.com's Price: $14.49 You Save: $2.46 (15%)as of 12/09/2009 12:36 EST
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5403
EAN: 9781893554177
ISBN: 1893554171
Label: Encounter Books
Manufacturer: Encounter Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 233
Publication Date: July 25, 2000
Publisher: Encounter Books
Studio: Encounter Books
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Editorial Review:
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
Product Description:
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.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
Norman Podhoretz was a New York intellectual in the 1950's-60's, once editor of Commentary magazine. A left-leaning writer then, in the early 70's he began leaning right and became one of the "founding fathers" of neoconservatism. He was an anti-Communist who rebelled against the anti-American bent of the 60's radicals. (The thought of Jane Fonda all decked out in her love beads sitting down with the North Vietnamese leadership to trash all things American still gives neocons the heebie-jeebies.) ... Read More
Rating:  -
Norman Podhoretz is one of the most important American intellectuals of the Post- War period. His shift away from the Left toward a Conservative position helped mark a new period in American intellectual life. In this memoir he writes about the ' friends' of a former time, each of whom is a distinguished 'name' by themselves. Allen Ginsberg, Hannah Arendt, the Trillings, Lionel and Diana, Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer. Podhoretz blends the personal anecodote with the ideological quarrel in explaining ... Read More
Rating:  -
Podhoretz, the man who recently said what's the big deal about a few thousand dead G.I.'s in Iraq considering what's at stake (without having a clue that nothing is at stake), Norman disparages the artist/intellectual/egotists of the 60's/70's that don't fall in line with his ideology while today he lauds the conservative egomaniacs that have brought our country to its low level of intellectualism and turned a nation founded by intellectual deists into a Disneyworld of McReligion. But it's all fine so long ... Read More
Rating: -
This highly readable book is going to be despised on the far left for exposing some of the key intellectual icons/godparents of the movement as insidious buffoons. A useful and brief companion book written years ago for some context would be Tom Wolfe's Radical Chic/Mau Mauing the Flakcatchers.
Rating:  -
I read this book because I had heard the name "Norman Podhoretz" bruited about in the odd book review here and there. He is, or at any rate was, the editor of a journal called "Commentary", which I have only ever heard of in the context of the Woody Allen joke: "I heard that 'Commentary' and 'Dissent' have merged, and now they're called 'Dysentery'". It seems that the author once knew some people who are now way more famous than him, and he wants to tell us all about how he believes they went wrong.
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Dewey Decimal Number: 818.5403
EAN: 9781893554177
ISBN: 1893554171
Label: Encounter Books
Manufacturer: Encounter Books
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 233
Publication Date: July 25, 2000
Publisher: Encounter Books
Studio: Encounter Books