NYPL Researcher Spotlight: David Evanier

This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.

A former senior editor of The Paris Review, David Evanier is the author of 11 fiction and non-fiction books. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and he has received the Aga Khan Fiction Prize. He began his publishing life at 13, interviewing Sophie Tucker, and at 15 was introduced to the work of Thomas Mann, Maxim Gorky, and Knut Hamsun on the porch of the Cherry Lawn School by the school's principal, Dr. Christina Stael. Cherry Lawn lit the way.

Tell us about your research.

I am writing a biography of Norman Podhoretz entitled "Norman Podhoretz: The Man Who Changed People's Minds.” Former editor of Commentary, author of 12 books, and a founder of the “neoconservative” movement, his memoir Making It attacked the ethos of the New York Intellectuals and became a source of bitter controversy, especially because of his assertion that these high-minded intellectuals secretly craved fame and success. The book was consigned to near oblivion for 50 years, but in 2017 it was designated a New York Review Books Classic and republished by New York Review Books. My biography will examine his rightward trajectory, tracing his life from his early years, the son of a milkman on the hardscrabble streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn, to his scholarships at Columbia, Oxford, and Cambridge, the mentorship of Lionel Trilling, and the tutelage of F. R. Leavis. I will write of Podhoretz's role in shaping Commentary's status as a journal of high intellectual achievement and wide impact, and its ideological transformation under Podhoretz's editorship from left-liberal to conservative. 

The youngest member of the New York intellectual set centered around Partisan Review, Podhoretz was quickly accepted as one of an extraordinary group that included Sidney Hook, Phillip Rahv, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Hannah Arendt, Nathan Glazer, Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Daniel Bell, Lionel Abel, Ralph Ellison, William Barrett, Irving Howe, and Robert Warshow. Among the outstanding works produced by this group were Ellison's Invisible Man, Trilling's The Liberal Imagination, Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, and Kazin's A Walker in the City and On Native Grounds.

Podhoretz was writing for The New Yorker and F. R. Leavis's Scrutiny in England before he was 25 years old. He criticized the celebrated work of Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March) and Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism) so adroitly that his fame escalated as a result and these essays, first published in Commentary, are still widely anthologized and frequently mentioned in conjunction with the works themselves. His personal friendships soon consisted of an elite circle of writers, including Norman Mailer, the Trillings, and Lillian Hellman. 

Many of these friendships ended when he published Making It in 1967. Podhoretz became a pariah in the literary community. He lost his status as the Golden Boy of the New York Intellectuals and suffered a devastating depression that lasted several years, although he continued to devote his editorial energies to Commentary. By the early 1970s he had re-emerged with a new identity as a polemicist and political leader of the ideological movement of neoconservatism. Forsaking his roots in literature, he earned renewed fame and notoriety and became the lightning rod of a political movement that influenced the course of American political life in the 70s through the 90s.

With his new identity, the ambitious Podhoretz was soon in the company of another group of famous intellectuals. He again forged close friendships, including with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry Kissinger. He did not sever his friendship with Norman Mailer, who unexpectedly eviscerated Making It in the pages of Partisan Review, although the relationship gradually came to an end later on. 

Podhoretz’s life story spans almost a century of intellectual achievement and political engagement and is emblematic of a group of mostly Jewish intellectuals whose ideological trajectory moved from left to right.

When did you first get the idea for your research project?

I had followed the writings of Norman Podhoretz for many years and was intrigued when this writer of often incandescent prose, this major intellectual who had built Commentary into a major journal of intellectual inquiry, announced in the Wall Street Journal that he was supporting Donald Trump for president. Whatever his political stance, Podhoretz had maintained his rigorous writing style and intellectual depth throughout his career. And in this sense, he could be seen as the anti-Trump. Yet his endorsement was yet another chapter in a lifetime of “breaking ranks,” the title of his 1980 book, and of being a contrarian. 

But was it being contrary or, as he maintained, the result of a stubborn independence? He often related the Groucho Marx joke about the man who discovered his wife in bed with another man. The wife's lover springs out of bed and shouts at the husband: “Who do you believe: me or your lying eyes?” Podhoretz maintains that he has always believed his “lying eyes.”

He had for many years been the closest friend of Norman Mailer, remaining his friend even after Mailer stabbed his wife. Mailer dubbed him a “foul-weather friend” in gratitude (but betrayed him later with his book review). Yet Podhoretz was also in a sense the “anti-Mailer,” a devoted husband and father.

The paradoxes and mysteries abound with Podhoretz. A passionate defender of Israel, he has said, “I would die for Israel. But I'd rather die than live there.” 

I approached him about writing an unauthorized biography and he wrote back, “Definitely.” I interviewed him for 14 months and have interviewed 20 other people and will be interviewing 30 more. 

And I began to write this book.

What brought you to The New York Public Library?

My writing workspace, Paragraph, suddenly closed and the building actually collapsed. I was adrift until I discovered NYPL’s Dorot Jewish Division, which turned out to contain the oral histories of Podhoretz, his wife Midge Decter and many other major figures with whom he worked, and also NYPL’s Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities, with its beautiful study rooms. I have also joined the excellent Writers Room near Astor Place.