A partisan view

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A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life, by William Phillips. New York, Stein and Day, 1983, 312 pp., $19.95.

William Phillips was a founding editor of the literary magazine Partisan Review in 1934. At that time Partisan BOOK REVIEW was the organ of the New York chapter of the Communist Party's John Reed Clubs, publishing writers in outright rebellion against the culture and politics of capitalist society. In the late 1930s the editors were sympathetic to Trotskyism.

Five decades later Partisan is still edited by Phillips, but the publication is now embraced as "the best literary magazine in America" by the New York Times Book Review and other representatives of the cultural establishment. At the age of 76, Phillips continues to call himself a socialist and he is critical of the neo-conservatism espoused by many one-time contributors to Partisan who are now grouped around Norman Podhoretz's Commentary magazine. Nevertheless, Phillips rejected Marxism in the 1940s and ever since then he and his journal have had only a sentimental connection to the revolutionary internationalism to which Partisan aspired in the 1930s.

At the.start of the Great Depression, Phillips' circle of Bohemian-literary friends gravitated toward the Communist Party, and the young writer threw himself into Party-sponsored literary activities. But he soon felt a tension between his desire for unlimited literary expression and pressure from the Communist movement to judge creative activities by political criteria.

This contradiction came to a head in 1935 when the Communist Party drastically changed its political orientation from the ultraleftism of the "Third Period" to the liberalism of the Popular Front. The "literary line" was altered accordingly: The John Reed Club members were ordered to cease their advocacy of a "proletarian literature," a policy with which Phillips and his close associate Philip Rahv had never felt very comfortable; instead, they were urged to celebrate works by famous authors and Hollywood stars who declared themselves supporters of the Popular Front.

This intolerable turn-about in cultural policy was followed by the disconcerting Moscow Purge Trials (1936-38), in which Joseph Stalin framed up and executed the surviving leaders of the Russian revolution, imprisoning millions of others, and news that the Communists in Spain had repressed and assassinated forces to their left. Prodded by the Marxist novelist James T. Farrell, and taking a good deal of inspiration from the revolutionary anti-Stalinist writings of Leon Trotsky, Phillips and Rahv broke from the Communist Party in 1936. A year later they relaunched Partisan under the direction of a like-minded group of writers who were Marxist in politics and sympathetic to the modernist avant-garde in culture.

Until the advent of World War II, Partisan considered itself a Leninist publication with considerable sympathy for Trotskyism. Although Phillips and Rahv were suspicious of any organizational association, one of the magazine's editors, Dwight MacDonald, briefly joined the Socialist Workers Party, and Trotskyists as well as Trotsky himself were among Partisan's contributors.

But war-time pressure caused a major rift in the editorial board. MacDonald, and the art critic Clement Greenberg argued that opposition to fascism should not mean abandoning the struggle for socialism or endorsing the imperialist war aims of the Allies. Rahv and Sidney Hook wrote in favor of giving "critical support" to the U.S. government. Phillips stayed out of the fray but tacitly backed Rahy. In 1943, MacDonald felt forced to resign and began publishing his own magazine, Politics, which eventully became anarcho-pacifist. After this rupture, Partisan's connections with the left became even more tenuous.

Partisan printed little on political matters during the Cold War and McCarthy era, but when it did the editors' virulent hostility to the Soviet Union was no longer balanced by a militant anticapitalism. What had once been a revolutionary anti-Stalinist political outlook became ated with the Party.

Yet the January 1933 issue of the Communist, theoretical organ of the Party, contains a 3000-word essay by Phillips denouncing the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset as a social-fascist backed by Wall Street and a slanderer of the Soviet Union. This article would have had to have been written and accepted in 1932, and it's hard to believe that the Communist's editorial board would have accepted a piece from a person entirely unknown to them.

As for Phillips' Trotskyist associations, it is true that he never joined, but Rahv's substantial correspondence with Trotsky on behalf of Partisan's editorial board demonstrates close political agreement with the International Left Opposition, and Phillips taught classes sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party. Furthermore, in 1939 Phillips joined with intellectuals in the SWP to form the League for Cultural Freedom and Socialism, an organization of revolutionary writers and artists inspired by a manifesto written by Trotsky, Andre Breton, and Diego Rivera. All of this information is deleted from Phillips' memoir.

Even when he presents excerpts from Partisan's first editorial after the 1937 reorganization, to demonstrate the magazine's "combination of social concerns and literary standards," Phillips omits all reference to its anti-capitalist political thrust. He might have included the following paragraph:

"Our program is the program of Marxism, which in general terms means being for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society, for a workers' government, and for international socialism. In contemporary terms it implies the strugPhillips' autobiography typifies the experience of a large part of the generation of American intellectuals who turned sharply left after the stockmarket crash of 1929, only to become increasingly deradicalized during the 1940s and 1950s. Under the disillusioning blows of the defeat of the Spanish revolution, the degeneration of the Russian revolution, World War Il, the Cold War, and McCarthyism, they evolved into "critical supporters" of the same oppressive social order that they had once set out to transform.

Of course, the social pressure that confronted these intellectuals was overwhelming, but only a vulgar determinist can blame the outcome entirely on difficult objective conditions. Phillips compounded the problem of sustaining fidelity to one's ideals when he severed his ties with working-class organizations and abandoned Marxism, the most effective tool for making sense out of the world and developing a perspective on the meaning of one's life.

Opposition to imperialism, racism, and class exploitation simply faded into the background for Phillips and his circle. Individual existence became paramount, and now he lives only "to see how it all turns out."

Marxist workers and intellectuals today need to understand the causes of the profound metamorphosis in political and cultural values that occurred among mas, and pressures not unlike those of our predecessors. Autobiographical memoirs such as this present one, if critically examined, can be useful in revealing certain facets of the process.

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radicals of Phillips' generation, for we are confronted with problems, dilem-