12/16/21

William Barrett is best known for "Irrational Man" a collection of essays on the most prominent 20th century existentialists that was for a time a go to standard college text on the subject of Existentialism. The Truants was written in the early 1980s and is a personal memoir of his days on the editorial staff of Partisan Review and his relationships with, in the main, Delmore Schwarz, Philip Rahv and William Bennett. PR was the premier left wing journal that was Marxist in political and economic orientation but was consistently anti-Stalinist and consequently at "war" with the Communist Party and its fellow travelers at publications such as The Nation and The New Republic. The magazine's Marxism did not get in the way of a commitment to Modernism in art and literature and to an infatuation on the part of some of its contributors with Freudianism.

A great deal of the book covers the in-house politics in which Rahv and William Bennett contested for leadership creating awkward moments for Barrett and the rest of the staff. There are poignant reflections on the personal decline of Schwarz and the drift of Rahv to the far left in during the Vietnam war era. There are some interesting observations by Bennett as an Irish guy living and working among the Jewish New York intellectuals who predominated in the circles in which he traveled.

I think it is safe to say that over time Barrett rejected the doctrinaire Marxism of his PR days and embraced the Madisonian politics of American liberalism. This turn to Liberalism is reflected in a post-war editorial he volunteered to author that is included in full in an Appendix.. With a few exceptions it presents an understanding of the origins of the Cold War that could've been published a decade later by William F. Buckley's National Review. ( )