An Archaeological Inquest

I HAVE IN my possession a copy of an old Partisan Review, Winter 1960, Number 1, price $1.00, which was given to me by a student who knew of my interest in American postwar nonfiction. It is an astonishing object, like one of those time capsules buried with the hope they will amuse our descendants. Perfect-bound, 190 pages, with a modernist graphic cover design, probably by Alvin Lusting or one of his imitators: the words “Partisan Review” appear in dark blue against an olive square; below, another olive box promises its interior contents—a short story by Alberto Moravia, essays by Leslie Fiedler, Elizabeth Hardwick, Richard Wollheim, Max Hayward, Harold Rosenberg, F. W. Dupee, and Lionel Abel, criticism by A. Alvarez, Richard Chase, Irving Howe, Lewis Coser, Frank Kermode, Howard Nemerov, among others, and poems by W. S. Merwin, Kenneth Koch, James Merrill, Robert Penn Warren… In its utter differentiation from the literary scene of today, it may as well have been the nineteenth-century London Magazine featuring William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, or one of those fat Russian periodicals that included chunks of novels by Tolstoy and Turgenev.

The back cover contains a full-page ad for Edmund Wilson's : “Here is the book that when it was first published thirteen years ago… Now Edmund Wilson has polished and perfected this devastating portrayal of the waspish women of suburbia.” Well, times have changed. You have to hand it to that publisher, though, who knew well the aspirational readership of . Before diving into the issue's meaty essays, I pause with curiosity at the ads inside: a four-page spread (!) devoted to Robert Lowell's , with blurbs from Alfred Kazin, Stephen Spender, Elizabeth Bishop, F. W. Dupee, A. Alvarez; announcements for other periodicals— (its contributors listed as, among others, F. W. Dupee, Harold Rosenberg, Dwight Macdonald, C. P. Snow), (its editor Irving Howe proudly announcing a 15,000-word document “On Socialist Realism”), and (a “Quarterly Jewish Review,” featuring Irving Howe, Leslie Fieldler, I. Bashevis Singer, Lewis Coser…). How amazingly unified the literary class of that period looks! We might characterize it in shorthand as the New York Intellectuals, with an Anglophile back office in London.