Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue
- 1 Brownsville
- 2 Columbia
- 3 Cambridge
- 4 The Family and the Army
- 5 The Practicing Critic
- 6 Boss
- 7 “This Was Bigger than Both of Us”
- 8 One Shoe Drops
- 9 Dropping the Other Shoe
- 10 Liberalism Lost
- 11 George Lichtheim, Pat Moynihan, and a Lecture Tour
- 12 Domesticities, Lillian Hellman, and the Question of America's Nerve
- 13 Moynihan, Podhoretz, and “the Party of Liberty”
- 14 Breaking and Closing Ranks
- 15 Present Dangers
- 16 “The Great Satan of the American Romantic Left”
- 17 Regulated Hatreds
- 18 Culture Wars
- 19 A Literary Indian Summer
- 20 Verdicts
- 21 New Wars for a New Century
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
12 - Domesticities, Lillian Hellman, and the Question of America's Nerve
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue
- 1 Brownsville
- 2 Columbia
- 3 Cambridge
- 4 The Family and the Army
- 5 The Practicing Critic
- 6 Boss
- 7 “This Was Bigger than Both of Us”
- 8 One Shoe Drops
- 9 Dropping the Other Shoe
- 10 Liberalism Lost
- 11 George Lichtheim, Pat Moynihan, and a Lecture Tour
- 12 Domesticities, Lillian Hellman, and the Question of America's Nerve
- 13 Moynihan, Podhoretz, and “the Party of Liberty”
- 14 Breaking and Closing Ranks
- 15 Present Dangers
- 16 “The Great Satan of the American Romantic Left”
- 17 Regulated Hatreds
- 18 Culture Wars
- 19 A Literary Indian Summer
- 20 Verdicts
- 21 New Wars for a New Century
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Starting in what Decter called “the blue period” following the slamming of Making It, Podhoretz turned listening to music into a daily meditative ritual, a means both of learning the classical tradition and of settling his soul. In 1974, he offered Rachel and Naomi, who were in Israel, a facetious depiction of his audiophilia. He had a new stereo system,
which, I need hardly say, was both chosen and hooked up by Neal [Kozodoy]. It's literally like an addiction: [the record store] Sam Goody, the connection, feeds my habit and I use the needle for a fix every morning and then late into the night.…I am slowly driving everyone crazy, especially John, who wonders and wails about: 1) when he's going to get his father back; 2) when he'll ever get to watch the color television set again; 3) whether I will ever go to the movies with him again. Little does he know how much I am suffering, caught helplessly in a compulsion, a gluttony no less ferocious (indeed more ferocious) for being spiritual.
With an ironic shrug, he added that the girls' mother would pass along “news concerning trivial matters like births and deaths.”
We get another view of the Podhoretz apartment that autumn. Kozodoy had installed speakers in the bedroom so that Norman, as Midge wrote the Wheldons, could listen to his “infernal Mahler and Bruckner and Wagner” without disturbing the rest of the family.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Norman PodhoretzA Biography, pp. 169 - 179Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010