A Partisan Review: Five Decades of the Literary Life Thomas Mallon
tality, which sets the USSR off from other industrialized countries. The past decade, moreover, has seen an unquantifiable but undeniable decline in civic morale, reflected in...
...President should ffse that adjective, much less put "empire" after it), and much of his and others' intellectual lives have been spent positioning themselves against it as usefully and honestly as conviction would allow...
...She was "the golden girl," Fitzgerald's equivalent of the princess in the fairy tale, the center of his imagination...
...However, I assumed that Diana was trying, by turning on me too, to lessen the assault on Norman and to indicate she had not suddenly swung way over to the left...
...It is one of the merits of Scott Donaldson's new "biographical portrait" of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Fool f o r Love, to develop the critical significance of social class in the life and work of Fitzgerald...
...Phillips illustrates the subtlety o f the prevailing Left literary sensibility of those days with the following story: It was the time of the famous Scottsboro case, which involved the arrest of several young black men accused of raping two white girls...
...The meetings between Ginevra and Fitzgerald were few...
...A policy is simply the effective direction in which one throws all one's available political weight...
...The average John Reed Club member viewed literature as a socialist tool roughly on the order of a truncheon or a rutabaga quota, but Phillips and Rahv somehow managed for the nine issues (a little more than two years) that the magazine lived under the club's dubious protection...
...it seems that he had fallen in love with her image before he had met her in person...
...mattered to him was love between man and woman, the pursuit of love, the survival of love, the changes of love, and the death of love...
...What Franz M. Oppenheimer is a Washington lawyer...
...I was so taken aback by Diana's sudden shift in my direction that I hardly knew what to say...
...The conventional wisdom as taught in schools and reported by foreign observers was that there were no social class distinctions in America...
...It was best if they were rich as well, but money to Fitzgerald was a fitting attribute of the well-born, not a necessary condition...
...But as the unmentionable subject of sex in fact preoccupied the writers and painters in Vienna, so in this country class distinctions preoccupied the writers of plays and fiction ranging from critical successes to pulp magazines...
...Yet such was Fitzgerald's universe...
...the worldly failure of his father resulting in constant changes of the family domicile, and the social condescension of the Wasp establishment of that time to Irish Roman Catholics...
...The thirties: Was there ever a decade when the playing was more for keeps...
...While the overall prospects for the Soviet Union as a society presented in this book are not encouraging from the Soviet leadership's standpoint, it is important not to get carried away by current trends...
...Many books of John P. Marquand, John O'Hara, Philip Barry, and Christopher Morley are about little else...
...So much of Phillips's memoir concerns the shiftings and modulations from Left to Right and back and back again that all the calibrations may seem comic...
...This strikes me as rather like telling the Lord that, well, you won't interfere with the harrowing of Hell if He'll just be quick about it...
...Fitzgerald never reached the detachment to see that the good people of Lake Forest and similar places may have been collectively neither unduly glamorous nor unusually wicked, but just folks, i, I t was only in the decade after Fitzgerald's death in 1940 that American sociologists discovered the social class system of their country...
...And yet this great love cannot have been for someone of flesh and blood, for a particular soul and intellect...
...What you are, and how you should be judged, depends in large measure on how you've judged it...
...Even the central love of Fitzgerald's life, that for his wife Zelda, according to Donaldson "hardly began as a romantic idyll...
...I din't jazz nobody...
...Would, for example, the exposure of Anthony Blunt have been quite so edifying had he not still been alive to soak up its shame (and, admittedly, Me sympathy of the addled...
...Nor was there ever any doubt in Fitzgerald's mind about why he had lost "his" golden girl...
...You won't learn this from Coover or Doctorow or Garry Wills, but Phillips remembers...
...In Chapter 21 he says it was a "tr~ling period...
...Beatrice Dance, "the first woman to make him forget Zelda," had a father "who had made a great deal of money, [and] was "somebody'in Texas . . . . " Indeed they all were "somebodys" in the social sense, or, as the French would put it, they were all women of whom "one knew whence they came...
...FOOL FOR LOVE: F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Scott Donaldson/Congdon & Weed/S16.95 CLASS: A GUIDE THROUGH THE AMERICAN STATUS SYSTEM Paul Fussell/Summit Books/S13.95 Franz M. Oppenheimer L i k e sex in Freud's Vienna, social class was a taboo subject in the United States of the 1930s...
...This may exist as a confusion and a fear in 'William Barrett, The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (Doubleday, $15.95/$8.95...
...Maybe it was...
...It is especially good to see longevity granted William Phillips, who is instructive and admirable, and whose Thomas Mailon teaches English at Vassar College...
...The doctrine of containment outlined by George Kennan in his famous 1947 "Mr...
...Name Address Clty State Zip Telephone THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984 37 P h i l l i p s does not find himself a happy man...
...God help him...
...Warner demonstrated the existence in Yankee City of six highly differentiated social classes, ranging from an upper upper to a lower lower class...
...Phillips says that "Communists represented an evil cause" (Heaven forfend a U.S...
...When Partisan Review came fuUy up from the club's fetid air to begin its "raucous, impious, and intransigent" life as an independent magazine, it stuck to its heroic guns and kept its pages open to the surgeries of New Criticism, the delicacies of Lionel Trilling, and, yes, the Marxism of those like Rahv...
...Nonetheless, it is salutary to remember in the face of all the negative news we hear about it that, like the poor, the Soviet Union will always be with us...
...Even under the most pessimistic assumptions about future productivity the Soviet economy will continue to grow at slightly under 3 percent per year for the rest of the decade, which as Campbell points out is higher than Western growth rates between 1978 and 1982...
...The first volume of his magnum opus, the Yankee City Series, The Social Life o f a Modern Community, was published in 1941, and analyzed the social status system of Newburyport, Massachusetts, the same town that inspired some of Marquand's best fiction...
...The arts he loved are in a tacky muddle...
...He has been unable to embrace the neoconservatism that others who followed his honest, troubled route have arrived at...
...Like Jay Gatsby "he had reached beyond his grasp, for she came from a different social world," writes Donaldson...
...The modernism that Partisan Review championed is now something classical, the dignified and appalled parent of a lot of subgeneric bastards: "The more recent 'conceptual' and 'realistic' schools strike me as popular and perverse exploitations of the interest aroused by the abstract expressionists...
...story shows a man both made and worn out by the ideological course corrections of a lifetime...
...The great helmsman of this moveme~ was W. Lloyd Warner of the University of Chicago...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as se~n through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...Phillips, never a Communist party member himself, had in mind a magazine that would "reconcile the modernist spirit, which was often conservative and antihistorical, with a political consciousness that emphasized the historical dimensions of a r t . " If he didn't think literature existed in a social vacuum, he still believed in letting it breathe a little air of its own...
...Recalling an argument between the Lionel Trillings and the Norman Podhoretzes, Phillips writes: I stayed out of the cross-fire, but I was pulled in when Diana suddenly switched to me and said the criticism of Commentary was not to be taken as a political approval of PR...
...X" article was premised on the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union as a result of its internal contradictions...
...Communist thinkers had, says Phillips in a sentence he doesn't seem to realize is funny, their own range: "Communist intellectuals ran the gamut from the natural or induced innocence of the rank-and-file mentality to the professional cynicism of those who knew what they were doing...
...Painting and writing have made too many compromises with mass culture...
...many 'liberal' minds, but it is none the less a policy for all that...
...There has been a fairly consistent pattern among American observers of the Soviet Union to exaggerate the problems of the Soviet system and to underestimate its resiliency and dynamism...
...At that time, unlike today, centers of power such as the large banks, industry, the leading law firms, and the Foreign Service were largely in the hands of a Waspish and predominantly Eastern seaboard upper class...
...When the reading was over, one John Reed Club member jumped up and announced, "This is literature...
...It is here that William Barrett's charge that Partisan Review's high-mindedness sometimes constituted a kind of truancy from reality has the most validity...
...Because all these fluctuations and personal complications have come about from attempts to deal with, yes, evil...
...At a meeting of the club a letter from one of the blacks was read, which sounded like this: "I din't jazz no girls...
...Nora Flynn "was the youngest of the famous Langhorne sisters of Virginia," the most famous of whom was Lady Nancy Astor...
...Phillips seems to be such a nice man that one wishes he could have been spared the sixties...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Piease send me information about this program...
...Is fife too short to keep track of all this...
...If the Rosenbergs died for anyone's sins it was their own, not ours...
...tlartisan Review finished the decade still flying its banners of high culture and democratic leftism...
...I hope he felt better after writing this...
...And were Lillian Hellman still not around to prolong her squalid lawsuit against Mary McCarthy, would we not all be deprived of one more reminder of just how difficult the life of the mind was for anybody possessing one in the 1930s...
...By the late forties, when the intellectual waters were once more befouled by fellow-traveling, Partisan Review was ready to take sides in the two-sided world that had emerged from the war: " I t is c l e a r . . , that the 'liberals' are embarked upon nothing less than a policy of appeasement o f Russia...
...Indeed the justification for adding another biographical study to the excellent four previous full-length biographies (those of Mizener, Turnbull, Bruc~oli, and Le Vot, the last two published within the last three years) and quite a few others is Donaldson's thesis "that F. Scott Fitzgerald was driven to please other people, especially rich and prominent people" and that this drive took the form of seeking romantic love...
...and if, in the last instance, it prevails over other disciplines, it does so through the medium of democratic controversy...
...With his own ability to write blocked up for most of his life, he spent fifty years editing for others the honest patch of ground that has been Partisan Review...
...As Phillips states: "Our hatred for Hitler and our concern for civil liberties and for the fate of the Jews made most of us passive if not active supporters of the war...
...There were Elisabeth Lemmon, Nora Flynn, Beatrice Dance, Margaret Case, Emily Vanderbilt, and others...
...Some of Barrett's other charges about the various derelictions of PR's writers are not nearly so well founded...
...A PARTISAN VIEW: FIVE DECADES OF THE LITERARY LIFE William Phillips/Stein and Day/S19.95 Thomas Mallon I f longevity were granted only to the admirable, we would be denied some instructive spectacles...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...
...When I was a b o y . . . What Phillips's life most convinces one of is that Communism was, and remains, the great Breathalyzer test of the twentieth century...
...Today these words would be considered a little nasty even in a conservative journal, but they in fact come from an editorial (written by Barrett) in PR's Summer 1946 issue...
...All biographers of Fitzgerald, however, do write about his critical views of the uRper class, expressed in stories such as "'A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and in the harsh portrayal of such as Tom Buchanan and Daisy in The Great Gatsby and of Nicole's family in Tender is the Night and in his occasional flirtations with left-wing political ideas...
...She was well-born, she was rich, she was beautiful, and she came from the place that Fitzgerald saw as the Eden of all those qualities: "Once I thought that Lake Forest was the most glamorous place in the world," he wrote his daughter Scottie in July 1940...
...He is a man left with more regrets than shibboleths...
...Come on, Bill, let it rip--let's go back to what you said in Chapter 2: "the counterculture and the new l e f t . . , their ignorance, their petulance, their selfi n d u l g e n c e . . , an infantile l e f t politics and pop culture that managed to be both ~tlienated and modish...
...Donaldson gives far more attention to Ginevra and to the loves of Fitzgerald other than his wife Zelda and his last love Sheilah Graham than do other biographers...
...These biographers fail to see that such hostile projections were no haore realistic than the glamorization of d~butantes: Both attitudes were the result of Fitzgerald's intense social insecurities rooted in the ambiguous social station of his family at the edge of the social establishment of St...
...for two or three pages...
...Probably, but one should fight the inclination to say so...
...The past decade, moreover, has seen an unquantifiable but undeniable decline in civic morale, reflected in widespread corruption, a loss of optimism about the future, and a growing absorption i n private and family life...
...But this is an attempt at self-control...
...But the Second World War that followed was not its most honorable hour...
...and in 1949 published a manual for the scientific 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1984...
...Elisabeth Lemmon was "beautiful, cultivated and well-bred...
...Phillips has come through these wars weary and disappointed, but still somehow believing "in the omnipotence of argument and reason...
...The decade ~vas rough on him and the magazine, which wobbled not only from the Zeitgeist without but from Philip Rahv's renascent Marxism within...
...Yet this is precisely what happened...
...Nobody jazzed no girls," etc...
...Donaldson writes: "The hurt of losing her never left him, and thinking about it invariably brought tears to his e y e s . . , his rejection by Ginevra motivated much of his f i c t i o n . . , the wound would not heal, no matter how often he cauterized it...
...The John Reed Club didn't know what it was getting into when it allowed Phillips and Philip Rahv to start the magazine with the club's sponsorship early in the thirties...
...And the women to be loved by Fitzgerald and by the heroes of his fiction were high-born and high-bred...
...Some gamut...
...Here too, while Zelda's family had little money, Fitzgerald may have fallen in love in good part with the image of the Southern "belle of good family" who socially stood at the very top in Montgomery, Alabama...
...The authors of After Brezhnev do not of course predict that the USSR will collapse or that the Kremlin leadership will face a major crisis in the eighties...
...Today a universe dominated by romantic love and social hierarchy and the interaction between them has become almost incomprehensible...
...He fell in love while at Princeton with Ginevra King from Lake Forest, Illinois...
...let the best "ism" win" "Marxism in culture, we think," said a statement of editorial alms in the first non-John Reed issue, "is first of all an instrument of analysis and evaluation...
...Midge even became momentarily sympathetic to me, although I was further from her views than Diana and Lionel were...
...It was a bracing, instead of runny, pluralism...
...In the fifties, Phillips's anti-Joe McCarthy credentials would pass any liberal muster, but he remains proud that he "did not succumb to the hysteria that was whipped up at the time and is now coming back again, in a kind of retroactive indignation and an attempt once more to use the abuses of McCarthyism to suggest the innocence of the Communists...
...It is instructive to go back and read earlier prognoses of the USSR: Even as hardheaded a book as Strategic Power and Soviet Foreign Policy, written by Myron Rush and Arnold Horelick shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, rejected the likelihood of a massive Soviet buildup of ICBMs on the grounds that the Soviet leadership could not afford to squeeze consumers to the extent such a policy would imply...
...Yet the sociologists then treated social class almost exclusively as a matter more or less of money, if they discussed it at all...
...With Stalinist sympathizers in so many of the editorial saddles that counted in New York in those days, it took a heroism scarcely imaginable to write about politics clearly and whole, a toughness that makes today's complaints about liberal bias in the media, even when they're right, seem like pantywaisted whining...
...L THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...Paul...
...And however much opportunism and accident have blended into the response, mostly what Phillips and the writers he edited have tried to do is respond to the dark star (read "evil empire") in whose shadow we fight for our lives, and against which most of our social changes and liberation movements, however admirable they may be, constitute a kind of luxurious fine-tuning...
...And you know these kids who never had to live through the depression: "The drift of young people today has an element of middleclass self-indulgence and antipathy to the idea of work, and is not without a measure of affluence...
Vol. 17 • April 1984 • No. 4
