Steven Marcus

Historical periods in culture often have multiple endings: they may be thought to end at different moments or at a series of moments. These dates usually entail a resonating event–often such an event is at the same time the first notable phenomenon of a new era. Sometimes, however, the event has the force (or effect) of a summary. It obliges us to look backward and to recognize in the interval of life or narrative that has now been concluded an achievement of meaningful form and a structure that has a central coherence and abiding significance. The death of William Phillips prompts us to consider once again the attainments of his life and to account for how that life and its work touched and affected our own.

For well over three decades, Partisan Review occupied a unique and pivotal place in the intellectual culture of the twentieth century. Its list of subscribers never exceeded about twelve thousand, but it seems to have been read by many more, and it was generally assumed that it achieved an influence out of all proportion to the actual number of copies printed by means of a process known to students of culture as "percolation downwards." I began reading PR when I was in my last undergraduate year, and I can truthfully say that it was as educationally formative for me as anything that I learned in a classroom. For me, as for many others, it provided a singular experience of intellectual awakening and intensity. I did not read each issue as much as I gulped it down. And although, like any little magazine of the period, it provided a sufficiency of indigestible matter, there was also more than enough in each issue not merely to learn from but to internalize as well, and for it to become an assimilated part of oneself in more than exclusively intellectual senses.

It brought together, first, an explicit commitment to modernism, to the modernist movements in art and culture. This meant, one soon discovered, an explicit commitment to the cultural life of the city and to the class of urban intellectuals who were among the chief critical spokesmen for the various modernities. And it meant as well an orientation toward Europe (although America was not to be overlooked) and to the avant-garde cultural and intellectual centers of Paris, London, and Rome, the counterpart creative universes of their suddenly arrived peer, New York.

What was especially invigorating was that the magazine had a simultaneous political project. It was ferociously anti-totalitarian and anti-Stalinist. And it included within its withering polemic the American and New York groups of writers, intellectuals, teachers, and public figures who were not merely adherents of Stalinist ideology, but who were fellow-travelers of it and hangers-on to it as well, and who in their turn uniformly despised PR and what it stood for (culturally as well as politically) with a virulence that was only surpassed by the glee with which the PR regulars argumentatively dismembered their "progressive" antagonists. The atmosphere of uninterrupted ideological controversy and debate had its origins in the radical and communist matrix of the 1930s, out of which the magazine had risen, from which it had departed, and against whose descendants and legatees it pitted itself.

This compounding of a commitment to high cultural modernism along with the unmodified rejection of any politics that entailed, or even intimated, the sacrifice of intellectual freedom, is what at the time made Partisan Review an original and distinctive and, in the long run, influential force. Substantial numbers of at least two generations of aspiring young intellectuals were trained by the demanding discipline of its pages in the forms of modern cultural sensibility, in the moves of ideological demystification, and in the traditions that modernism had done so much to renovate.

But there were at the same time lively internal differences and debates on all sorts of matters. Some of them were carried out in the pages of the journal, often with wit and high spirits, just as often cryptically to those new to the game or on the outside of it, but always loudly, defiantly, and almost always with refreshingly little attention paid to good manners, decorum, or parliamentary procedures. It seemed on certain occasions as if someone were trying to produce on the printed page a representation of a room full of people all speaking at the same time.

And that is what it could still seem like when, in time, I came to write for PR and become part of its world. William was one of its two centers and supplied in genuine measure whatever extra-intellectual solidarity there was that kept together the exceptionally gifted and naturally volatile gang of old and young bohemians, traveling intellectual salesmen, drunken poets, European exiles, and European visitors on the make, along with oddball American professors and a miscellaneous assortment of self-certified geniuses. He did it by means of his wonderfully flexible, ironic intelligence, his sociability, his willingness not to shout at the top of his lungs all night long, his natural gift of friendship–but above all by his identification with the undertaking of the magazine itself. In time it became more than evident that the two realities were for him an inseparable union, a single identity. PR was his life–he was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep it going.

Some of those lengths were indifferently successful and some were indifferently savory, but he never wavered in his dedication to the project of the continued existence of PR. Like one of the geniuses–Dostoevsky or Kafka–who were indispensable to his conception of the modern artist, his neurosis was indivisible from his creative, obsessive achievement. His great success in sustaining the continued life of PR could not be effectively separated from the virtual impossibility of his imagining the existence of one without the other. And, in the end, he did not have to. I knew him for forty-seven years. I loved him, and he drove me crazy. In my books, I still do, and he still does, as well.