I Walked with Intellectuals

William Barrett’s The Truants: Adventures Among the Intellectuals (Anchor/Doubleday, 1982) is a slippery and maddening book. It is an account of one man’s intellectual coming of age, and it has the qualities of a backward glance at a busy, crisscrossed time. But it is also a subtle, unceasing—and, the reader may feel, not always conscious—attack on that time.

Barrett recalls the days when, in the late 1940s and early ’50s, he worked for the formidable Philip Rahv and the somewhat more retiring William Phillips, the founders and editors of Partisan Review. Barrett had been a pal of Delmore Schwartz’s before the war, when Schwartz, then in his early twenties, was achieving renown in New York literary circles for his stories and poetry. When Barrett returned from active duty overseas, he picked up his friendship with Schwartz, who had become a figure at Partisan Review. As Barrett tells it, Schwartz came to him one day, and, in a scene that m...