BOOKS OF THE TIMES
By John Gross
Published: May 9, 1986
THE BLOODY CROSSROADS: Where Literature and Politics Meet. By Norman Podhoretz. 221 pages. Simon & Schuster. $16.95. ALTHOUGH he is best known today as a writer on politics, Norman Podhoretz began his professional life as a literary critic, and in the essays gathered together in his latest book he partly resumes his original role. For the most part they are reports from what Lionel Trilling once called, in a phrase that gives the book both its title and subtitle, ''the bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet'' - bloody because writers have so often been the victims of political oppression, no less bloody because so many of them have encouraged or condoned that oppression.
The essays have a number of obvious and important virtues. They generally address themselves to the issues that matter most; they are blessedly serious, at a time when so much criticism is characterized by frivolous over-elaboration; they are crisp and well argued - almost too well argued, you feel, since they display some of the limitations as well as the strengths of intellectual neatness.
Their clarity also means that for the most part their arguments can be briefly summed up without doing them violence. Take the opening essay, which is a reconsideration of ''The God That Failed,'' the celebrated symposium (first published in 1950) in which half a dozen distinguished authors who had formerly been Communists or Communist sympathizers traced the history of their disenchantment with Communism.
Mr. Podhoretz gives a persuasive account of why the book had the impact it did, but his general conclusions can be boiled down to a sentence or two. In the first place, by 1950 the nature of the Soviet regime should have been plain to anyone who cared to look. But with a few honorable exceptions, liberals preferred to avert their eyes; at that time, among intellectuals at least, former Communists were usually the only people who could be relied on to take the threat posed by Communism seriously.
Yet in retrospect, he argues, we can see that the contributors to ''The God That Failed'' didn't go far enough. They clung to the belief that you could reject Soviet Communism without abandoning socialism or even Marxism; they failed to acknowledge that capitalism was both a necessary aspect of democracy and the only existing economic system that delivered the goods. And these reservations left the way open for fresh illusions - about the supposed virtues of socialism as practiced outside the Soviet Union, in China or the third world, and about the devotion of the Soviet leadership, whatever its record at home, to the cause of peace and stability abroad.
In the essays that follow, on Albert Camus and George Orwell, Mr. Podhoretz's judgments are more complex - he is dealing, after all, with highly complicated men. But in both cases he contents himself with pursuing a single clear-cut theme.
The Camus he prizes most is the author who spelled out the baleful aspects of Communism in his tract ''The Rebel,'' even though he shied away from drawing the obvious practical conclusion that this entailed taking a firmly pro-Western stand. By an ingenious twist, Camus's bad conscience over failing to do so is seen as the true source of the guilt that afflicts the narrator of his last novel, ''The Fall.'' As for Orwell, Mr. Podhoretz grants his many contradictions, but insists that the principal thrust of his political writing was directed against the realities of Soviet Communism and the illusions of left-wing intellectuals in the West.
The political disaffection of intellectuals, on the right as well as the left, forms the main subject of the book's central section. If a sketch of how ''the adversary culture'' has developed in recent years has to cover too much ground in too few pages to offer more than a cursory view, a pair of individual case histories provides valuable new insights. Mr. Podhoretz was once a pupil of the English critic F. R. Leavis, but his loyalty to Mr. Leavis's memory doesn't prevent him from recognizing the affinities between the critic's hostility to industrial society and the counterculture that emerged in the 1960's and undercut almost everything else he stood for. A trenchant account of Henry Adams brings some overdue skepticism to bear on the received view of Adams as a hapless displaced person, the victim of a materialistic America that no longer had any use for his gifts.
''The Bloody Crossroads'' also contains essays on Milan Kundera, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the memoirs of Henry Kissinger. On these and the other subjects he discusses, Mr. Podhoretz is hard-hitting, undeterred by intellectual fashion, and often altogether convincing. (The low quality of the criticism heaped on him by his more extreme opponents is itself a tribute to the force of his arguments; much of it appears to be inspired by the grand old principle once enunciated by a Victorian lawyer: ''No case - abuse plaintiff's attorney.'') Yet his dialectical skills can also betray him into settling for a view of the world that is too simplified and schematic, as though a successfully conducted argument necessarily represented the last word about the real world. To assume that unmodified capitalism is the only viable alternative to Communism is to accept the either/or categories of the Communists themselves. To contend, as he does, that if Orwell had lived he would have evolved into a neoconservative may have a certain logic, but it overlooks a multitude of other factors, not least the likelihood that a writer as English as Orwell would have found a phenomenon as American as neoconservatism fairly remote.
Still, it would be a far more damaging simplification than any of Mr. Podhoretz's to use the fact that he tends to overstate his case as an excuse for rejecting that case out of hand. He remains a formidable critic of liberal pieties, and the essays in ''The Bloody Crossroads'' are as challenging as anything he has written.
Photo of Norman Podhoretz (Magnum/Alex Webb)