Love, American Style

When Norman Podhoretz was nineteen, he left his working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn to work as a counselor at a summer camp in Wisconsin. There’s been a lot of romantic comedy, by Neil Simon and others, about the sorts of Jewish neighborhoods Podhoretz was leaving. But the Podhoretz home was no sitcom setting. His maternal grandfather was an angry, spiteful man. His great aunt committed suicide. The trip to Wisconsin was his first venture out of his narrow Yiddish subculture into the wider America.

In the middle of that summer, one of the other counselors took Podhoretz to visit his parents at their vacation home fifty miles from the camp grounds. While they were hitchhiking over, it began to rain and they arrived at the large summer house soaking wet. Podhoretz was sent upstairs to one of the bedrooms to get some dry clothes. The door to the room was open, Podhoretz writes in My Love Affair with America:

And when I closed it there was a click as the latch snapped firmly into place. At the sound of this click, I burst into tears. Bewildered by my strange reaction, I stood there weeping for a few seconds, and then it came to me that what had caused it was the fact that the doors in our apartment in Brooklyn, thickly encrusted as they had become from repeated painting over the years, could never be snapped shut with that marvelously satisfying click. . . . It took this trivial detail to make me realize fully for the first time in my life that I was poor.

Podhoretz tells this anecdote with some discomfort. He doesn’t want to come off as one of those Clifford Odets characters consumed with self-pity because he grew up lower class. And he wants to assure us that the clicking door was not just a symbol of affluence. It’s never been money Podhoretz was after, as you could gather from the fact that he spent the bulk of his life editing a small circulation opinion magazine.

Rather, the door-closing seemed to represent all the wonder of American life that he’d been missing: “As I stood, tears streaming down my face and my body wracked with sobs, in an opulently appointed summer home in the gorgeous north woods of Wisconsin, the revelation came to me that until now I had not yet so much as begun to know the half of what America was all about, and what it might have to offer, even for the likes of me.”

Norman Podhoretz went on to become one of the most important intellectuals of his generation: the long-time editor of Commentary, one of the founding figures of neoconservatism, and a distinguished literary critic and provocateur. My Love Affair with America is a book of gratitude for all that America has meant to him and done for him. It’s a warm sparkler of a book. In such previous works as Making It, Breaking Ranks, and Ex-Friends, Podhoretz has demonstrated an ability to describe the state of America by telling the story of his interaction with it. This book too describes the intellectual history of the past forty years through the narrative of Podhoretz’s own journey.

But I do have one large quarrel with the book, which starts with the title and its central metaphor. Podhoretz describes his relationship with America as a love affair. Here was this kid from Brooklyn who met America and fell in love with her. The love affair started, he says, not with the bounty of America or its beauty, but with its talk and writing. As Podhoretz writes in the first sentence of this book, “It all began with language.”

Podhoretz grew up in a home in which Yiddish was the dominant language. When he was five or six, his public school bumblingly assigned him to a remedial speech class. He was surrounded by kids with real speech impediments and forced to do pronunciation exercises day after day. The result, he says, was that he lost all trace of a Yiddish (or Brooklynese) accent: “I cannot help feeling that my life would have been very different if I had never been forced to speak like a classier and more cultivated person than I actually was.”

Not only that, the speech class gave him, he writes, an early and acute sensitivity to the wonders of the English language. When he was old enough to read in the public library, he continues, again crediting his remedial speech class, “I was almost abnormally alive to the language of these books.”

And it was his love of language that served as a ticket to the wider America. It attracted the notice of a doting schoolteacher. It won him a scholarship to Columbia College, getting him in under the Jewish quota. It enabled him to win a scholarship to Cambridge University in England, and thus go on to a career as a literary critic and editor. He concludes the book with a lyrical expression of gratitude for all that America has done for him. He was able to rise from his poor Brooklyn neighborhood and now he owns a nice apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and, he says, a lovely summer home in East Hampton.

But somehow this love story doesn’t explain Podhoretz’s patriotism, or why he has consistently taken pro-American positions on most major issues. In the first place, it couldn’t have really started with language. Many writers and intellectuals fall in love with the English language. Then, if they are like T. S. Eliot or Henry James, they go off to England to live in the land of Shakespeare, practically renouncing their American roots. Or else they retreat into rarefied aeries, as Henry Adams did, and scorn the vulgarity of America. But that isn’t what Podhoretz did. In fact, he criticizes James and Adams for distancing themselves from the rough and tumble of American life.

If it were merely language and ideas that moved Podhoretz, he would have been more likely to follow the course set by so many other intellectuals of his generation: He would have gone over to Europe spouting Freud and Sartre, and joined the pan-national intellectual priesthood. He would have ended up condemning America for Vietnam and a thousand and one supposed horrors. But Podhoretz could never bring himself to do this. He broke with his fellow literature lovers, at great personal cost.

One finishes the book thinking that America was not something “out there” in the land of clean Wisconsin door-latches for Podhoretz to discover and fall in love with through the medium of language. Instead, America was something inside Podhoretz from the start — even though he was speaking Yiddish in Brooklyn — that he couldn’t later renounce even when so many of his friends were doing so. Podhoretz didn’t so much fall in love with America as embody it.

And what made him quintessentially American from the first was the quality he described in his first book, Making It. That quality was ambition. Podhoretz announced in that book that he was ambitious, and sought to rise in the world. That was a taboo in literary circles — the book caused much outrage and embarrassment — but it’s perfectly normal to be ambitious in most parts of America, even a little admirable.

“Making It” is actually a perfect title for an American book. The phrase perfectly captures the dynamism of American life: the story of millions of people moving West, or tinkering in their garage in a desperate effort to make something of themselves. One suspects that even at an early age, it was this longing that connected Podhoretz to the people out in Wisconsin, or Texas, or California. It’s ironic that one of Podhoretz’s first famous essays was a negative review of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. That book opens with the sentence “I am an American — Chicago born.” That sentence, if you change the birthplace, applies pretty well to Podhoretz.

Now, as a senior citizen, some of his drive is mellowing, replaced by a gentler sense of gratitude. But his writing is still brash and boisterous. Whether you are dazzled or dazed, you can’t help but be fascinated by Norman Podhoretz. That is yet another quality he shares with his nation.

David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.