‘The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center’
By Marty Peretz
Post Hill Press, Wicked Son Books, 336 pages

Marty Peretz’s “The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center” is a memoir that doubles as a Grand Tour of American intellectual and political life in the second half of the 20th century and the first fifth of the 21st. Now in his ninth decade, Mr. Peretz has made fierce friends and implacable enemies. That has led to a book crackling with personality and not lacking in ego. It is also, though, an elegy for a world of ideas even the mighty Mr. Peretz could not sustain. 

The author writes that he “aspired, from the beginning of my life, to be in the thick of things, and that aspiration I’ve achieved.” Mr. Peretz calls his story, though, “a tale of failure” and labels himself “a dissatisfied man” and a “marginalized” one who nevertheless “fashioned a place for myself as a kind of catchall, on the border of different establishments” even as a “reputation for heedless controversy has, to a certain extent, swallowed me.” He says he identifies with Franz Kafka.

All this sackcloth and ash could appear incongruous given Mr. Peretz’s successes. A Yiddish-speaking son of Grand Concourse immigrants, he showed a precocious aptitude for finding himself in the intellectual thick of it, first at Brandeis at its heyday — he studied with the Marxist Herbert Marcuse and was a student alongside the philosopher Michael Walzer — and then at Harvard, where he arrived as a graduate student and stayed for 50 years. 

Mr. Peretz never ascended the academic ladder — he was a tutor and lecturer, but never a full professor. He was comfortable enough at his perch to get to know a seemingly endless parade of students who trundled by and who would go on to acclaim, a glow of naches that backlights the book. Most treasured is Vice President Gore, who becomes a kind of protege and white knight, the 2000 presidential election being Mr. Peretz’s great “what-if?”

Mr. Peretz describes his ex-wife, Annie Devreaux, from the clan that founded the Singer Sewing Machine Company, as “wealthy almost beyond imagining.” That lucre allows Mr. Peretz to find his footing as a political donor — he gave to President Biden’s first Senate run. The book’s pages are littered with accounts of gifts and bequests. Eventually, that fortune allows him to buy the New Republic and make it, for a time, into a magazine that mattered. 

“The Controversialist” is especially vivid when it comes to painting portraits of those he worked with at the magazine, where he was for decades editor in chief. One writer, Henry Fairlie, is a “resident Tory” who “burned through everything in his life and was sleeping on a couch in our offices” while “chain-smoking his way to the grave.” The former editor, Andrew Sullivan, is a “committed Catholic who gave himself freedom to sin as he chose.”

Mr. Peretz, who seemingly knows everyone, spends much of “The Controversialist” telling how he came to know himself. He begins as a man of the left — though never a Stalinist — and a “Harvard patriot.” By the book’s end, he is mournful for what he knew in his youth, the extinction of a “rich, thick world that ran on older social bonds,” the “little structures and societies that had shaped my generation.” He is not only a controversialist, but also a nostalgist.

Mr. Peretz discusses his broken relationship with his father, and his ensuing propensity toward rage. He repeatedly mentions what he calls his “gayness” but never delves into how it affected his marriages and is silent on any relationship with men. He writes of his two divorces as if from a great distance. When he is wrong on a political point, he admits it. 

Was Mr. Peretz a failure? He begins his book by noting how a “reputation for heedless controversy has, to a certain extent, swallowed me,” and it ends with an account of how incendiary comments about Muslims and terrorism, dashed off on a blog, made him a pariah at Harvard. The New Republic, removed from its glory days, could now double as the Oberlin Review. There will be no President Gore. 

He shouldn’t be too down on himself, though. It is no small achievement to have swung the New Republic — a liberal magazine —  and those who read it behind the vision of Theodor Herzl. He writes that it “was a pro-Israel magazine — this was known to everybody in Washington, the staffers, the readers, the politicians, and the critics.” 

Zionism, Mr. Peretz wrote, “was the one thing I absolutely would not compromise on.” May he live a long life but be secure in the knowledge that when his time comes he will be gratefully remembered among the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.