By Richard Kostelanetz

Free Press, 2004, 478 pages, $35

A few decades ago, Norman Podhoretz, still shy of 40, published a kind of autobiography, bumptiously titled Making It, in which he confessed to what he called "a dirty little secret"—that as an aspiring writer he sought power, not excellence, as his stepping stone to cultural prominence, becoming, as he did, the chief editor of the monthly Commentary soon after he turned 30. Podhoretz wanted readers of Making It to believe that every literary aspirant did likewise, many familiar examples to the contrary notwithstanding.

As a blustery personality, Podhoretz didn't admit a truth apparent to any skeptic: that he sought power first because he recognized early in his writing life that he couldn't survive professionally without the bullying leverages available from a power pulpit. Though writing and literary criticism were his original ambitions, Podhoretz's name does not presently appear in any nonsectarian literary histories or encyclopedias, which is to say that, "making it" though he claimed to do, such measurable success didn't happen for him as a writer. Nothing can match the bitterness of a disappointed cynic who thought he knew what calculating moves would be necessary to play a game and yet did not succeed.

The lesson of The Norman Podhoretz Reader, purportedly collecting his best work from five decades, is that he wasn't much of a writer or a thinker or even a polemicist, to cite the three epithets claimed in the opening lines of the book's dust-jacket (quoting in turn from the preface by Paul Johnson). His reprinted literary essays are so embarrassing—especially "The Know-Nothing Bohemians," (1958) being so wrong about Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac—that the reader rightly wonders why Podhoretz should voluntarily want to remind everyone how dumb he was 45 years ago. Likewise, his attack on Hannah Arendt's monumental Eichmann in Jerusalem was wrong. Even the best of his flat-footed polemics cannot rank with the worst of Mark Twain's, Dwight Macdonald's or H.L. Mencken's, to cite three masters of the genre of literary demolition.

As for the Reader as a whole, the familiar fault of reprinting in chronological order reflects a lack of editorial intelligence or, in this case, perhaps a comical pretense to intellectual history.

One mark of Podhoretz's best essays, such as "My Negro Problem—and Ours" (1963), is a brutality, not only toward others but toward himself, that propels prose so leaden that without a hot-button subject his pages would be turned aside. Indeed, so much of his reprinted writing, just like so much in his magazine Commentary, depends upon subjects hyped in newspapers, literary notoriety and his own experience as an aspiring celebrity. What he could never do is write as major literary critics do, about people or issues known only to a few. The closest semblance of an unfamiliar opinion is his appreciation of Henry Kissinger's memoirs for their literary style! A Charles Lamb or Michel de Montaigne or Edmund Wilson he ain't. In his implicit youthful self-estimate of his literary insufficiencies, Podhoretz did not err.

Richard Kostelanetz