Journal's Closing Spells End of an Era

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
April 17, 2003
Journal's Closing Spells End of an Era
By EMILY EAKIN

Partisan Review, the quarterly journal of culture and
politics that emerged from the ideological ferment of
the 1930's to become the house organ for a generation
of brilliant American intellectuals and writers, is
ceasing publication after 66 years. The journal's
final issue, a tribute to its co-founder and editor in
chief, William Phillips, who died in September at 94,
is being mailed to subscribers this week.

The journal's circulation — never more than 15,000 —
had dwindled to about 3,200. And its influence had
long ago been supplanted by better financed
high-profile competitors like The New Republic and The
New York Review of Books. But it was the death of Mr.
Phillips that proved decisive in determining its fate.

Edith Kurzweil, Mr. Phillips's widow and the journal's
current editor, said that after her husband's death,
ownership reverted to Boston University, its major
financial backer, and that John Silber, the
university's chancellor, had decided that the time had
come to close it. The Chronicle of Higher Education
reported the news yesterday. 

"It was William Phillips's legacy," Ms. Kurzweil said.
"I didn't think we should water that down." 

In an interview Dr. Silber said that after Mr.
Phillips's death he had polled a "broad spectrum of
intellectuals," and that "the unanimous opinion" was
that the review had become obsolete.

"It was magnificent when it was the left's response to
Stalinism," he said. "Following Stalin's death it
continued to still have relevance because we were in
the Cold War period. But after Perestroika, the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the breaking down of
the Berlin Wall, the magazine lost its purpose."

Still, he called Partisan Review "a valuable name"
adding, "I would still hope that it could be revived."

Even if not, the magazine is unlikely to be forgotten.
1937, which included Delmore Schwartz's short story
"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," a poem by Wallace
Stevens and contributions by Lionel Trilling, Sidney
Hook and Edmund Wilson, to its heyday in the 1940's
and 50's, the journal published an astonishing range
of landmark work. For many Americans, Partisan Review
was their introduction to Abstract Expressionism,
existentialism, New Criticism and the voices of
talented young writers like Robert Lowell, Norman
Mailer, Elizabeth Hardwick and Susan Sontag. 

"It was one of the four or five greatest magazines in
America," said Morris Dickstein, a professor of
English at the City University of New York and a
contributing editor to the journal. "It was a very
small enterprise to begin with, the work of a very
small circle, mainly Jews in the New York area, who
were not academically credentialed. And they turned
out to be among the most brilliant intellectuals
America has ever produced." 

In some ways, he said, its demise was inevitable. As
Partisan Review's influence spread, "the uniqueness of
the magazine diminished and disappeared," Professor
Dickstein said.

"In that sense," he said, "the magazine was killed by
its success." 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/17/books/17PART.html

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