COMMENT
William Barrett, who died last September, was an associate editor of
Partisan Review
from 1946 to 1955. With great energy, he was quite ac–
tive, almost compulsively involved in editorial matters. He wrote articles,
reviews, and comments: perhaps the best-known were his explanations of
existentialism, which had just been imported into this country, and his
strong criticism of left-liberalism in a piece not reticently called "The
Liberal Fifth Column."
Barrett was trained in philosophy, which he taught at New York
University until his retirement. But he had what might be called a liter–
ary mind. Like most literary-minded students of philosophy, he was
drawn more to Europe than to Britain and America. Steeped in the
European metaphysical tradition, he did not care much for the English
or American exercises in logic or epistemology. Barrett bypassed prag–
matism and the analytic strain. Wittgenstein was not his dish. But he did
not go in for rhetorical thinking; he was a strict methodologist.
As a person, he might best be described as a loner. Though on the
surface he appeared to be an exuberant talker and gregarious in com–
pany, he led a solitary life, and many of his habits and haunts were myste–
rious. Physically and socially, he was quite awkward, as was his closest
friend, Delmore Schwartz, and some people, like Mary McCarthy and
Hannah Arendt, thought he lacked
savoir faire
-
something on which
they placed a very high value. (The
New York Times
obituary was wrong
in saying he was close to Arendt, McCarthy, and Rahv.)
Politically, like most of the community of which he ' was a part,
Barrett was a strong anti-Communist but far from a right-winger. The
Times
obituary also was wrong in saying that Barrett had been a
Trotskyite. In later years, Barrett, like many of his contemporaries, be–
came more conservative. But I am not sure whether he became a full–
fledged neoconservative, as the
Times
obituary stated.
Barrett had several utopian dreams: one was to become a Jew, an–
other to write a successful musical comedy. Of the latter, I couldn't
convince him you had to have a talent for popular entertainment. Of the
former, he said that as a boy he had seen an elderly Jewish man across the
courtyard reading a book, something his own Irish parents never did.
Since he couldn't break completely with his Irish roots, he said he
would like to be circumcised at the Vatican in Rome. Like his friend,
Delmore, William Barrett lived in his head. All that counted was in his
head. And he thought - or pretended to think - that Jewish heads were
better than Irish heads, but not better than his own.
