BOOKS
Woofers and Tweeters
BY JULIAN SYMONS THE history of Partisan Review is in large part the story of the intellectual excitements, achievements, illusions, betrayals, of our time. Founded twenty-nine years ago as a sort of 'intellectual' pendant to the 'popular' American Communist paper New Masses, it adopted in 1936 a near-Trotskyist left-wing independent position until America's entry into the war. The most important, or at least the most vocal, of its early editors was Dwight Macdonald, who left the magazine to found in 1944 the anti-war monthly Politics. Since the demise of Politics in 1949 Macdonald has turned into a free-wheeling journalistic commentator on literature and cur- rent affairs, a lively writer who has never become, as once seemed likely, the humanist Mencken of the Left. James Burnham, another of the early editors, left the magazine at about the same time as Macdonald, after publishing The Managerial Revolution. He may now be glimpsed occasion- ally far, far out on the Right, editing the National Review. Many other writers have been associated editorially with the magazine but two, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, have maintained editorial status unbroken during the whole twenty-nine years.
The magazine for which Phillips and Rahv have been so largely responsible is an extra- ordinary achievement. This third anthology taken from it* is packed with stories, essays, poems, critical attacks and evaluations, which testify to the editors' sensibility and judgment. Dip, and you come up with Orwell on Gandhi, K.oestler on the Intelligentsia. Eliot on 'The Music of Poetry.' Too familiar? Dip again, and you get an early story by Saul Bellow, Leavis on Ezra Pound's Letters, the first serious criticism of Nathanael West after his death. No other magazine can approach such riches, no other `little' magazine has kept an intellectual banner flying for so long.
There is a Partisan view of literature and a Partisan view of society. The creative work printed is by preference either strongly avant- garde—they have come some inevitable croppers here in the past—or realistic, and the Partisans are upon the whole opposed to the American literary strain of post-Nineties estheticism repre- sented in different ways by Carl van Vechten, Truman Capote, Salinger, Nabokov. The Partisan view of society is—well, it is really a view of
the intellectual's role in and relationship to society. The New Failure of Nerve,' 'The Intelli- gentsia,' 'The Fate of the Avant-Garde,' Artistic Truth and the Warped Vision,' these are typical titles of articles. Partisans are strongly influenced by Freud and they are cosmopolitan in the sense that they warmly welcome European contribu- tors, but much of the magazine's character comes from the strength of American national feeling shown in it. I wish the editors had found space to print some of the wartime controversies which would have shown clearly how, when the crunch came between 'nationalism' and 'international- ism' (represented at the time by Dwight Mac- donald), the magazine came down heavily upon the national side. 'America - is Radicals,' the Partisans might say in parody of Archibald Mac- Leish, but they are themselves radicals who react sharply when any threat to national security is involved. A meaningful echo of that old argu- ment is going on in the magazine at present in a series of articles about 'the cold war and the future of the West.' Now that America itself is certain to suffer heavily in nuclear war, some Partisans have decided that 'nothing is worth a nuclear war.' This was not the way they felt a few years ago, and their attitude might be crudely expressed as: 'If America's not going to be pre- served, what's the use of fighting?'
Mr. Alfred Kazin is a Partisan critic, by which I mean not only that he is a frequent contributor to the magazine but also that his collection of essays, Contemporaries, t exemplifies some of the virtues and most of the limitations of the Partisan point of view. We have no literary critic in this country who writes so sensibly about so many things, Freud and Trotsky and Kennedy as an intellectual, Malamud and Bellow and Mailer, Thoreau and Melville and Howells. And he is often more than sensible, he is acute. His piece on John O'Hara, 'The Great American Bore,' is devastating, and so is his phrase—'soft con- cussion'—for the impact of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandrian novels. He is always intelligent, never positively wrong What is it that makes him so often a maddening writer? Chiefly, I think, that earnest intentness on being up-to-date, combined as it is with a zest for intellectual analysis which sometimes makes one feel, as one feels with Mary McCarthy, that the important thing for a critic is not to experience literature but to explain it. Fair play to Mr. Kazin, he explains it (sometimes almost explains it away) very well.
Mr. Conrad Aiken belongs to the deliberate long-fingered aesthetic school of American artists. He is a writer distinctly un-Partisan, one who, as he says in Ushant4 has 'never found it possible to take more than a casual and superficial interest in practical politics, viewing it, as he did, as in- evitably a passing phase, and probably a pretty primitive one, and something, again, that the evolution of consciousness would in its own good season take care of.' As a poet he is at his best (Preludes For Memnon, The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones, Senlin) rhetorically magnifi- cent in a way that has been unfashionable throughout his lifetime. As a prose writer he has * THE PARTISAN Review ANTHOLOGY. Edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv. (Macmillan, 30s.) CoNnEMPORARIES. By Alfred Kazin. (Seeker and Warburg, 42s.) USHANT. By Conrad Aiken. (W. H. Allen, 21s.) CONRAD AIKEN, A LIFE OF HIS ART. By Jay Martin. (Princeton and O.U.P., 40s.) written one very interesting failure of a novel, Blue Voyage, and one neglected masterpiece, Great Circle, perhaps the only novel in which Freudian ideas are truly absorbed into a work of art. Published in 1933 and remaindered within a few months, Great Circle will surely one day be reissued and find a public appreciative of its extraordinary self-perception and what Aldous Huxley called the astonishing verbal felicity of its writing.
I wish I could say that Ushant was a great book too, or even a good one. but this 'auto- biographical narrative,' which appeared in America in 1952, shows all Aiken's weaknesses of vagueness, wordiness and self-dramatising self-indulgence, with little of his lyric grace and few really illuminating rhetorical passages. The narrative form, certainly, is original. D, the narrator, is returning to Aries Island (England) and more particularly to his house in Saltine (Rye) after the war_ On board ship he recalls fragments of his past life, including his relation- ships with Lorelei One, Two and Three (wives) and other ladies, encounters with the Tsetse (T. S. Eliot), Rabbi Ben Ezra (Pound), Hambo (Mal- colm Lowry), and others.
Such a brief account may make the book sound more coherent and straightforwardly autobiographical than it is. The narrative shifts about confusingly in time, almost every incident is masked by indirection, and Mr. Aiken's style is at its most ophidian, winding about sometimes through what seems to be dozens of subordinate clauses to no particular end. Mr. Jay Martin, in a solemn but comprehensive book useful to any student of Alken,§ says that the autobiography was first called Rooms, Streets and Houses, and certainly the places in the book come through more clearly than the people—Duxbury and childhood, Cambridge (Mass), the Lake District, bits of London and above all Rye, symbol of Mr. Aiken's long love affair with England.
The places are more real than the people, but both places and people are three-quarters sub- merged below the style, that liquescent intermin- able wave of a style which conceals as much as it reveals of personal history, and rolls up and back, up and back, through 360-odd pages on to the shores of our consciousness, creating for us finally a portrait which is at times without doubt shimmeringly bright, but a portrait also in which the features are as indefinite and shift- ing as those seen under the medium that obsesses Mr. Aiken, here and in so much of his work, water.
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