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12. Revolutionary Intellectuals: Partisan Review in the 1930s
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CHAPTER 12 ALAN WALD Revolutionary Intellectuals: PARTISAN REVIEW IN THE 1930s What distinguished Partisan Review from the New Masses was our struggle to free revolutionary literature from domination by the immediate strategy of a political party.-William Phillips and Philip Rahv, Letter, New Masses, 1937 But it is not only the old Bolsheviks who are on trial [in Moscow]-we too, all of us, are in the prisoners' dock. These are trials of the mind and of the human spirit. Their meanings encompass the age.-Philip Rahv, Partisan Review, 1938 In the third decade of this century, a generation of young American writers and critics began to turn from introverted immersion in the experimental forms and esoteric sensibilities of the years following the First World War to the political-literary activism of the early 1930s. Yet this was a far less sweeping and unqualified process than might appear from our vista in the 1970s because the achievements of the 1920s were considerable and could not be ignored. The disillusioned exiles and individualistic aesthetes of the postwar decade had technically revolutionized and thematically internationalized American literature. Furthermore, the disciples of Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stein-despite the apolitical and sometimes reactionary social views of these figures-established themselves, against twentieth-century alienation and commercialism, as an avant garde in literary protest. To most writers galvanized into political activity by the 1929 crash and subseA shorter version of this essay appeared in Occident 8 (Spring 1974). At that time I received valuable assistance from Leonard Michaels, David Reid, Michael Folsom, and James Gilbert. The new version has benefited from critical readings by George Novack and Henry Nash Smith and from comments about the original from Felix Morrow, Meyer Schapiro, Lionel Trilling, and other veterans of the 1930s. Some of the original research for the study was made possible by a travel grant from the University of California at Berkeley, which enabled me to interview F. W. Dupee, James T. Farrell, Dwight Macdonald, and William Phillips. 188 Alan Wald quent depression, the legacy of Eliot and the others appeared insufficient; but to certain of the newly radicalized literary intellectuals, the 1920s were an important component of a cultural tradition that required assimilation. It was in part their preoccupation with the work of the previous decade ---its innovations in technique and sensibility, its Europeanization of American culture, its absorption with the estrangement of the intelligentsia -that distinguished William Phillips and Philip Rahv from most of the young writers attracted to the Communist party's literary wing and its John Reed clubs. Their preoccupation would later account significantly for the development of Partisan Review, when the two editors broke with the Communist party after assessing historical events in the Soviet Union, Spain, and Germany and after witnessing the failure of the proletarian cultural movement. At the end of 1937 Phillips and Rahv emerged as leaders in an independent Marxist, but anti-Stalinist, literary left, whose mark on American intellectual and cultural development remains evident today." Born in 1908 in the Ukraine, Philip Rahv came to the United States at the age of fourteen. He arrived in New York City ten years later, in 1932, having nourished an interest in literature while working in advertising on the West Coast. He joined the Communist movement and became active in its literary affiliates, Prolit Folio magazine and Jack Conroy's Rebel Poets group. William Phillips was born in New York City of an immigrant family. In 1976 he recalled that I myself had come from the poor boy's land, from the Bronx and City College, then graduate work at NYU and Columbia. Despite the lack of money and worldliness, I had managed to avoid radicalization-or, indeed, politicization of any kind. On the contrary, my literary and intellectual development was rooted in the 20s, in the experience of modernism: my world was bounded on all sides by Eliot, Pound, Joyce, the Cubists, Mondrian, etc. It was only in the depth of the Depression-in the 30s-that I began to take any interest in social themes and movements. 2 Phillips and Rahv met in the New York chapter of the John Reed Club, and, in 1933, together with other members, they conceived a plan for their own magazine. With the support and assistance of-established Communist cultural leaders like Joseph Freeman and Mike Gold-and with funds raised through a lecture by John Strachey-the new journal was launched. Recollections still conflict as to who did what...