To Brecht and Back. Notes on Clement Greenberg’s Avant-Garde and Kitsch

Clement Greenberg’s international reputation is partly due to the success of one of his first and most perceptive essays, Avant-Garde and Kitsch, published in the Fall 1939 issue of “Partisan Review”. Despite its unsurpassed importance, the article still requires a broader comprehension of its origins: according to Greenberg’s personal papers, the essay’s main concepts began to take form during the Winter 1939, when the author was involved in the drafting of a new essay on Bertolt Brecht, still unpublished today, at that time submitted to the “Partisan Review”’s editorial board but rejected. A second document enables to trace back Avant-Garde and Kitsch’s roots even further: according to a letter by Greenberg, one of the editors, Dwight Macdonald, plagiarized the rejected script as his last essay, Soviet Society and Its Cinema, clearly seemed to prove. The varied topics articulated in the letter, as well as in the draft on Brecht, would be at the basis of Avant-Garde and Kitsch, becoming crucial and early components of the editorial process of the well-known essay.

Presentación dosier: Repensar lo camp, investigar lo queer

Han pasado ya 55 años desde la publicación del célebre «Notas sobre lo Camp» en Partisan Review, uno de los textos más conocidos de la filósofa y escritora Susan Sontag. En 1964 el término «camp» era, ante todo, una palabra-código en las subculturas gays de Nueva York y Londres y significaba una actitud irónica de la lectura a contrapelo de películas, novelas y objetos decorativos kitsch y de la cultura de masas (Schreiber, 2018). Desde entonces, la palabra camp ha ido ganando espacio en los ámbitos culturales, hasta el punto de que el Met (The Metropolitan Museum of Art de Nueva York) ha querido conmemorar el aniversario del ensayo de Sontag con una exposición, una gala y un magnífico catálogo con el objetivo de explorar los orígenes de la exuberante estética de lo camp (Bolton et al., 2019).

From Greenberg to Rahv

This chapter traces Rahv’s story of immigration and explores his psychology as an immigrant. Reaching back to his time in Russia, it considers pogroms, the notorious trial of Menahem Mendel Beilis, the use of Yiddish and Russian language, and the Bolshevik revolution. It examines his dysfunctional Jewish family, which it relates to the families of other New York Jewish intellectuals. It explores the significance of his father’s beginnings as a peddler, his mother’s Zionism, and the time he spent in Palestine. Some light is shed on the mysteries surrounding his lack of formal education. Detailed analyses of two texts are provided: “Homeless but not Motherless, Variation on a theme by L. Kwitko” by the Ukranian poet Leib Kvitko, which Rahv translated from Yiddish; “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” Delmore Schwartz’s modernist tour de force which appeared in Partisan Review in 1937.

Endgames

This chapter traces Rahv’s disintegrating relationship with Partisan Review and explains why he could no longer play the leadership role of “secular rabbi.” It considers the magazine’s alleged ties with the CIA. It discusses changes in Rahv’s personal life: moving to Boston, joining the faculty at Brandeis, remarrying, founding a new magazine, Modern Occasions. It relates Rahv’s story to that of Hanneh Arendt, whose publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem provoked a bitter split within Partisan Review. Arendt’s and Rahv’s attitudes toward Jewishness and Israel are discussed. It considers his animus toward Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer and enthusiasm for the New Left, which provoked a public rift with longtime associate Irving Howe. It delves into the mysterious circumstances surrounding Rahv’s death and bequest to Israel. I relate my own attitudes during the sixties to Rahv’s, notably regarding new intellectual movements and feminism.

Discoveries

This chapter traces preliminarily the history of Partisan Review and the stages in Rahv’s life and career, from his immigration in 1922, through the 1920s, and up until his death in 1973. Noting the traits of his complex personality that friends and associates observed, it delves deeper into the roots of his character through the love letters he sent to my mother, Ethel Richman, between 1928 to 1931. They uncover previously unknown information including his time spent in Savannah, GA and Portland, OR teaching Hebrew; several pieces of juvenilia; his experiences with race and anti-Semitism; and his literary aspirations. The chapter lays the groundwork for the book’s major thematic emphasis on Jewishness. In Rahv’s case, key components discussed are appearance, voice, and name. In a “Personal Reflections” section, I reflect on experiences of Jewishness in the Lower East Side of NYC, Savannah, GA, and Peekskill, NY.

Wartime Crises

This chapter considers how Rahv’s Marxism and anti-Stalinism shaped his timid response to fascism. It presents the loosening of his ties with Marxism and move toward the American identity manifest in “Paleface and Redskin,” which divided American writers into plebian redskins (Steinbeck, Dreiser) and patrician palefaces (Eliot, James). The muted response to the Holocaust by major newspapers, the Roosevelt administration, and Jewish groups sets the stage for a discussion of how Partisan Review responded, including publishing Eliot despite his alleged anti-Semitism. A discussion of the complexities of Rahv’s marital status and military record is followed by a consideration of “Under Forty,” essays on Jewish identity by eleven young Jewish writers which Rahv published as editor of Contemporary Jewish Record in February 1944 and which reflected his evolving identity as an American Jew. The chapter closes with reactions to the Holocaust—by Rahv, New York intellectuals, and in my own life.

The Secular Rabbi

The Secular Rabbi is an intellectual biography of Philip Rahv, co-founder of Partisan Review. It focuses on the ambivalent ties that Rahv, a Russian immigrant, retained to his Jewish cultural background. Drawing on letters Rahv wrote to her mother from 1928 to 1931, Doris Kadish delves into Rahv’s complex and enigmatic character, his experience teaching Hebrew in Savannah, GA and Portland, OR; his attitudes toward class, race, and gender. Kadish positions herself in relation to Rahv in attempting to understand her own Jewish identity and perspective as a 21st century woman. The book draws on historical accounts, genealogical records, memoirs by Rahv’s friends and associates, interviews, and secondary scholarship devoted to the New York intellectuals, the history of Partisan Review, and Jewish studies. Key components of Rahv’s Jewishness—appearance, voice, name, attitudes toward Yiddish and Zionism—are explored, as is his deep-seated faith in Marxism. Textual analyses of Rahv’s works are interwoven with analyses of writers whose works appeared in Partisan Review: Delmore Schwartz, Franz Kafka, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow. Rahv’s relations with writers who figured prominently in his life—most notably T.S. Eliot, Mary McCarthy, and Irving Howe—are explored. Events relating to anti-Stalinism, responses to the Holocaust, and alleged ties with the CIA, are discussed. Kadish sheds light on modernism, proletarian literature, and Jewish writing as well as movements that defined American political history in the 20th century: immigration, socialism, Communism, fascism, the cold war, feminism, and the New Left.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter summarizes the meaning of Jewishness in Rahv’s life and work. It traces his religious attitudes back to the familial conflicts of his youth as well as to his reading of Marx. It also looks at writers whose works on Jewish issues Rahv chose to publish in Partisan Review—Jean Paul Sartre, Sidney Hook, Isaac Deutscher, and Leon Trotsky. It argues that their viewpoints approximate and illuminate what his was likely to have been regarding such issues as anti-Semitism, assimilation, Zionism, and definitions of the term Jew. It compares Rahv to current-day immigrants. It closes with conclusions regarding his inner struggles, his achievements, and his relations with women—Ethel, Mary McCarthy, and myself.