Partisan Requiem

The announcement a few weeks ago that Partisan Review was closing shop after a run of nearly seventy years brought sadness--since PR at its best was a central site of American cultural life--but also a sense of inevitability. No one expected the journal to go on much longer after the death last year of its longtime editor William Phillips, who helped found it in 1934. Sadly, PR had been without vital signs for many years, its existence more and more a matter of cryonics.

At its proudest, PR offered a powerful if not always coherent emulsion of European Modernist culture and American left-wing anti-Stalinism. It justly took pride in denouncing Stalinism at a time when many on the left were still apologists for all that occurred in the Soviet Union, while it provided trenchant literary commentary on Eliot, Kafka, Malraux, Camus, Silone and many others. And the commentary came from such critics as Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Irving Howe, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, and Steven Marcus. PR developed a distinctive New York style of cultural criticism, engaged with literature--especially the literature of ideas--but with a particular awareness of social context and the alienated condition of the modern artist. Other quarterlies--such as Kenyon Review--carried more refinedformal literary analysis. In PR, it was the ideas that mattered most.

Both the cultural and political underpinnings of PR had collapsed by the 1960s. Its anti-Communism became irrelevant, since younger generations of Americans were all anti-Communist by then; virulent anti-Communism had largely become an excuse for a slide toward the right. The cultural avant-garde of high Modernism no longer held sway. What came along to replace it was baffling: a flirtation with the mass culture that PR writers had always disdained. The new sensibility often seemed indifferent to aesthetic discriminations.

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