Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America by James Gilbert (review)

152 Canadian Review of American Studies existed" (150), points back to Brooke-Rose's essay, and to what, for the most part remains silent, or at best implicit, about the problems of interpretation presented in Eco's lectures. The political and social implications of interpretation , overinterpretation, or even misinterpretation are muted here, and one wishes that Eco had given more lectures and had more responses, or, at least, that it would have been possible to include more of the less formal debate that would have followed. The single drawback to this text is that it seems to be just getting started by the time it ends. Brad Bucknell University ol Windsor James Gilbert. Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992 (first edition 1968). Pp. xiv + 303. When Writers and Partisans:A History of Literary Radicalism in America was published in 1968, it was considered an insightful guide to twenty years of the publishing history of the Partisan Review. James Gilbert took on a number of issues in the book: the intellectual as social critic, the movement through left-wing politics of the editors, the idea of radicalism and the comingling of a literary and political life, to name a few. Partisan Review was first published in 1943 as an organ of the John Reed Club in New York. That organization gathered together writers and artists and "provided a meeting ground for radical art and political activity" (107). It came out of an atmosphere where small magazines were burgeoning and Gilbert nicely concentrates the history of those magazines and bohemianism. Early little magazine involvement gave Philip Rahv and William Phillips a place to develop theories of criticism that were the ground upon which the Partisan Review grew. It was fertile soil, mainly because at that time, "adherence to the idea of proletariat literature, perhaps the most rigid literary theory ever held by the left, was not the exclusive test of allegiance to the radical movement" (110). In fact, the editors, in the first Partisan Review symposium (printed in April 1936) challenged the idea of a proletarian literature altogether. Book Reviews 153 Although the John Reed clubs had unknown writers as the bulk of their membership, the first issue of Partisan Review consisted mainly of contributions from well-known radical writers. From the beginning, even the proletariat within the clubs did not have access to its pages. To Rahv and Phillips, "proletarian literature as they understood it and wrote about it was both a literature for and about the working class, which grew out of an emerging revolution, and literature that would answer the problems of the modern intellectuals" (121). Neither they, nor Gilbert writing in the 1960s, considered whether or not this literature should be written in the main by members of the proletariat. Part of this gap of recognition came from the editors' continuing struggle with seeing the artist as aesthete, an isolated outsider, a romantic conceit not unfamiliar in the 1960s, so that the reality of editorial policy was an answer to the latter part of what Gilbert saw as their concern: formulating answers to problems posed by modern intellectuals . The focus for many of the questions and issues for the editors and others who contributed to Partisan Review was T. S. Eliot. He published both "East Coker" and "Dry Salvages," two of the Four Quartets in Partisan Review in the 1940s. But even in the second issue, Eliot's After Strange Gods was reviewed , if denounced. The review itself highlights the continuous debate within Partisan Review's pages about the nature of politics and its relationship to art. Where in his review Phillips might have contended that "only the blind would hesitate to call Eliot a fascist" (125), the editors never hesitated to publish him. It may have been as Gilbert posits that to Phillips "an essential problem was to explain in a poet such as T. S. Eliot the simultaneous existence of a radical approach to literary technique and of reactionary political stands" (111). Gilbert, himself, does not attempt to explain T. S. Eliot in either political or artistic terms and his late sixties attitude towards Eliot and...