If you were going to sum up the post-war American Jewish experience, who would you pick as the age’s great exemplars? The choices would clearly be dizzying.
In film there’s everyone from Woody Allen to Steven Spielberg to Stanley Kubrick. In literature, there’s Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. In music, there was Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Irving Berlin — well, if we’re going to get into musical theater, we could be here a while . . .
New Yorker writer David Denby has come up with four names to essentially fashion a group biography around. He picked Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer, and Leonard Bernstein, and the book he produced is called “Eminent Jews.”
The title is a deliberate (and bold) wink to Lytton Strachey’s landmark 1918 book “Eminent Victorians,” which chronicled the lives of Henry Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Thomas Arnold, and Major-General Charles George Gordon (the British soldier better known as “Chinese Gordon”).
But where Strachey offers a glimpse of an age across a vast landscape of religion, war, and education, Denby’s quartet had more modest reach: New York (with a little LA) and its culture.
Mailer’s profile is the most emblematic of the quartet’s impact on contemporary culture.
The writer was at once the kid from Brooklyn who went to Harvard at 16; was sent to the Pacific during World War II; became a national celebrity at 25 when he penned “The Naked and the Dead” (which was probably as much a curse as a blessing); ran for mayor of New York; stabbed one of his wives; fathered some untold number of children (one of whom I went to grade school with) and became one of the best journalists/sages of his age.
While much of his fiction now feels dated, there are few greater pleasures than “The Executioner’s Song” or “The Armies of the Night.”
But despite Denby’s best efforts to declaim otherwise, the Jewish part of Mailer was never the central thing. Mailer was more a figure of 1960s Americana. He grazed all the cultural touchstones, he brawled in all the public spats (sometimes literally), and he made his bubbling personality part of the zeitgeist.
Mailer’s life was filled with excesses, experimentation, unapologetic self-regard, and tragedy. Not only did Mailer nearly kill his second wife, Adele Morales, in the throes of booze and drugs (she later refused to press charges), but he championed the parole bid of Jack Abbott — who went on to murder a waiter six weeks after his release.
However, no one could compete with Mailer the intellect: The psychologist, the sociologist, the reader of human character and politics. (Spend a few minutes on Youtube watching him chatting with Charlie Rose, Dick Cavett or William F. Buckley to see the mind in all its plumage.)
How much of this does Denby capture in the book?
Some. The zigs and zags of life itself make any biography of Mailer exciting. But the limitations of a group biography is that Denby can’t truly delve into the kinds of details that Mailer himself did so well.
Mel Brooks (who, in Denby’s chummy telling, is only ever referred to as “Mel”) might not have been the troubadour of the age, but he was maybe the greatest comic mind who ever lived.
A poor, crazy kid from Brooklyn, Brooks latched onto Sid Caesar, writing for “Your Show of Shows,” creating the spy spoof “Get Smart” with Buck Henry and striking comedic gold with “The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man” before finally getting into the movies with “The Producers.”
It’s a wildly happy story. And unlike a lot of books which take a brilliant comic mind and step all over the jokes, Denby transmits Brooks’ appeal by taking a step back and letting the comedian do the work.
“This is one of the great charades,” Brooks told Johnny Carson back in 1983. “I was 5’11, blonde, a Gentile with a perfect little nose. I went into Mount Sinai for over thirty-six hours. They knocked . . . the stuffings out of me. They pulled out my nose, they turned it, they bolted, they shortened my hair, they took two inches out of my legs because I wanted to make it . . . as a Jew comic!”
The Friedan and Bernstein’s chapters of “Eminent Jews” are less compelling; Denby’s veneration of Bernstein is heartfelt (fans of Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” will no doubt have something to enjoy), but it comes across as largely a chronicle of events; I’m not sure if one comes away knowing the personality, or fitting Bernstein into the bigger picture.
Friedan feels like a somewhat missed opportunity.
With “The Feminine Mystique,” Friedan fired a warning shot across the culture, but by the end of her life, feminism outgrew and out-radicalized her. Denby doesn’t ignore this, exactly, but a complicated legacy is largely elided.
What perhaps distinguishes “Eminent Jews” most is the fact that the subjects (with the possible exception of Brooks) were not the very best in their fields. However, they were remarkable in their own way. In that sense the book is an elegy for the rapidly vanishing Jew in American intellectual life.
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