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PARTISAN REVIEW
was it then the policy of
Partisan Review.
Nor is it now. In fact, I do
not know of any other person close to
Partisan Review
who had either
Rahv's personal traits, which Barrett makes out, himself, to be quite
unsavory, or his swerving politics, which Barrett condemns. It is
Barrett's ideological bias that makes Rahv's late reconversion typical
- typical of the failure of what Barrett characterizes as the politics of
the Truants, of those, that is, who played hooky from reality. But
not even Rahv played hooky; he played with ideas. And if Barrett
wants to depict Rahv as a truant, then the question is whether his
original leftism, his later anticommunism, or his final radical rever–
sion was the expression of his truancy. And how were the rest of us
truants? Barrett suggests our truancy consisted in our critical
attitude toward the quality of modern life .
An example of Barrett's ideological inflation of small incidents
is his report of a silly encounter between Harold Rosenberg and
Philip Rahv. According to Barrett, Rosenberg asked Rahv how
Partisan Review
could have published a supposedly "bourgeois" piece
by Trilling. This kind of banter and political baiting was not
uncommon at the time, as we were all shifting, and watching each
other's shifts. And Rahv considered it worse to be
accused
of moving
an inch to the right than of having betrayed a friend, which involves
only sentiment. But this was only talk. Rosenberg was obviously
posturing and using the occasion to indicate his superior editorial
nose. And Rahv was also posturing and protecting his left flank,
without having to do anything about it. For the fact is that Rahv's
genuflection to the left did not reflect editorial policy, and Trilling
was welcome to publish in
Partisan Review
and did so.
Ideology makes not only for strange bedfellows but for strange
divorces.
It
is part of Barrett's the;:;is to claim that the editors of
Partisan Review
and those close to them did not follow the logic of
their position and end up as neo-conservatives. Now this is based on
the assumption that all anticommunist roads must lead to neo–
conservatism. But, as Trotsky once said of Stalin: Barrett assumes
what he has to prove. Barrett puts Trilling somewhere in the middle:
as one who foreshadowed neo-conservatism but did not go all the
way. This reminds one of the Podhoretz argument that Trilling, like
a few other anticommunists, including myself, pulled back from
neo-conservatism out of fear of being ostracized by the Left.
However, as I have indicated elsewhere, neither I nor Irving Howe
nor Lionel Trilling were scared to become neo-conservatives . What
was there to be scared of? We were always being criticized by the
Left. And now, after all, the neo-conservatives have been riding
