Ex-friends Book

Ex-Friends is Norman Podhoretz’s account of why he hates people, very specific people. He used to be friends with these people, but he is going to tell us why they did not live up to hs standards. Fiirst there is Allen Ginsberg, who was a co-student of Podhoretz’s at Columbia. (He tells us this a number of times.) They ceased to be friends, and Norman didn’t like Kerouac, Ferlingehtti, Peter Oblov, or William Burroughs either. Furthermore he doesn’t like Southerners such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren or anybody who called themelves an “Agrarian.

You think that’s bad? He hates Ginsberg’s poetry and he hates homosexuals and those dirty things they do to one another. He also hates Lionel Trilling who was his teacher at the C–word university. And Diana Trilling, who was his professor’s wife. And his other teacher at the other C-word university F.R. Leavis, and that old fraud (according to him) C.P. Snow. Understand that there is culture and there in non-culture, and whatever Norman Podhretz says, that’s what you should believe. He will also tell you about Philip Rahv and Norman O. Brown and every editor of every obscure publication in the ‘fifties.

However, if these names don’t mean much to you, you are not alone. But Podhoretz has been stewing for over fifty years why he doesn’t like these people. See, he’s a critic, and he himself writes that this is the best part of America’s literature, the criticism. But he’s also a social critic who although he once upon a time thought a socialist thought, he quickly decided Joe McCarthy was right and those Commies were wrong as were the ‘sixties radicals. Oh, and he hates Jane Fonda, too. Not to forget Mary McCarthy. And Pete Seeger. Stalinists and Trotskyites ---all of them.

Lillian Hellman, yep! She, as he points out is a Southern girl, who didn’t know anything. Also a Commie. And even as a Jew, she is anti-Semite. Plus she wrote horrible plays and movies. Oh, and Dorothy Parker is also an anti-Semite, too, although Dorothy was only half a Jew. He didn’t care for Hellman’s long time companion Dashell Hammet, either. In fact, he says Hellman’s writing was an imitation of Hammett’s imitation of Hemingway. Thus, if you know your Platonism….

And don’t get him started on Hannah Arendt, she was one of those German Jews, and you know how they are ---all of them. And here’s what I should have said to her. No, there is no end to the bleakness, even after he accepts Ronald Reagan as his Lord and Savior. In the Arendt section he promulgates some of his most dangerous dogma.

Then he wants to tell us about Norman Mailer, whom he always called “Mailer,” even though Mailer called him Norman. You get the idea. The world is full of anti-Semites, Commies, perverts, and no talent people. At least according to NP.

This is a bitter failed book by a bitter old failed man.