Partisan Review

PARTISAN REVIEW. Born in the world of 1930s radicalism, the Partisan Review (PR) began in 1934 under the sponsorship of the New York John Reed Club, one of the Left literary groups organized to foster the work of proletarian writers—those aiming to combine literary imagination and class-consciousness. Founded by two young radical critics—Philip Rahv and William Phillips—PR announced that it would “concentrate on creative and critical literature, but... shall maintain a definite viewpoint—that of the revolutionary working class.... The defense of the Soviet Union is one of our principal tasks.” While PR continued to trumpet the potential and the successes of proletarian art, the editors began to harbor doubts about the quality of much proletarian literature and, especially, the role of intellectuals and critics within the radical-art movement. In 1936 they suspended publication of the magazine.

The “new” PR reappeared in 1937, with four additional editors—F. W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald, George L. K. Morris, and Mary McCarthy—and a new independent editorial position. The period between its rebirth and Pearl Harbor remains the magazine’s most fruitful as a Left journal. Splits in the Left created an intellectual vacuum that PR occupied. A great number of important nonaligned leftist writers came to the magazine, including Edmund Wilson, Wallace Stevens, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, and James T. Farrell. In addition, promising writers debuted there: Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, John Berryman, and Elizabeth Bishop among them.

PR also sought to revive the literary reputations of modernist writers, bringing them into a new conception of radical art, a “revolutionary modernism.” A radical “sensibility” was just as important as explicit political consciousness. Rahv found that while “reactionary in its abstract content,” Dostoyevsky’s work was nonetheless “radical in sensibility and subversive in performance.” For art critic Clement Greenberg, the avant-garde became a driving radical force in the contemporary world. Middlebrow culture, including proletarian literature, helped perpetuate capitalism. The avant-garde could move the world toward socialism.

This new cultural position corrected the perceived faulty relationship between writer and critic within proletarian art. The critic was now the essential analyst for sifting through literary works and identifying the radicalizing insights of numerous writers—alive and dead, radical and conservative; Kafka and Eliot, as well as Dreiser and Malraux.
PR stayed out of the Popular Front and was aligned with, but never formally allied to, the Trotskyists. When the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 destroyed the Popular Front, the editors reiterated their position of supporting a “third force,” radical and uncompromised. In 1941 Macdonald and Greenberg published an essay disassociating themselves from American war efforts, seeing them ending with capitalism strengthened. Rahv, however, attacked this “morally absolutist” position and, revising his earlier thinking, called for support of American actions.

The war debate split the PR editorial board, leading to Macdonald’s resignation. By 1945, new intellectual concerns moved the magazine and its contributors: a renewed focus on American culture; newly emerging considerations of Freud, Sartre, and Jewish culture; and the emergence of a liberal anticommunist position to replace the radical anti-Stalinist arguments of the later 1930s. New editors, including Schwartz and William Barrett, joined as well.

During the 1950s, PR became one of the leading journals of postwar culture. The famous symposium “Our Country and Our Culture” demonstrated a new harmonious relationship between American society and the once-radical, now liberal intellectuals. Phillips served on the board of the anticommunist American Committee for Cultural Freedom.

In the 1960s, PR moved to Rutgers University. Rahv, in Boston, grew increasingly alienated from PR. While Phillips exhibited interest in the counterculture, Rahv disdained it. He resigned in 1969. Staying as editor, Phillips oversaw the magazine’s transfer to Boston University in the 1970s and its move back to the political center and, then, toward neoconservatism before it ceased publication in 2003.

Bloom, Alexander. Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Cooney, Terry A. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.

Gilbert, James B. Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1969.

Phillips, William. A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life. New York: Stein and Day, 1983.

Saunders, Frances Stonor. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New York: The New Press, 2000.

Wald, Alan M. The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987.

Partisan Review Online. Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. http://hgar-srv3.bu.edu/collections/partisan-review/