I’ve been curious about this book ever since I read a review back when it came out in 1982, but I never happened to come across it, so the other day I checked it out of the library and read it.

William Barrett was born in 1913, and The Truants is his memoir of his time working at Partisan Review, the famous magazine of the so-called New York Intellectuals of the 1930s-50s. The thing that interests me about the Partisan Review crowd in particular is that so much has been written about them, but it’s hard to figure out exactly why. They weren’t particularly talented writers—for that, you’d go for Mary McCarthy and Edmund Wilson, who were part of that general social circle but not core Partisan Review writers—or, further afield, there’s A. J. Liebling, Saul Bellow, etc., all of whom found larger audiences. Alfred Kazin and Daniel Bell had more to say, but they weren’t really Partisan Review writers either. Then there was the political line of the magazine—liberal and anticommunist. Barrett makes a big deal about this, but in the 1930s and 40s, liberal and anticommunist was about as mainstream as you could get in the U.S. Liberals were winning elections (with a brief exception in 1946), and communism was never popular in this country. So, sure, give them credit for not falling for Stalinism, but that can’t be enough, right?

The editors of Partisan Review were Philip Rahv and William Phillips, and I think it’s fair to say that neither of them is remembered for anything but being an editor. It seems that Partisan Review published lots of good essays and stories on a very low budget, so this would their distinguishing characteristics: not their personalities, not their politics, but their skills as editors. To use a sports analogy (which I guess these guys never did), I don’t know how much of that was recruiting and how much was coaching, but in any case they must have been doing something right. Unfortunately, Barrett talks all about their personalities and their politics, and nothing about their editorial skills, so overall his book was a disappointment to me—it was as if Moneyball had been written without ever talking about baseball strategy—even thought it was well written and he had some interesting things to say.

What really fascinated me about the book, though, was its self-defeating nature. About half the book is gossip and half is politics. (OK, I guess it’s more like 30% gossip and 70% politics, but gossip is more fun than politics so I remember it as 50/50.) Anyway, the gossip part is roughly 50% gossip and 50% of Barrett criticizing other people for gossiping, and the politics part is roughly 50% criticizing other people for being dogmatic about politics and 50% Barrett being dogmatic itself.

Also, it’s so retro! He starts out on page 1 describing a Jewish guy as “dark and faintly menacing . . . The gaze is heavy-lidded, exotic; he might be a diamond merchant in Antwerp or a mysterious agent on the old Orient Express.” A diamond merchant in Antwerp, huh? And then later on, after describing a visiting E. M. Forster as “an elderly queen camping all over the place,” Barrett writes, “Once, a few years back, when homosexuals in demonstration marched up Fifth Avenue, I expressed distaste to a friend and was rebuked for being intolerant; I replied that it was not a question of tolerance but that I would feel the same distaste if a crowd of heterosexuals were to march up Fifth Avenue with their flies open. . . . What was so bad about the closet anyway? It was warm and cozy here.” The amusing thing to me about this passage is not how dated it is, or its illogic (I doubt the gay people were marching in Fifth Avenue with their flies open), but that Barrett tells this story of “the spectacle of the aging queen” but then blames it on Philip Rahv, who apparently was the one who told it to Barrett “with great glee, fairly dripping with Schadenfreude.”

This is pretty much the pattern with all the stories. Juicy gossip attached to a moralistic anti-gossip stance. On page 24, Barrett writes, “In this memoir, I must warn the reader, I am not a walker in the city seeking narcissistically to capture myself.” OK, I get it, he doesn’t like Alfred Kazin, the literary critic most famous for his memoir, “A Walker in the City.” Now I’m curious what Barrett has to say directly about Kazin, so I go to the index, which leads me to pages 46-47, where there are 6 paragraphs of funny anecdotes recounting putdowns that Rahv, Phillips, and others did on Kazin behind Kazin’s back, followed by a paragraph discussing how maybe all this gossip was a bad thing: “remarks made in the family did not always remain there but had a way of getting noised abroad and passing into circles where their effect would be malicious and damaging. The question was whether Rahv ever observed this distinction—whether he would not deliver his personal observations wherever he pleased. . . . Rahv stood so much at the center of the circle, he embodied it so much in his single person, that his own negative attitude could hardly keep from spreading to the whole.” Indeed. And this happens over and over in the book: Barrett tells a story that makes Edmund Wilson, or Hannah Arendt, or some other literary figure look bad, and then, in a more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone, blames it on Rahv. It’s enough to make me feel some sympathy for the old diamond merchant.

And then there’s the politics. Perhaps 1982 was the high-water mark of the neoconservative movement, and I can hardly fault Barrett for his anticommunism or his annoyance to his Partisan Review colleagues who condemned Stalin but still couldn’t let go of Marxism. The funny thing here is that Barrett slams those liberal Marxists for being dogmatic and overlooking the failures of socialism, but then he’s so dogmatic in the other direction. Economic freedom is great, but is freedom what the U.S. was dishing out in Guatemala, Iran, Vietnam, etc.? The odd thing about Barrett’s take on politics is that he was operating in a social milieu in which Marxism was the norm, but in the U.S. as a whole Marxism was a fringe ideology. Back in the 1930s-50s, a large part of America was still racially segregated! I guess this is an example of what they say about people swinging from one political extreme to the other.

Anyway, my point here is not that Barrett had some blinkered ideological takes on politics—lots of people have that, and you can still deliver insight from a one-sided position. I just thought it was interesting that, with the politics as with the gossip, Barrett was criticizing his friends for doing exactly what he was doing himself. It’s the whole unreliable-narrator thing, and it can make fascinating reading.