Volume 2, Number 6 · April 30, 1964
City Light
By Benjamin DeMott
Doings and Undoings
by Norman Podhoretz
Farrar, Straus, 371 pp., $4.95
Hold a mirror up to Manhattan's literary man-of-all-work and what do you see? Virtues, vices, neutral peculiarities. The chief virtue is the man's guilefulness as a performer. (Aware of the perils of working to a chilly house, the New York wit comes on with warm gossip—a swift inside glance at the doings of a celebrity, a rumor about orgasms in academia. Aware that literary scuffles for fame are dull in the report, he packages his accounts as cataclysms or 'undoings,' thus tweaking the market. And aware that a pinch of self-disclosure can redeem even a longish sermon about books, he has taught himself to emit—when his learning flags—a piquantly malodorous autobiography smog.)
Review, 1830 words
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