‘What mattered most to him was writing,” says someone (his son) who knew Norman Podhoretz well, and after revisiting his tall stack of books in the weeks since he died, I don’t doubt it. The body of work he left behind is astonishing in its quality and range. The range took him from precocious essays (in his early 20s!) of wise and worldly literary criticism to fulminations on foreign policy to a long, late-life meditation on the prophets of the Hebrew Bible; the quality, sentence by sentence and essay by essay, places him in the top ranks of 20th-century prose artists. One question is how he did it.

In my trek up Mount Norman, I think I found a few clues. His earliest published works sometimes show the starchiness of the young intellectual. By the time he was 30, the preening and self-regard had been winkled out. His greatest sustained performance, the memoir Making It, published when he was 37, was notorious for a directness about his own ambitions that borders on insouciance, and the directness is reflected in the prose. It’s very hard to dissemble in the style that Podhoretz arrived at. Then again, maybe he arrived at his prose style because he himself found it very hard to dissemble, to pose and conceal, to present artifice as genuine, to fake it. It resembles the style of his hero Orwell in that way, and I’m sure he could conceive of no higher praise.

In an essay from 1965 on editing, Podhoretz revealed what went into putting together a piece of prose; it reveals also why the act of writing could not have been altogether pleasant for him. The process was relentlessly self-questioning, especially after the words were down on paper in the form of a first draft. Upon rereading a draft, he will discover a rash of imperfections:

One sentence does not logically follow from the next; the paragraph on page 8 only makes sense if it is transposed to page 6 and stitched in with a clever transition to cover the seam; a point which seemed persuasive on first reading turns out to need bolstering with more documentation (or the irrelevancies surround it have to be peeled away); an argument which looked reasonable before is now revealed as contradicting another argument elsewhere in the piece …

And so on and so on. This is an extreme form of the old cliché that hard writing makes for easy reading. A writer who subjects his own stuff to such internal scrutiny, as Podhoretz obviously did, must emerge at the end of the examen a bit battered and sore. It left its marks on his style—all of them, to my ear, virtuous and appealing. He was miserly in his use of the em-dash—so irresistible to so many writers—probably because it often signals a speed bump or even a sharp turn in an argument, and Norman, behind the wheel, was full-speed-ahead. For that reason, too, he disdained contractions, giving his otherwise supple prose a touch of Latinate formality. He wasn’t afraid of long sentences and was fearless in making them all the longer by attaching two related but separate thoughts with a semicolon. Indeed, he was a voluptuary of the semicolon, as the quotation above suggests. Its use is much derided in journalism nowadays, usually by boors who wouldn’t know a nuance if it clobbered them over the head; in fact, the semicolon is an irreplaceable tool in the kit of anyone who wants to make his printed thoughts partake of the rhythms of speech.

Readers who tire easily of politics were sorry to see him turn so much of his attention to that dismal if unavoidable subject in the 1970s, but we were delighted when, in later years, he came back occasionally to literary and cultural topics. And when he did so, he brought a new transparency to his opinions. In an essay on Ralph Ellison, for instance, he let readers in on how he arrived at his judgments, as a proof of good faith. He inventories his own motives to see if they are tainted by extra-literary considerations. Sometimes yes, sometimes no:

For all I know, then, the poor impression I had formed of Ellison personally may have had something to do with the somewhat lessened esteem in which I now held his novel [Invisible Man]. And what may have influenced my slight change of judgment even more was the obvious dislike Ellison felt for me.

In the same way, but in the opposite direction, he refused to let his reverence for Aleksander Solzhenitsyn as one of the great men of the age soften his aesthetic assessment that Solzhenitsyn’s later novels were deficient as works of art. He makes the same self-inventory in essays on his (rather less titanic) contemporaries: Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and others. It might seem odd to highlight such hesitancy in the work of a writer famed for the ferocity and insistence of his political opinions, but literature brought out the best in him.

And so did his own literary ambitions, as in his highly successful attempts to stretch himself as a writer beyond polemics into portraiture or, more often, to use portraiture to soften and refine his polemics. His later memoirs, Breaking Ranks (1979) and Ex-Friends (1999), are hard to put down for their sumptuous gossip, but there is much more to them than that. He could locate an entire era, an entire approach to life, in a single personage. The best of the sketches, to my mind, concerns the least admirable of his ex-friends, the playwright Lillian Hellman. She was a liar and fantasist, a moral ham and hypocrite, and withal a great charmer. Typically, Podhoretz takes care to let us know he was drawn not only by the charm of her company but also by her fame, wealth, friends, and praise. The waterfront estate on Martha’s Vineyard didn’t hurt either. The friendship followed its inevitable descent into rancor and dissolution, and they went years without seeing each other. Until …

… shortly before she died, I saw her again, and for the very last time, being carried in the arms of a young man into her building on Park Avenue from a car. The pity of it hit me hard, and I had a powerful impulse to run over and plant a kiss on her forehead. By this point, however, we had become not just estranged friends who retained a lingering fondness for each other but passionate and bitter enemies, and I had long since forfeited the right to make any such tender or affectionate gesture. Besides, I was pretty sure that if I were foolish enough to try, she would have summoned enough strength, even in the moribund condition she was clearly in, to tell me to go f—k myself.

The story of a friendship, from soup to nuts, is told in those eloquent, rueful sentences, in their images and feeling, with all hints of sentimentality dashed at the end by a perfect kicker. If there was one thing that meant more to Norman Podhoretz than good writing, it was telling the truth. In him the two activities were inseparable.

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