'Not Actual Things, but the Moral Truth of Things'

On the free book cart in the library I found the March-April 1954 issue of Partisan Review, scuffed and turning brown but intact and perfectly readable. The cover price is 75 cents. This is a relic of the “little magazine” era, when even small-circulation journals attracted serious attention among readers and writers. 

Partisan Review was founded in 1934 by the John Reed Club, the cultural branch of the American Communist Party. Four years later, under the editorship of Philip Rahv and William Phillips, the magazine shifted to an anti-Stalinist, occasionally pro-Trotsky, uniformly Modernist bent. It would publish T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets," essays by George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, and Saul Bellow’s first story. The magazine folded in 2003.

 

The year of publication, 1954, is significant. Stalin and Dylan Thomas had died the previous year. In 1952, Partisan Review had published “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night.” Art and politics were mutating. The first piece in the issue I found is Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story “From the Diary of One Not Born,” translated from the Yiddish by Nancy Gross and included in his first collection of stories, Gimpel the Fool (1957). Also here are two poems by Delmore Schwartz, listed as one of the magazine’s associate editors: “Hölderlin” (whose madness prefigured Schwartz’s own) and "Baudelaire." And here is Robert Warshow’s “Movie Chronicle: The Westerner,” later collected in The Immediate Experience (1962). At age thirty-seven, Warshow would suffer a fatal heart attack in 1955. When a revised and enlarged edition of Warshow’s book was published in 2002, Terry Teachout wrote: “I can think of no essay collection of the past half-century more richly deserving of republication--and none more likely to be misunderstood.”

 

Joseph Frank, the future biographer of Dostoevsky, reviews Iris Murdoch’s book on Sartre and J.P. Stern’s on Ernst Jünger. The odious Leslie Fiedler reviews Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons. I’m impressed by the magazine’s eclecticism of content and the absence of a “house voice.” Martin Greenberg contributes a “Fiction Chronicle” and reviews five novels, including a translation of Cousin Bazilio by the great Portuguese writer José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, and Ivy Compton-Burnett’s The Present and the Past. It was customary at the time, especially among American readers and critics, to treat Compton-Burnett as a freak. To his credit, Greenberg treats her like a modern master:

 

“[A]s in Henry Green, all the novel’s excess literary baggage is pitched overboard. In both cases this produces tight little books, and an astonishingly eerie effect. In Green that effect is one of magic: he wants words not to mean but to be, and his novels, when they are successful, are a kind of hallucination without meaning. [Compton-Burnett] produces a hallucinatory effect too, as of seeing too clearly—but seeing too clearly not actual things, but the moral truth of things.”

 

The ads in this issue of Partisan Review are reminders of an era when people still took art, books and ideas seriously -- occasionally, too seriously. The display ad for Harcourt, Brace features Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk and Peter Taylor’s The Widows of Thornton. There are ads for the Bollingen Series, the presses of Stanford, Chicago and Columbia (much literary criticism featured), and the Hans Hofmann School of the Fine Arts. At the back of the magazine is an ad that carries this headline: “Will you ‘adopt’ a Spanish Civil War refugee?” It’s a fascinating and pertinent artifact from another world, fifteen years after the end of that war: