Norman Manea

I was lucky to have William Phillips among the then-unknown friends who introduced my first American book to its audience. At his initiative, Partisan Review soon pre-published two of my short stories and included them, afterwards, in an elegant anthology entitled Sixty Years of Great Fiction–in which I found myself not only under the prestigious umbrella of the magazine’s literary tradition, but also in the company of the great prose writers of the twentieth century, promoted in the U.S. by William and his colleagues.

In 1992, when I read William’s precise and meaningful "blurb" on the cover of my book of essays, On Clowns, I immediately understood that he knew a lot about Nazism, communism, and dictatorship, about "intellectual deadening" under extreme situations, and about the "personal aggrandizement" of fellow travelers and their unfortunate evolution. This certainly was a most favorable premise for our subsequent dialogue.

During the following years I had the chance to understand William Phillips’s precious mind much better. I then grasped his rich spiritual biography and the real importance of his vivid, decisive role in the history of American and especially New York culture of the last century. Indeed, William Phillips was a man of letters familiar with European and Eastern European cultural and political history, with the great and sometimes bloody intellectual debates before and after the Second World War. This might have been the best premise for our connection, but it was far from being the only one. For the newcomer, which I was and still am, it was a refreshing experience, during the last decade, to converse and get close to such a knowledgeable reader of European literature but also, and perhaps especially, to face his always lucid, sharp, original scrutiny, enriched by a particular sense of intellectual honesty and courage. Encountering William Phillips meant being offered that most desired confirmation that legendary people who lived in a legendary time and attained legendary achievements (in his case, the stimulating, storming, seductive–in one word, sensational–Partisan Review of the thirties and forties) are strong enough and authentic enough to reject the sacralization of the past and any embalming of their current work. William shared many jokes and ironical assessments about the past; he remained firm in his resilience against conformity, pursuing his editorial leadership with the same criteria of excellence as ever. I’m sure that if I would have asked him the old question: why are you still preaching? whom do you hope to change? he would have answered as the old Rabbi did: I’m preaching so that I don’t change, that’s the real and only reason, no other hope involved.

Debilitated by old age and poor health, but never complaining about it, William kept alive an exemplary adventure of thinking independently, ready to risk and accept the consequences of singularity and loneliness. In his memorably sound wit, he expressed skepticism and criticism about the not-too-wonderful evolution of our contemporary life and culture. The incandescence of his intellectual passion for ideas, for social-political commitment, as well as his cool lucidity of judgment led him to ignore the frailty of his body. This forced everybody around him to ignore it, as well, and to take advantage of the ongoing dialogue and the challenges it provided.

To the very end still a handsome man, despite his frailty and diminished physical abilities, William was an attentive listener and a fierce debater, acutely interested and immersed in the country’s and the world’s affairs of all sorts. With William Phillips, a great period of American culture has disappeared, a way of life, of thinking, of behaving in the public and private realms, as well as in the cultural-literary one. His adventure engraved a fascinating, unforgettable chapter in the human story and history of his country and far beyond it.

I assume William may enjoy, now, at his faraway refuge, listening to a passage from Seneca, from Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, XXX:

I admit, therefore, that I have visited this dear friend of mine more frequently on many pretexts, but with the purpose of learning whether I should find him always the same, and whether his mental strength was perhaps waning in company with his bodily powers. But it was on the increase, just as the joy of the charioteer is wont to show itself more clearly when he is on the seventh round of the course, and nears the prize. . . .

It may be a way of saying that we still feel him, often, here among us.