#partisan review

[cinematic-literature]

Wildcat (2023) by Ethan Hawke

Book title: Partisan Review #12

This American literary magazine was published from 1934 to 2003. The issue #12, published in December 1949, included the short story The Peeler by Flannery O'Connor

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"But what, exactly, was the alternative? [Dwight] Macdonald’s politics, always ardently advocated, were an ever-evolving mess, but running underneath it all was a baseline of personalist idealism that connected him to Day, Muste, Rustin, King, and others he found sympatico, and that helps us see coherence in what might otherwise appear just a uniquely Dwight-ish tangle of moralism, anarchism, and aestheticism. Macdonald’s central concern was the dehumanization he saw as the product of modern mass society and the technologies that enabled it. Armed force, immensely powerful governments, religious dogma, mass media, kitsch in the arts—all conspired to erase individuality and turn people into things, the worst possible crime to this radical individualist and compulsive dissident. This is the lens that enables us to make sense of his animosity to both nuclear weapons and abstract art, and you can see as well that while his soon-to-be born little magazine would have exquisitely sensitive antennae for signals from the world of tomorrow, Dwight was nonetheless hostile to modernity and writing in a tradition of American dissent going back to Thoreau. Certainly Dwight’s anti-interventionism, which proved far more durable than his Marxism, is easily traced all the way back to the earliest days of the republic. It’s not for nothing that Michael Wreszin’s biography of Macdonald was entitled, A Rebel in Defense of Tradition.

Partisan Review may have been America’s biggest little magazine in all the ways that mattered, but it still wasn’t big enough to hold the compulsively provocative Macdonald and his cautious editorial partners. So during the war he started planning a journal of his own. In October of 1943, having consulted the lawyer and constitutional scholar Milton Konvitz (who was later Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s teacher and longtime correspondent), Dwight learned that what he’d already written against the war for Partisan Review was “not less ‘seditious’ than the statements in the court record” of the government’s successful 1941 prosecution of Trotskyists under the Smith Act. Despite the FBI’s recent interest and the various provocations he and his forthcoming journal were about to commit, Washington sensibly stood aside.

It was in 1944 that Macdonald launched the short-lived publication he called, at the suggestion of the radical sociologist C. Wright Mills, politics, always lower-cased, whose influence would extend far beyond the five thousand subscribers it managed to accumulate at its peak. Under the headline “Why politics?” in the first issue, Dwight laid out the magazine’s aims, which included teasing larger trends from the day-to-day noise of the news, bringing to the fore new, younger writers from a variety of disciplines, considering artistic works in various mediums “as social and historical phenomena,” and, not least, “to create a center of consciousness on the Left, welcoming all varieties of radical thought.”

One of these was pacifism. In the March 1944 issue, Dwight ran a potently condensed piece by the war resister Milton Mayer, reprinted from The Progressive, entitled, “How to Win the War,” which it proposes to do by dropping leaflets on the Germans telling them to emancipate themselves from the tyranny under which they live “and join us in the brotherhood of man.” In a prefatory comment, Macdonald, noting that “Mayer has been viciously smeared by Walter Winchell, “PM” and similar guardians of public morality,” says he nonetheless doesn’t think becoming a CO [conscientious objector] is the right choice because

it seems to me one can more effectively fight for one’s ideas if one does not isolate one’s self from one’s fellow-men, and that the Army is a better place to learn, and teach, than either a C.O. camp or a jail.

Characteristically for politics, the July issue carried a well-argued and informative response by a conscientious objector named Don Calhoun, who argues that COs have hardly retreated into some cloister. Calhoun wrote:

There is probably no situation in which a drafted man can place him self which brings him into closer identification with the elemental social struggle than in a prison.”

Nor are the war resisters indulging in mere moral vanity:

The potentiality present in conscientious objection is demonstrated by the utterly disproportionate nuisance value of our handful of C.O.’s…Today the conscientious objector, and the conscientious objector alone, stands out as the possible nucleus for the only movement which can shatter the confidence of the state in its ability to effectively make war if and when it wishes.

Despite his confident ferocity in argument, Macdonald was always open to persuasion, not only changing his mind frequently but annotating his own work and even writing critically about it in letters to the editor under an assumed name—what we might today call sock puppetry. Long before social media, he meant it when he said that he wanted his journal to be a place to thrash things out. Calhoun’s cogent missive, which cited a variety of CO protests in places like Danbury and Lewisburg and the reforms that resulted, struck a chord with an editor who was nothing if not open-minded. “Don Calhoun,” Macdonald began his rejoinder in the same issue, “has made out a much stronger case for Conscientious Objection as a political anti-war tactic than I should have imagined possible.”

Dwight doubts conscientious objection can influence large numbers of people or even that it bestows moral superiority if the CO is doing “work of national importance,” because doing that work in itself contributes to the war effort if only by freeing up men who would otherwise have to perform it. Dwight says:

The C.O. does have a moral advantage, however, over the man who submits to being drafted: that of refusing to cooperate in the war effort to the extent the State commands him to—even though, in an ultimate sense, he can escape cooperation only by taking to the hills. At least he puts limits on his obedience, at least he confronts the State power with his own conditions, at least he makes an overt gesture of opposition to the war…His day-to-day actions and his long-range convictions, if they do not wholly coincide, are at least on speaking terms.

Calhoun was back in the October 1944 issue, responding to Macdonald’s response, their exchange spirited but never spiteful and Macdonald, at least as judged by the journal he edited, palpably evolvingtoward the CO position. In the editions to come, the issue would be reported on, discussed, and debated time and again as Dwight began to see pacifism not as futile and self-deluding resistance but as the potential basis for many of the changes he was seeking."

- Daniel Akst, War By Other Means: How the Pacifists of World War 2 Changed America for Good. New York: Melville House, 2022. p. 210-212

[rashansworld]

The entire archive of The Partisan Review is available to browse online for free thanks to Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Center.

The Magazine

Founded in 1934, Partisan Review magazine was one of the most significant cultural literary journals in the U.S. Throughout its 69-year history (with a brief interregnum in November 1936 to November 1937), Partisan Review editors and contributors have viewed critically both liberal and conservative agendas. Apart from an early connection to the Communist Party, it has eschewed party affiliation.

In addition to art and book reviews, Partisan Review contributors wrote on the cultural and political subjects of the day, ranging from psychology and political theories to feature columns from intellectuals who reported on World War II and the Holocaust, the reintegration of Europe, September 11 and the global rise of terrorism, among other topics. For almost seven decades, the magazine published firsthand accounts of American and European arts and culture, and the political scene of various countries.

Partisan Review is valued for its legendary editors, William Phillips, Philip Rahv (two of its founding editors), and Edith Kurzweil. They provided a forum to publish creative essays, commentary, book reviews, and book excerpts by such writers as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Marge Piercy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Shattuck, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren. The entire list of editors and writers is a virtual who's-who of the cultural and literary world.

[redshift-13]

‘Closing Time’: My Lost Literary World

Although all of us sustain losses—of loved ones, friends and acquaintances—at some point in our lives, it is around this time that they begin to accrete, and at an accelerating rate. All losses leave holes in the fabric of life. The one uppermost in my mind today is the end of a distinct period in American letters, when literary culture held sway in this society, commanding respect and bestowing prestige. It was a world peopled by impressive and varied figures such as Lionel Trilling and Mary McCarthy, and, in its impassioned involvement with the life of the mind, made my contemporaries dream of gaining admission to it. That sense of an ending comes with a melancholic recognition that everything, including what once seemed to be a vibrant and entrenched style of intellectual engagement, is fleeting.

[infiniterichesinalittleroom]

Somewhere I read that driving is a substitute for sexual intercourse. I am as good an authority as the next man on both subjects, and can affirm without hesitation that for thrills, entertainment, and hygiene the woman is no match for the automobile.

James Merrill • Driver

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

Educated people in urbanized countries, especially those who regard themselves as liberals or socialists, often deny they believe these differences make women inferior. That women differ from men, they argue, does not mean that women are not the equal of men. Their argument is as dishonest as the separate-but-equal argument once used to defend the legal segregation of the races in schools. For the specific content of these supposedly innate differences between women and men imply a scale of values in which the qualities assigned to women are clearly less estimable than those assigned to men. “Masculinity” is identified with competence, autonomy, self-control, ambition, risk-taking, independence, rationality; “femininity” is identified with incompetence, helplessness, irrationality, passivity, noncompetitiveness, being nice. Women are trained for second-class adulthood, most of what is cherished as typically “feminine” behavior being simply behavior that is childish, servile, weak, immature. No wonder men balk at accepting women as their full equals. Vive la difference indeed!

Susan Sontag, “Third World of Women” from the Partisan Review (1973)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

As I see it, the main point about the relationship of the struggle of women to what Marxist-oriented revolutionary movements define as the central struggle, the class struggle, is the following. To liberate women requires a cultural revolution that will attack attitudes and mental habits which otherwise could well survive the reconstruction of economic relationships that is the goal of the class struggle. The position of women could, conceivably, be scarcely affected by a change in class relationships. Because Marx and Engels were humanists, heirs of the Enlightenment, they denounced the oppression of women under capitalism. But the traditional “feminism” of Marx and his successors is not logically connected with Marxist analysis. (Neither, I would argue, is Freud’s coarse “antifeminism” logically connected with the basic ideas of psychoanalytic theory.) Socialism will not inevitably bring about the liberation of women. Nevertheless, only in a society that one calls, for want of a better name, socialist, would it be possible to invent and institutionalize forms of life that would liberate women. Therefore, though the struggle to build socialism and the cause of women’s liberation are hardly identical, militant feminists do have a vested interest in the fortunes of a revolutionary socialist movement and good reason to be, if only tacitly, allies — as they have reason to be the enemies of all right-revolutionary (or fascist) movements, which always preach the reinforcement of male privilege and the subservience of women.

Susan Sontag, “Third World of Women” from the Partisan Review (1973)

[vladimir-nabokov-official]

Marxists have not properly estimated the depth of sexism any more than, in setting out to defeat imperialism, they properly estimated the depths of racism.

Susan Sontag, “Third World of Women”