Browsing Among the Brainy Set

...In response to Lillian Hellman's attack on Partisan Review in her book, Scoundrel Time-she charged the magazine with not protesting sufficiently against the blacklists of Communists?Phillips recalls a time when he and other writers who had broken with the party were kept from contributing to certain publications and getting university jobs "by the pressures and machinations of the Communists...

...by Hilton Kramer, whose magazine, the New Criterion, is described as "an organ of shrill polemics against all the people Kramer regards as not conservative enough or too liberal...

...We do not have "our" culture and "their" culture...

...He also seems quite sane beside many of those who people his memoirs...

...Reviewed by Walter Goodman There must be one or two notable American writers and critics of the past half century whom William Phillips did not run into during his decades as editor of the Partisan Review, but I wouldn't bet on it...

...He sees a resemblance in today's "disarmament unilateralists, the Greens in Germany, the anti-Israelis, the supporters of the PLO" to old Stalinists in at least one respect, "the combination of innocence and ideology...

...Rahv, who died in 1972, had a reputation for being a "difficult character," and Phillips takes this opportunity to define the word...

...He is distressed by the way he and his magazine have been "misrepresented" by William Barrett in his book, The Truants...

...Sometimes I feel that Podhoretz has been created by the Left...

...A pause to exchange compliments with Dwight and Mary and Sidney and Diana...

...The book ends on a melancholy note...

...A nod to the two Irvings, the two Normans and the two Lionels...

...Reading his memoirs is like walking into a West Side cocktail party...

...Phillips comments that the fabled Rosenfeld, who died too early to enjoy the university posts and grants that came to many of his peers in the 1950s, was ahead of his time in his eccentricities...

...Instead, "what one feels most strongly is that there is no central idea in our culture, no leading tradition, no main direction, only divergent themes and visions, expressing the chaos of modern life...

...Phillips emerges as something of a political naif, despite all the political wars in which he found himself...

...The reader may sympathize-to my mind, Partisan Review was on the side of the angels in its best years-yet not be wholly able to join the author in his nostalgia for a time when, as he himself shows, there was no less intellectual crookedness, opportunism and downright madness than we have at present...

...Phillips is mystified by the sudden rage of Clement Greenberg, which destroyed their relationship in the 1950s...

...Phillips' harshest language, however, is reserved for Philip Rahv, his co-editor for many years, who resigned in 1969 after prolonged and bitter infighting...

...He tells of Saul Bellow grieving over a review of The Adventures of Augie March because Norman Podhoretz had compared Bellow unfavorably with Dickens and Balzac...

...His almost ritualistic conservatism is a response to the foolishness and irresponsibility of the Left...

...Lionel Trilling' s reserve "amounted almost to a wall around him...

...None of this stopped him from telling of f the rest of the nation for its tastes and behavior...

...The end of relationships is a kind of theme of this book.These smart, talented, often whacky people, filled with ambition, obsessed with politics, jealous of those whom they most admired, brought to Manhattan's literary life the overheated emotions of the Bronx and Brooklyn kitchens where many of them had grown up...

...A smile for Saul and Meyer and Isaac...

...He sighs that "political naivete and bad faith are back again...

...Heremembers the Communist Party-liners of the 1930s who closed their eyes to the horrors of the Soviet Motherland ?Privately they knew everything, publicly they knew nothing"-And the sometime fellow travelers like Malcolm Cowley, Granville Hicks and Kenneth Burke who "danced to the Communist tunes...

...Norman Mailer gets the prize for the most gifted writer not to realize his gifts, and Phillips' admiration for Doris Lessing is couched in a way that is guaranteed not to increase the numbers of her readers...

...Today, Phillips writes, "Neat cultural divisions no longer exist...

...He describes a 1948 encounter between Arthur Koestler, then playing with Eastern religious thought, and Sidney Hook, the "superrationalist," ostensibly over philosophical and political matters, but really for the smiles of Mary McCarthy, long America's most attractive intellectual...

...A slanging match with Philip...

...He observes that Simone de Beau-voir's ignorance of American life and writing, and her poor grasp of English, never stopped her from asserting her pro-Soviet, anti-American dogmas in a most truculent manner...

...And along the way, a wave to Jean-Paul and Ignazio, in town for a few days, and a couple of action painters who are acting up...

...But Phillips' special animus these days is directed at the Right, the neo-conservatives...

...Even at its most exhilarating, much of the commotion over art and politics that Phillips tells us about seems now to have been more brilliant than sensible, more ingenious than honest, more an exercise in self-dramatization and self-promotion than an effort at understanding...

...Phillips does not miss the opportunity to get back at those who crossed him over the years, or who have lately published their own histories of the Partisan crowd...

...A snub for Lillian...

...Meyer Schapiro was "the nearest thing to a superb intellectual machine that I have ever met...

...Hecharges Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, with "idealizing the norms of respectability...

...Readers of The New Leader may be interested to learn that Isaac Rosenfeld, for a time this journal's book editor (at $15 a week), did a translation of The Waste Land into Yiddish...

...He's a marvelous steerer," she assured their passenger shortly before they crashed into another car...

...The lesson here, probably unintended, is that intellectuals are interesting and valuable people to have around, but it is not strictly necessary to take them at their own estimate of their worth...

...By his description, Rahv was "aggressive, flamboyantly assertive and domineering...

...Although Phillips is not strong on humor, he knows when the biggies are being amusing...

...He recalls a crazy London automobile ride with a drunk Kenneth Tynan-who could not drive when sober-Al the wheel whilehis wife worked the brakes and clutch...

...My favorite is Phillips commemorating the "unusually advanced" Partisan Review secretary who, he one day discovered, was typing all correspondence without the use of capital letters: "She said she was using avant-garde punctuation, which she thought appropriate to an avant-garde magazine...

...Phillips' award for "most tortured writer" goes to Delmore Schwartz, followed hard by John Berryman and Robert Lowell...

...Here are character sketches and thumbnail assessments of practically everyone who wrote for and edited the Partisan Review, the creation of a handful of people united in its great years by a commitment to modernism, literary innovation and radical (but staunchly anti-Stalinist) social and political thought...

...and, most particularly, by Norman Podhoretz...

...Except for his outburst at Philip Rahv, Phillips' tone is mild compared to the vituperation that appears to serve as ordinary discourse in his circles...

...By the '60s, with counterculture kitsch rampant, things had begun to come apart...

...Edmund Wilson, his nick-name of "Bunny" notwithstanding, was "a strange, remote, impressive figure...

...Phillips says of Podhoretz' book, Breaking Ranks, a sort of political autobiography in which Phillips and others were criticized for being soft on the Left: "By his own account, he was always right...

...The most exciting years of the Partisan Review were in the 1930s and '40s, when everybody was young and the political and esthetic battles were hot and straightforward...

...He was taken aback to learn that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was financed by the Central Intelligence Agency, and seems to have been startled to discover during a spell with the National Endowment for the Arts that political considerations are not ignored in the distribution of Federal funds...

...He was also competitive, bad-tempered, self-indulgent, bullying, disloyal and ruthless...