The Literary Mafia

Abstract

The Literary Mafia James D. Bloom (bio) Josh Lambert. The Literary Mafia: Jews, Publishing, and Postwar American Literature. Yale UP, 2022. 272 pp. $35.00 hardback. If you’re reading philip roth studies, you’ll need to read the literary Mafia. But if you’re expecting a story about the mafia—about offers you can’t refuse or about pole dancers at the Soprano family’s Bada Bing club—fuhgeddaboudit. Nathan Zuckerman, who considered hiring Al Capone and a Meyer Lansky henchman to do his dirty work, and Philip Roth, who worked for Newark mob boss Longy Zwillman as a schoolboy, might have been disappointed at this bait-and-switch tease (Anatomy 67; Zuckerman 110; Facts 41). In his introduction to The Literary Mafia, author Josh Lambert has, to his credit, made a point of distancing himself from what’s probably a publisher-imposed title, conceding that “it may seem strange that this book takes its title from a myth” about “a concentration of Jewish literary power,” which Lambert “deems false and even pernicious.” In his introduction, Lambert identifies the most influential culprits in promoting this myth: Truman Capote, Jack Kerouac, and “mother-tongue” defender Katherine Anne Porter (1), along with two disgruntled Jewish writers, Meyer Levin (4) and Richard Kostelanetz (4–5). Having documented this myth, its origins during the Cold War years, and the “homophilous logic” underpinning the myth (24, 59), Lambert surveys the gate-keepers who constituted this “imaginary [. . .] so-called Jewish literary mafia” (166, 168). Lambert’s meticulous account of the careers of these gatekeepers decisively discredits this myth. At once weaving and casting a wide net, Lambert explains the influence of some marquee name influencers—Alfred Knopf, Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Lionel Trilling—and their relationships with the supporting players whom they depended on, sponsored, or clashed with. In introducing this large cast, Lambert mentions in passing or offers thumbnail sketches of Knopf editor Harold Strauss and Viking editor Pascal Coivici, Commentary editor Marion Magid, American Review founder Ted Solotaroff who “owed his career to Roth” (59). Lambert also thoroughly sketches the career narratives of promising upstarts like novelists Ann Birstein who lampooned Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Our Gang (1971), and The Breast (1972) in a [End Page 92] single sentence (116); Sam Astrachan, whom Lambert makes sound like a wannabe Faulkner (71); and Ivan Gold. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Lambert reports, Roth replayed a joke about a Jewish GI’s Japanese bride featured in Gold’s 1963 story “Taub East.” Giving Roth his due, Lambert also argues that “Taub East” “reads like a rewriting of Philip Roth’s ‘Defender of the Faith’” (Portnoy 189; Lambert 88, 87). The range, analytic acumen, and archival thoroughness of The Literary Mafia as a chronicle of the literary marketplace in which Roth launched his career makes it a must-read for Roth devotees. Despite Lambert’s learned and enthusiastic immersion in this milieu, Rothophiles might be disappointed by Lambert’s chapter on Jewish women in postwar publishing, which doesn’t so much as mention Maxine Groffsky. The model for Brenda Patimkin in Roth’s 1959 “Goodbye Columbus” (according to all the available scholarship on the question), Groffsky served as George Plimpton’s go-to editor at the Paris Review when it published “The Conversion of the Jews” in 1958 and subsequently founded an eponymous Broadway literary agency. Groffsky’s private life, her affairs, and her marriage also played out at the heart of the nepotism-ridden, sex-saturated intellectual-commercial milieu that made Roth a star and that provoked the mafia myth that Lambert debunks. Though Lambert never introduces such Roth-oriented questions, his deep dives into postwar literary culture pointedly raise questions likely to occur to Roth readers and other students of Cold-War-era US writing. What Lambert describes as the “literary enfranchisement” of Jewish Americans and the “major transformation of American literature and culture” this enfranchisement occasioned (8, 15) coincided with the effect of the GI Bill on a broader egalitarian reorientation of the arts and with the impact of New Critical formalism on Literary Studies and on the intellectual and artistic coming of age of such Roth contemporaries as Adrienne Rich, Joan Didion...