The 'Partisan' Impact

...But to many students who were genuinely wrestling with the problems of the 1960s the New York Intellectuals' anti-Communism of the Left shone through as an honorable, principled, albeit not easy, path IF THE DECADE of the '60s was difficult for everyone, for the New York Intellectuals it was a disaster, for what community of opinion they shared fell apart The Vietnam war was a major cause of the disintegration, pushing a few of the group into vociferous support of that unfortunate venture and a few others to Hanoi, while scattering the rest across the spectrum of American opinion More devastating still, I would say, was the Kulturkampf that raged during those years Nothing divided the New York critics more from their younger readers, nothing isolated them so much from the currents of their time, as the controversy that developed over artistic achievement and esthetic standards As critics, the New York Intellectuals were identified with the cause of modernism in the arts, the complex, abstract, difficult writings of authors like Joyce, Pound and Eliot, and the painting of the New York School, Pollock, Kline and de Kooning Little in their critical canon equipped them to deal with the work that most excited the '60s generation, or with the media in which it was being created—film and music A few of the New York Intellectuals had written on movies, almost always from a "high-art," stratified standpoint But the '60s brought an upheaval in taste led by critics like Andrew Sams and Pauline Kael that focused attention on American directors the Partisan Review crowd dismissed as Hollywood hacks Film societies sprouted up on campuses across the country dedicated to showing the pictures of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and John Ford, leaving the New Yorkers behind There was little that someone whose standards had been formed by "The Waste Land" and Ulysses could say about Hitchcock's Psycho or Hawks' Rio Bravo The position of the New York critics was made still worse by the fact that the European directors whom they applauded as true artists within the modernist tradition extolled the very same American films and filmmakers they were dismissing In music the New York Intellectuals were even more at a loss...

...Of all the arts, it was the one they seemed to care least about Irving Howe, for instance, placed it "along the margins of social life," a view that would flabbergast any European intellectual And it was the art form the younger generation responded to most completely, from a direction that was utterly foreign to Partisan Review The magazine was the champion of the avant-garde, the kids were listening to rock 'n* roll There was no common ground...

...For what was modernism to the Beatles, or the Beatles to modernism'' Today, Lennon / McCartney songs are as much a part of the landscape as the Empire State Building (or "The Waste Land"), and the New York Intellectuals still haven't recovered They probably never will It is therefore appropriate that retrospectives have begun to trickle out from the group Some of them are invaluable for anyone interested in the ideas that have molded our era I would recommend one of the earliest, Dwight Macdonald's marvelously entertaining autobiographical sketch written for Encountering 1957 and reprinted as the introduction to his collection, Politics Past, also Bell's topographical essay, to be found in The Winding Passage, and Howe's deeply felt, rather rueful depiction, "The New York Intellectuals A Chronicle and a Critique," originally published in Commentary and collected in Howe's Decline of the New To these pieces must now be added Barrett's The Truants As a memoirist of the circle, Barrett possesses some unique quali fications apart from his experience as a Partisan Review editor His contacts were extensive He was an intimate of Delmore Schwartz He had close connections to the New York School artists His training in philosophy gave him a link to Hannah Arendt, as well as a historical role as one of the first to introduce existentialism to the American public With a foot in the academic community, he even encountered the young Henry Kissinger (whose talent was already so obvious that Barrett predicted, "this young man will go far, he will end by becoming a dean") Yet Barrett was as much an outsider as an insider He wasn't Jewish, while most of the group was, and he was modest, a good listener in a bunch of talkers When Barrett imagines himself a movie star, it isn't as Jimmy Cagney, but as a supporting player, Frank McHugh This detachment gives him the ability to outline sharply and fairly issues the Partisan writers fought over, his discussion of the Lionel Trilling/Delmore Schwartz debate is a model of concision In addition, Barrett has a great talent for character-portraiture, for searching out the root of people, what he calls their "pietas " His Mary McCarthy one remembers for her childlike playfulness, his Trilling for a quality of secular rationalism at once deep and limiting But the finest portrait?and the center of the book—is that of Philip Rahv, the domi-nant figure at Partisan Review and Barrett's choice as the archetypal New York Intellectual Rahv is described here as arrogant, rude, secretive, nihilistic, cowardly, ruthless, nonetheless, he emerges bigger than life, a large spirit whose failings prevented him from being a great man I found this picture extremely moving, sadder even than Barrett's account of that unhappy individual, Delmore Schwartz Where I think Barrett goes awry is in his negativism He has turned in his later years to neoconservatism, and this leads him to downplay his radical youth, to underrate the accomplishments of his early intimates The very title of his book is a slap at his past Embattled as ever, he casts his spears at liberals, who he feels have altered their fellow-traveling habits very little in 35 years He is wrong, and a great deal of the credit for the change goes to the New York Intellectuals Because of his newfound conservatism, too much space in The Truants is given over to apologies Barrett worries that he is writing about an obscure coterie of no particular interest or importance to contemporary readers He has nothing to apologize for...

...Writers & Writing THE 'PARTISAN' IMPACT BY BARRY GEWEN WILLIAM BARRETT's touching, thoughtful, instructive, gossipy, sad memoir, The Truants Adventures Among Intellectuals (Anchor/Doubleday,270pp ,$15 95)is,to my knowledge, the most intimate portrait we yet have of that remarkable collection of men and women gathered under the rubric of the New York Intellectuals About 50 writers and critics belonged to this circle, including the Trillings, Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Sidney Hook, Mary McCarthy, Clement Greenberg, Hannah Arendt, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, Irving Knstol, and, slightly later, Norman Podhoretz and Susan Sontag Hundreds more hovered around the perimeter, and ties extended overseas to Europeans like Orwell, Koestler, Sartre, Camus, Aron, and Silone Given such a line-up, their story constitutes one of the central chapters of contemporary American history Barrett's book touches on only a portion of the New York I n-tellectuals, those he was acquainted with personally, but since he got to know them while working in the late '40s and early '50s as associate editor of Partisan Review, the magazine that served as the group's bristling nucleus, his testimony is especially rich and valuable And to this reader, at least, his reminiscences provoke personal remembrances, in particular two brief memories trom the early 1960s A friend, now a prominent historian but at the time a graduate student taking his first few professional steps, received notice that one of his reviews had been accepted by Paittsan Review Longer and more impressive pieces of his had already been published in other journals where an appearance meant tar more to a budding academic career, vet this new acceptance carried a special significance for him Smiling broadly, he danced into the room whciea number ot us were scaled and chanted "I'm a New York Intellectual, I'ma New Yot k Intellectual " Paitisan Review was bv then a much diminished force in American letters, but we all understood his delight (We were also a little envious ) I recall, too, Dwight Macdonald coming to speak in Boston My roommate and I, great admirers of his mordant and erudite polemical style, attended the lecture, and at theend of the question-and-answer session asked him if he would have the time later that day to join us for a drink at our apartment Although Macdonald took our address, we weren't surprised when he failed to appear What did surprise us was the bnet note we received a week later thanking us for the invitation and apologizing that his tight schedule hadn't allowed him to come Macdonald could not know how pleased we were to get this two-sentence letter, typos and all, but once again friends understood We had received a direct communication from one of the luminaries of what seemed to us a very charmed circle indeed Such youthful enthusiasms are normally associated with the kinds of emotional outpourings generated by rock or film stars Intellectuals are hardly expected to have "fans," certainly not writers and thinkers whose most influential work consisted of short critical pieces written primarily m the v ears surrounding World War II for magazines read by approximately one-hundredth of 1 per cent ot the American public Yet the New York Intellectuals plaved a major part in shaping the ideas of a large number of inquisitive, bookish, dissatisfied college students in the late'50s and earlv '60s, in many cases the major part The remarks ot Mary McCarthy or Daniel Bell or Harold Rosenberg in Partisan Review, Com-mentary, THE NEW LEADER and a host ot other magazines including bv then establishment outlets like Esquire and the New Yorker, counted for more than anything professors were saying in the classroom Not that we necessarily agreed with the opinions ot the New York Intellectuals For one thing, they usually didn't agree with each other, an aspect of their approach, and perhaps the feature that most readily caught the attention of younger readers, was their willingness—one might say eagerness—to attack each other in print For another, as the '60s wore on and the counterculture blossomed, whatever might be considered their collective perspective probably produced more disagreement than agreement between them and their youthful audience Nonetheless, even when the gap was greatest, for many of the '"60s generation" if not its most publicized element, the views of the New York Intellectuals could never be ignored or dismissed Having given us our foundations, they were our Elders, so to speak, our most authoritative parental conscience THEIR CONTINUING prestige among my friends and thousands of others rested, I think, on two bases Most important was their role as an American intelligentsia—their commitment to expressing and promoting ideas and values, as well as to living their lives accordingly They provided standards in both word and deed This role has been discussed from many angles in recent years, but its meaning for younger people can best be understood by comparing the New York Intellectuals to the obvious alternative in the world of thought, the academic community There, ideas too frequently were used merely as building blocks in the construction of a career, books were charted as pieces of capital, knowledge became a commodity to be chopped up into dry little pieces called specialties To the New York Intellectuals, by contrast, ideas were vibrant, active weapons that signified what life was about Instead of seeking tiny academic territories of expertise to be defended like nests of chicks, they were all over the place, free-floatingintelhgences writing on virtually everything that was important to thinking men and women of their time "What do you specialize in," the young Daniel Bell was asked "Generalizations," herephed Yet the New York Intellectuals were not dilettantes They did not play at erudition, or cultivate themselves for the sake of cultivation They meant what they thought, even when they were constantly changing their positions Thus their fierce polemical style, the blood—theirs and others'—spattered on the pages As Barrett explains, a high degree of courage was required for this life of the mind, this willingness to plunge into existence armed only with one's convictions When he first met McCarthy, Macdonald and Rahvin 1937, shortly after they had created the modern Partisan Review from the ashes of a defunct Stalinist periodical, he was filled with awe "To my youthful eyes they belonged to the great world outside the walls of academy where I was still drudging for a degree Theirs was the world of bohemia and the arts, of political movements and countermovements, bold and sweeping ideologies, and they were the intrepid spirits who bravely walked within that world They were therefore beings invested in my eyes with a strange and mysterious glamour, and I felt tongue-tied and stupid in their presence " Since then the motives of the New York Intellectuals have been called into question Human beings, they proved susceptible over the years to the bitch goddesses of fame, money and power I think they generally remained far more upright, much less easily seduced, than the criticisms of them would have us believe Whatever the case, for many young readers in the Eisenhower-Kennedy period the New York Intellectuals retained the intimidating aura of heroic idealism Barrett describes He also puts his finger on the second source of their influence The New York Intellectuals were among the earliest vigorous opponents of Stalin "Had they criticized the Soviet Union from the point of view of the Right or even the Center," Barrett writes, "I, like most of the radical youth of my time, would have turned my back on them But these intellectuals of the new Partisan Review were attacking Stalin and the Soviet Union from the point of view of a purer Marxism, and it was above all the purity of their radicalism that lured me on ' By the early '60s "purer Marxism" was a rather questionable if not dated goal to be pursuing (far from trying to be purer, the people I knew often could not decide if they were Marxists or not), and even the word "radical" might have made my friends uncomfortable("politically active" was more like it) Otherwise, Barrett's comments applied as much to them as to him The New York Intellectuals maintained a special status because they were anti-Commun-ists with a difference, anti-Communists of the Left In The Truants, Barrett stresses the first half of that equation—the anti-Communism During the late '30s and '40s, when fellow-traveling was socially acceptable and Stahn was "Uncle Joe" to thousands of American liberals, the radicals around Partisan Review, Trotskyists primarily, performed a crucial public service in exposing the threat of the Soviet Union Their message—that not all "progressives" were friends, that horrors could be unleashed in the cause of fighting injustice greater than the injustice itself—is one that every generation can bear hearing Barrett is proud of the pioneering work he and his co-editors did in denouncing Left totalitarianism, and he has reason to be For later readers, however, I would say it was the second half of the equation that was the more important Growing up in the United States after World War II, one inhaled anti-Commumsm with the very air one breathed, and it took a real leap of the imagination to understand that anti-Sovietism in the 1930s was a courageous stance—especially since '50s anti-Communism had become harnessed in many quarters to unsavory positions that are still influential today It was used as a cloak for reaction and demagoguery, a rationale for opposing revolution everywhere except behind the Iron Curtain, an excuse for following a policy of "no enemies on the Right " The '60s produced an inevitable backlash against so simplistic a politics, sending some of the loudest members of the counterculture into fairly exotic realms of political non-think Maoism, Castroism, Albania-ism, anything rather than anti-Communism...