Apr 19, 2009 0
Editing, Movement Politics, and a Bewigged Queer Jeremiah: Ted Solotaroff at Commentary
In January, The Nation published a discursive but fruitful memoiristic essay by Ted Solotaroff, who spent a career in political and literary editing beginning at Commentary in the ideologically tumultuous 1960s. It is illuminating for anyone interested in this period, when the nation’s intellectual heft began to swing decidedly to the right, a swing that determined the political and social structures of our own period, and so one instructive to those who wish to map, influence, or create the political and social structures of the future. Solotaroff gets us inside the heads of some of the people whose contingent decisions and actions set that formation in motion. While the first half of Solotaroff’s piece treats the politics of internecine midcentury literary-political editing, the second traces his relationships with his later writers—after his estrangement from the supercilious Podhoretz and much of the intelligensia that gathered around him—notably Cynthia Ozick and, hugely, the subjectively-unhinged critic, fiction writer, and jetsetting homosexual intellectual Alfred Chester, whose peripatetic life as a self-declared immoralist, vexed by poverty, alienation, and aberrant desire, ultimately made him into a searing and prescient queer moralist.