I have in my possession a copy of an old Partisan Review, Winter 1960, Number 1, price $1.00, which was given to me by a student who knew of my interest in American postwar nonfiction. It is an astonishing object, like one of those time capsules buried with the hope they will amuse our descendants. Perfect-bound, 190 pages, with a modernist graphic cover design, probably by Alvin Lusting or one of his imitators: the words “Partisan Review” appear in dark blue against an olive square; below, another olive box promises its interior contents—a short story by Alberto Moravia, essays by Leslie Fiedler, Elizabeth Hardwick, Richard Wollheim, Max Hayward, Harold Rosenberg, F. W. Dupee, and Lionel Abel, criticism by A. Alvarez, Richard Chase, Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, Frank Kermode, Howard Nemerov, among others, and poems by W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Koch, James Merrill, Robert Penn Warren… In its utter differentiation from the literary scene of today, it may as well have been the nineteenth-century London Magazine featuring William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, or one of those fat Russian periodicals that included chunks of novels by Tolstoy and Turgenev.
The back cover contains a full-page ad for Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County: “Here is the book that became a cause célèbre when it was first published thirteen years ago… Now Edmund Wilson has polished and perfected this devastating portrayal of the waspish women of suburbia.” Well, times have changed. You have to hand it to that publisher, though, who knew well the aspirational readership of Partisan Review. Before diving into the issue’s meaty essays, I pause with curiosity at the ads inside: a four-page spread (!) devoted to Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, with blurbs from Alfred Kazin, Stephen Spender, Elizabeth Bishop, F. W. Dupee, A. Alvarez; announcements for other periodicals—Encounter (its contributors listed as, among others, F. W. Dupee, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight Macdonald, C. P. Snow), Dissent (its editor Irving Howe proudly announcing a 15,000-word document “On Socialist Realism”), and Midstream (a “Quarterly Jewish Review,” featuring Irving Howe, Leslie Fieldler, I. Bashevis Singer, Lewis Coser…). How amazingly unified the literary class of that period looks! We might characterize it in shorthand as the New York Intellectuals, with an Anglophile back office in London.
Perhaps our review periodicals today (the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the TLS, the LRB, Bookforum, Harper’s, The New Yorker) are not that dissimilar, featuring as they still do the flavor of the month (Sheila Heti, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard), and more or less sharing an overall outlook (a respectful nod to diversity and political correctness). But our critics reviewing the latest topical products haven’t the same preening self-importance as did that gang featured on the cover of my old copy of Partisan Review. Those dinosaurs effortlessly and unapologetically monopolized the cultivated reading public’s attention, while seemingly in constant, if bickering, communication with each other.
It is not just that the same names keep popping up, but that they share a rhetorical level of gravitas, an agreement about the sound of serious prose, regardless of their location on the political spectrum. To be sure, that commanding tone was a performance having more to do with willed, imaginative mimicking of authority than actual sovereignty. As Irving Howe noted in a witty essay, “The New York Intellectuals,” analyzing his tribe:
Few of the New York intellectuals made much money on books and articles. Few reached audiences beyond the little magazines. Few approached any centers of power, and precisely the buzz of gossip attending the one or two sometimes invited to a party beyond the well-surveyed limits of the West Side showed how confined their life still was… For all their gloss of sophistication, they had not really moved very far into the world. The immigrant milk was still on their lips.
The year 1960 was probably the high point of their influence, which had been building all through the Fifties; soon it would decline, and by the late Sixties they already seemed a throwback, supplanted by the more demotic voices of pop culture and youthful rebellion. But what a display while it lasted! In perusing the essays in my Partisan Review copy, I am awed and impressed by their self-assurance, their ex cathedra opinions, their standards of maturity, worldliness, and wisdom—their confident belief that there even was such a thing as wisdom—and at the same time disconcerted by their narrow provinciality. Were I still the young cub I was in 1960, entering college, who might have picked up that just-printed copy of Partisan Review, I’m fairly sure I would have taken their views as gospel, secretly embarrassed that I’d not already come to the same conclusions. But since I am now an oldster, with a long literary career behind me, I feel freer to quarrel with their assertions—respectfully, mind you, in a filially indebted spirit.
For instance, Leslie Fielder’s essay “The Novel in America” takes the position that the American writer
is forever beginning, saying for the first time (without real tradition there can never be a second time) what it is like to stand before nature, or in a city as appallingly lonely as any virgin forest. He faces, moreover, another problem, which has resulted in a failure of feeling and imagination perceptible at the heart of even our most notable works. Our great novelists, though experts on indignity and assault, on loneliness and terror, tend to avoid the passionate encounter of a man and a woman, which we expect at the center of a novel. Indeed, they rather shy away from permitting in their fictions the presence of any full-fledged, mature women, giving us instead monsters of virtue or bitchery, symbols of the rejection or fear of sexuality.
All this sounds merely an extension of D. H. Lawrence’s pioneering Studies in Classic American Literature, which had the additional advantage of its boldness and wackiness. But where is Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen, Ellen Glasgow, William Dean Howells? Of the last-mentioned (one of my favorite American authors, it so happens), Fiedler sneers at “historians who have been pleased to speak of ‘The Rise of Realism’ or ‘The Triumph of Realism,’ as if the experiments of Hawthorne or Poe or Melville were half-misguided fumblings toward the final excellence of William Dean Howells!” Fiedler could have benefited from consulting Lionel Trilling’s more measured essay, “William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste,” which appreciated what Howells had to offer while acknowledging his lack of ferocity. Fiedler seems to want to have it both ways: castigating American fiction for its supposedly adolescent lack of mature women, while ignoring actual women writers and sympathetic male authors as somehow too genteel to be taken seriously.
Lionel Abel, who wrote hilariously in his memoir The Intellectual Follies about the posturing of the New York Intellectuals meeting to figure out what their stance should be toward the Soviet banning of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, is represented here by “Not Everyone Is in the Fix,” a critical response to Jack Gelber’s off-Broadway play, The Connection, about heroin addicts waiting for their dealer to show up. Significantly, Abel doesn’t mention by name the jazz musicians (led by saxophonist Jackie McLean) who brought such life to that production, nor any of the skilled actors, nor even the director. Nor does he bother to place the play in the larger context of experimental theater or, for that matter, American drama in general (say, The Iceman Cometh). Instead, he takes a lofty position above the fray, saying “You are bored stiff by the junkies on the stage; they are bored stiff too, with each other and with themselves.” But he defends the play because it forces us to consider what, if anything, are our “high experiences.” Abel’s greybeard detachment toward the cultural scene he is examining shows why Susan Sontag’s pieces a few years later, about Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and rock ’n’ roll, created such a stir. The Partisan Review crowd desperately needed a Sontag who could bring them more informed reports on the downtown scene.
Richard Wollheim’s “Orwell Reconsidered” argues sniffily that The Road to Wigan Pier—to my mind an endlessly evocative, stimulating, if tortured account of English miners—is nothing but “dated journalism.” Perhaps Wollheim’s efforts to downgrade Orwell before he’d been accepted as a major figure in the canon were excusable. Still, the whole notion of “datedness” is so rank and debatable, as is the blurry line between high journalism and literature, that Wollheim’s essay itself looks wrongheaded in retrospect.
Of course it would be unfair to judge these critical pieces by hindsight. How would Irving Howe have known, in his intelligent assessment of Norman Mailer’s Advertisements for Myself, that it would be the hybrid form of that book, more than its contents, which would so inspire future writers? Howe commends Mailer for his verve, his “bravado and good humor,” while properly registering skepticism about his romanticizing of the hipster: “Hunting for an emblem of energy in the hipster, he seems at one rather shocking point in ‘The White Negro’ to be praising the violence of a hoodlum who beats up an old shopkeeper. Even if one puts aside the ethical question, which certainly should not be done for long, this kind of thing can be very dangerous to writers.” We can be grateful that Howe issued this caveat, even if he was silent about the problem today’s critics would unpack: Mailer’s presumptuous categorizing of Blacks as amoral hipsters.
Elizabeth Hardwick’s “Living in Italy: Reflections on Bernard Beren-son,” a reminiscence about her personal encounters with the great art scholar, manages to invoke gossipy dirt about him without settling the central issue one way or another. “Was Berenson shady, crooked?” she asks. “Did he make his fortune with the help of willfully false as well as genuine attributions?” It is a classic Hardwick performance: sparklingly written and a little catty. F. W. Dupee contributes a thoughtful piece about Dickens. Max Haywood offers his expertise on the state of Soviet literature. Lewis Coser takes C. Wright Mills to task for his simplistic, self-serving book, The Sociological Imagination. Harold Rosenberg pugnaciously asks if the reproductions in art books are replacing our need to see paintings in person. Frank Kermode mildly critiques a series of American poetry collections, and Howard Nemerov does what he can with a group of forgettable novels. No matter: what counts is the attempt to cover all areas of artistic, literary, and intellectual endeavor.
And then there are the poems by W. S. Merwin and Robert Penn War-ren, James Merrill’s masterpiece “An Urban Convalescence,” and Kenneth Koch’s pricelessly cheeky “Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Wil-liams.” The short story by Alberto Moravia, “The Woman From Mexico,” is about a guy who leaves his house overdressed in the summer heat and gets suckered into a sordid erotic adventure. Moravia was riding high at this point: his stock had not yet taken a nosedive, shortly to be deemed unfashionably realistic, replaced by the more playfully postmodernist Italo Calvino. I was a big Moravia fan at the time, and was puzzled when he went from stardom to patronized near-oblivion. So I can forgive the editors of Partisan Review for placing their bet on the wrong horse, hoping for a little worldly international glitz.
What lingers in the mind is the sense of an intellectual caste that regards itself as superior to the culture it is judging. They are not afraid to show off, to sprinkle quotations in German without bothering to translate. Whence this self-confidence? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Let us say for the moment that in some ways it is a good thing, at least compared to our present critical discourse, which trembles at the accusation of elitism. How much of it is the function of a past educational system—or of a social set, with its bonds of friendship and competitiveness—rather than an agreed-upon agenda? I am not saying I prefer the old manner, nor am I waxing nostalgic for the Good Old Days. I am simply pointing out how strange it looks from our current perspective. I would hate to see a return to that secular rabbinate, which was undoubtedly so hard to crack, but I can’t help admiring its rock-solid certainty. A lost world, in any case.
Philip Lopate recently edited a three-volume anthology of the American essay. He is a professor at Columbia University.
