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Magill’s Literary Annual 1983

The Truants

by John N. Wall Jr.

First published: 1982

Publisher: Doubleday & Company (Garden City, New York). 270 pp. $15.95

Type of work: Cultural history; memoir

Time of work: 1935-1960

Locale: New York City

A narrative of the author’s involvement in the New York literary scene, chiefly in the years following World War II, together with a retrospective evaluation of the political and aesthetic concerns of that era

In the two decades immediately following World War II, New York City was the center of American intellectual and artistic life to a degree unequaled before or since. Part of William Barrett’s agenda in this book is to invoke the flavor of that time and place by describing his involvement in the life of the Partisan Review, one of the major journals of opinion published in New York during that period. Since he was close to the circle of writers who produced the Partisan Review and served for part of this time as a member of the magazine’s editorial staff, he is ideally situated to provide an insider’s view of the personalities and issues which concerned those who had a major role in shaping American cultural life in the immediate postwar era. In this respect, he writes a fascinating and intriguing account.

Unfortunately, one of the qualities characteristic of American cultural life in that age was a narrowness of perspective and a passion for clique-building that often resulted in bitter disagreements, frequent back-stabbing, and broken friendships. One of the major story lines of Barrett’s memoir concerns the split between Philip Rahv and William Phillips, founders of the Partisan Review, which ultimately resulted in legal action to resolve control of the publication. Barrett, although he portrays himself as an inadvertent participant in these disputes, did side with Phillips, and maturity has not lessened his passion for being on what he feels is the right side of these and other matters. Along with evocative accounts of life among the intellectuals, The Truants is filled with more or less subtle but corrosive and derogatory accounts of the characters and the lives of many of Barrett’s acquaintances and associates from that period.

Let one of the more vicious episodes suffice as an example. John Berryman was a major American poet of the postwar period and, in the opinion of many, the founder of the “confessional” style of poetry whose practitioners included Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and other significant poets of the time. In addition, Berryman was widely hailed as a brilliant teacher, a major biographer of Stephen Crane, and a scholar of Shakespeare. Yet Barrett portrays Berryman as “stupid,” “hollow,” “panting,” and “plodding.”

Apparently, according to Barrett, Berryman committed two great mistakes: he was not part of the tight Partisan Review circle, and he was for a time a friend of Delmore Schwartz. In fact, Barrett assures his readers that Schwartz himself thought Berryman stupid. Schwartz and his own tortured life are important subthemes of this book; Barrett and Schwartz were close friends for a time, before Schwartz’s emotional collapse prevented him from having any friends at all. Indeed, Schwartz is the only person in this book, other than Barrett himself, about whom Barrett has little disparaging to say. To Barrett, everything Schwartz did that was less than perfect is forgiven, but John Berryman is not to be forgiven his friendship with Schwartz.

The matter of Berryman is typical of Barrett’s approach in The Truants. Having outlived most of the other people in the Partisan Review circle, he now seizes the chance to settle old scores, have the last word, and put people and relationships in their place. This persistence in continuing the quarrels of the past makes of The Truants a much less helpful and insightful book than it otherwise might be. It becomes evidence of the occasional cultural and intellectual parochialism of the New York cultural scene. At one point, Barrett notes disparagingly an essay on Schwartz that Philip Rahv wrote after Schwartz’s death. Barrett’s suggestion is that there is something unseemly about the way Rahv discussed Schwartz; certainly, the same could be said of almost every character portrait Barrett gives in The Truants, including that of Rahv.

Perhaps what The Truants really presents is a portrait of someone who has made a fundamental change of attitude and who now looks back on his life before that change as though it were the life of a stranger. Many American intellectuals, including Barrett, were Marxists in the 1930’s and 1940’s. In fact, the Partisan Review was founded to be a journal whose politics was Marxist and whose cultural preference was Modernist. While Modernism has survived as a fundamentally important cultural and artistic movement, the Marxism of the Depression era now seems to have been an aberration in American political life. Meanwhile, Barrett has converted to another cause, that of neoconservatism. He is now as certain that the free-enterprise system is essential to the preservation of liberty as he was then that Marxism was essential to the achievement of economic justice. As a result, the heroes of this book are those who anticipated that change, at least in Barrett’s opinion, and the villains are those who adhered to their political radicalism.

Barrett’s treatment of Philip Rahv is instructive here. He tries to be sympathetic to the man who became a Marxist, at least as that term would then have been understood against the background of the Depression experience. He applauds Rahv’s break with the “fellow traveler” position after Stalin’s enormities were revealed, but Barrett cannot forgive Rahv’s refusal to equate Stalin’s policies with Marxism itself. According to Barrett’s account, Rahv died a lonely, pathetic old man who had to spend his last days in an alien academic atmosphere far from his beloved New York. Perhaps he did, but one wonders to what lengths Barrett would go in his score-settling efforts.

Barrett is clear in this book about where he now stands. He reprints as an appendix his attack on Soviet sympathizers in the United States which appeared in Partisan Review in 1946. He finds nothing positive to say about life in America since 1960, finding the cultural upheavals of the 1960’s “infantile” and “grotesque.” In spite of his reactions to the politics of the 1940’s and 1950’s, his sympathies are all for Greenwich Village and New York in that era. From the perspective of his newfound convictions, intellectuals now seem paralyzed by their inability to learn the lessons from the early postwar period, lessons which Barrett understands so well. As a result, Barrett says that he rarely returns to New York any more; his final sad portrait of Rahv could almost be a self-portrait.

This book suggests why. Compassion, forgiveness, and the ability to grow are among the most desirable of human qualities, and the rarest, especially among those who have found an absolutist answer to fundamental human questions. Barrett, still fighting the battles of the 1940’s and 1950’s, now adopting a political stance that is at best the mirror image of his old radicalism, can make new friends with this book. It will be read by the curious who want to know something of the flavor of intellectual life in New York in the 1940’s and 1950’s or by those who enjoy gossip about the famous and near-famous, but it will not contribute to an understanding of how that era evolved.

Sources for Further Study

1 

American Scholar. LI, Autumn, 1982, p. 579.

2 

Choice. XIX, July/August, 1982, p. 1555.

3 

Georgia Review. XXXVI, Fall, 1982, p. 655.

4 

Ms. X, June, 1982, p. 75.

5 

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVII, February 7, 1982, p. 1.

6 

Newsweek. XCIX, March 8, 1982, p. 88.

7 

Saturday Review. IX, February, 1982, p. 66.

8 

Sewanee Review. XC, October, 1982, p. 569.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Wall, John N. "The Truants." Magill’s Literary Annual 1983, edited by Frank N. Magill, Salem Press, 1983. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=MLA1983_11790300303728.
APA 7th
Wall, J. N. (1983). The Truants. In F. N. Magill (Ed.), Magill’s Literary Annual 1983. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Wall, John N. "The Truants." Edited by Frank N. Magill. Magill’s Literary Annual 1983. Hackensack: Salem Press, 1983. Accessed April 22, 2025. online.salempress.com.