Partisans: Marriage, Politics, and Betrayal Among the New York Intellectuals

It's not initially evident how Laskin chose these particular authors. Wilson, McCarthy, Tate, Stafford, Woodburn, Arendt. The common thread seems to have been their alliance to the Partisan Review, but politics was never the prime impetus in their lives. They might be best described as political arrivistes in a variety of left leaning shades. None of their work resorted, thankfully, to rigid polemics, and in later forms showed a decided skepticism of all dogma. They could not be described as a literary school, even with a vague commitment to a never fully articulated 'modernism'. These poets, novelists and social commentators had individual interests and styles, with no common overarching credo. Lowell's Catholicism somehow coexists with Wilson's avowed Marxism, with little tangible conflict. What you do find is a writer's clique, which at times seemed only an excuse to engage in an exuberant circus of multiple marriages, affairs, heavy drinking and bourgeois tastes. These are consummate social clubbers, actuated by a discriminating sense of membership. A club founded, no doubt, on prodigious writing talent, but seemingly searching more for the legitimacy of membership than an invigorating intellectual culture.The style of the book is gossipy but energetic. Its aspirations are more to the interplay of personalities than the literary output. Laskin still manages a coherent critique of the major works, but his intent does not provide for much depth to the analysis. The times form an interesting period in American letters, still very much in the thrall of the late 19th Century romantic idealism, but in a society on the verge of massive social change, for better or worse. All aspired to stable marriage, but systematically destroyed relationships through petty cruelties and mutual infidelity. Laskin focuses primarily on the women and their relationships with their husbands or lovers. They desperately sought independent identities yet were inculcated with traditional ideas of roles. Their revolutionary zeal muted by conventional expectations. Simon De Beavoir's ground breaking treatise on feminism, The Second Sex, could still bring howls of derision and charges of flagrant denial of a natural order from them. They lamented shrillness and superficial icons of the bourgeoning women's movement. Unsurprisingly, this all produced a cynical edge in their writing. Laskin paints a vivid picture of the New York Literary scene of the 30's and 40's, arrogantly dismissive of American customs, and yet forever defined by the mores of the society against which they rebelled. It is not always a pretty picture, as a dimly perceived hypocrisy tinges their lives, along with the attendant profligacy, alcoholism, spousal abuse, and manic depression so seemingly entrenched in literary lifestyles. The book, though, is an insightful social looking glass, a page turner, and a good companion to his subject's writings.

It's hard now to imagine a world in which anyone paid this kind of attention to celebrities who weren't in the movies and couldn't dribble. But I found this book a delightful, if not particularly self-improving romp through the gossip of a vanished age.The drinking! The seriousness about ideas especially politics! The promiscuity! The casualness with which poets and "poor" writers acquire antique homes in Connecticut and Maine, to say nothing of duplex apartments in mid-town New York!The author, who writes with a female sensibility under a male name, does a very good job of portraying the frightening way in which physical and emotional abuse were accepted as just part of a normal marriage in the period before the emergence of true Feminism in the 1970s. His book reminds me of why I can never share Generation X's nostalgia for the 1950s. It was a terrible time to be female. Partisans makes it clear that even the female intellectual superstars portrayed in its pages had to put up with far more suffereing in terms of abuse, sexual infidelity, and having to do all the housework even when you were a world famous (woman) writer than any one of us would tolerate today.Definitely worth reading!

This is a startling and fascinating group biography. Partisans describes how many of the leading women writers from the 1930s to 60s -- people like Mary McCarthy and Elizabeth Hardwick -- argued, slept, partied, married and divorced their ways through the literary, political and gender battles of the times. Laskin describes the intersecting lives of these witty, rebellious people, both women and men, with respect but makes it clear how weirdly human and fouled up many of them were. One of his most interesting points is how these women were sort of proto-feminists, though most of them would deny it until their dying days. A great read! A great reading group book!

I just loved this book. The miracle that David Laskin has performed is managing so much biographical information on so many diverse and original characters, and making them live so vividly as individuals.How could it be that these women -- Hardwick, McCarthy, Arndt, Jean Stafford --- could have such first rate minds yet be so dismissive of feminism? What a wonderful, complex intellectual-historical question and what a good job Laskin does of answering it. They were all, of course, male identified, to use the modern parlance and it was this that liberated them to act as men and to write in the muscular way of men, and this was probably necessary to free them of the chains of their cultural "femininity." Thanks for this wonderful book, which feels perfectly necessary to the understanding of how we've got where we are today.