EX-FRIENDS: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Helman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.

• Author: Lemann, Nicholas
• Position: Review

EX-FRIENDS Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Helman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer By Norman Podhoretz The Free Press, $25

I had a distinctly middle-aged moment when I picked up the galley proof of Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends. The publisher's blurb on the inside cover says: "[T]his memoir of some of the key intellectual battles of the last 30 years offers a rare, firsthand portrait of the New York intellectuals--`American Bloomsbury' as they have been called--by one of the few surviving members" The phrase "American Bloomsbury" was coined, I believe, not by the etherous passive-voice-denoted entity of the blurb but by me, in the pages of this magazine, in a review of Alexander Bloom's Prodigal Sons published in 1986.

What I meant was that the New York intellectuals of the mid-twentieth century--or, as Podhoretz calls them, using Murray Kempton's term, "the Family"--was our best example of a tight-knit, complicatedly connected hothouse group of writers and intellectuals whose ideas changed the culture. Since then the comparison has become even more apt: Both Bloomsbury and the Family have spawned a seemingly inexhaustible series of memoirs. The publisher's blurb makes it sound as if Ex-Friends will be one of the last Family memoirs because so few of the members are left. I don't think so. If Bloomsbury is any guide, the death of the original members only frees their children to get started on their memoirs. Surely out of the group that includes David Bell and John Podhoretz and Maura Moynihan and Lizzie Glazer and Bill Kristol will emerge our Nigel Nicolson and Quentin Bell.

As with Bloomsbury, the story of the Family has by now become so familiar and comfortable that reading in it is like slipping into a warm bath. Norman Podhoretz alone has now written at least three Family memoirs (four if you count The Bloody Crossroads) covering essentially the same ground. Here is the broad outline: The Family took form in the 1930s, mainly around the founding of Partisan Review. Most of its members were Jews from working-class backgrounds, and most were ex-Communists. They came together in shared commitment to anti-Stalinist Left politics, but they were really esthetes first and political people second. Indeed, their disillusionment with Communism was over not just the Moscow trials and Stalin's alliance with Hitler, but also over the Party's insistence that its members celebrate mediocre, didactic works of art and literature and condemn great ones that didn't hew to the party line.

Through the '40s and '50s, its glory days, the Family lived a rarefied, enclosed, incestuous life, publishing in such small-circulation journals as Dissent, Commentary and The New Leader in addition to Partisan Review and conducting a never-ending series of complicated feuds and love affairs. It had no use for and little interaction with the main cultural institutions--and yet it produced such enduring works as Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Lionel Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, and Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The '60s brought the life of the Family to an end. Some became faculty fifth columnists in the student revolution, some (like Podhoretz) moved right...