EDITOR’S NOTE: This review of Norman Podhoretz’s The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet appeared in the July 4, 1986, issue of National Review.
Norman Podhoretz studied at Columbia with Lionel Trilling, then won a fellowship to Cambridge and worked with F. R. Leavis. Both of these modern masters are present in this book, at once as explicit subject–the title itself comes from Trilling–and as critical example. Trilling was a superb cultural critic, specifically of the liberal culture of his time, to which he had a peculiar relationship of loyalty and loathing. Leavis was at his best in dealing directly with a literary text.
Podhoretz does both things splendidly. After abandoning literary criticism for many years, he here [in The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet] returns to it, and he performs with great skill its central task: locating the sources of power in a literary text and demonstrating the ways in which they work. There is no literary critic writing today who pursues that enterprise more impressively. In strength of intellect, lucidity, and civilized pertinence, Podhoretz’s critical writing is exhilarating, and the more so when one comes to it from some of the … well, some of the material that pours from the academic presses today. Trilling and Leavis are indeed presences here, and behind them the major tradition of humane criticism that stretches back from Edmund Wilson through Arnold and Hazlitt. Read Podhoretz on Camus, on Orwell, on Henry Adams, on Solzhenitsyn, on Kissinger, on Kundera. His assessment of Kissinger as a prose master is utterly persuasive, as is his disagreement with him on important matters of policy. The metamorphosis of Kissinger as a writer between his early academic works and his memoirs is as startling in its way as the change in Yeats. His essay on Kundera sent me at once to The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a masterly novel that captures the eerie emotional music of a culture under pressure from totalitarianism.
Podhoretz’s skill with a text recalls Leavis; he combines it with a cultural criticism that reminds us of Trilling and may be seen as an extension of Trilling’s critical project. Those famous lines from the preface to The Liberal Imagination (1950) about liberalism constituting our sole intellectual tradition have so often been quoted that I will forbear citation here. But set beside some much darker sentences written about a year earlier, they define Trilling’s central problem. He observed that “Stalinism becomes endemic in the American middle class as soon as that class begins to think; it is a cultural Stalinism, independent of any political belief.” And he went on to hazard the opinion that the cultural ideas of the liberal ADA would not differ much from those of the Stalinist PAC of the CIO. What Trilling saw to his dismay was that the well-meaning bourgeois in whom the light of thought begins to flicker reaches tropistically for large moral simplicities, for slogans, for immediately applicable cultural and political power, and reflexively sympathizes with the liberals-in-a-hurry of the totalitarian Left.
In his extended critique of such a mentality, however, Trilling was seldom, if ever, confrontational. He did not make enemies. He made the liberal philistines uneasy, but he did not give them the chance to lay a glove on him. Though he inspected the ” bloody crossroads ” where literature and politics meet, he was not at all eager to do battle there, and he was protected by his urbanity, by a certain elusiveness, and by the good manners of the academy as it then was.
I take it that Podhoretz views our cultural circumstance today as far worse than it was in 1948 when Trilling uttered that “dark thought.” As he sees it, a critique of democracy and capitalism was launched a century or so ago by a small minority of progressives, clergymen, artists, and intellectuals, and this critique, through the agency of mass higher education, has now become a pernicious habit of respectable feeling. The cultural Stalinism identified by Trilling has metastasized and brought us the grotesqueries of the anti-Western anchorman, the Marxist reporter, the countercultural publisher’s editor, the ethnophobic advertising man. The academy has become a generator of junk thought.
Indeed, the situation may even be worse than Podhoretz realizes. The contemporary academy is populated by people who believe that they have contributed to the discussion when they bandy about terms like “racist,” “sexist,” “elitist,” and “homophobic.” As Jeane Kirkpatrick said so memorably, this ethnophobic mentality routinely blames America first. Its premise is implicitly suicidal. It, in an impish moment, you assert that we ought to promote democracy in Nicaragua, or that you suspect homosexuality to be abnormal, you are likely to receive the Fascist of the Year Award. The 1950s Columbia of Trilling and his student Podhoretz was a temple of intellect by comparison.
Podhoretz is a skillful diagnostician of this moral disease, and he has a prescription, which amounts to a theory of the Saving Remnant. After all, the mentality of Western suicide was launched in the form of a minority critique decades ago, and then grew to its present proportions. A minority counter-critique, launched today, may eventually likewise grow into a saving force. The minority around Commentary and The Public Interest are engaged in laying down just such a counter-critique, and in time, through force of mind and indeed–old-fashioned word–character, they will return the culture to sanity. It may well work. Let us pray. But meanwhile we do have this magnificent book.