Estranged Bedfellows. - Review - book review

National Review, April 3, 2000 by Kanchan Limaye

Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals, by David Laskin (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $26)

'THE men wanted slaves and peers, and the women did their damnedest to be smashing in both roles, even if it killed them." This maudlin motif overruns Partisans, David Laskin's verbal soap opera about the harrowing private lives of the public intellectuals who produced Partisan Review-a magazine founded in 1934 as an organ of the Communist John Reed Clubs and revived in 1937 to combine Stalinist Marxism with the cause of literary modernism.

Laskin, a journalist who has written A Common Life: Four Generations of American Literary Friendship and Influence and two obscure histories of American weather, examines the cultural period (1930s-1960s) of the group's heyday through their rocky marriages. Much as Ang Lee's 1997 movie The Ice Storm showed how disintegrating marriages were mere rumblings in the gathering countercultural storm of the 1970s, Laskin tries to prove that the traditional man's-work-comes-first model of marriage embraced by the pre-feminist women of Partisan Review represented the most repellent aspects of the unliberated 1950s. Outraged, he wonders why these accomplished professional women never tried to gain recognition solely by virtue of their talent, rather than sleeping and marrying their way to the top.

Laskin's book joins a number of similar memoirs, including Alexander Bloom's Prodigal Sons, Terry Cooney's The Rise of the New York Intellectuals, Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends, and William Phillips's A Partisan View-all of which focused on the group's ideas and arguments, not their personal lives. These books, along with Norman Podhoretz's earlier books, and memoirs by Diana Trilling and Mary McCarthy, have trained us to view the PR writers as intellectual heavyweights setting Ameri ca's-and often the world's-cultural and political agenda: America's answer to Bloomsbury. We don't normally think of these avant-garde intellectuals as a link between John Reed and Jane Fonda, but Laskin shows us the connection by taking us behind the mythos of their high- minded battles into the squalor of their bedrooms. There we find a bunch of infantile characters engaged in childish and disappointing relationships, while Laskin runs aground trying to convince us that the women were smarter than their men.

Take Laskin's portrait of novelist and essayist Mary McCarthy and her lover, Philip Rahv, the founding coeditor of Partisan Review. Laskin suggests that McCarthy married Rahv in an act of "literary social climbing" and continued in this opportunistic vein with her wife-beating second husband, Edmund Wilson, America's preeminent literary and social critic. Her second marriage ended after a particularly acrid scene in which Wilson refused to take out the garbage. McCarthy slugged him. Wilson slugged her back and she ended up in the hospital. They divorced and rabidly spun self-serving tales to their mutual friends.

Next we meet manic-depressive poet Robert Lowell, who plowed through alcoholic novelist (and fellow Pulitzer winner) Jean Stafford, leaving her a mess in a mental hospital. Later he allowed essayist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick to enchain herself to him, as many other "girls" drifted in and out of his life. These included the glamorous violinist Giovanna Battista, with whom he planned to elope to Italy, and Lady Caroline Blackwood, a neurotic noblewoman who needed a keeper as much as he did. Blackwood became Lowell's third and final wife, forming a partnership that Lowell aptly described as, "I'm manic, she's panic."

While Hardwick tolerated Lowell's sexual excess, Stafford complained of sexual deprivation during Lowell's Catholicism-induced "purification ma nias," during which he lived like a monk. Much to Hardwick's dismay, she had to live in the same house as Blackwood after Blackwood put in an hysterical performance at Lowell's funeral.

Then there are Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, and fellow emigre Heinrich Blucher, who met in Paris and escaped to the United States where their marriage "survived"-barring the minor matter of his multiple affairs and her compulsive flirtations. According to Diana Trilling, Arendt thought that as reigning female intellectual, she had the right to flirt with all the husbands in the room while treating their wives like nonentities. While the thin-skinned Diana was the only Partisan to take her husband's name, she complained that she often felt like a "marital appendage" to her husband, the literary critic Lionel Trilling.

All of this makes for a painfully juicy piece of gossip: the lies, betrayals, drunken brawls, batterings, and nervous breakdowns provoke a horrified addiction in the reader, despite the trite prose in which they are clothed. But Laskin tries too hard to squeeze high drama out of petty incidents of literary backstabbing, weakening his narrative. Too many high- octane phrases like "clandestine rendezvous" and "tense menage" clutter Partisans for any actual event to have an impact on the reader. Laskin constantly reminds us that we are reading about the "literary life," that these were "literary wives" in "literary marriages," as though that justified or elevated their infantile behavior.