The Press: Angel with a Red Beard

In Manhattan’s ramshackle Bible House, which shelters the New Masses and a raft of other left-wing and labor groups, there was a new stir of activity. Partisan Review, bimonthly magazine of the literary Left, had found an angel. So it was about to go monthly, and pay its editors a salary for the first time.

Red-bearded Allan D. Dowling, 43, who makes his money in real estate and spends some of it publishing his own avant-garde poems, had sent the Review a mash note. He thought it was the finest thing since the dear dead Dial, he said, and he offered to stake it to enough cash to make the Review in fact what John Dos Passos had called it: “The best literary magazine in America.” Longtime Co-Editors William Phillips and Philip Rahv told Angel Dowling that they thought the job would take at least $50,000 a year.

For the Initiated. Without a ‘big bank roll, Partisan Review has filled its pages with big-name writers to whom it has offered not money but space: a place to be as highbrow as they like, to talk to their own kind and never mind being intelligible to the uninitiated. The result has been sometimes stuffy, oftentimes overreaching, but usually stimulating. Such first-rate writers and critics as Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, George Orwell, Albert Camus, Andre Gide and Edmund Wilson have sold Partisan Review articles for a token $2 a page. Poets T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Karl Shapiro and Robert Lowell were paid $3 a page. Thanks to Publisher-to-be Dowling, Partisan Review will now offer 2½¢ a word for prose, 50¢ a line for poetry, beginning with next January’s issue. Furthermore, the editors will be able to commission articles, instead of taking whatever comes their way.

Editors Phillips and Rahv, only survivors (both 39 years old) of the crew of young Marxists* who founded the Review in 1934, hoped for an increase in circulation too. Including its new London edition (TIME, March 10), Partisan Review sells only 7,600 copies, at 60¢. Now the editors hope to hit 20,000 in the U.S. and Europe. A slightly larger format, more art work (in color) and photographs, regular departments on music, art and the theater, and “letters” from Europe’s capitals may help. But Phillips and Rahv plan to keep the Review uncompromisingly a magazine for what it considers the “intelligentsia,” will not desert its long-standing partisanship of “radical values and literary standards.”

*Originally Communist, Partisan Review suspended publication after being disillusioned by the Moscow trials, was revived as anti-Stalinist and vaguely Trotskyite, then independent Marxist, now classifies itself as “radical democratic.”