The New York Intellectuals: From Vanguard to Institution

274 Pages·1995·5.027 MB·English

by  Hugh Wilford

The New York Intellectuals
This study of the New York Intellectuals uses original sources to
reconstruct their history during the period of their greatest influ­
ence, the 1940s and 1950s. It takes as its major theme the contra­
diction between the Intellectuals’ avant-garde principles and the
institutional locations they had come to occupy.
Amongst those known collectively as the New York Intellectuals
were such thinkers and activists as Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy,
Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling. They assembled on the mar­
gins of American society in the 1930s and formed an intellectual
community on the basis of their shared concern with Marxism and
Modernism. Afterwards they enjoyed a steady ascent to national
and international prominence. Their influence is still felt in many
spheres of American public life today.
While defending the New York Intellectuals against the charges
that they ’sold out’, this book also mounts a sustained critique of
their cultural and political vanguardism. The author pays particu­
lar attention to three of the illustrious magazines associated with
the Intellectuals, Partisan Review, Politics and Encounter, providing
fresh insights into their contents and new information about their
material histories.
Hugh Wilford is Lecturer in American Studies at Middlesex
University.
For my parents
The New York Intellectuals:
from vanguard to institution
Hugh Wilford
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
Distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St Martin's Press
Copyright O Hugh WUford 1995
Published by Manchester University Press
Oxford Road, Manchester Ml 3 9NR, UK
and Room 400,175 Fifth Avenue,
New York. NY 10010, USA
Distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by
St Martin’s Press. Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue. New York, NY 10010, USA
British Library Cataloguing-ln-PubUcation Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Ubrary of Congress Cataloging-in-PubUcation Data
WUford, Hugh. 1965-
The New York Intellectuals: from vanguard to institution / Hugh WUford
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
ISBN 0 7190 3988 6 (hardback)
1. United States—Intellectual life—20th century.
2. Intellectuals—New York (N.Y.) 3. New York (N.Y.)—Intellectual life.
I. Title
E169.12.W52 1995
974.7'1043'08681—dc20 95-4043
CIP
ISBN 0 7190 3988 6 hardback
First published 1995
99 98 97 96 95 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset in Great Britain
by Carnegie Publishing Ltd, Preston
Printed in Great Britain
by Biddles Ltd. GuUdford and King’s Lynn
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgements xi
Prologue The rise of the New York Intellectuals 1
Introduction The New York Intellectuals:
a defence and a critique 9
Part one: The cultural avant-garde
Chapter 1 Partisan Review as avant-garde Institution 31
Chapter 2 Partisan Review in the 1940s:
the claiming of Modernism 61
Chapter 3 Politics, Pound and patronage:
Modernist contradictions 82
Chapter 4 Partisan Review in the 1950s:
the institutionalisation of the avant-garde 108
Part two: The political vanguard
Chapter 5 Post-modem possibilities:
Dwight Macdonald’s Politics 137
Chapter 6 An oasis: the New York Intellectuals
in the late 1940s 163
Chapter 7 The vanguard mutates: the New York
Intellectuals and the Cultural Cold War 193
Chapter 8 ’Unwitting assets’?:
the New York Intellectuals and Encounter 216
Epilogue 243
Select bibliography 248
Index 256

Preface
This is a history of the New York Intellectuals concentrating on
the years 1940-60. As such, it is also a narrative of rise and decline
or, more precisely, of marginality followed first by assimilation and
then by fragmentation. During this period the Intellectuals rose
from a position of marginal obscurity to one of national and inter­
national prominence; towards its close they began to drift apart
and pursue separate careers. This study sets out to identify the
causes and consider the implications of these developments.
Recent histories of the New York Intellectuals, of which there
are several, take a variety of topics as their central themes, ranging
from the Intellectuals’ ethnicity to their avowal of ‘cosmopolitan’
ideals.1 The main concern of this volume can be stated simply: it
is the New York Intellectual community’s relation to institutions,
in particular the contradiction between its identity as an autono­
mous vanguard and the institutional positions it came to occupy.
It hardly needs stating that the ‘rise’ of the New York Intel­
lectuals was an institutional process: they would not have ‘risen’
as they did without the endorsement, support and sponsorship of
such institutions as the American state, foundations, universities
and the publishing industry. In other words, ‘rise’ is a shorthand
way of describing the Intellectuals’ institutionalisation. Yet the iden­
tity of the New York Intellectual community, in both its political
and cultural forms, was predicated on the notion of an independent
vanguard/avant-garde - a notion contradicted by the Intellectuals’
new institutional location. Considering this, it is perhaps not sur­
prising that later intellectual generations have accused the Intel­
lectuals of trahison des clercs or, stated less grandly, a ‘cop-out’.
The standard leftist view of Intellectual history is of a descent from
prelapsarian autonomy into institutional corruption.
The present study rejects the ‘cop-out’ thesis. On the one hand,
it tries to show that the institutionalisation of the New York Intel­
lectual community was less the result of cynicism or careerism on
viii Preface
the part of the Intellectuals than of various recuperative,
hegemonic processes that were so powerful the Intellectuals could
not withstand them. Indeed, it is to the Intellectuals’ credit that
they did try to resist their institutionalisation, or at least often
succeeded in confounding institutional attempts to ’use’ them. On
the other hand, this book challenges the traditional leftist narrative
of New York Intellectual history by mounting a sustained and
vigorous critique of the Intellectuals’ brand of autonomous van-
guardism, pointing to a number of theoretical and practical errors
in the vanguardist project, and suggesting that the Intellectuals’
dual identity as a cultural avant-garde/political vanguard actually
Increased their vulnerability to institutional recuperation.
This study approaches the history of the New York Intellectuals
via three magazines associated with the Intellectual community:
Partisan Review, Politics and Encounter. There are two reasons why
this approach has been adopted. First, as the magazine article was
the Intellectuals’ preferred means of written expression, these pub­
lications represent invaluable documentary records of the Intellec­
tuals’ changing values and concerns. Second, the Intellectuals’
magazines possess considerable historical significance in their own
right, as centres of the New York Intellectual community, as in
fact the Intellectuals’ very own institutions. In addition to exam­
ining the contents of these magazines, this work also attempts,
with the help of unpublished archival materials such as personal
correspondence, to reconstruct their careers as Intellectual insti­
tutions. In this last respect particular attention is given to an aspect
of their histories that has previously been almost entirely ignored,
namely their material existence, in particular their relations with
patrons. The material histories of the New York Intellectual com­
munity’s magazines reveal both the inexorability of the institution­
alising forces at work on the Intellectuals, and the misguidedness
of their devotion to the ideal of intellectual autonomy.
Why these three magazines, as opposed to other publications
associated with the Intellectuals, such as New Leader, Dissent or
Commentary? Partisan Review (1934-) is generally acknowledged
to have been the New York Intellectuals’ leading magazine. It was
instrumental in the formation of the Intellectual community; it
became the principal centre of the Intellectuals’ communal life;
and it was crucial in cultivating their allegiance to the concept of
the cultural avant-garde. It might also be said that, although much
Preface ix
is known about ‘PR’ during the 1930s and early 1940s, surpris­
ingly little has been written about it during its peak years of influ­
ence, the late 1940s and 1950s - an omission this study attempts
to repair. Politics (1944-9) has been selected for special attention
because, first, it has been pointedly ignored in other studies of the
New York Intellectual community and, second, uniquely amongst
the Intellectuals’ magazines, it offered a radical political alternative
to the model of the revolutionary vanguard - an alternative that
still has political resonance today. The CIA-supported Anglo-
American journal Encounter (1953-90) has been chosen instead
of, say. Dissent, partly because of the British connection and partly
because it has received only perfunctory mention in other studies
of the Intellectual community, but mainly because its troubled
early history offers such vivid evidence that, even at the very site
of their ‘cooptation’ by the national security state, the New York
Intellectuals resisted the process of institutionalisation.
Finally, a few words about the focus and organisation of the
study. As a result of the decision to concentrate on these particular
magazines, most of the coverage is devoted to the ‘founding gen­
eration’ of the New York Intellectual community, the chief editors
of the ‘second’ Partisan Review: William Phillips, Philip Rahv and
Dwight Macdonald. This is not to say, however, that other Intel­
lectuals and, for that matter, other magazines do not receive de­
tailed attention. As regards structure, the Prologue offers a broad
historical overview of the New York Intellectuals’ ‘rise’, or institu­
tionalisation. The Introduction raises some of the key interpretive
problems explored throughout the study, as well as establishing
the context for subsequent discussion of the Intellectuals’ maga­
zines’ material history. Part One relates the history of the Partisan
Review, showing how during the 1940s and 1950s the Intellectu­
als’ identity as a cultural avant-garde was transformed into that
of an auxiliary of the culture industries and universities. Part Two
deals with Politics and Encounter, focusing on the former’s experi­
ments with non-vanguardist radicalism and the editorial disputes
that flared around the latter; the aim is to document the Intellec­
tuals’ mutation from a revolutionary vanguard into Cold War
propagandists. The Epilogue concludes the volume with some re­
flections on the significance and value of the New York Intellectu­
als’ legacy to the present day.
x Preface
Note
1 Recent booklength studies of the New York Intellectuals include:
Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Terry A. Cooney, The Rise of
the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle (Madison: Univer­
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The
Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Neil Jumonville,
Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America (Oxford:
University of California Press, 1991) (please note that subsequent refer­
ences to Jumonville’s work are to the doctoral dissertation on which his
book is based). Bloom's book concentrates on the Intellectuals’ ethnicity
and ethnic assimilation; Cooney’s on their cosmopolitanism; Wald’s on
their engagement with Trotskyism, and subsequent deradlcalisation; and
Jumonville’s on their adoption of more pragmatic, pluralistic ideals in the
post-War period.