Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics and the New York Review of Books

Before commenting on the worth of this book, let me give you a couple of points of reference by which you can judge my comments. First of all, I do not agree with Barry Goldwater that the northeastern habitat of the Cultural Mafia should be sawed off and towed out to sea; anything that unwieldy, drifting free, would be a serious hazard to navigation. Secondly, although my reading experiences with The New York Review of Books have been replete with tedium, I still have some faith in the magazine; any editorial staff that hates Norman Podhoretz as much as the NYR’s staff hates him must be putting out a product of integrity.

Now you know my biases and you will know what weight to put on my admiration for Intellectual Skywriting. Since the New York literary harem does exist, and since it does have a heavy influence on all our lives, whether we want it that way or not, we should know something about those people: the Guelphs of Commentary and the Ghibellines of NYR, and all the other warring tribes of Medieval Manhattan. Nobile, a contributing editor of Esquire magazine, offers the wittiest, least turgid, least self-conscious, and least belchable introduction to the circle that you are likely to find.

Admittedly, I do not find it all pleasant. I finally do get a bit tired being told where various literary bigshots rate on the scales of Zionism, radicalism, and chicism. But that is not Nobile’s fault; the New York book circle, I gather, really thinks that that sort of thing matters. What I do fault Nobile personally for is his implied, if not stated, criticism of the NYR as narrow-minded because it does not use writers who disagree with the NYR’s ideological positions. But is that not the way things are done at all opinion journals?

What is especially useful in Intellectual Skywriting is the honest portrayal of dishonesty, or underhandedness, or slipperiness among reviewers; of intellectual gangsterism and intellectual hucksterism; of gutting foes and puffing allies—with little regard for accurate appraisal of books. Nobile does not faint from asking the hard questions and giving the hard answers himself, to wit:

Should a writer be asked or permitted to review the book of his ideological foe? No, if it means NYR board member Jason Epstein is going to review Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, which badmouths NYR and pokes fun at Murray Kempton and the Panthers (when Kempton was doing a book on the Panther 21 for Epstein at the time). Epstein is both a founder of NYR and a vice president at Random House. Kempton writes for NYR and Random House. The point is obvious, and, being obvious, not made often enough. The book is also useful because Nobile occasionally meets someone of candor, although not often; sharing the same racket, the New York book elite, despite their feuding, are usually protective of each other. I. F. Stone talks to Nobile only off the record, but Richard Rovere talks to Nobile on the record when he discusses Stone: If Izzy says on page 537 of such and such a book you’ll learn that so and so.... I won’t believe it. I’ll check myself. I don’t think he’s an honest controversialist. We had to check him every inch of the way when I was at New Masses in 1938-39, and just because of the Soviet-Nazi pact. He was more indignant about that pact than anyone I knew. His indignation didn’t last long. He was a Stalinist—a loose and nasty term—but by my lights he was. It’s not so much being a Stalinist as using their polemical techniques.... Izzy’s scholarship is impeccable, but based on a load of crap. Fight on. Fight on. There is something healthy and regenerative in the airing of such opinions, and one of the attractive things about Nobile’s book is that those of us on the outside, who must deal with pettiness and shoddiness all the time, are permitted to see that in the glamorous inner circle of the literati, life is not much different. The insults are simply punctuated and parsed more accurately.

Reviewed by Robert Sherrill / 312 Pages / BFL Price $7.95