The Partisan review anthology [1st ed.]

Table of contents :
I. Interpretation. The D.H. Lawrence myth / William Troy --
The music of poetry / T.S. Eliot --
The new failure of nerve / Sidney Hook --
The intelligentsia / Arthur Koestler --
The temptation of (Saint) Flaubert / Paul Valery --
The gangster as tragic hero / Robert Warshow --
Reflections on Gandhi / George Orwell --
Men, women, and sex / Diana Trilling --
In the hotel de la mole / Erich Auerbach --
Many thousands gone / James Baldwin --
Art, popular art, and the illusion of the folk / André Malraux --
Conversations with Kafka / Gustav Janouch --
The myth and the powerhouse / Philip Rahv --
This age of conformity / Irving Howe --
"American-type" painting / Clement Greenberg --
America and Dylan Thomas / Elizabeth Hardwick --
Humanism in Thomas Mann / Marguerite Yourcenar --
Artistic truth and the warped vision / William Phillips --
The fate of the avant-garde / Richard Chase --
Symbolism and the novel / Ursula Brumm --
Love, love, love / Gore Vidal --
Psychoanalysis and literary culture today / Alfred Kazin --
Art books, book art, art / Harold Rosenberg --
Characters in fiction / Mary McCarthy --
On the modern element in modern literature / Lionel Trilling. II. A group of stories. America! America! / Delmore Schwartz --
The Mexican General / Saul Bellow --
The sin of Jesus / Isaac Babel --
Life and letters / Angus Wilson --
George / Isaac Rosenfeld --
The magic barrel / Bernard Malamud --
The rehearsal / Elisabeth Mann Borgese --
Everything under the sun / James Purdy. III. Selected poems. Never, never, never / Kenneth Fearing --
Lament & Triumph / George Barker --
The statue / John Berryman --
The woman that had more babies than that / Wallace Stevens --
Washington Cathedral / Karl Shapiro --
The contours of fixation / Weldon Kees --
The George Sands garden / Horace Gregory --
The lion / William Carlos Williams --
The partner / Theodore Roethke --
Do not go gentle into that good night / Dylan Thomas --
Emma's story / John Thompson --
The man upstairs / Stanley Kunitz --
To a little girl, one year old, in ruined fortress / Robert Penn Warrren --
Visits to St. Elizabeth's (1950) / Elizabeth Bishop --
Ready to roll / Allen Ginsberg --
Memories of west street and Lepke / Robert Lowell --
Man and wife / Robert Lowell --
An urban convalescence / James Merrill --
Digging it out / John Hollander --
In the deep museum / Anne Sexton. IV. Variety. "The truly monstrous" : a note on Nathanael West / Daniel Aaron --
Mr. Eliot's evening service / Hans Meyerhoff --
Religion and intellectuals / Hannah Arendt, A.J. Ayer, Robert Graves, Jacques Maritain, Meyer Schapiro, Allen Tate, Paul Tillich --
Keats in his letters / W.H. Auden --
Fitzgerald and America / William Barrett --
Ezra Pound : the promise and the disaster / F.R. Leavis --
Monstrous dust / F.W. Dupee --
McCarthy and his apologists / Dwight Macdonald --
Symbolism and/or literature / Norman Podhoretz --
Sufficient unto the day / Leslie A. Fiedler --
The deeds and dreams of Yeats / F.W. Dupee --
Socialism and sociology / Philip Rieff --
Three obsessed critics / Steven Marcus --
Anglo-Saxon attitudes / Stephen Spender --
The mezzanine / Walter Stone.

Citation preview

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PHILLIPS ACADEMY

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LIB R ARY ampliciu

GIFT OF MR. DUDLEY FITTS

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Since its founding in 1934, Partisan Review has won a deserving reputa¬ tion as one of the finest literary period¬ icals in America and as an important exponent of the liberal point of view. Now,

William

Phillips

and

Philip

Rahv (founders and editors of Partisan Review) have assembled a rich collec¬ tion of the best critical and creative writing published in their magazine over the past twenty-eight years. The roster of contributors includes T.S. Eliot, writing on poetry; Clement Greenberg, on American art; Irving Howe, on “This Age of Conformity”; Andre Malraux, on “Art and the Illu¬ sion of the Folk”; Paul T illich and and Angus Wilson, to name but a few; and poetry by Allen Ginsberg, Horace Gregory, Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, and William Carlos Williams -all of which first saw print in the pages of Partisan Review. Its galaxy of distinguished contribu¬ tors is only one of the reasons why Partisan Review has played such a crucial role on the American intellec¬ tual scene. Perhaps its chief distinction is that it has always, in the words of Lionel Trilling, “accommodated the old and the new, the traditional and the experimental, the religious and the positivistic, the hopeful and the de¬ spairing.” In this bold tradition of the past, the editors have compiled a collection that has value and pertinence for today.

The Partisan Review Anthology

The Partisan

Review Anthology

Edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv

HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON • NEW YORK

Copyright © 1962 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1938, 1939, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954, © 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, i960, 1961 by Partisan Review. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Limited. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-12136 First Edition

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Designer: Ernst Reichl 87326-0212

Printed in the United States of America

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publishers for permis¬ sion to reprint their copyrighted selections: Beacon Press for “Many Thousands Gone” from Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, copyright 1951, © 1955 by James Baldwin; and “American Type Painting” by Clement Greenberg from Art and Culture, copyright © 1955, 1958, 1961, by Clement Greenberg. Bollingen Foundation and Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. for “The Tempta¬ tion of St. Flaubert” which will appear in Volume 9 of the Collected Works of Paul Valery, Descartes, Goethe, and Others, in a translation by Martin Tumell. Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, Inc. for “The Magic Barrel” by Bernard Malamud, from The Magic Barrel, copyright 1954, © 1958 by Bernard Malamud; “The Music of Poetry” from On Poetry and Poets by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1942, © 1957 by T. S. Eliot; and “Characters in Fiction” from On the Contrary by Mary McCarthy, copyright © 1961 by Mary McCarthy. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Faber and Faber Ltd. for “The Woman Who Had More Babies Than That” from Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose, by Wallace Stevens, copyright, 1939, 1942, by Wallace Stevens, copy¬ right renewed © 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly Stevens. The Macmillan Company and Jonathan Cape Ltd. for “The Intelligensia” from The Yogi and the Commissar by Arthur Koestler, copyright 1945 by Arthur Koestler. William Morrow, Inc. and Martin Seeker & Warburg, Ltd. for “Life and Letters” from The Wrong Set by Angus Wilson, copyright 1949 by Angus Wilson. New Directions for “The Lion” from The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams, copyright, 1944, 1948, 1950 by William Carlos Williams; and “America! America!” from The World Is a Wedding by Delmore Schwartz, copyright 1940, 1948, by Delmore Schwartz. New Directions and J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. for “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, copy¬ right 1952, © 1957 by New Directions. Frederick A. Praeger, Inc. for “Conversations with Kafka” by Gustav Janouch, copyright 1953 by Gustav Janouch. Princeton University Press for “In the Hotel De La Mole” by Erich Auerbach from Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Litera¬ ture by Erich Auerbach, copyright, 1953 by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. Random House, Inc. for “Washington Cathedral” (“Person, Place and Thing”) from Poems 1940-1 953 by Karl Shapiro, copyright 1941 by Karl Shapiro. Random House, Inc. and Eyre & Spottiswoode, Ltd. for the first two sections (Sirocco and Gull’s Cry) from “To a Little Girl, One Year Old, in Ruined Fortress” from Promises: Poems, 1954, 1956, by Robert Penn Warren, copy¬ right © 1955 by Robert Penn Warren. Viking Press for “In George Sand’s Garden” from The Selected Poems of Horace Gregory, copyright 1948 by Horace Gregory.

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PREFACE

This is the third collection in book form * of critical and creative writing drawn from the pages of Partisan Review, a magazine that has broken most records for longevity, while it has tried to keep a continuity of edi¬ torial taste and direction. It might be added, too, that the magazine’s commitment to the modern sensibility in literature and the arts and to a radical consciousness in social and political matters has persisted through the years, in spite of occasional lapses and the hard pressures of recent years in favor of the chic, the respectable, the conservative, the popular. This anthology differs from the first two in that it draws on the maga¬ zine’s entire history for its contents, and this has made for special diffi¬ culties in putting it together. Thus, because of all the material at our dis¬ posal, going back to 1937, it proved impossible to make a selection that would be fully representative. We realized that if the aim were representa¬ tiveness then only a book at least twice, if not several times, the size of this volume would suffice. Hence, we were forced to restrict ourselves to a typical sampling and to dispense with comprehensiveness. And we ask the reader to keep in mind that we have deliberately omitted a great many pieces, excellent in their way, that are topical or polemical in character. Also, that we have judged it best to omit a good many stories, poems, and essays that have been widely reprinted in books and anthologies, because it seemed to us pointless as well as wasteful of the available space to in¬ clude them in one more edition. Finally, it should be said that we some¬ times had to be arbitrary in our choices, because there just wasn’t enough room to include everything. Nevertheless, we believe that the material we have included is fairly indicative of the magazine’s substance and expressive of its tone and major concerns through several decades. We should also like to take this opportunity to thank Jane Richmond for all the work she did in helping to get this collection together. —WILLIAM PHILLIPS AND PHILIP RAHV * The first two are The Partisan Reader (The Dial Press, 1946) and The New Partisan

Reader, 1945-1953 (Harcourt, Brace, 1953).

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