CHRISTOPHER LASCH
185
sector of American society, by no means the least affluent, which in
every sphere but the political has collapsed into total permissiveness."
As
editor of
Modern Occasions,
which he founded after leaving
PR
in the mid-sixties, as well as in frequent contributions to
The New
York Review,
Rahv continued to defend critical modernism against
both traditionalists and swingers. He wrote approvingly of the New
Left while criticizing its indifference to history and
jts
lack of strategic
sense. He pushed his study of Dostoevsky almost to completion. Even
though
Modern Occasions
suspended publication after six issues,
Rahv's .own powers showed no sign of diminution, and his death in
1973 deprived American culture of a critic whose independence from
fashion is increasingly rare in a society that has assimilated culture so
completely to the requirements of commodity production.
The new collection of Rahv's work, edited by Arabel
J.
Porter, his
editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Andrew
J.
Dvosin, author of a New
York University dissertation on Rahv, gives an idea of the range of his
interests but makes it difficult to follow the development of his career–
presumably the principal reason for bringing out such a volume at this
time. Instead of arranging the essays in chronological order, the editors
have grouped them rather arbitrarily into literary and political catego–
ries, an arrangement that violates the spirit of Rahv's work. Running
heads at the top of right-hand pages refer only
to
the editorial
categories into which the collection is divided, not to the titles of the
essays themselves, and the date of their composition can be found only
by thumbing to the back of each essay. The political section leaves
many phases of Rahv's career unrepresented. His editorials in support
of World War II, which caused Dwight Macdonald to leave
Partisan
and found
Politics;
his support of American foreign policy during the
early years of the Cold War; his criticism of McCarthyism and of left–
wing intellectuals who defended McCarthy; his controversy with Irving
Howe over the New Left-these writings make no appearance here.
Their omission leaves the impression that Rahv was mainly a literary
critic who now and then wrote on political subjects; they make it hard
to
understand why Rahv believed that a defense of "high culture" was
not only compatible with political radicalism but essential
to
it. In an
essay on "The 'Partisan' Intellectuals," inspired by the publication of
this collection
(The New York Review,
23 November 1978), Frederick
Crews airi ly writes that "no one" connected with
Partisan Review
"could explain how neo-Marxist political commentary was to be
reconciled with 'The Dry Salvages' and highbrow discussions of the
modern masters." But this is precisely what Rahv and his colleagues
