Comment
Two more revisionist accounts of the New York intellectuals have just
been published - one book-length,
Renewing the
Left.
Politics, Imagination,
and the New York Intellectuals
by Harvey Teres (Oxford University Press)
and the other a chapter in a book,
Left
Intellectuals and Popular Culture in
Twentieth-Century America
by Paul R. Gorman (University of North
Carolina Press). Some of the earlier books and articles on the subject were
written from a leftist view. But the newest additions are different. The
earlier ones had ingenious explanations of why the New York intellectu–
als abandoned their radical views, which they held in the thirties and early
forties. The latest versions use the leftist criterion for evaluating the
achievements of the New York intellectuals.
However, it must be said that the criticisms by Teres of our straying
from the radical canon are mild. And he praises our stand against the
Communists when we were associated with the John Reed Club and in
the early days of the independent
Partisan Review.
He is also generally ap–
preciative of the magazine and its major contributors. He is particularly
generous in his praise of the early writings of Lionel Trilling, Philip
Rahv, and myself In fact - and this is at the heart of his thesis - Teres re–
gards our early work and the stance of
Partisan Review
as a usable past for
current cultural leftism. He approves of our early anti-Stalinism, our
championing of modernism, and our insistence that literature has a life of
its own and cannot be controlled by or dictated to by political parties or
interests. It is our later history that he disapproves of: our so-called elit–
ism, our failure to support radical feminism, black and gay liberation, and
radical causes generally.
But even the earlier approval is slightly askew. Teres grasps some of
its meaning, but he misses much of it, especially the tone and the impli–
cation of the magazine and of the things Rahv and I wrote. For example,
he fails to understand that our support of modernism came from the con–
viction that it was the most advanced movement in modern art and
literature, indeed, the only legitimate one. It was the natural accompani–
ment to radical politics, but the championing of modernism was also an
emphatic way of rejecting the idea of proletarian art and the social reading
of American literature by critics like Parrington and Hicks.
Teres also doesn't really know how the Communist Party operated.
That
Partisan Review
was permitted to criticize the sectarian line in litera–
ture, he takes as a sign that the Party was tolerant of disagreement. The
fact is, as he knows, Mike Gold and Granville Hicks were outraged by
our views. But several Party members, who were on the staff of The
Daily
Worker,
were in the John Reed Club and supported us. Moreover, we
were just beginning, and the Party did not have time to crack down on
