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.” […]
Parisian Review
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America’s Bloomsbury
For anyone who has ever worked on a struggling, high-minded publication, the fate of Partisan Review represents the ultimate Walter Mitty fantasy. Here is a publication with a circulation in the low four figures whose every leading writer and editor seems to have been the subject of a biography, a written memoir, or both, and whose editorial […]
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Putting the Mind Over What Matters
In Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift there is a scene where the crazy poet-hero, Von Humboldt Fleisher, now widely known as Delmore Schwartz a clef tells his protege Charlie Citrine about his hopes and dreams for the presidency of Adlai Stevenson. “If you could believe Humboldt (and I couldn’t),” says Charlie, “Stevenson was Aristotle’s great-souled man. In his […]
