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
18 - Culture Wars
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
In 1990, Paul Ferris, an Englishman who had written biographies of poet Dylan Thomas and actor Richard Burton, published one of another Welshman, the late Huw Wheldon. Novelist Kingsley Amis, a family friend, had recommended Ferris to Jacqueline Wheldon. Clearly, someone needed to tell the story of the BBC's liveliest, most intelligent impresario during what, it was already plain, had been television's golden age. In the United States as in the United Kingdom, millions had seen Alistair Cooke's America, Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, all Wheldon projects.
Regrettably, Ferris's method was to look down at Wheldon, offering nothing but pop-psychological commonplaces about adolescent anxieties over sex, peeks at pornography, and fumbling love affairs before meeting Jacqueline. Although Wheldon and Podhoretz didn't talk much about politics, Ferris assumed they had. He wrote insinuatingly to Podhoretz: “One encounters occasional left-of-centre friends and acquaintances of Huw who…use his friendship with you to suggest that in later years he changed colour politically and (in their opinion) for the worse.” To which Podhoretz replied: “Contrary to what you have been told, [Wheldon's political] views never changed. He was, and always remained, a liberal in the old and best sense of that currently much misused word.”
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Norman PodhoretzA Biography, pp. 261 - 275Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010