Good evening, everybody. Good evening. Im eric the executive director of the. [inaudible] and behalf of the society i am pleased to represent tonight in conversation our chairman robert should be giving this introduction and i know this would have meant a great deal to him. Unfortunately, hes a bit under the weather and he sent me instead. Its a great honor to make the introduction. Its been said that theres the story and then the real story and then the story of how the story came to be told. The book 50th anniversary we celebrate tonight making it by our guest of honor Norman Podhoretz is an important story in any way you look at it. Good promotion there. [laughter] tonight will tell the story behind the story. In his book, norman says all writers become famous go through ups and downs. These fluctuations reveal less about the writers actual work than they do about the changing fashions of the time. Heres how he put it in his own words 50 years ago every morning a stock Market Report comes out on reputations in new york. It is invisible but those eyes to see can read them. Soandso did have dinner at Jackie Kennedys apartment up five points. Soandso not invited by the locals to meet the russian poet . Down and eight. Did soandsos vote book get nominated for the National Book award . Up to a half. Little did norman know when he wrote those words that his own stock was about to experience an incredibly fair market increase of its own. The early signs were disappointing, even before the book is published. Imagine that your prospective publisher, has given you a happy advance and after reading your manuscript they tell you, keep the money, keep the book and under no circumstances are we going to publish it. The advice from normans best friend from columbia, jason epstein, was to throw the whole thing in the garbage. Lionels mentor from columbia told his publication would be a gigantic mistake and would take ten years to live down. All this for a single reviewer had trashed the book which happen fast on the heels of publication. As the saying goes, if you live long enough you see everything. Norman podhoretz has lived long enough that his book has now been dubbed one of the 20th centurys classics by no less than the new york review report. Its their 50th anniversary reissuing under their classics imprints. Hold up the book again. [laughter] we celebrate this tonight. See for yourself, get your very own copy right here in the lobby what an incredible reversal. Just goes to show that all truth passes through three stages first, ridicule. Violent opposition and then acceptance is selfevident. When you read the book today it feels as relevant as it did when it first came out. Human nature doesnt change except that back then people didnt reveal their private feelings and aspirations publicly the weight norman did. He such a good writer that then or now no ones cell productions carry as much punch as his due. Tonight, will tell the story about why was it that normans candidness and honesty created such an incredible start and who better to talk about it than podhoretz and podhoretz. That is norman and his son john the distinguish editor of commentary. While normans classic taking it is a book about ambition, i stand here with great humility in the presence of true intellectual excellence. When people ask how to understand political thought, some might say read strauss, to understand politics and culture, read crystal, Foreign Policy, kissinger, the hebrew bible but if someone were to ask you to read to understand all of these disciplines, the answer is read Norman Podhoretz. All the rest, is dare i say it. [inaudible] [laughter] [applause] this is the first time that we have ever appeared in public together. I am turning 56 and a couple of weeks, you are 87. This book which was published in 86 is dedicated in part to me, my sister lucy, my sister naomi and my late sister rachel. It is described in the dedication to whom this is in a way a letter. I think its a letter to all of us, now, from the past and a very vanished past. Thats my experience of having read this book again after maybe 25 years. The world that you are describing is so thoroughly gone from us that the idea that it could have stirred the kind of passionate opposition and hostility will strike anyone who reads it now as being absolutely baffling. Its very sharp but rather gentle set of ambiguity about what it means to be a success in america, what it means to pursue a career in the United States and the brutal bargain as you call it. The tradeoff that is required of you in the course of your life, in order to achieve success will not strike anyone as being particularly controversial. Id like to start and then ask you to reflect on the passage at the end of the second chapter. You have just its a peculiar memoir. Its not a personal account but it is a memoir. You make yourself the object, or the sort of, the object of your analysis of how a wife pursuing excess success in america is led so at this point you are graduating from college and heres what you write. Its very striking. Quote, in any event while i myself from a very early age and knew everything there was to know about jealousy and from both sides of the fence, i knew almost nothing about and be having experienced so little of it either. Not only did i not recognize it when i saw it but i was scarcely aware of such a thing existed and this remarkableobtuseness was of course compounded by the adored childhood illusions that the world around me would declare a holiday whenever i won a prize. Hence, my incredibly stupidity and failing to anticipate that my friends at Columbia University would be envious when after observing the blow he won a scholarship to go to Cambridge University they would also have to endure seeing me when the only film right any of us was. Hence, to my incredibly sensitivity and expecting them to be happy for me and my amazement when i realized they were not and hence, finally, my inability to understand the intention behind the effort to persuade me that adaptability would be speaking farming is the sole was any virtue are mine or character accounted for my success. Not perceiving the envy of this assault, taking it indeed just as my friends and themselves did for the honesty of a courageous love. We were great believers and telling each other the truth i was altogether helpless before it in before the guilt and selfdoubt it aroused. It was the first time i had ever experienced the poisoning of success by envy because it was the envy not of enemies but a friends and because it came at me not naked and disguised but posing as love and masks in the ideologically possible as late as asian. [inaudible] and harder still because of my instinctive terror of the community object was appropriating and cannibalistic passion. I was unwilling to appear to myself that it was in fact directed against me. I think thats a pretty fair description of what happened when this book came out there is a critics diaries came out after his death and theres a passage in one of them in which he remarks i remember edwin wilson is a very little kid and being over my apartment and doing a magic trick of spinning a plate on his nose. He was over at our apartment and maybe that very night he went home and wrote this vicious diary entry about how how he heard you got a big advance and who the hell were you. This young with whippersnapper getting all this money, everyone in town is talking about how awful it was. Basically, you are set up to fail two years before the book came out once people knew that you had hit this mark. How do you feel 50 years on even then having written this passage , this very passage, you had absolutely no idea that you would have basically a giant boulder dropped on your head . Thats an understatement. I was absolutely flabbergasted by the response to this book. I was very proud of it. I was very happy that i had managed to write it. Incidentally, people called it a memoir but i call it in auto case history thats an ugly and unyielding phrase. In fact, as john pointed out i was using myself as a case study of the scene of the ambition for success and whether it fails and how people feel about it. So little was this understood that one of the many attacks on this book said this man is such a brutal, insensitive character that theres not a single word in it about his children of whom he has for. The things that were said about this book are hard for me to even paraphrase. I can tell you the measure of that response was a story in Newsweek Magazine which went Something Like this and i fully almost exactly last week in new york dinner tables a new subject eclipsed vietnam as the subject of the general outrage. A book called making it. Imagine eclipsing vietnam. In 1967. [applause] it was amazing. I was, of course, deeply hurt as well as baffled but what could i do. The i had written the book and i certainly didnt want to throw it in the garbage, as my best friend suggested. I hope he is having indigestion over the fact that the new york review is reissued it under its classics. The. The new york review was edited for decades by his exwife. Jason epstein was married for 30 some odd years and she was one of the editors of the magazine. Yeah, and i can only hope that jason is suffering from a severe case of indigestion. [laughter] my main feeling is about the reissue is one of almost equal astonishment at the original reception. I certainly never thought id live to see the day that i would be vindicated. There it is. I tell the editor of the new york books, new york review books, edwin frank, i havent told him this but when he called to tell me i had just read this book for the first time and [inaudible] i thought it was a practical joke. [laughter] i said when i discovered that it wasnt a practical joke i asked him whether the late bob goldberg had he was the sole editor of the new york review books for 54 years until he died a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, i wondered what might happen when he heard about this. Edwin frank assured me that he had editorial independence so there was nothing to worry about i wont make any connection between the sudden death. [laughter] its a weird coincidence. [laughter] just to give you a sense of how times have changed a lot of people in this room know there was a long profile of the New York Times a couple weeks ago by john leland as part of the series called, lyons of new york, which leland sat down with you and discussed this vanished world of the new york intellectual that the family and the outpouring, enthusiasm about the world that evoked in this world peace. It was 10000 times more powerfully. The bookwas such that a friend of mine who is a movie producer sent me a text saying can we talk i happen to be in the San Francisco airport at the time waiting for a bag and i said sure, call me and i have five minutes. He calls me and says, i was just texting this young movie star a and young movie star a read this piece in the New York Times and he is very excited about the possibility of making a tv series out of this world where people are arguing about books, drinking, theyre having fights, its like madmen with books. [laughter] when i was a teenager, one day at my sisters apartment, we sat down and we wrote out this immensely long cast list of characters should play parts in the film version of making it. We had decided this wouldve been in the late 70s, we decided that Richard Dreyfus should pay you. Laurence olivier who had just been in, the jazz singer, giving an absolutely horrendous performance of a yiddish speaking holocaust survivor cancer should play your father. This should give you a sense of the seemingly, absurdity notion of very cerebral, very intellectual book about intellectuals. It you might evoked this kind of response. You know, in the world of Popular Culture. Yet, reading it, as i thank you all would find when you read it, if you havent read it yet, there is a real glamour that is adjust the glamour that you as an immigrant kid getting interested in the son of an immigrant, son of a milkman, very poor, growing up in brooklyn, finally having access to a world in which the mind is central. A lot of people werent really all that glamorous and reallife in their own person and i dont think philip rob was a particularly glamorous person, yet, he had very many affairs that would be a fine character on a tv show but the glamour is very real because this is a book about people who take something with events seriousness. Right . Interestingly, virginia, zero very well known libertarian, wrote a book on glamour in which she says her idea of glamour came out of a book called making it. That was the world in which she wouldve wanted to participate. It was certainly glamorous to me it was also very dangerous. A scene in which i there were always a lot of parties and if you happen to be at the wrong side of the room for lets say mary mccarthy, you are in danger of being excoriated with a brilliance. Does that name mean anything to anyone . She was a critic and a novelist of famous wit was about ten years, 15 years older than you, right mark she wouldve been from a previous generation. The founding generation, as it was called, family. She was rare in this case because she was a catholic. Most of the new york intellectuals were jewish but a surprising number were not. When the world. [inaudible] this group always identified as jewish and some of the most important members were not jewish though. It was a little complicated. In any event, it was a world which is hard to imagine in todays climate. As i say in the book, people actually came to blows over disagreements on art, fistfights over whether it was a great novel or not. I wrote a critical review of that book by paul gallo in 1963. I was just a kid, 23 years old and at one of these big parties, a very drunken gentleman came up to me and i didnt know who he was but he turned out to be John Berryman who was the famous poes but certainly an eminent american poet. When he says will get you for that if it takes ten years. You say that thats a very interesting. [inaudible] you do not name berryman and for a book that is viewed or was viewed as being bold girly gossipy, you, in fact, indulge in shockingly little gossip because, as you said, this is not what it was for. In fact, had it, had you been more. [inaudible] about it in had named names and been more open about the anecdotes the negative anecdotes are about. You dont even name even your great antagonist in the book, twin editors of commentary in the mid 50s when the editor in question, eliot cohen had had a nervous breakdown, you simply call this tandem, these twins, the boss. What in fact, one of them was the eminent art critic pretty much in american history, greenberg. You dont even say that it was greenberg. This is a book that is elevated from gossett. Its deliberately not gossipy. The thing with greenberg he is was very eminent, still is in the art world. He was a champion of Jackson Pollock and is often said he discovered Jackson Pollock. His rhizome was Harold Rosenberg who roundup writing art criticism for the new yorker which when i first came into this world was an inconceivable that someone like Harold Rosenberg would rise at all. In any case, they were the two rival sensors of power in the art world. Rosenberg was a. [inaudible] the crooning, pollock rivalry led to fistfights. He actually had a fistfight in our living room when someone who said the wrong thing about Jackson Pollock or the other painter and its hard i was watching on television a series called, the west, by ken burns disciples and it was very pro indian american. Theres a scene in which we see sitting bull, chief sitting bull , say, i was a great chief and i had these lands and i had these followers and now where are they all. I have to tell you that since making it was reissued, i feel like sitting bull. [applause] [laughter] i wrote a book in which i do name a lot of names and i did emit that as much as i have suffered from that world, i missed it. I miss the intensity, the fashion, it wasnt just about literature it was also about politics. Not everybody in that world was on the left. The right was off the radar. It didnt exist. It was a question of where you a trotskyite or a stalinist or anti stalinist or social democrat and so on. Those were the factions and they were taken deadly seriously. Was marx responsible for the wars of stalinist russia . However, i would like to quote from page 116 your initial entry into the world basically, in the offices of commentary for which you had started to write in 1952 as a 22 yearold, friended by probably the best essayist whoever wrote for commentary outside of the two of us sitting here. [laughter] robert who died tragically, probably the best writer in Popular Culture that the United States ever produced, died in his late 30s of a heart attack and he friended you and heres a sentence here Clement Greenberg was not so generous. That is the only indication of this thing that i said about Clement Greenberg. I said i was anatural. [inaudible] irving howe, another famous socialist selfdescribed socialist, literary, intellectual figure later created a magazine called the sense which is still he was expressing concern over the neoconservatism of the Younger Generation on the basis of one of my reviews. Neoconservatism appears in this book in 1967, long before anybody thought to adopt the term and apply it to you. Though, i will say, toward the end of this book, there are hints of. [inaudible] the change that you are about to go through in which you start to complain about how the new left, which you as an editor had started champion in the early 1960s, had stopped dealing with the difficulty from social problems of the United States in the 1950s which is largely being racial and had started delving into the ideas of the 1930s meaning, communism, support for socialism, someone who had clung to anti communism that you have never fallen prey to. They are, interestingly enough, theres a hint of maybe what it was that you didnt even understand it was going to invoke this rage reaction to the book. Thats a very important point i never looked at making it after it was pu