Walter Bagehot, writing in 1855, observed that “it is odd to hear that the Edinburgh Review was once thought an incendiary publication.” That was approximately half a century after the Edinburgh Review had been launched by Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, and Sydney Smith on its career of critical controversy and political partisanship. Younger readers of Partisan Review, coming to that venerable journal in 1996, more than fifty years after its founding by William Phillips and Philip Rahv, might be forgiven for entertaining a similar sense of wonder about a magazine that has enjoyed the status of an established institution for as long as they can remember. Its days as an “incendiary publication” have likewise passed into history.

As a consequence, attempting to explain to younger readers in the 1990s what it meant in 1937 to launch a literary magazine in New York that was at once Marxist, pro-modernist, and anti-Stalinist is likely to entail a feat of historical elucidation not unlike that required to explicate some of the more arcane mysteries of medieval Christian theology for a modern audience of the heathen. The lineaments of an entire historical epoch need to be reconstructed for even a minimal understanding of its impulses and orthodoxies to be grasped. It is not only that the pillars of Marxist belief have now crumbled beyond repair. Modernism, too, though it still accounts for the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century, has itself become an object of deconstructivist orthodoxy.

As for Stalinism and the fierce political and intellectual resistance it met with in the heyday of its influence in this country—a resistance in which Partisan Review played a significant role—that is another phenomenon that is nowadays only vaguely understood. About the cultural as well as the political consequences of Stalinism, our historians are only now—thanks, in part, to the opening of the Soviet archives--beginning to tell the full story of what amounted to a massive and largely successful campaign of ideological brainwashing, conspiracy, and intimidation. Add to all this the general level of historical ignorance about matters large and small that obtains even among the so-called educated classes, and you have a situation in which almost nothing about the cultural life of this century can any longer be taken for granted.

It is clearly as an attempt to correct this situation as far as the history of Partisan Review is concerned that Edith Kurzweil, who now serves as an editor of the magazine, has assembled a new anthology called A Partisan Century: Political Writings from Partisan Review. There have, of course, been several earlier anthologies drawn from the pages of Partisan Review. A Partisan Century differs from these in being wholly drawn from the magazine’s political writings, which, because Partisan Review was always primarily a literary magazine, may in some respects be considered the most perishable part of its history. That this turns out not to be entirely the case is itself a reflection of the special position that PR (as it came to be called) has occupied for a good deal of its history.

For PR is a literary magazine that was founded as a consequence of a decisive political quarrel, and it was in the nature of that quarrel that it did much to determine the way the journal subsequently conducted itself as a literary magazine. The original Partisan Review was a quarterly created in 1934 as a publication of the John Reed Club, itself an organ of the American Communist Party. Its program—the Party’s line at the time—was largely devoted to the promotion of so-called “proletarian” literature. This first Partisan Review proved to be short-lived, however. Two of its young editors, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, were soon discovered to be unacceptably critical of the “revolutionary” writing favored by the Party hierarchy. They were promptly accused of “bohemian individualism”—a serious charge in Communist circles—by the literary editor of the weekly New Masses, the Party’s principal cultural journal.

Before that dispute could be resolved, however, the Party received orders from Moscow to shut down its network of John Reed Clubs. These were now to be replaced by another creation of the Party—the League of American Writers—signaling a shift in the international Party line. The call for a literature that supported a Soviet-style revolution and stigmatized bourgeois writers as class enemies was suddenly abandoned in favor of an alliance with “antifascist” liberals that included a good many of those very same bourgeois writers.

What had happened, of course, was the emergence of Hitler as a credible threat to Stalin’s plans for the Soviet Union. Stalin now needed allies in the Western democracies for his “antifascist” crusade. In 1935, the new line was proclaimed by the Comintern as the Popular Front, which effectively supplanted the earlier “united” front in the service of the revolutionary proletariat. None of this had anything to do with an interest in literature, of course, but it completely altered the way literature was now to be assessed by the Communists and their literary fellow travelers.

As a Trotskyist critic sardonically observed at the time: “Sinclair Lewis has been miraculously transformed from a petty-bourgeois writer, who turned his back upon the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat, into a literary hero of the Popular Front.” Many other middlebrow talents, theretofore denounced in Communist circles as reactionary lackeys of capitalist exploitation, were now similarly embraced as progressive exponents of the Kremlin’s “antifascist” crusade.

Liberals flocked to this new progressive banner. The Comintern’s Popular Front proved, in fact, to be an immense success. To this day, moreover, the history of its role in shaping the future course of American cultural life—not only in the 1930s but for a considerable period thereafter—has never been written. The Popular Front mind— intellectually middlebrow, artistically philistine, politically “progressive,” and both sentimental and simplistic in its views of human nature and the nature of the Soviet Union—became a staple of American cultural life. It exerted enormous influence on Hollywood movies, the Broadway theater, popular fiction, mainstream journalism, the academy, the liberal clergy, and the liberal weeklies. “What had happened,” wrote Robert Warshow in an essay called “The Legacy of the 30s” (1947), “was more than the defection of one part of the intelligentsia. The whole level of thought and discussion, the level of culture itself, had been lowered.” It was in this sense that a good deal of American cultural life may be said to have been Stalinized, and at certain intervals—in the cultural revolution of the 1960s, for example, and with the imposition of political correctness and multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s—has been repeatedly re-Stalinized ever since.

It was the distinction of the new Partisan Review, which was re-launched in 1937 as an independent left-wing literary journal, that it set itself in open opposition to this Stalinization of culture and politics. The magazine’s literary, artistic, and critical loyalties were now more openly highbrow and modernist. Its general political orientation remained Marxist, but what this meant in practice was to be a source of conflict within the magazine itself for some years to come. The new PR’s political identity was, in any case, more clearly established by the magazine’s enemies—the Communist Party and its literary fellow travelers—than by its own political avowals.

Even before its first issue was off the press in December 1937, the new PR was castigated in the New Masses and the Daily Worker as “fascist,” “Trotskyist,” “slanderers of the working class,” “agents provocateurs,” and so on, and it wasn’t long before the liberal weeklies joined the Stalinist chorus, with Malcolm Cowley denouncing the magazine in The New Republic as “anti-Soviet” and a perpetrator of “literary crimes.” By the time the latter charge was brought, PR had already published fiction and poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore Schwartz, Wallace Stevens, James Agee, Eleanor Clark, Louise Bogan, and Dylan Thomas, and criticism by Edmund Wilson, Meyer Schapiro, and William Troy. Cowley had meanwhile written a rousing defense of the Moscow Trials for The New Republic. It was a measure of the power enjoyed by Stalinist orthodoxy at that moment--1938 —that Cowley could bring the charge of “literary crimes” against PR without being thought ridiculous. On the other hand, it was the rhetorical violence of the Stalinists’ attack on the revamped Partisan Review that instantly established it as an “incendiary” journal.

On the new board of editors at PR, William Philips and Philip Rahv were joined by Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, F. W. Dupee, and George L. K. Morris. Macdonald was in some respects the most militant in his political radicalism, espousing a brand of Trotskyism with which, for better or worse, PR became identified for a time. It is one of the disappointments of A Partisan Century, by the way, that Edith Kurzweil has not felt under any obligation to clarify the editors’ rather muddled relation to Trotsky and his ideas in these early years. He was clearly a much respected figure in PR circles—rather too respected, considering his political crimes in the early years of the Bolshevik regime. He was published in PR—Professor Kurzweil reprints a piece on “Art and Politics” from 1938—and his assassination in 1940 was treated as a momentous event. (A Partisan Century reprints James T. Farrell’s eulogy to “the Old Man,” as Trotsky was affectionately known among his admirers. Omitted, unfortunately, is Dwight Macdonald’s even more effusive tribute to Trotsky.) The exact extent to which the Old Man served as a political mentor for PR remains as blurred as ever in this volume.

By the early 1940s, however, PR had already won a firm place for itself as a literary magazine of considerable distinction. In its issues for 1941, in quick succession it published T. S. Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages,” W. H. Auden’s “At the Grave of Henry James,” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Three Key West Poems,” and began a regular series of “London Letters” by George Orwell. The following year, it again published Eliot— this time an essay on “The Music of Poetry”—as well as Marianne Moore’s memoir of The Dial, fiction by Saul Bellow and Edmund Wilson, and reviews by Robert Penn Warren, Weldon Kees, and Randall Jarrell. The magazine was well on its way to being the premier American literary journal of its time.

Owing, however, to conflicts among the editors as to what a properly Marxist or socialist response to the war should be, the political course of PR in the early years of the war was a good deal more problematic. These conflicts ripened into a full-fledged factional dispute when, in the July-August issue of 1941, the magazine published “10 Propositions on the War,” a socialist manifesto drafted by Macdonald in collaboration with Clement Greenberg, who was now a member of PR’s board of editors.

This hopelessly obtuse political declaration, which Professor Kurzweil reprints in A Partisan Century, confidently predicted that “in the war or out of it, the United States faces only one future under capitalism: Fascism.” It was therefore firmly believed that “to support the Roosevelt-Churchill war regimes clears the road for fascism from within and blocks the organization of an effective war effort against fascism outside.” It thus followed that “all support of whatever kind must be withheld from Churchill and Roosevelt.”

And what, in the view of these militant socialist theorists, would “an effective war effort against fascism” consist of? “The only way this conflict can be won in the interests of mankind as a whole,” the manifesto concluded, “is by some method of warfare that will transfer the struggle from the flesh of humanity to its mind. Such a method is offered only by the cause of socialist revolution.”[1]

This exercise in utopian Trotskyite nonsense proved to be too much for Philip Rahv, who promptly dismissed the Greenberg-Macdonald manifesto as “a kind of academic revolutionism which we should have learned to discard long ago.” (Rahv’s response is also reprinted in A Partisan Century.) “The orthodox Marxists,” Rahv wrote, “thought that the imperialists of both camps will exhaust themselves and then they will take over.” He pointed out, however, that “there has been no stalemate; England has survived, but her continental allies have all suffered total defeat. Now Russia is next, and if Stalin fails to stem the invasion it won’t be a Trotskyite but Hitler’s Gauleiter who will be installed in the Kremlin.”

No sooner had Rahv’s response been published in the November-December 1941 issue of PR than the United States was indeed at war, thanks to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and in its first issue for 1942 PR now took the position of having, in effect, no position on the war. In a statement signed by the editors, the magazine acknowledged that “for some time … the editors have disagreed on major political questions” and would henceforth “express themselves on the [war] issue as individuals.” PR’s main task now, said the statement, is to preserve cultural values against all types of pressure and coercion.”

Yet even this concession to socialist piety failed to satisfy Macdonald, who was intent upon playing the academic revolutionist. The issue was settled for Clement Greenberg—for the moment, anyway—when he went into the U.S. Army. Macdonald proved to be recalcitrant. As William Barrett later observed: “For him every venture into politics was a leap toward the Absolute.” He quit PR, declaring that the magazine was no longer political enough, and promptly started his own magazine. It was called, appropriately, Politics, and its position on the war might best be described as high-minded pacifism, while its views on other political matters cleaved more to a variety of libertarian anarchism than to Marxist socialism. After Politics folded in 1949, Macdonald took a sabbatical from politics to write for The New Yorker, a magazine he had hilariously ridiculed in the first number of the reborn PR in 1937. It wasn’t until the 1960s, when the Vietnam War and the emergence of the counterculture provided yet another Absolute he could pursue with impunity, that he returned to the political wars.

It may well be asked: Why, more than half a century after these sometimes solemn, sometimes comic-opera contretemps, is it still worth recalling the political twists and turns that animated them? In retrospect, after all, Dwight Macdonald was never a serious political thinker—nor, for that matter, was Philip Rahv. Compared to its brilliant contributions to literature and the arts, moreover, PR’s contribution to political thought was, with one exception, never either clear-headed or dependable. Its single shining virtue as a political journal was the anti-Communism that derived from the editors’ early rejection of Stalinism, yet even that great virtue was severely compromised in the radical uproars of the 1960s. As Professor Kurzweil discreetly acknowledges, in the 1960s there was “a lessening of the magazine’s anti-Communism.”

Yet it is precisely in such surrenders to political and cultural accommodation that the history of Partisan and its literary circle does so much to illuminate the moral temper of the period the magazine has traversed. A more thorough examination of PR’s political history than is provided by A Partisan Century would be obliged to address itself to a grim paradox: that the literary journal which established its political and cultural independence in the heyday of the Popular Front and carried the anti-Communist banner in the Cold War of the 1950s, so readily succumbed once again to the totalitarian temptation in the 1960s.

Among the editors who guided the breakaway PR in 1937, three thoroughly disgraced themselves in the Vietnam War period: Dwight Macdonald, who made common cause with the anti-intellectual, anti-democratic radicals whose pop-culture values he had spent his whole professional career ridiculing; Mary McCarthy, who volunteered her services as an apologist for the Communist regime in North Vietnam, going so far in the process as to vilify George Orwell for his anti-Communist writings; and Philip Rahv, who ended his days as what Frederick Crews aptly described as a “born-again Leninist,” and capped the debacle of his career by mounting a Stalinoid attack on one of the writers —Henry James—to whose work he had devoted some of his own best writing. By the end of the 1960s, the betrayals perpetuated by these writers were more frequently to be found in The New York Review of Books, but PR was clearly doing its best to keep up with the radical momentum already established by The New York Review.

In this connection, it isn’t entirely accurate to claim, as Professor Kurzweil does in her introduction to A Partisan Century, that PR always “eschewed trendy politics.” However true this was in the late 1930s, when PR was bucking the Stalinist tide, it was no longer the case after the Second World War. By the 1950s, certainly, its politics were distinctly “trendy.” To its great credit, PR went very far in embracing the pro-American, pro-Western “trendy politics” of liberal anti-Communism during the Cold War years of the 1950s, and to its discredit it gave warm welcome to the anti-American, anti-Western politics of the Vietnam War period in the 1960s.

To the re-Stalinization of the political Left in the 1960s PR offered a lot less resistance than it had mustered against the original Stalinist assault thirty years earlier, and to the re-Stalinization of culture in the 1960s it offered scarcely any resistance at all. Over time, to be sure, the magazine has fortunately recovered some of the ground it had ceded to the radical Left in the darkest days of the anti-war movement and the counterculture. Its symposium on “The Politics of Political Correctness” in 1993, for example, is one of the best discussions of the subject that we have. (A Partisan Century reprints Steven Marcus’s valuable contribution to that symposium, an essay called “Soft Totalitarianism.”) Yet there is no denying that the 1960s caused great damage to the magazine. Its position of intellectual leadership fell hostage to the authority of the new radicalism and the “new sensibility.”

All of this would have been made a lot clearer to readers in 1996 if Professor Kurzweil had not omitted certain watershed contributions to PR from the late 1960s. Take, as an egregious example, Susan Sontag’s contribution to the magazine’s symposium on “What’s Happening to America?” in the Winter 1967 issue. This was the piece that contained the never-to-be-forgotten assertion that “the white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions —which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.” In a volume purporting to trace the course of PR’s political history, this remarkable pronouncement—the most extreme expression of racialist ideology ever to appear in the magazine—certainly merited a prominent place. This wasn’t Malcolm X or Eldridge Cleaver speaking. This was the doyenne of the “new sensibility.” Yet this historic utterance is passed over in favor of Sontag’s better-known “Notes on ‘Camp.’ ”

Frankly, I think this omission represents a failure of nerve—to use a phrase that PR once made famous. So does the omission of that other emblematic expression of the “new sensibility”—Richard Poirier’s essay, “Learning from the Beatles,” in the Fall 1967 issue of PR.[2] By that time, alas, it was no longer very clear to the readers of PR as to who was actually in charge of the magazine’s affairs. Rahv, though his name still appeared on PR’s masthead, had decamped to a professorship at Brandeis, and was very outspoken—among friends, anyway—in his bitter denunciation of the “swingers” who had seized control of the magazine. PR had meanwhile moved to Rutgers, where Richard Poirier was installed as an editor. William Phillips remained as chairman of the magazine’s editorial board, but it was no secret that he wasn’t entirely happy with PR’s new alliances.

It wasn’t until he was able to take the magazine to the more conservative intellectual environment of Boston University that PR began to regain some of its old footing. Yet by then the magazine, with Mr. Phillips still in charge, faced a different kind of challenge: how to remain a recognizably liberal journal when so many of its actual intellectual affinities now lay with writers and artists whose loyalties are more conservative than PR wished to be seen to be. That, it seems to me, remains the dilemma of Partisan Review at the present time.

For certain writers and intellectuals of my own generation, however, the earlier Partisan Review, the magazine we were first drawn to in the late 1940s and early 1950s, will always occupy a special place in our experience. At that moment in our lives, PR was more than a magazine. It was an essential part of our education, as much a part of that education as the books we read, the visits we made to the museums, the concerts we attended, and the records we bought. It gave us an entrée to modern cultural life—to its gravity and complexity and combative character—that few of our teachers could match (and those few were likely to be readers of or contributors to PR). It conferred upon every subject it encompassed—art, literature, politics, history, and current affairs—an air of intellectual urgency that made us, as readers, feel implicated and called upon to respond. If, later on, we began to question the perfect confidence that PR seemed to bring to its pronouncements on every issue, and to understand the unacknlowledged contradictions that lay concealed beneath its style of apodictic authority—well, that too was an essential part of our education.

Elsewhere, to be sure, there were critics who did more to shape our comprehension of the disciplines that interested us—B. H. Haggin and Virgil Thomson on music, Edwin Denby on dance, Stark Young and Eric Bentley on theater, and the New Critics on poetry. On political matters, too, Elliot Cohen’s Commentary soon outdistanced PR as the principal intellectual organ of liberal anti-Communism. Yet well into the 1950s, despite the quarrels and recantations and expulsions that marked its history in that still misunderstood decade, PR retained its authority for us—and not only for us, as I quickly learned when I made my own first contribution to the magazine as a critic.

In the spring of 1953, I sent an essay on the contemporary art scene to Philip Rahv, whom I had met the summer before at the School of Letters in Indiana. (I had gone there to study Dante with Allen Tate and Shakespeare with Francis Fergusson.) Much to my astonishment, Rahv accepted the piece and promptly published it in the July/August issue of PR. I had already published some literary criticism elsewhere, but this was my debut as an art critic and I quickly discovered that, owing to the intellectual authority which PR then enjoyed, publication in the magazine was in itself a ticket to a career I wasn’t yet certain that I wanted. Invitations to write for other publications—including one from Clement Greenberg to contribute to Commentary— soon came pouring in, and I woke up one fine day to discover that the world, or at least the part of it with which I was now becoming acquainted, considered me a professional art critic.

It was then that I began seeing a good deal of Philip Rahv, first in New York and then in Boston when he took up his appointment at Brandeis. I liked him—when the spirit was upon him, he could be very generous and wildly funny—but I never quite trusted him. Listening to the scurrilous things he habitually said about his closest friends and colleagues, I never doubted for a moment that he was likely to be saying the same sorts of things about me to them. I somehow knew the day would come when I, too, would be classed as an enemy.

And so it did in the early 1970s, not long before his death. A few years earlier, when he broke with PR to start his own magazine, called Modern Occasions, he asked me to write something for it, and I did—an essay on art and politics. He then asked me to join his staff as managing editor. This I declined to do, and not only because I was then happily employed at The New York Times. The prospect of placing my professional life in Philip’s hands was simply unthinkable. By that time, it was plainly evident that the principal mission of Modern Occasions was the settling of old scores, real or imaginary, with Rahv’s former colleagues at PR. I was horrified by the attacks he published on Clement Greenberg and Lionel Trilling, and told him so. Yet he continued to importune me for further contributions, and the end came when I told him I would be sending my essay on “The Age of the Avant-Garde”—the introduction to my first book—to Norman Podhoretz at Commentary, not to Modern Occasions. He never spoke to me again, though I gather he had much to say about me to his circle of young acolytes in Boston.

I did not get to know William Phillips until after Rahv’s death. We’ve had our disagreements, and will no doubt continue to have others, but I nevertheless consider him a friend. And the feat he has achieved in keeping Partisan Review going, through good times and bad, is unequaled, I believe, in the entire history of American literary journals. It is doubtful, moreover, that The New Criterion would be what it is today if PR had not been what it was when I discovered it more than half a century ago. Let me close, then, as I began, by quoting Walter Bagehot. “If in the [preceding] pages we seem to cavil and find fault,” wrote Bagehot, “let it be remembered, that the business of a critic is criticism; that it is not his business to be thankful; that he must attempt an estimate rather than a eulogy.” That is what I have thought important to attempt here.

Notes
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1. A Partisan Century: Political Writings from Partisan Review, edited by Edith Kurzweil; Columbia University Press, 409 pages, $49; $19.50 paper. Go back to the text.
2. It is worth recalling that the United States was not yet officially at war when this was written. Yet most of continental Europe was already under Nazi control, Japan was advancing in its conquest of Asia, and Britain was still conducting its lonely struggle for survival. Go back to the text.
3. “Well, sometimes they are like Monteverdi,” wrote Mr. Poirier, “and sometimes their songs are even better than Schumann’s.” And: “It could be said that they know what Beckett and Borges know but without any loss of simple enthusiasm or innocent expectation, and without any patronization of those who do not know.” In the end, the Beatles were firmly placed among “the very great.” Go back to the text.