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The Responsibility of Intellectuals
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12381 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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1 / 1987 |
4,041 Words |
| Author
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Wilfred M. McClay
Wilfred M. McClay is an assistant professor of history at
Tulane University in New Orleans. |
As the 1986 publishing season passes into 1987, one thing that is certain, despite the vagaries of intellectual fashion, is that books about the Partisan Review circle of New York intellectuals will continue to appear. Indeed, this industry is rapidly approaching the point that Edmund Morgan, historian of colonial America, observed in his own field when he remarked that there would someday be more books about the Puritans than there had been Puritans. Surely the outpouring of works on the Partisan crowd has grown disproportionately to their achievements, impressive as they may have been in some cases. In the past few years alone, we have seen memoirs by William Barrett, Irving Howe, Lionel Abel, and William Phillips, full-length studies by Alexander Bloom and Terry Cooney, and innumerable works hashing over the legacy of Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, Paul Goodman, Hannah Arendt, and other prominent Partisan alumni. Some of these figures deserve the attention they receive. When one considers, however, the extraordinary attention paid to a figure of such relative insignificance as Delmore Schwartz - namely, a full-length biography by James Atlas, a thinly fictionalized portrait in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, and various editions of Schwartz's letters, journals, and his slender and generally sophomoric oeuvre - one can only assume that the explanation fore this phenomenon is cultural rather than intellectual.
Lest these comments appear to convey unqualified disdain, let me hasten to confess that I am as fascinated as anyone by the old Partisan crowd and, more generally, by the heyday of the New York intellectuals. Well-thumbed copies of Atlas' biography and Bellow's novel sit on my own shelves, along with virtually every significant work by or about the Partisan's key figures. Like a soap opera junkie, I too revel in tales of perfidy, courage, pettiness, grandiloquence, venery, shabbiness, and adventure among the intellectuals. Even if one lacks a taste for la vie boheme, one may nevertheless be enough of a Partisan buff to derive pleasure vicariously from the currents, both personal and intellectual, that swirled about the magazine's contributors. To be sure, although the Partisan championed such writers as Koestler, Orwell, Arendt, and Camus, it also published a great deal of undistinguished and forgettable prose and its leftism was often reflexive and dogmatic. Even so, the level of discourse in its pages was, on the whole, extraordinarily high - even if, as Sidney Hook recently pointed out, the Partisan's European-minded editors were woefully ignorant of indigenous American intellectual and political traditions. Phillip Rahv and William Phillips, the magazine's coeditors foe many years, were exceptionally open to the new currents of European thought that streamed into the country during the years
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