Word: rahvs
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...anew. "I ruined your third act!" exults McCarthy. "I was your third act!" retorts Hellman. Ephron's play, alas, has two acts full of distractions and gimmicks. There are childhood flashbacks that force grown actresses to talk like widdle girls. The literary men in their lives (Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv) are trotted on and off the stage like stuffed dummies. There are actual stuffed dummies too--a cutesy stage device that wears thin quickly--and songs by Marvin Hamlisch and Craig Carnelia. The depths of pointlessness are reached in a vaudeville-style number featuring Frankie Fact and Dick Fiction, which...
...former fiction editor at the New Yorker, has written a portrait not only of McCarthy, the critic and novelist, but also of her literary generation. Kiernan's book teems with a splendid cast of characters--starting with McCarthy's Partisan Review crowd of the 1930s and '40s (Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Delmore Schwartz and Dwight Macdonald), then widening to include other figures in McCarthy's busy, contentious life, including Wilson, whom she called "the monster," her unexpected soul mate Hannah Arendt and dozens of gifted walk-ons, such as Robert Lowell and Isaiah Berlin. And of course there is McCarthy...
...invented the term "the Family" to describe the New York intellectuals--a half-forgotten confraternity of writers and thinkers--clustered roughly around Partisan Review and Commentary. But it was Norman Podhoretz, in his young rooster's memoir, Making It (1968), who gave the term currency. In the Family (Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Irving Howe, Harold Rosenberg, Hannah Arendt and others), Podhoretz played a noisy, precocious younger brother, an irritant who would not stay put ideologically. In recoil against the Eisenhower inertia, Podhoretz had steered to the radical left by the early '60s. But then...
...hardly mattered. There were hundreds of other notables to engage the philosopher's attention. Although he was at constant odds with colleagues like Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy and Dwight Macdonald, Hook was associated with the opinion molders of the Partisan Review, perhaps the closest thing to the claustrophobic Bloomsbury set the U.S. has ever produced. They wrangled over every aspect of politics and culture, and as the memoirs of the survivors show, after a half-century, sentiments have still not cooled. Particularly Hook's, who now regards the Partisans as the "Radical Comedians" because "there was something truly comic about...
...range from reportage to literary criticism to the comparative values of wood ash, manure and seaweed in the garden. All of the works are reminiscent of, in Stendhal's memorable phrase, "a mirror walking along a main road." McCarthy's reflections begin with a recollection of her colleague Philip Rahv, longtime editor of Partisan Review. Thousands of words have been spent discussing the unrepentant old radical; this obituary captures him in three sentences: "He never learned to swim . . . He would immerse his body in the alien element but declined or perhaps feared to move with it. His resistance to swimming...