The tensions, for instance, between Phillips and Rahv are finally seen (probably rightly) to be more the effect of opposite natures than real ideological/cultural differences-not to mention the ""nastiness, bitchery, and backbiting"" that build up in the formation of any consciously conceived literary circle. But Barrett, while frequently insisting on the importance and coherence of the PR crowd's work, too often ends up rambling away from the intellectual and literary point. And for a while it seems as if the two chief Partisan Review editors-William Phillips and Philip Rahv-are to be the central focus here. Thus, he was at the center of what's usually considered as the ""New York intellectual"" style (anti-Stalinist, Freudian, committed to fiction and poetry of a largely European model) the big names of that school-Mary McCarthy (awesomely smart, regal, so secure in her young looks and brains that she doesn't bother shaving her legs), Edmund Wilson, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Randall Jarrell, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg-all float through this memoir. Barrett (Irrational Man, The Illusion of Technique) served for a time in the 1940s as one of the editors of Partisan Review, crucible of the ""two M's"": Marxism and modernism.
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