WILLIAM PHILLIPS
355
her eighties. Brodkey was an odd talent. Brodsky was a commanding fig–
ure, an original and profound writer in Russian and English. Eleanor
Clark was an old friend, going back many years.
It was in the late thirties, when
Partisan Review
had just recently come
out as an independent journal, that Eleanor Clark and Mary McCarthy
emerged from Vassar and plunged into the heated atmosphere of New
York literary and intellectual life. Mary had a polemical personality and
fitted right into the bruising style that mixed friendship with antagonism.
Eleanor actually did not like New York, and she kept her distance. She
acted the part of a country girl. She was a woman of sensibility rather
than of disputatiousness. Eleanor was athletic, outdoorish, a good swim–
mer. She beat me at tennis.
But Eleanor did embrace the radical anti-Stalinism of the magazine,
and she became actively engaged in the politics of the New York intel–
lectuals. I remember one incident. I ran into Eleanor on Eighth Street -
where everyone met - when the news of the Moscow Trials had just
come out. We were of course bewildered but skeptical. I said to Eleanor,
"This can't be true." She thought for a moment and said very positively,
"It's impossible, it's all lies."
Her earliest published story in
Partisan Review
was in 1938. And she
contributed frequently with stories, reviews, and translations. Her fiction
was sensitive but full-bodied; her reviews penetrating and sympathetic;
her translations - of such diverse figures as Rosa Luxemberg and Andre
Malraux - were superb. I saw her less often after she married Robert
Penn Warren and escaped from New York - settling in Connecticut.
Meyer Schapiro's relation with us also began in the thirties. Some of
his important pieces were written for
Partisan Review.
His learning was
prodigious, his memory phenomenal. He was renowned for his lectures,
which had a mesmerizing effect on his audiences, often made up of New
York writers and artists.
I recall a telling incident that illustrates his wit, his knowledge, and his
view of the mind. It was in the forties that I was having lunch with
Schapiro and R . P. Blackmur at a deli on Eighth Street. At one point
Schapiro asked Blackmur what he was working on, and Blackmur said it
was a study of Henry Adams, for which he had received a Guggenheim.
Schapiro then proceeded to give Blackmur a lecture on Adams, citing
page numbers and long passages. Blackmur became irritated and in a
slightly anti-Semitic outburst, he said, "You intellectuals in New York
use your minds too much." Schapiro responded instantly: "When you use
your mind, you do not use it up."
w.
P.
