Volume 10, Number 2 · February 1, 1968
Du côté de chez Podhoretz
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
Making It
by Norman Podhoretz
Random House, 360 pp., $6.95
'For taking my career as seriously as I do in this book, I will no doubt be accused of self-inflation and therefore of tastelessness,' Norman Podhoretz writes in the Preface to Making It. 'So be it. There was a time when to talk candidly about sex was similarly regarded as tasteless—a betrayal of what D. H. Lawrence once called 'the dirty little secret.' For many of us, of course, this is no longer the case. But judging by the embarrassment that a frank discussion of one's feelings about one's own success, or the lack of it, invariably causes in polite company today, ambition (itself a species of lustful hunger) seems to be replacing erotic lust as the prime dirty little secret of the well-educated American soul.' 'Such a book,' he notes in the concluding sentences, 'ought properly to be written in the first person, and it ought in itself to constitute a frank bid for literary distinction, fame, and money all in one package; otherwise it would be unable to extricate itself from the toils of the dirty little secret. Writing a book like that would be a very dangerous thing to do, but some day, I told myself, I would like to try doing it.
Review, 2659 words
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