An American original.(The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s through the 1990s)(Book Review)

The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s through the 1990s, edited by Thomas L. Jeffers (Free Press, 496 pp., $35)

IN the old days, traditionalists and libertarians supposedly divided the American Right between them. Then along came the neoconservatives. Not only did the neocons assert that something new could be conservative, but they implied that the new species was an advance over the old. For a movement that had never held Darwin in high esteem, American conservatism suddenly seemed poised to evolve.

It was political art, not natural selection, however, that produced the vigorous hybrid of Reaganite conservatism. Rather than supplanting everyone else, the neocons contributed their distinctive, and manifold, virtues to the blend. And among the chief contributors was Norman Podhoretz, who in nine books and in his 35 years as editor of Commentary powerfully shaped the neoconservative "tendency," as he prefers to call it.

In this excellent new collection of his writings, Podhoretz, who wonders whether he's been around long enough to be called a "paleoneoconservative," reminds us of the distance that he, and we, have come. Elegantly edited and introduced by Thomas L. Jeffers, who teaches American and English literature at Marquette, The Norman Podhoretz Reader spans five decades of his writings and exhibits his great gifts as a literary stylist and political controversialist. Not incidentally, it illuminates his personal odyssey from liberal to radical to neoconservative to conservative.

Through all his wanderings, Podhoretz was an anti-Communist. This distinguishes him from those neocons who went through a youthful flirtation with Communism, often of the Trotskyite variety. He attributes his immunity to the good luck of being born too late (1930) to have entertained illusions about the USSR, and to the profound example of his mentor at Columbia, Lionel Trilling, who defended liberalism against totalitarianism. The rejection of totalitarianism would be another constant in Podhoretz's career, even when he turned toward radicalism at the end of the 1950s.

Of this radicalism Jeffers provides only scattered examples. Other than some hindsight glimpses (from Breaking Ranks, Podhoretz's 1979 "political memoir"), the only radicalism on display here is a few discouraging words about America: in the famous 1963 article "My Negro Problem--and Ours" and in essays on Saul Bellow's novels and Huckleberry Finn.

Perhaps that's for the best, inasmuch as his radicalism involved taking a lot of writers seriously whom it would be hard for anyone, including Podhoretz, to take seriously today--e.g., Paul Goodman and Norman O. Brown. From the selections included here, Podhoretz's radicalism was as much literary-intellectual as political, anyway, springing from what he calls "the religion of art" and thus sparing him the sins of those who truly longed to make a religion of politics.