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Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals
Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals
319 pp. An illuminating portait of the writers who dominated New York intellectual life from the 1930s through the 1960s and of the complex tangle of literature, politics and passion that drove this group of friends, rivals and lovers. Includes biographical material on Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hannah Arendt, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Diana Trilling and others.Keywords: BIOGRAPHY LITERARY NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS
319 pp. An illuminating portait of the writers who dominated New York intellectual life from the 1930s through the 1960s and of the complex tangle of literature, politics and passion that drove this group of friends, rivals and lovers. Includes biographical material on Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hannah Arendt, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Diana Trilling and others.Keywords: BIOGRAPHY LITERARY NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2000
About the author
David Laskin
24 books105 followersBorn in Brooklyn and raised in Great Neck, New York, I grew up hearing stories that my immigrant Jewish grandparents told about the “old country” (Russia) that they left at the turn of the last century. When I was a teenager, my mother’s parents began making yearly trips to visit our relatives in Israel, and stories about the Israeli family sifted down to me as well. What I never heard growing up was that a third branch of the family had remained behind in the old country – and that all of them perished in the Holocaust. These are three branches whose intertwined stories I tell in THE FAMILY: THREE JOURNEYS INTO THE HEART OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.
An avid reader for as long as I remember, I graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a degree in history and literature and went on to New College, Oxford, where I received an MA in English in 1977. After a brief stint in book publishing, I launched my career as a freelance writer. In recent years, I have been writing suspense-driven narrative non-fiction about the lives of people caught up in events beyond their control, be it catastrophic weather, war, or genocide. My 2004 book The Children’s Blizzard, a national bestseller, won the Washington State Book Award and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and was nominated for a Quill Award. The Long Way Home (2010) also won the Washington State Book Award.
I write frequently for the New York Times Travel Section, and I have also published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Seattle Times and Seattle Metropolitan.
When I’m not writing or traveling for research, I am usually outdoors trying to tame our large unruly garden north of Seattle, romping with our unruly Labrador retriever pup Patrick, skiing in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains, or hiking in the Wallowa Mountains of northeast Oregon. My wife, Kate O’Neill, and I have raised three wonderful daughters – all grown now and embarked on fascinating lives of their own.
An avid reader for as long as I remember, I graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a degree in history and literature and went on to New College, Oxford, where I received an MA in English in 1977. After a brief stint in book publishing, I launched my career as a freelance writer. In recent years, I have been writing suspense-driven narrative non-fiction about the lives of people caught up in events beyond their control, be it catastrophic weather, war, or genocide. My 2004 book The Children’s Blizzard, a national bestseller, won the Washington State Book Award and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and was nominated for a Quill Award. The Long Way Home (2010) also won the Washington State Book Award.
I write frequently for the New York Times Travel Section, and I have also published in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Seattle Times and Seattle Metropolitan.
When I’m not writing or traveling for research, I am usually outdoors trying to tame our large unruly garden north of Seattle, romping with our unruly Labrador retriever pup Patrick, skiing in Washington State’s Cascade Mountains, or hiking in the Wallowa Mountains of northeast Oregon. My wife, Kate O’Neill, and I have raised three wonderful daughters – all grown now and embarked on fascinating lives of their own.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 1, 2008
I didn't expect this to be so moving. Very, very engaging. Laskin also makes want to read more Robert Lowell, and builds a convincing case that Mary McCarthy is my hero. The pictures and anecdotes he marshalls of Hannah Arendt make her sound downright sexy.
"Despite Lowell's determination to be 'surrounded by Catholics,' the couple instantly got swept up into the fast, loud current of atheist-Jewish-Marxist-hard-drinking-fast-talking literary New York. Philip Rahv and Nathalie Swan took a shine to Lowell and Stafford, and soon they were getting invited to the Rahv's combative, whiskey-soaked parties."
Sounds rather fun.
"Despite Lowell's determination to be 'surrounded by Catholics,' the couple instantly got swept up into the fast, loud current of atheist-Jewish-Marxist-hard-drinking-fast-talking literary New York. Philip Rahv and Nathalie Swan took a shine to Lowell and Stafford, and soon they were getting invited to the Rahv's combative, whiskey-soaked parties."
Sounds rather fun.
July 30, 2007
My continued hunger for knowledge about the New York Intellectuals was sated with this book; well-researched and entertaining. Damn, those kids could drink!
December 7, 2007
David Laskin usually writes books about the weather...So a book about New York intellectuals, albeit a SLIM volume, seems a bit of a stretch...Laskin writes in the introduction that the women in the Partisan crowd, Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hannah Arendt and Diana Trilling, were "the last generation before feminism." This is the overarching theme of the book. These women didn't need feminism and ridiculed "women's lib." Hmmm.... why is it suspect when a MAN writes a book like this? I enjoyed the history, but do I really need an author explaining that Robert Lowell and Edmund Wilson were just drunk when they beat up their wives, and besides, you couldn't really trust the wives' side of things because they were drunk, too...How about saving your opinions for books about...the weather, maybe?
May 27, 2014
It's a very lightweight, gossipy book about a lightweight, gossipy group. The Partisan Review crowd and those in their orbit were never as important to anyone else as they were to themselves. Seek out Alan Wald's New York Intellectuals for a more substantive exploration of their writing and ideas. But history has not been kind to either. Their ideas about culture and politics mirror the greatest confusions of their eras, not the analyses that transcended them. For example, the women of the group really did disdain feminism, calling it "ridiculous" (this in contrast to the ad hominem attack of one reviewer here).
And their writing - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - has not fared much better. None of the fiction of Stafford or McCarthy is taken seriously or taught anymore. The poetry of the Agrarians Tate and Ransom was forgotten quickly as embarrassingly reactionary. And their students of the next generation, such as Berryman, Lowell, Merwin, Jarrell, are read mostly for the work they produced after breaking away from pseudo-Modernist formalism. The academic myopia that crowned Robert Lowell the prince of poets for this shift to vernacular poetics has at last cleared up and acknowledged that Allen Ginsberg and other Beat Generation poets were responsible for the move and Lowell, just along for the ride.
So what remains of the PR/NY Intellectuals? Mostly a lot of journalism that dissects the minutiae of the moment. Read it if you must and it will arouse a little interest, at least until realizing you'd profit more from re-reading G.K. Chesterton novels or a Zane Grey western.
And their writing - fiction, non-fiction, and poetry - has not fared much better. None of the fiction of Stafford or McCarthy is taken seriously or taught anymore. The poetry of the Agrarians Tate and Ransom was forgotten quickly as embarrassingly reactionary. And their students of the next generation, such as Berryman, Lowell, Merwin, Jarrell, are read mostly for the work they produced after breaking away from pseudo-Modernist formalism. The academic myopia that crowned Robert Lowell the prince of poets for this shift to vernacular poetics has at last cleared up and acknowledged that Allen Ginsberg and other Beat Generation poets were responsible for the move and Lowell, just along for the ride.
So what remains of the PR/NY Intellectuals? Mostly a lot of journalism that dissects the minutiae of the moment. Read it if you must and it will arouse a little interest, at least until realizing you'd profit more from re-reading G.K. Chesterton novels or a Zane Grey western.
April 6, 2014
I must admit that I mind this relentless defoliation (or deforestation) process. As though to grow old does not mean, as Goethe said, ‘gradual withdrawal from appearance’-which I do not mind-but the gradual (or rather sudden) transformation of a world with familiar faces (no matter, foe or friend) into a kind of desert, populated by strange faces. In other works, it is not me who withdraws but the world that dissolves-an altogether different proposition.”
Hannah Arendt in a letter to Mary McCarthy on growing old, discovered in David Laskin. Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000): 276: 2010:06:07
Hannah Arendt in a letter to Mary McCarthy on growing old, discovered in David Laskin. Partisans: Marriage, Politics and Betrayal among the New York Intellectuals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000): 276: 2010:06:07
March 21, 2007
intellectuals lead incredibly dysfunctional lives.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews