Farewell, Old Partisans ...

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
April 19, 2003
Farewell, Old Partisans of Past Crusades
By MORRIS DICKSTEIN

Partisan Review, the groundbreaking quarterly of arts
and ideas, has suspended publication precisely when
widespread nostalgia for public intellectuals has
reached a peak.

In the 1980's and 90's, when literary and social
criticism were choked off by the jargon of academic
theory, many looked back to the fractious band of New
York intellectuals who founded Partisan Review in the
1930's as lively generalists who were receptive to new
art, hostile to totalitarianism left and right, and
lived shamelessly for ideas. Unlike the talking heads
who pass for public intellectuals today, they wrote
mainly for each other: the larger world at first had
little interest in them.

As children of the Depression and immigrant poverty,
they had few job prospects and much incentive to
criticize a failing society. And they pursued their
advanced degrees in public libraries and little
magazines rather than at universities.

This makes it all the more remarkable that Partisan
Review rose to such a height of prestige and influence
in the two decades after World War II, when it
published almost every important new writer, from
Robert Lowell and Saul Bellow to Mary McCarthy and
James Baldwin. At the same time it fostered the
dominance of Abstract Expressionism in the art world
and opened American culture to important European
currents, including existentialism and psychoanalysis.
Once Communism became their God that failed, the
Partisan Review writers not only replaced Marx with
Freud but also paved the way for a rapprochement
between once-radical intellectuals and a booming new
American reality.

But the main influence of Partisan Review came from
its freewheeling intellectual style, which was
exactingly critical yet jokey and colloquial, rooted
in sources as wildly varied as Yiddish humor, Talmudic
debate, sectarian Marxist polemics, modernist
intransigence and psychoanalytic unmasking. Versions
of this style surfaced in journals of different
political stripes, including Elliot Cohen's Commentary
in the 1940's, Irving Howe's Dissent in the 1950's,
The New York Review of Books in the 60's, Hilton
Kramer's New Criterion in the 80's and others. They
drew away talented writers and eroded Partisan
Review's natural constituency.

Like many another offshoot of modernism, Partisan
Review's cachet as a byword for high culture depended
on its speaking for a minority in a larger philistine
or middlebrow society. But these lines grew blurred as
more Americans went to college and the nation became
more cosmopolitan. The post-60's generation had grown
up on popular culture as well as the modernist
classics and even saw interesting links between them.
For them the songs of Bob Dylan and the films of the
French New Wave were as complex and challenging as the
novels of Proust and Joyce, as subtly allusive as the
poems of T. S. Eliot. Partisan Review's investment in
modernism had always had its conservative side. Its
Proust, its Kafka, its Joyce were not so much radical
breaks as the ripe culmination of the Western literary
tradition.

The magazine's best critics always shied away from the
wilder shores of the avant-garde, from the language
experiments of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and William
Carlos Williams and the dream world of the surrealists
to the populist modernism of the Beats. Though
Partisan Review created a sensation with the early
work of Susan Sontag in the 1960's, her enthusiasms,
ranging from camp and literary pornography to Godard's
films, provided a road map of exactly where the
magazine, perhaps justifiably, would choose not to go.
As its politics shifted markedly to the right in the
80's, it became the carping conservator of an older
culture rather than the energetic expositor of the
new, and its appeal to younger writers and readers
declined. Meanwhile, the communications revolution
made the quarterly seem obsolete.

All this might have gone differently had William
Phillips, the co-founder and longtime editor, seen his
way to revitalizing the magazine by passing it on to a
younger generation, as Howe did with Dissent. The
magazine at its zenith, when all its contributors were
young themselves, was a high-wire act of astonishing
virtuosity. Much of the intellectual excitement
created in the first 30 years was dissipated in the
years that followed, but some of it lives on and
always will, under many other names and guises.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/19/arts/19PART.html

Dickstein, Morris.  The Gates of Eden: American
   Culture in the Sixties.  NY: Basic Books, 1977.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/DICGAX.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=73079&sort=date

__________.  Leopards in the Temple: The
   Transformation of American Fiction, 1945-1970.
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002 [1999].

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/DICLEX.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=72330&sort=date

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0210&msg=72007&sort=date

Sorry, don't know what happened with that last one ...

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