Over the course of a book editor’s career, it is not uncommon to be asked to take over a book that had been signed up by another departing editor. When, early in 2009, Adam Bellow left his post as an editor for Doubleday specializing in books of a conservative political bent, I was asked to be the editor of a book he’d signed up, Norman Podhoretz’s work in progress, Why Are Jews Liberals? I was delighted to do so, despite the fact that I am neither Jewish nor remotely conservative in my political opinions.
But I knew my Podhoretz all right. Ever since college, I have been fascinated by the, ahem, doings and undoings of that contentious tribe, the New York Intellectuals, of whom Norman was one of the last and most influential members. To me his books—Making It, of course, and Breaking Ranks, and that first-rate collection Doings and Undoings—and essays and reviews were required reading, even when I vigorously disagreed and sometimes shook my head at what was on offer. He wrote with a bracing vigor and clarity and was in every sense the man in the arena. You had to pay attention to what he had to say. And there was this: I am a Brooklyn native (Bay Ridge), and Norman was the author of the most beautiful and telling sentence ever written about our borough-in-common: “One of the longest journeys in the world is the one from Brooklyn to Manhattan.” They ought to emblazon that over the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge.
So I did what editors do in these cases, which is to get in touch and invite Norman to lunch, for us to get to know each other and for him to be reassured that someone cared and was on the case. Now the word “pugnacious” is somewhat reflexively applied to him, and it is not inaccurate. But the person I encountered at our first lunch was in every way charming. As we shared personal data and made literary chitchat and shot the breeze, I began to see just what made him such a great editor for Commentary. He let me in on one of his techniques that allowed the magazine to punch well above its weight financially and in terms of its circulation. He knew he could not afford to pay competitive rates for the biggest names in Quality Lit of the Fifties and Sixties, who were accustomed to handsome checks from well-heeled competitors such as the New Yorker and Esquire. So he would ask those big names whether they had a subject they burned to write about, but in which their usual outlets were not interested. This worked like a charm and often yielded pieces of greater interest and impact than the larger magazines were getting. Which of course attracted other writers of note with hobbyhorses to ride.
Norman turned out to be a total pro when it came to the editing process. It was not my place to push back in any way on his political views; my job was to make sure he was making the best arguments possible on behalf of those views. At one point, though, I screwed up my courage and suggested—as delicately as possible—that the space and the emphasis on Israel in the book were crowding out other important considerations about the political views of American Jews. Not the easiest query or suggestion for an Irish Catholic to be making to Norman Podhoretz, I can tell you. He listened to what I was saying, though, and did some deft revisions that improved the book.
He was good company at the lunch or dinner table. He told excellent stories from the intellectual and literary wars he’d fought in, and he had a wry sense of humor about them. Which leads me to a delicious story: In mid-2010, my employer, the Knopf Doubleday Group, threw a large cocktail party at the Strand Book Store on the occasion of the American Booksellers’ annual convention being in town. All of the locally available authors with books on the summer and fall lists were invited, including Norman. So I arranged to meet him on 12th Street and Broadway outside the store, and I was pleased to see him coming down the block after climbing up the stairs from the subway, as a good Brooklynite should. It spoke well of him that this intellectual giant still took public transportation.
As we were entering the store, though, I looked over my shoulder at a gleaming Lincoln town car pulling up to the curb, and who should step out but Norman’s onetime closest friend and now ideological enemy Jason Espstein, perhaps the most conspicuous example on earth at that time of a limousine liberal. Jason was flogging a book for Knopf at the time on, what else, food. At the crowded party, I saw a noted columnist for the Nation do a visible double take when he spied Norman, as if some political barrier had been breached, and maybe it had. As we worked the room full of booksellers and authors, I was very aware of where Jason was at all times, fearing, but also a little hoping, that the two men might bump into each other and then…Well, it would be something to see. After a while, we both got a bit tired and decided to leave, and then something even better happened.
As we were retrieving our coats to depart, who should arrive but Robert Silvers. Norman had told me that in fact he had been the first candidate, before Silvers, to serve as the inaugural editor of the New York Review of Books way back in 1963 when it was being started by Jason and Barbara Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell. But he had a good thing going at Commentary, so he decided to stay put rather than take a gamble with his career on a chancy new enterprise likely to fail after a few issues. How very different our intellectual history would have been if he’d taken the job!
Anyway, Silvers and Norman could not avoid talking to each other in the cramped circumstance, and an outwardly perfectly cordial catching-up exchange took place before my astonished eyes. In my imagination, the ions between the two men, both of them brilliant, neither of them likely to agree on much of anything, in truth ideological enemies forced by circumstances into politeness, were crackling with electricity. It struck me then, and still does, as an extraordinary if very brief summit meeting. I’ve never forgotten it. There’s a novel there, all right, for someone to write.
Nor have I ever forgotten my brief but exceptionally satisfying stint as Norman Podhoretz’s editor. In my career, I was lucky to have met and worked with many writers of great stature and permanent importance, and Norman was one of them. And also a gentleman and, in my experience, a very nice guy.
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