"an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic murderer-poet."

[Michael Pugliese]

The New York Observer








The publisher files Partisans under ‘women’s studies’; given the author’s
fascination with marital violence, why not ‘Comp-Hit’?

Even Educated Fleas Do It: City Brainiacs Flub Marriage
by Robert S. Boynton

Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals,
by David Laskin. Simon & Schuster, 319 pages, $26.
Even a quick study of the cerebral crew known as the New York intellectuals
reveals that the female of the species never received the attention she
deserves. For the most part, Mary McCarthy,HannahArendt, Jean Stafford,
Diana Trilling and Elizabeth Hardwick wrote as much as—and, in the case of
Arendt, more and better than—their male counterparts, and yet the women were
usually banished to the back room of the Partisan Review clubhouse.
Histories of the group have done little to rectify this oversight; while
women’s names are sprinkled liberally on the dust jackets and in the
indexes, even the finest accounts—such as Alan Wald’s The New York
Intellectuals (1987) and Alexander Bloom’s appropriately titled Prodigal
Sons (1986)—are mostly devoted to the “boys”: Daniel Bell, Alfred Kazin,
Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Delmore Schwartz, Edmund Wilson, Lionel
Trilling, Irving Howe and Dwight Macdonald.
The bias is particularly odd because—as David Laskin points out in
Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal Among the New York
Intellectuals—the women’s achievements may be the notable feature in this
period of American intellectual history. “As a generation, these women had
unprecedented opportunities—to write, to publish and edit, to stand up as
public figures, to marry multiple times and have love affairs as they
desired,” he writes. Indeed, among the many reasons the New York
intellectuals capture our imagination is that their literary accomplishments
didn’t preclude equally robust social lives. The “P.R. girls,” as their
nemesis Diana Trilling called them, “were lucky enough to encounter a
generation of men who were interested in their minds as well as their bodies
and as eager for their work as their love,” Mr. Laskin writes.
Work versus love, writing versus “wifely duties”—herein lies the tension,
both for the women and for Mr. Laskin. Any successful intellectual biography
strikes a delicate balance between the work and the life. Focus too tightly
on the former and you have a dissertation; stick too closely to the latter
and you get a cocktail of salacious anecdotes. In order to reconcile these
approaches, Mr. Laskin pairs off his subjects much as he did in A Common
Life (1994), his book about literary friendship and influence. “As wives and
husbands they were most fully and unconsciously themselves,” he writes in
Partisans. “Marriage was their mode, their stage, their fallback position,
their default option.”
The concept of marriage has an almost talismanic hold over Mr. Laskin, who
argues that the group’s serial devotion to matrimony reveals something
essential about them as intellectuals. Marriage is crucial to his enterprise
not because the New Yorkers married frequently, but because they married
badly—a “theme” that gives him an excuse to fill his book with truckloads of
gossip.
Think of Partisans as a pointy-head bio-pic, a docudrama about intellectuals
that does its best to avoid their ideas. The skittish, clichéd segues with
which Mr. Laskin lurches from textuality to sexuality are the stuff of
parody. “But it wasn’t all high-minded analysis and embattled idealism down
at the seedy little P.R. office near Union Square,” he reassures the reader
after a meager one-paragraph history of Partisan Review. “There was also
plenty of gossip, intrigue, and back stabbing, as well as off-hours boozing
and competitive sex.” Page after page, Mr. Laskin dissects these
flamboyantly disastrous marriages—in particular McCarthy’s to Wilson, and
Lowell’s to Stafford and, later, to Hardwick—with the fastidiousness of a
Talmudic scholar poring over Scripture. “The evidence is highly suggestive
that Wilson did in fact beat [McCarthy] up in June 1938 and that the beating
was traumatic enough, whether physically or mentally, to bring on a
psychological collapse,” he concludes soberly.
Simon & Schuster files this book under “women’s studies”; given the author’s
fascination with marital violence, why not “Comp-Hit”? Not content to
describe every lurid episode in detail, he constructs a carefully calibrated
hierarchy of wretched behavior. “Certainly there is a stronger case against
Lowell for spousal abuse than against Edmund Wilson,” he reasons after a
particularly spicy passage. It seems that McCarthy got off relatively easy
compared to Stafford, who was permanently disfigured in a car crash she
believed was Lowell’s attempt at murder-suicide. Remarkably, she agreed to
marry him after their high-speed “courtship.” (“He said he was in love with
me and wd. I marry him and to avoid argument I said sure, honey, drink your
beer and get me another one,” she writes to a friend.) One reads in horror
as Ms. Stafford announces their marriage; in the same letter she describes
Lowell—accurately, it turns out—as “an uncouth, neurotic, psychopathic
murderer-poet.” Ah, love
It’s not entirely fair to say that Partisans is pure gossip. Because Hannah
Arendt’s marriage to Heinrich Blücher was relatively peaceful, Mr. Laskin is
forced to discuss her work, which he does quite well. The connections he
draws between the New Yorkers and the Southern Agrarian writers are also
intriguing, although one suspects he includes literary critic Allen Tate and
his wife, novelist Caroline Gordon, out of prurient interest in their long,
tortured marriage. When Tate accepted a job at Princeton in 1939, he
summarily quit both his and his wife’s positions. “It was years before it
occurred to me,” said Ms. Gordon, “that Allen had resigned my full
professorship—always a hard thing for a woman to come by—without consulting
me.” Mr. Laskin affords her only slightly more respect; though he notes that
she published nine novels and two story collections, which makes her one of
the most prolific writers in the book, he tells us virtually nothing about
them.
The stated goal of Partisans is to praise these honorable women (“our
teachers and mentors,” he gushes, “they were the writers whose words taught
us what we were thinking”), and so there’s something odd about the author’s
fixation on the most demeaning details of their tempestuous couplings. Odd,
that is, until one understands the book’s implicit argument: Rather than
celebrate the emerging feminist movement of the late 50’s and early 60’s,
these women chose to define themselves through their patriarchal,
exploitative marriages. If Mr. Laskin is disappointed that they were
professionally, but not emotionally, “liberated,” he is positively outraged
that they refused to rise up and embrace their victimhood.
When Ms. Hardwick dares to offer a modest humanistic credo (“I’m a feminist,
of course, but it’s not my interest to look at things from the woman’s point
of view. You write as who you are”), Mr. Laskin fairly seethes with
contempt. “Hardwick had been one of the boys since the old P.R. days back in
the 1940’s, and she never really renounced her membership in the club. She’d
always gotten too much out of it,” he writes. Incredibly, he concludes that
it was their antifeminism—not their intellectual
accomplishments—whichultimately bound the diverse group together. “They
refused to see that they were exceptions. And because they were successful,
at least by their own lights, they refused to see the point of feminism.
Gender had been no impediment in their own careers, every one of them
insisted at various times in her life. So why make such a fuss about it?”
In the midst of his ax-grinding and gossipmongering, Mr. Laskin manages,
inadvertently, to pose a genuinely interesting question: Why did the New
York intellectuals—male and female alike—lose their relevance and authority
in the 60’s? The answer surely has something to do with their parochial
brand of Cold War liberalism, as well as their inability to appreciate
various aspects of the counterculture, of which feminism is one. But to hang
so much on their failure to understand the importance of Betty Friedan’s The
Feminine Mystique (1963) is absurd. Mr. Laskin’s suggestion that a writer
squanders her chance in the great literary sweepstakes if she rejects
feminism betrays a naïve, overly politicized notion of how literary canons
are formed: “Had Stafford not ridiculed ‘women’s lib’ in the 1960’s and 70’
s,” he writes, her novel, The Mountain Lion, “might have found a place on
feminist reading lists instead of assuming the shabby-genteel status of a
neglected classic.”
Though Mr. Laskin makes good on his promise to shine a spotlight on these
extraordinary women, his pathographic group portrait is so unflattering that
one would prefer the discreet shadows of their erstwhile obscurity.
“Neglected classics” never looked so good.
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This column ran on page 75 in the 12/20/99 edition of The New York Observer.
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