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PARTISAN REVIEW
Schapiro, as well as art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.
(I first read Rosenberg's political and cultural essays in French translation,
at Editions de Minuit, when I was a college student in Romania in the
early
1970S.)
Among the contributors to PR were some of America's great
fiction writers: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and
Saul Bellow.
It
was in PR that Susan Sontag published her controversial
"Notes on Camp" (again, I read her
Against Interpretation
in Romania,
before leaving that country for political reasons in
1981).
Under the guid–
ance of William Phillips, PR enthusiastically promoted abstract expres–
sionism, at a time when the custodians of philistine realism were looking
askance at paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark
Rothko. The main idea that inspired the magazine from its inception was
the affinity between Rimbaud's call for "changing life" and Marx's
Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach ("change the world"). Years later, the jour–
nal moved away from any kind of political, leftist radicalism, but it has
remained loyal to its espousal of modernity and the avant-garde, as well
as to its commitment to unencumbered political freedom. Among those
who appeared in the first issue of the magazine were Wallace Stevens,
Lionel Abel, Lionel Trilling, and Sidney Hook. The same issue included
Delmore Schwartz's famous story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities." In
a country where the very concept of intelligentsia sounded bizarre, exotic,
even outlandish, PR created an intellectual environment comparable with
the best journals in Europe (in some respects even more impressive).
During the first years of publication, American communists tried to
exert ideological control, which of course infuriated Rahv and Phillips.
Challenging the ideological commissars led to the growing autonomiza–
tion of the magazine and the affirmation of an adamant anti-Stalinist
and anti-totalitarian line. Phillips was one of the first major Western
intellectuals to advocate simultaneously anti-fascism and anti-Stalinism.
Utterly sensitive to the European political and cultural debates, Rahv
and Phillips emphasized the right of critical thinking and opposed the
obscurantism championed by Stalin's American admirers . They
denounced Stalin's show trials in Moscow as a despicable mockery of
justice. Their vision of partisanship was the negation of the Leninist
straitjacket known as
partiinost
(party-mindedness).
A Partisan Century
groups together some of the seminal political and
intellectual essays published in PR (among them, a fragment of Andre
Gide's
Return from the USSR,
one of the main contributions to the lit–
erature of disillusionment and awakening). The volume is a collection
of testimonies and analyses that shed an especially lucid light on what
Hannah Arendt once called the ideological storms of the twentieth cen-
