Radical Intellectuals

"I like [it] because I am a very confused young man. . . ."

"This form of metropolitan provincialism I find particularly loathsome. ..."

These readers' comments are printed in the current issue of a magazine called Partisan Review. In previous issues have appeared comments of another kind, like John Dos Passos' "Best literary magazine in America," and the (London) Criterion'?, rarely awarded adjective, "excellent." Both kinds of opinion are held in literary circles; both suggest the curious resonance of the Partisan Review and the small cluster of radical intellectuals who run it.

Three of them are Yalemen; all of them want to be better. One of them started life (after Yale '28) as a floorwalker in Macy's, eager to learn in that temple the arcana of business success. He later got a job with FORTUNE. One was a Chicago boy who (after Yale '27) wandered to Spain, North Africa, Florida in search of the right place to sit down and write. One (an indispensable one) had money: a Yale ('28) esthete whose Manhattan family helped manage the Revolution (1776) and has since been so well-satisfied with itself that it remembers the great Henry James, whom it once put up as a house guest, merely as a great bore.

These three long domed Dwight Macdonald, hoarse voiced Frederick W. Dupee, pale-browed George Lovett Kingsland Morris--put out their first post-graduation magazine in 1930: a slim, self-conscious sheaf called Miscellany that lasted one year. Their later vehicle, the Partisan Review, was first published in 1934 as an organ of the John Reed (Leftist writers') Club of New York, among its editors being two literate Leftists named Philip Rahv and William Phillips. Writer Dupee meanwhile drank at the revolutionary fount in Mexico, returned to Manhattan to work for the New Masses. What threw him and Rahv and Phillips together and incidentally off the orthodox Party line was the blatant Soviet tyranny over culture, the Soviet political debacle of the Moscow Trials.

Without Communist support, Rahv and Phillips' Partisan Review quickly withered in 1936.

By that time Dwight Macdonald had belatedly capitulated to the Depression's reddest virus, become an apostate from business and grown a (small) Trotsky ite beard. He took up with anti-Stalinists Rahv, Phillips and Dupee. Into the picture, as angel, swam George Lovett Kingsland Morris, who had spent his time collecting and even painting abstract art. Result: the rebirth in December 1937 of Partisan Review, as a vigorously, snobbishly radical and experimentalist literary monthly (later quarterly, now six times a year) which snubbed Dictator Joe Stalin, smiled kindly at Comrade Leon Trotsky.

Since then Editor Macdonald has blown a sharp if not widely audible pipe against the New Deal, The New Yorker, TIME ("major house organ for the American business class"), the post 1930 Soviet cinema. No less snappish is the Partisan Review theatre critic, Mary McCarthy (Mrs. Edmund Wilson), who breaks Broadway butterfly hits on an ironbound esthetic wheel. At the peak of Partisan Review sophistication stands Art Critic Morris, whom practically nothing pleases. "It is something less than an exaggeration," writes Critic Morris with his characteristic faint shudder, "to state that the painting and sculpture being 'encouraged' in America ... is more esthetically barren and tasteless than anything that the world has previously produced. . . ."

Immoderate and humorless as Marxian sectarian journalists, as human beings the Partisan Review editors are an eager, uneven, engaging crew. Happiest when criticizing critics, capitalizing on capitalists and declaring war on "Imperialist War," they are almost as happy when they can snag a literary lion. Of these they have snagged a pride, from Apostle Trotsky himself to such international camelo-pards as Andre Gide and Gertrude Stein. Latest catch is Poet T. S. Eliot's new, beautiful, 200-line poem for the current May-June issue.

By its enthusiastically surgical criticism (Rahv, Dupee, Edmund Wilson), such a magazine certainly keeps a few (circulation: 2,000) U. S. eyes peeled for the new and elsewhere unrecognized forms of excellence toward which it is receptive-though faintly proprietary. However, though Partisan Review editorially reflects a highly doctrinaire sense of the world, it rarely reflects a humane knowledge of the U. S. west of Newark, N. J. But its editors have the courage to take life hard, and sometimes even acknowledge that their convictions are not immutable. "There are more and more things in the world," says Editor Macdonald now, with disarming moderation, "that Marxism does not explain to me."

*Descendant of Gouverneur Morris, brother of Manhattan's City Council President Newbold Morris, first cousin of U. S. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles.

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