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By Root 853 0

counter and earn the affection accorded durable entertainers. But there’s a catch—there’s always a catch, for everything. Like Woody Allen’s comedians, such elegant wiseacres can often feel as if they’ve been denied a seat at the adults’ table, unless it’s the Algonquin Round Table that’s their ideal, where they would have been right at home, passing the soup to Dorothy Parker. They can even start to talk about their reviewing as if it were a minor knack at which they got nimbly adept, like card tricks or shooting pool. But it was these Parcheesi champions with whom I felt the most kinship in the seventies and beyond, the ones unafraid to crack jokes that had a hickory snap to them, such as, yes, John Leonard. Though I didn’t share his enthusiasm for that bevy of neurasthenic seismographs—among them, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joan Didion, and Renata Adler—he escorted round the cotillion whenever one of them had a new book out. He and I had a vaudeville moment in the seventies when I was entering the auditorium for the National Book Critics Circle Awards just as he was exiting and he halted, did a classic double take, and asked, “What are you doing here?” as if the purpose of the organization were to keep people like me out. Then he clapped a friendly hand on my shoulder as if to say, It’s okay, you can go in.

Other serious comedians: the marauding balletomane and literary critic Marvin Mudrick (who, told by a young woman at the Hudson Review, where he was a regular contributor, “You’re the funniest writer I have ever read,” beamed and said, “I could live the rest of my life on that compliment. I don’t care whether it’s true; I love it. That’s what I want to be”); Alfred Chester, whose review of John Rechy’s City of Night provided the template for every hatchet job Dale Peck would undertake decades later; and Wilfrid Sheed, a novelist of asperity (his Max Jamison of 1970 is the definitive poison-pen etching of a critic and the vale of vanities he inhabits—“He was in love with the way his mind worked, and he was sick of the way his mind worked. The first thing that struck you about it, wasn’t it, was the blinding clarity, like a Spanish town at high noon. No shade anywhere. Yet not altogether lacking in subtlety”), primarily known as a critic who could spin dimes with every sentence. His defoliation of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It was something to cherish, something I would sometimes lift from the milk-crate shelf and read in rainy moods like selections from Robert Browning:

This is the first impression of Making It: that of a burlesque queen solemnly striding up and down to the strains of “Temptation,” and nothing coming off. Hour after pitiless hour …

… Ambiguity is totally alien to Podhoretz’s book, which has but one gear and one track and rolls down it like a Daily News van …

… The names come tumbling out like clowns from a circus car. Mary and Dwight and Philip—but then he gets stuck. A gentleman doesn’t rat on his friends. He simply uses them to pad his index …

… An anatomy of Making It should not bog down on the first navel it comes to. Why have we been brought here, anyway? Anyone who has paddled about in these literary wading pools knows at the very least that George Plimpton looks over your head and Podhoretz looks under your armpit and that Macdonald looks you periodically right in the eye. (Our bad luck that the armpit man wrote the book.)

In the foreword to the expanded edition of The Morning After, where the Making It review was collected, Sheed recounts a party hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. where he was “accosted by a man I didn’t recognize anymore who said, or rather sneered, ‘I guess there’s a statute of limitations, you son-of-a-bitch,’ and turned on his heel.” It was, of course, Armpit Man making the heel turn. Sheed: “Welcome to the world of Norman Podhoretz, where there obviously is no statute of limitations, even after thirty years, and where enemies are forever. In fact, Podhoretz had written a book around then called Ex-Friends in which ancient feuds still sound as fresh as this morning