Irving Howe
LITERARY LIFE: NEW YORK*
By 1947 it seemed the quarrels of the thirties were done
with: we had apparently won, we leftist and liberal anti-Stalinists.
Too young to have experienced personally the literary-political wars
of the thirties, I sometimes felt as if! had lived through them, partic–
ipant by courtesy of inherited myth and judgment. ...
Sometimes by speaking truth, sometimes by shows of bril–
liance, sometimes by sheer nerve,
Partisan Review
had clawed its way
to cultural strength. The magazine could now hoist reputations,
push a young writer into prominence, and deal out punishment to
philistines, middlebrows, and fellow travelers. Because it stood for
something,
Partisan Review
gained influence.
It
evoked fear among
opponents, rage among academics. William Dean Howells had once
joked that anyone can make an enemy, the problem is to keep him.
This skill
Partisan Review
had mastered. . . .
Most of the New York writers were still young. "Veterans" like
Hook and Rahv, Phillips and Schapiro , Rosenberg and Clement
Greenberg were in their forties. Younger people, very talented, kept
appearing: Randall Jarrell , Elizabeth Hardwick , John Berryman ,
Saul Bellow , Robert Warshow. Not all of these sympathized with
Partisan
politics, but most felt at home with its homelessness. The
magazine had a heady cosmopolitan air in those days, with contri–
butions from T.S. Eliot and George Orwell, Andre Gide and Jean–
Paul Sartre. Anti-Stalinist leftism created a fragile bond across bor–
ders: one felt a kinship with writers like Orwell, Silone, and Camus
without having ever met them. There was a visible pride in the
capacities of mind. There was an impatience with that American
tradition which regards writing as the outpouring of untainted intui–
tion. There was a spirit of arrogance that kept out lesser souls,
smaller talents.
Now that Hitlerism was destroyed, intellectuals felt they had to
reach out for new ideas, new modes of sensibility fitting the postwar
• Excerpted from
A Margin oj Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography
by Irvin g Howe, to
be published by H arcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. (Copyright © 1982 by Irving
Howe.)
