0 Shares a Art Politics Writers and Partisans a History of Literary Radicalism in America
PARTISAN Culture, PARTISAN POLITICS
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February seven, 1982
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THE TRUANTS Adventures Among the Intellectuals. Past William Barrett. 270 pp. New York: Anchor Printing/Doubleday. $15.95.
It is often a source of wonder and consternation for the powers that preside over the not bad opinion-making organs of our society - in regime, in culture and in the media - to observe that the views then fluently disseminated by their vast enterprises have had their origin, more often than not, in the ideas and controversies of obscure intellectual coteries that seemed, at the time of their emergence, to exist at a great altitude from any sort of power or influence. Even so this design, by which initially unknown, cocky-nominated intellectual elites accept come - for ameliorate or for worse - to exert a decisive influence on the course of culture and lodge, is one that has been repeatedly traced in the history of the modern era. It is, amid much else, a remarkable example of the way the ability of heed in our civilisation acts as a goad and a challenge to the more worldly realms of power.
The great interest of William Barrett'south new volume is that it takes us inside the lives and the minds of 1 of these pivotal intellectual coteries - the Partisan Review circumvolve as it emerged in the years immediately earlier and after Earth State of war II - and re-examines both its leading personalities and its governing ideas with an unusual degree of intimacy, intelligence and candor. ''The Truants'' is, first of all, an insider'due south vivid and poignant memoir. It closes, indeed, with its author in tears, and it contains many other pages that, without e'er becoming mawkish or self-indulgent, stir the emotions.
The book is exceptionally well written, and information technology abounds in brilliant portraiture. Particularly stunning are the accounts of Philip Rahv and Delmore Schwartz. Rahv, the critic and editor who was the leading spirit of Partisan Review until his ouster in the 1960's, remains for Mr. Barrett the quintessential case of that at present mythical figure - the New York intellectual. Schwartz, the illfated poet, brusk-story author and critic who introduced Mr. Barrett to the group in the winter of 1937-38, was for many years the author'due south closest friend. These, certainly, are the dominant characters in the story that is told here, and it is to their memory that ''The Truants'' is dedicated. But the book contains abrupt glimpses, likewise, of Hannah Arendt, William Phillips, Clement Gree nberg, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Paul Go odman and other eminences of the early on Partisan Review circle . When Mr. Barrett returned to New York from military service in 1945, he was taken on as an editor of the mag, and he remained closely involved in itsaffairs and a keen observer of its internal s trife until he drifted abroad from the group in the mid-1950's.
This book is something more than than an exercise in personal reminiscence, however. It is also a penetrating analysis of the intellectual life of its period. And because our civilisation is notwithstanding beset past so many of the illusions that were spawned and codified in the milieu that Mr. Barrett has set out to depict in this book, ''The Truants'' is very much a text for our time likewise. The arguments information technology recounts, the positions it defines, the careers it retraces, the whole literary, artistic and political ethos that is then cogently evoked in its pages - all of this turns out to contain a good deal of the intellectual debris that continues to litter the cultural scene today.
Foremost among the articles of belief upheld past Partisan Review in its heyday was the confidence that it was somehow possible for intellectuals to concord in tandem a steadfast commitment to what Mr. Barrett describes equally ''the two M's ... Marxism in politics and Modernism in art,'' and to practise so, moreover, without any sense of contradiction or any fearfulness of their ultimate incompatibility. The immense appeal exerted by Partisan Review - for Mr. Barrett and subsequently for others - lay precisely in this independent and big-minded encompass of both radicalism and the avant-garde, a position that required courage equally well as independence in the political climate of the 30'south.
The magazine had actually begun publication in 1934 as an organ of the Communist Party, simply information technology foundered when its principal editors - Philip Rahv and William Phillips amid them -could no longer accommodate themselves to the Moscow-dominated party line in either politics or civilisation. It was thus as a dissident Marxist periodical that Rahv and Phillips, now joined by Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, F.Westward. Dupee and the painter George L.K. Morris, revived Partisan Review in 1937, and made it the leading intellectual magazine of the anti-Stalinist left. Its politics were Trotskyist - the founders of the new Partisan Review, every bit Mr. Barrett writes, ''were attacking Stalin and the Soviet Matrimony from the signal of view of a purer Marxism, and information technology was above all the purity of their radicalism that lured me on.''
At the same time, he writes, ''this radical and avant-garde attitude was not to be confined only to politics; it was to comprehend literature and the arts too.'' This enlightened cultural program was initiated at a time when the Communist Party and its large liberal following - the so-called fellow travelers then very powerful in the printing, in publishing and in certain university circles - were continually upbraiding the avant-garde, ofttimes in vicious terms, for its failure to serve the interests of the masses, while the reactionary academic world still looked upon the modernistic motility in literature and fine art equally niggling more a distasteful hoax. ''In this situation,'' Mr. Barrett writes, ''it was a bracing challenge to exist on the side of the difficult and the rare, and to defend the creative person'sfreedom to be as complex every bit he wishes within the boundaries of his talent and his medium.''
Such, in whatsoever instance, were the intellectual ethics that launched this coterie of writers and critics, and won them an important following in the years to come. On the political side, the tasks they set for themselves in the internecine battles of the thirty'south acquired an added urgency in the years immediately following World War II, when liberals once again took upwardly the cause of the Soviet Union. ''These goddam Liberals,'' Mr. Barrett quotes Rahv as saying at this time, ''they'll finish past giving away the whole of Western Europe to Stalin. He won't even have to push for it, they'll make a present of it to him'' - words that have a sobering resonance for anyone who has followed contempo debates over a proper response to the Polish crackdown.
Well-nigh the cold-state of war flow Mr. Barrett has much to tell us -much, indeed, that casts an illuminating low-cal on more recent efforts by the intellectual left to ascribe all blame for the cold war to the evil designs of American foreign policy, and to acquit the Soviet Union of all malevolent intent. It is positively spooky, for instance, to read the essay called ''The 'Liberal' Fifth Column,'' which Mr. Barrett wrote for the Summer 1946 issue of Partisan Review and which he has now reprinted every bit an appendix to ''The Truants,'' and be made to realize how little has really changed in the thinking of the American left in the last 36 years.
It was, then, one of the master missions of Partisan Review in this immediate postwar menstruation to take a strong stand against this widespread misperception of Soviet policy - a policy, later all, that had already sent millions to their deaths and enslaved many millions more -and the magazine upheld this position with a steadfastness that was unusual at the fourth dimension. Yet there was, all the same, a great flaw in the position that Partisan Review adopted toward Communism and the Soviet Union, and this, also, is one of the central themes explored in Mr. Barrett's book, and the theme that is alluded to in the very championship of ''The Truants.''
In a conversation with Philip Rahv late in the 1950's, Mr. Barrett recalls: ''He told me he had often thought of writing a novel about the people we knew, and if he did, he would call it 'The Truants.' ... The point of his title, he explained, was that during all those years the people who had come and gone in connection with the magazine had been playing truant, escaping for a while from the harshness of whatever practical reality would claim them again.'' And Mr. Barrett goes on: ''Since Rahv would never get around now to using his title, he might not listen my borrowing it. Besides, I seemed to encounter a further meaning in information technology than he did. He w equally thinking of all the immature literary aspirants who had come up and gon due east during his years equally an editor. They were escaping for a few years into bohemia, playing truant from the ordinary means of life, hoping to spread their wings and soar for a while.''
In the ''further meaning'' that Mr. Barrett discerns in this idea, Rahv and his entire intellectual enterprise are plant to exist truants in some other, more profound sense. ''The intellectual,'' he writes, ''is tempted into a more subtle class of truancy. He has only to plough his mind in a certain direction and some unpleasant realities tin can disappear. He goes in search of original and sweeping ideas, and in the process may conveniently forget the humbling weather condition of his ain existence. In politics, for instance, that his own continued existence equally a dissenter depends on the survival of the United States equally a gratis nation in a earth going increasingly totalitarian.''
Thus, in attempting to speak for a ''purer Marxism'' than Stalin'due south, Partisan Review remained theoretically hostile to the values of conservative commonwealth and categorically opposed to the very ethos of American commercialism. The magazine's own concept of an ideal Marxist revolution may have been confused, and indeed something of a chimera. Its commitment in that direction was certainly muted during the early years of the cold war, when the magazine was seeking - and finding - a wider and less ideological readership. But for Rahv, at to the lowest degree, this intellectual strategy turned out to be more a matter of discretion than of hope or conventionalities. Marxism remained for him an unquestioned faith, and the revolutionary ideal - however quiescent at times - was never abandoned. The decease of Stalin in 1953 gave information technology a new luster and impetus, and the radical movement of the 60'due south a new sense of opportunity and purpose.
At that place thus occurred what Mr. Barrett speaks of as ''a desperate reversal'' in Rahv'southward political stance - his ''conversion away from anti-Communism,'' and his open and increasingly shrill boast of radical causes. This was truancy indeed, for his re-emergence as a Marxist firebrand came, as it happened, at a time when Rahv'due south personal fortunes were prospering every bit they never had in the past. He was appointed to a professorship at Brandeis Academy and occupied a huge townhouse on Beacon Street in Boston. He took upward cooking as a hobby and prided himself on living well. Yet the more than he prospered, the more violently did he denounce the system that had brought him his success. ''His attit udes, if annihilation, became more anti-American than ever,'' Mr. Barrett writes. ''He was like those children of affluenceduring the 1960'due south who constitute their eye-class advantages a further reason for hostility toward American society.'' Mr. Barrett, who is alternately repelled and fascinated by Rahv, manages to write well-nigh him with an affection and regard that are all the more impressive considering he remains so completely undeceived. ''Rahv, in fact, was one of the intellectuals of the 1950's who was preparing the way for the radical outbursts of the 1960'south,'' he writes, ''and when these came, he was fix to receive them with open arms. All in all, it wasto be a strange turn in the career of a man who had always been an outsider: hit herto, in the 1930'due south and 1940's, he had fought against the dominant tendency, merely now in the 1960's he had turned about and was running with the pack.''
The portrait of Philip Rahv strikes me as quite the best affair in Mr. Barrett's book. Written with effeminateness, precision and even at times a grim sense of humor, it is non but an important contribution to intellectual history but a literary feat of no minor distinction. Rahv was indeed a formidable personality of considerable influence, and Mr. Barrett has now succeeded in making his unusual story a permanent part of our literature.
If the portrait of Delmore Schwartz, fine every bit it certainly is, does not achieve quite the same distinction, it is only considering this story of a shattered talent and a shattered life has already been told past Saul Bellow (in ''Humboldt'due south Gift'') and James Atlas (in his biography of the poet) at even greater length. What Mr. Barrett adds, however, is of import in two respects. He gives the states a very moving account of the vicissitudes of a high-spirited, intellectual friendship that, for him, ended in the scene of madness and tears that closes the book. And he recalls for us the precipitous and divisive controversy between Schwartz and Lionel Trilling that defined not simply the differences separating 2 of the about gifted writers to be associated with Partisan Review, but the deeper sectionalisation that put into question the mag'due south abiding function every bit a champion of modern literature and advanced culture.
It was Trilling'south conventionalities that the classics of modern literature then beloved by the radicals of Partisan Review could not, in the end, truly be reconciled with their political outlook. (Rahv'due south late reversal in repudiating the piece of work of Henry James afterward his early and very persuasive defense force of information technology would certainly bear this out.) Trilling'south was not a position that Partisan Review wanted to hear, nonetheless, and it earned him the enmity non only of Delmore Schwartz and Philip Rahv simply of the whole community of literary and creative modernists, and the issues raised by this dispute have continued to haunt Trilling's posthumous reputation as a critic to the present day.
Mr. Barrett gives united states of america a marvelous account of these issues in the chapter of ''The Truants'' called ''Beginnings of Conservative Thought'' - a give-and-take that also contains ane of the nigh intelligent analyses of Trilling's criticism anyone has given us. Trilling, writes Mr. Barrett, was ''calling attention to the value of class distinctions for the writer, speaking sympathetically, even when critically, of the middle class, and bringing forward a less adventurous and experimental catechism of authors to be admired. Where the intellectuals had been preoccupied with figures like Joyce and Proust, or Dostoevski and Kafka, Trilling urged the case of more conventional novelists like E.M. Forster and Jane Austen. ... All of this was disquieting to the more austerely modernist tastes of the magazine.''
The alarm was sounded one day when Harold Rosenberg, ever eager to uphold a position of radical intransigence (this was prior to the fourth dimension of Rosenberg's attachment to The New Yorker), asked Rahv ''where Partisan Review was headed when it kept printing somebody like Trilling, who was simply making a case for 'conservative values.' '' Rahv, according to Barrett, ''was now visibly shaken. Like the Catholic lady in Stendhal'southward novel who enjoys trysts with her lover until one day the word 'infidelity' crosses her mind and she is overwhelmed at the sinfulness of her act and the awful damnation she is incurring, so at the dread expression 'bourgeois values' all Rahv's Marxist pieties were shaken to their depths. Bourgeois values! What a specter! And to retrieve that he, as an editor, had been helping to promote them!''
It was left to Delmore Schwartz, however, to launch the retaliatory assault. This he did in an essay called ''The Duchess's Ruby-red Shoes'' - a slice that undertakes to respond to Trilling's famous essay on ''Manners, Morals, and the Novel'' and that marks, as Mr. Barrett sadly observes, the last occasion when Schwartz ''was able to bring all his intellectual energies into focus.''
''What was troubling Delmore (and the residue of us at that time),'' Mr. Barrett writes, ''was what would happen if ane carried over the statement from literature into life. Trilling writes with such enthusiasm about the virtues of class distinctions and the social manners that go with them equally material for the writer that he seems to be recommending that they should exist kept as a desirable part of the good gild.'' As Schwartz said of Trilling in his attack: ''he entertains social views (and social misgivings) which would be intolerable if they were presented nakedly, as social criticism of a political plan, instead of being united with literary considerations.''
The neat fright, as Mr. Barrett observes, was ''that Trilling might seduce united states of america to think the unthinkable thought. ... Might information technology not be that the conditions which led to a more interesting literature also produced a more satisfying life within society itself?'' Thirty years after, Mr. Barrett notes, ''some of us have constitute ourselves able to remember the unthinkable thought after all, and observe it non so dire every bit nosotros had expected.'' Yet he too recognizes that Trilling, though he was, in Mr. Barrett's view, ''the most intelligent human of his generation - or at least the near intelligent I knew,'' had quite failed to exercise justice to those ''regions of the man spirit'' that were the special province of the avant-garde and apocalyptical writers favored by Partisan Review.
Information technology might be true that such writers could non be reconciled to the magazine's politics, but neither, in Mr. Barrett'due south view, could Trilling's own critical outlook - despite the value information technology placed on complexity and flexibility - really come to terms with the depths of their vision. For Mr. Barrett, Trilling remained at middle - despite the fact that he was ''ahead of his fourth dimension'' in preparing the way for a more conservative criticism of modern culture - ''a thorough-going liberal to the end: the cast of his heed was the rational, secular, and non-religious 1 of classical liberalism.'' And it is from this perspective that Mr. Barrett accomplishes something very remarkable in his analysis of Trilling's thought. He takes upwards the critique of the liberal listen that Trilling launched in ''The Liberal Imagination'' and extends it to Trilling'due south own writings in that book. In the terminate, though he parts visitor with Schwartz'south radical views, he all the same defends the modern vision, and his own criticism of Trilling's position is, as a consequence, even more than profound than anything Schwartz had attempted.
In this department of ''The Truants,'' the author reminds us that he is non just an invaluable witness to the events and personalities he has memorialized in these memoirs, but 1 of our best critics likewise. Something similar occurs in the chapter Mr. Barrett devotes to the painters of the New York School - another of the causes avant-garde by Partisan Review in the 40'south and l's. Here over again Mr. Barret t writes as a champion of modernism. By far the nearly intelligent criticism of the New York Schoolhouse at that time was written by Clement Greenberg, a onetime editor of the magazine who remained its principalart critic in this period. Mr. Barrett came to know and admire the artists in this group, especially Willem de Kooning, and he had a keen appreciation, besides, of Mr. Greenberg's critical try on their behalf. Yet he performs upon Mr. Greenberg's disquisitional outlook an analysis quite as penetrating as the 1 he devotes to Trilling'due south and leaves united states with a vivid sense of the role played by ideology in the germination of issues that were ostensibly purely esthetic.
''Follow the zigs and zags of any given intellectual,'' Mr. Barrett observes at one betoken in his narrative, ''and you may turn out to be reading the fever chart of the next generation.'' In ''The Truants'' certainly, William Barrett has written a book that not only illuminates the ''zigs and zags'' of the Partisan Review intellectuals, but a ''fever chart'' that is essential reading for anyone attempting to understand the art and culture and politics of the nowadays historic period.
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