I WALKED WITH INTELLECTUALS

...It never occurs to him that the painters shared any of the ideas or aspirations of Greenberg or Rosenberg or of writers who weren't interested in the visual arts—Rahv, for instance...

...They felt themselves to be the heirs of Europe's fortune...

...Essentially, he thinks about them only as a foil to the gossipy, analytical-minded, cynical literary intellectuals...

...Wanting always to sum up the combative, beleaguered, and lonely position of the modern man, his pieces sometimes have the effect of being pressurized, miniaturized Russian novels —ones where all the action is conveyed in a rambling but relentless conversation between two men during the course of a stifling St...

...The meeting—Barrett got this story at the time from Rahv—took place at an "apartmentloft somewhere downtown in the East Village in the midst of a party of homosexuals," and Trilling, so the tale goes, was shocked and dismayed to see Forster in this company...

...Barrett, though, never goes into whether these people, in their work, can irritate—or excite—us...

...From the little he tells us of his own feelings at the time, the reader senses that Barrett, whether out of duty, respect, or fear, didn't say or do what he wanted when he was in the company of Rahv and the others...

...They couldn't get the achievements of the great 19th- and early-20thcentury Europeans out of their minds...

...The difference between him and his subjects is that, while he has a strong feeling for futility and impermanence, he is a comfortable man...

...but, contrary to Barrett's feeling, most good artists, from any era, are aware of where their medium is, especially when they're on the verge of finding what's individual about themselves...

...he fights hard, as a writer, for his big view...

...He goes on about how people at the time didn't have any knowledge of Forster's homosexuality and about how shocking, to him at least, were the reports of the novelist's behavior...

...To show how people can humiliate one another...

...If someone gives the living "charity" instead of honest talk, and if someone waits for people to be gone before he can be "candid" about them, it's possible that he will always be thinking and feeling in a woozy, delayed, unspontaneous way...

...Barrett's unthinking enjoyment in recounting the gossip nullifies the story as we read it...

...These qualities are perhaps most vivid in the Abstract Expressionist paintings, where tenuous and delicate feelings are spread over great expanses of canvas—where the painters seem to be saying that they want to be monumental and are willing to work in the grandest of European manners, and where they also show, in the marks they make on the canvases, their frightened and impatient awareness of what it means to take on so much...

...The reader is not informed that it was at this time—in the late '40s and early '50sthat almost all of the Abstract Expressionists were finding their most distinctive and original styles...

...Trilling's beloved idol came on simply as an elderly queen camping all over the place," Barrett writes, unmindful of how he presents himself through his use of words...

...They seem defanged, too easily summarized...

...it says that most of the achievements of the men Barrett came up with proved futile or delusory...

...His ideas about what qualities make for world-historical art did harden and become simplified, and a school of painters (accompanied by dealers, critics, and museum curators) did come into being in the wake of those ideas, because, in the beginning at least, the ideas were irresistible to many people, including people of great talent...

...But elsewhere he slaps Rahv because "his mind was not logical but intuitive— and sometimes intuitive according to his own devious patterns...

...Barrett had been a pal of Delmore Schwartz's before the war, when Schwartz, then in his early twenties, was achieving renown in New York literary circles for his stories and poetry...

...When he points out the foibles, philosophic inconsistencies, and wrecked hopes of his influential friends, he does it in the spirit of a public-relations spokesman, someone who carefully presses his hands together and informs us that this is, unfortunately, an imperfect world and everything we do will mirror our flawed condition...

...When Barrett writes about Rahv's essays you feel that there is finally a floor under Barrett, something his opinions can be judged against...

...Barrett speaks for many people when he presents the "New York Intellectual" of those days so skeptically...

...He must be read slowly for his ideas to be absorbed, yet the effect of his sentences is of a great freight train hurtling by...

...The artists "had yet to make their big splash before the world and they were not rich...

...But the inner check that makes him pay lip service also keeps him from being truly caustic, withering...

...It is an account of one man's intellectual coming of age, and it has the qualities of a backward glance at a busy, crisscrossed time...

...It might be said that there was more energy in criticism at the time Barrett is writing about than in any art form except painting or perhaps poetry...

...The reader pulls back and is embarrassed, too, not only for Trilling and Forster but for Barrett, because there is something unseemlj in his avid desire to recollect Trilling's embarrassment and in the way he mangles Forster in the process...

...It takes the punch out of his gesture, which says "Screw you" to America, and "So you think you know everything about me...

...But he never pulls out the stops and says unequivocally that these men and women at one time or another wrote great criticism...

...He likes remembering the art scene and the Greenwich Village of those days as an American "Vie de Boheme...

...But then, in the cold, tone-deaf language of a supermarket celebrity tabloid, he returns to the "great gulf" between Forster's wellknown novels and "the spectacle of the aging queen turning on in public...

...He tells "dear Philip" that The Truants is but a "poor wreath" placed on "your grave...

...broke through," and that there was something "more youthful and yearning" underneath Rahv's "cynical postures of the ideologue...

...It's showy, flourishful...

...There is a grinding anger to him then...

...When Rahv died he left his money to Israel, an act that Barrett says "puzzled many," presumably because Rahv hadn't been known for Zionist sympathies or for being pro-Israel...

...Tying to create a gap between the supposedly idea-bound writing of his intellectual companions and the art and literature they were drawn to, Barrett subtly belittles those subjects...

...He wants us to see Rahv, Greenberg, and Trilling as fogged in by ideology, forced to forget the realities of life and to misconstrue the novels, paintings, and poems they wrote about...

...He is too determined to present them to us as bulls led this way and that by the ideological rings in their noses...

...He has been telling us that Rahv's political pieces are strident Marxist mouthings, and that, given the barest opportunity, Rahv, in conversation, would gleefully analyze people's motives to shreds...

...like rising young writers, lawyers, and politicians, they think a lot about where they fit in, and how they can advance their enterprise...

...He is in Rome during the last days of the war, serving in the Army, and receives a call one day from Edmund Wilson, who is there picking up atmosphere and information for a series of articles for the New Yorker on conditions in Italy...

...The sign says "scholastic," not "socialist," books...

...Greenberg didn't invent the idea of an ongoing tradition in art, he revitalized it for his time...

...Why was the moment recreated...

...The refugees feared that the Allies would allow Soviet officials to come through the camps and send them back to the Soviet Union...

...365...

...The English writer arrived with a person whose name Barrett has not thought worth looking up...

...Yet he never goes at them directly...

...to his friends and public...

...These painters, too, wanted their work to stand for one magnified thing...

...Whether in Meyer Schapiro's art lectures and writing, Saul Bellow's novels, or Mary McCarthy's theater reviews, ideas were made to live, ideological enemies were knifed brilliantly, and we were left convinced that no aspect of the world's history was foreign to these buoyant warriors...

...There is something forbidding and steely cold about many of these personalities and their work...

...He described the situation—and the fact that it was Barrett who drew his attention to it—in Europe Without Baedeker (1947...

...Barrett describes how Wilson goes to Milan at one point and sees a sign in a bookshop window saying "Socialist books are not sold here," and takes that as evidence that the political right is gaining ground in the north...

...But Wilson did...

...Curious, Barrett goes to the bookshop to see the sign, and it turns out that Wilson's Italian is faulty...

...There is a sense of crowding and nervousness and an awareness of what others may think behind Rahv's words...

...Barrett recalls the days when, in the late 1940s and early '50s, he worked for the formidable Philip Rahv and the somewhat more retiring William Phillips, the founders and editors of Partisan Review...

...It was the classic moment for Kline and Pollock and, possibly, for de Kooning, too, and also for artists Barrett does not mention: Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Barnett Newman...

...they knew that their art might become severe and flat in the process, but they wanted to run the risk...

...Rahv couldn't be Edmund Wilson because, for all that he may have wanted to speak with fluency and with the assurance, as he might have put it, of a landowner from one of the old families, he realized he had to be a writer of one thing, which was large and small: the endless trial of being modern...

...But a greater number of later artists rejected Greenberg, and found themselves by going around his path—and the path of the Abstract Expressionists...

...Barrett wants to set the historical record straight but he doesn't get the cleansed feeling he seeks...

...Yet these people have a balsa-wood lightness...

...It's possible, too, that he will have a sense of anger inside him that will grow as time goes on and that will always come out muffled...

...Their desire for that greatness and their doubts over whether they would achieve it did not, taken together, make them any friendlier as individuals...

...He left in the beginning of 1952, at the age of thirtynine, when differences with the editors, as friends and colleagues, made him feel it was time to move on...

...The most he can say for Rahv's piece on Franz Kafka, which appears as the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Kafka's stories and has for long been the essay most people know this author by, is that it is "fine...

...Rahv's unexpected parting gift to Israel also has something in it of the flaunting and wrenched farewells by suicide of many of the writers and painters of the time...

...He isn't prepared to see in de Kooning's work something more furious and frustrated than "Gee...

...There is the story of E. M. Forster's visit to New York...

...What he doesn't get is that while many of the most brilliant historians, essayists, poets, and painters of the period may have been drawn to one ideology or another, or may even have been ideologues (as he calls Rahv), ideology does not sum up the work they produced...

...Yet his writing is personal...

...To give us a taste of Philip Rahv's gossipiness...

...Nor does he want to imagine de Kooning's naivete and 363 childlike directness as possibly the response of a very canny and learned man, though that has occurred to many who have known and written about the painter, and it is felt in his recorded remarks and sly, witty statements about painting...

...He still sees it as a relief from the Partisan Review world...

...What he wants to remember is that in the good old days they were blissful, poor, unencumbered by dealers and reputations, and, perhaps best of all, living refutations, in their heartiness and simplicity, of the ideas that Clement Greenberg and, later, Harold Rosenberg, foremost among others, would see embodied in their art...

...He and Schwartz became associate editors, working under Rahv and Phillips, and for the next seven-odd years he was at or near the center of the quarterly that was left-wing in its politics, "modernist" in its literary values, and, by general consent, the most influential intellectual magazine, certainly in those years, in the United States...

...But from another point of view this interpretation makes mush out of Rahv's spirit...

...Barrett tells us that Rahv had no interest in or comprehension of the new American painting of the time, and the reader has no cause to doubt him...

...The Truants seems to lead up to the pages, toward the very end, where Barrett takes on Rahv's work as a critic...

...He takes the scene as an example of the deadly influence of critical thought, which had then already filtered down from the desks of writers such as Greenberg and Rosenberg, to destroy instincts in the studio...

...Of all his subjects, he has the most praise for Trilling as a writer...

...The Russia of his articles and portraits is in part the fantasy Russia that many Americans have long carried in their minds...

...They wanted to be the new American creators, men without a past, and they also felt themselves to be the last true ambassadors from old Europe to America...

...Judicious" is the tone Barrett must believe he achieves...

...Barrett's preference is for predictable intuition...

...His chapter entitled "The Painters' Club" is an intimate view of some of the Abstract Expressionists at the moment before their reputations were made...

...his ideas developed at the same pace, and with the same backtrackings, as the most difficult new art of the '40s, and his opinions and formulations may have given these artists an incentive to keep growing...

...That is the effect of The Truants, where you frequently don't know whose side Barrett is on, or whose interest he thinks he's serving...

...He keeps worrying the issue of how the figures he came to maturity with did or did not give themselves to their respective faiths—Rahv to Marx, Trilling to Freud, Greenberg to Kant and 362 "historical inevitability" in the development of art styles...

...What wasn't wonderful was the feeling that the warrior was showing off...

...Yet Rahv was very close to the Abstract Expressionists in his feelings, especially Rothko and NewmanRothko in the way he turns the great modern writers into mammoth far-reaching essences that hover before us, Newman in the way his determination to deal only with the largest issues often left his world stripped of texture, barren...

...Embedded in the flow of recollections are studies of Rahv, Schwartz, Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Clement Greenberg, Hannah Arendt, James Burnham, and Sidney Hook as thinkers and writers...

...In his best-known work, Irrational Man, a study of existentialism and its historical background, and in Time of Need and The Illusion of Technique, he presents ideas as they are embodied in biographical details and in works of literature and art as well as in formal studies of philosophy...

...If he were openly in conflict, he might seem more honest, and we might respect him more...

...The combination of fragility and headstrong, argumentative strength is also there in the thrusting quality of the writing...

...He was known for his devotion to Russian 19th-century literature, especially to Dostoevski and Tolstoy, who gave him his best opportunity to describe the profusion of social and psychological tensions that he felt the biggest characters in literature had to be visited by...

...And if Barrett wasn't able to get to Wilson before the article appeared in the magazine, why didn't he tell Wilson of his mistake thereafter, so that it would not be repeated when Wilson included his article in a book...

...You can tell that he didn't enjoy writing, and it rarely feels as if he discovered things about himself as he wrote...

...Handing down a B+ on Rahv's "Tolstoy: The Green Twig and the Black Trunk," he declares that it is "one of the best short introductions" to Tolstoy "as a writer...

...he really feels that he is looking at a vast nothing, that the figure he is writing about is bad for culture and life and that we will be led astray by admiring or believing in him...

...The Truants moves back and forth in a fluid, unchronological way, weaving together recollections of moments in the life of the magazine with descriptions of the eminent European writers who came to New York after the war and of the Abstract Expressionist painters and their milieu...

...He himself is more like the picture of the black-souled Rahv he has drawn than he knows...

...And when can one try to be candid about other people except when they are not listening...

...Barrett tells us that Rahv was obsessed with Edmund Wilson, and it is easy to see why—Rahv wanted to be an august critic...

...Rahv wrote about James's vision, which grew grander over the years, of the American girl as the figure who would come to be the rightful inheritor of "all the ages" of European refinement...

...You don't question the sincerity of the praise he offers Rahv and the others, but you don't feel that the praise goes deep, either...

...Petersburg night...

...Barrett, who has couched this story in a series of impressions of Wilson that leave the reader feeling that Wilson was pompous and self-centered and that his famous flair for languages and facts could not always be trusted, happens to be sent to Milan a few days after Wilson returns...

...Willem de Kooning looks at "the work of the old masters with the wonderful directness and energy of a child," and, more than once, Barrett has him responding to some supposedly profound formulation about the new American painting with "Gee...

...It has its own blend of tortuousness and velocity...

...As he presents it, it was a time of much jitterbugging and robust thoughts...

...Why, we ask, didn't he alert Wilson at the time that the Italian was mistranslated...

...360 Barrett is aware that he has ambivalent feelings —especially about Philip Rahv, who struck him as a secretive, egocentric, truculent, but also somehow weak and vacillating man, full of angers and hatreds that followed him like a black cloud and kept Barrett at a distance...

...He presents himself as something of an invisible, frustrated, but obliging, gentlemanly outsider, and that is the vantage point he still has...

...Yet he couldn't move with Wilson's limberness and command from one subject to another...

...But this waiting-for-later policy backfires on him...

...At least as early as right after the First World War, Americans sensed that they would take on the mantle of Europe, and journalists wondered when New York would become the new Paris...

...Barrett wants to put finishing touches on past history, but he himself is loose with facts...

...He believes they are somehow responsible for much of what he alludes to as the impoverishment and glibness of recent life...

...He is invariably in the thick of the most important distinctions from the first paragraph...

...When Barrett returned from active duty overseas, he picked up his friendship with Schwartz, who had become a figure at Partisan Review...

...Possibly this was because for many Americans who came of age in the '40s there was no better, more immediate way to do justice to the new themes and awarenesses that presented themselves than through criticism...

...For writers who had grown up in the Depression, criticism was also the most apt place to insist that art be no more important than the most crucial issues of life...

...Few novels of the time have the twisting, raw but precise declarations of feeling, the lively scorn and enthusiasm for daily life, and the lyrical appreciation for earlier American and European personalities and social conventions of the critical writing—contributed by fulltime critics, philosophers, poets, novelists, and historians—that found its way into Partisan Review and other small magazines...

...It was a fragile, self-conscious, and belligerent generation—maybe because it felt it had lived through the death of Europe and knew that the time had come for it to prove itself...

...Barrett wants us to know that Rahv would have understood, respected, and wanted nothing less than Barrett's owning up to his ambivalence...

...The reader believes that Barrett genuinely liked the Club and that he was especially fond of de Kooning and Franz Kline (Jackson Pollock, as Barrett saw him, tended to be either dead silent or on the verge of eruption or drunk and loutish...

...The risk almost seemed to be the point...

...Barrett's reader is informed that after the artists began making money the blissful days ceased, and some of the figures, de Kooning in particular, began drinking heavily...

...Rahv is often "judicial," as Barrett calls him, but he wasn't ever "judicious," which Barrett also says 364 he was...

...But it is also a subtle, unceasing--and, the reader may feel, not always conscious—attack on that time...

...If Barrett leaves us confused as to when artists began to be weighed down by ideas, it's possibly because he doesn't want to raise the question of what his Club friends did or did not achieve...

...this man is labeled Forster's "boyfriend, a London policeman...

...Barrett is a knowing judge of how the reputations of those he knew from his Partisan Review days have worn, and he has obviously enjoyed re-creating the sound of their voices, the way they moved, the lively cracks they made at each other's expense...

...The way he puts it, every time he lays a wreath he gets a go-ahead to dispense some more constructive criticism...

...Barrett's position is that these men—or at least de Kooning and Kline—were always warm and simple but fame somehow ruined everything...

...Reading Rahv now can be a little difficult, partly because his ideas about 19th-century and modern literature have become so widely accepted that they don't seem as if they were ever his own, partly because he doesn't spend time trying to re-create the texture of the writer he is presenting...

...His tone is that of a TV talk-show host who looks over his guest's shoulder at his audience and winks, as if to say, "We'll just bother with this one a little longer...

...Barrett wasn't surprised, though, because years before, in a conversation in Washington Square, when Rahv had been talking about the "tepidness" of life in America, he impetuously said he wished he were in Israel...

...He makes the requisite distinctions between the works Forster was then known for, which have no overt homosexual content, and the writings published later, where he tackled homosexual themes, and which are lesser works...

...he likes to correct, and you feel that he does this without being malicious, that he isn't fully aware of the effect he leaves...

...You wonder if they have become as musty as Barrett makes them, and you also wonder how much he wants to write about them...

...he dismisses each succeeding style as another empty trick...

...When he writes to sweep away the false views of other critics or to say how some novelist isn't truly modern, he seems to be facing the tundra as he puts the words down...

...Barrett sees the writers he came to maturity with as part of a grand design that encompasses American culture to this day...

...It expressed the trapped feeling so many had about their situation in history, and also their wanting to break loose from that entrapment...

...and then Barrett goes on to whittle away at those essays...

...But it was the generation of the '40s that felt the weight of the new cultural and political adulthood sitting on its head...

...Yet his ambivalence hasn't given him insights—it is simply the bind he is in...

...For the generation of the '40s, everything led up to the grand, confounding gesture, whether in one's work or life...

...But he never goes deeper, to see why this generation, in so many different guises, needed Marx—or Freud or the concept of "historical inevitability" —to set its hopes on, or how those overriding ideas were the catalytic agents for perceptions about art and literature that have their own life, and don't necessarily make us think, when we read them, of the ideas that fed them...

...The "best part of him," we are told, is in his essays about literature...

...In many ways, Rahv was writing about himself and his contemporaries—not only among the critics...

...The Truants leaves a very bleak, dead message...

...He doesn't feel himself to be a stranger in the world, or, if he does, he doesn't write from such a view...

...Barrett thought the subject would be of interest to Wilson, but Wilson, whom he has been portraying as someone who only "saw what he wanted to see," didn't, Barrett says, pursue the subject...

...As Barrett tells it, Schwartz came to him one day, and, in a scene that might be an illustration of the title of Schwartz's best-known story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," told him, without any prior word that this might happen, that he was now on the staff of the magazine...

...He doesn't give an idea of how varied and packed almost every single issue of Partisan Review was, or even how the magazine, as an object, looked...

...A former professor of philosophy at New York University, William Barrett might, as a writer, be called a portraitist of ideas...

...Tough Barrett sprinkles some diplomatic compliments in the paths of the people he's writing about, he never gives them the true laurel...

...It is the country of undiluted soul feelings, the place where happiness is always mixed with a sense of the painfulness and emptiness of things...

...He tells us he called the Eighth Street hangout generally known as the Club the Painters' Club, because that made it easier for his "literary friends" when he was talking about his downtown visits...

...The Truants leaves you with the grayed feeling that the immediate postwar era in New York was a time of fussing and bickering, mistakes and delusions, when everyone got it wrong somehow...

...He certainly isn't interested in anything that followed the A. E.s...

...But he presents himself as scarless and contented...

...He doesn't give the reader the remotest sense of how rich American criticism was then...

...but then the suspicion was beginning to dawn on me that the way that the intellectuals looked at things might not be the only or in all cases the best way of looking...

...He has dedicated his memoir "For Delmore and Philip, restless shades," and his opening chapter, on Rahv, is entitled "Prologue: A Mass for the Dead...

...He leaves the reader feeling that, while Rahv was important because many of his ideas have been picked up by teachers of literature, those ideas have the weight of very debatable notions...

...Attempting to justify his fault-finding tone, he says, "Our charity is needed more by the living, who are still struggling to cope with things, and who are easily upset by any disobliging remark...

...Barrett sees Rahv's will as a sign that, at the end, "something more human than literary...

...Months later," Barrett tells us, "when I 361 was back in the United States, I looked up an old New Yorker, and, sure enough, Wilson was telling its readers that rightist sentiment was running so high in Milan that bookstores would not sell socialist books...

...In a way, Barrett is a man of his time...

...He faults Rahv for his "simple and comprehensive explanation of the world, above all unquestioned, so that it could have the redeeming stability of religious faith...

...but he never says anything about the work of these artists...

...what you keep is a fishier feeling about why someone should smilingly dish his intellectual youth...

...One of Philip Rahv's most famous essays is "The Heiress of All the Ages," which might be called an ode, in the form of literary analysis, to Henry James's heroines...

...When he is dismissive and curt, he is Russian, too...

...Greenberg's influence on new art was vast in the '50s and for much of the '60s...

...What you take away, though, isn't a sense of loss or of a wasted period in Barrett's life...

...A meeting with Forster was arranged for Trilling, Forster's foremost critic in the United States and the author of an influential study of him...

...Barrett talks about going with a friend to a young painter's studio in the mid-'50s and finding her disconsolate about her work (which Barrett thinks is "not without its merits"), because she feels it may not add anything to "Painting...

...He tells us that during those days in Italy he drew Wilson's attention to the case of the Russian refugees in Rome...

...The subsequent history of the New York School was to be, at least in part, an indecent traffic with ideas, in the course of which it is really remarkable that some good painting managed to get done," he announces, not making it clear if the "traffic with ideas" stood in the way of the later development of the Abstract Expressionists or if this traffic got in the way of the "New York School" art that came after them...

...No doubt," he says, "my intellectual friends would have found many of the ideas of the painters crude or naive...

...Each man's time of exploration and indecision was now over, and in these years they were making the first and still most fresh-looking examples of the paintings that would give American art its first international renown...

...Barrett's is a legitimate way of interpreting what Rahv did...

...Barrett doesn't say much about this except that he was surprised, and that he accepted...

...Not feeling that estrangement has kept him a stranger to his own generation...

...Barrett has a schoolteacher's instinct for spotting mistakes of fact and logic...