Tributes to William Phillips
DANIEL BELL
In
Arguing the World,
Joseph Dorman's remarkable film about the New
York intellectuals over a sixty-year period, Nathan Glazer, standing on
the plaza of City College, recalls that in
1943,
classmate Seymour Mel–
man (later professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University)
told him, "You must read
Partisan Review.
It's very important."
Why important? Because it was a new
intellectual
magazine that
printed novel and provocative ideas. There were few intellectual maga–
zines at the time:
New Masses,
the Communist magazine, discredited by
the Nazi-Soviet pact;
Saturday Review of Literature,
a middlebrow
review of books edited by Henry Seidel Canby and Norman Cousins;
The New Leader,
a right-wing socialist weekly, focusing on anti–
Stalinism and the revelations of what Alexander Solzhenitsyn would
later call the Gulag Archipelago (and of which I was then, at a preco–
cious age, the managing editor); and
The Kenyon Review,
of John
Crowe Ransom, which represented the "Southern Agrarians" and the
close reading of literary texts.
PR-no one seemed to know why it was called "Partisan," and what
it was partisan about, and
PR
was the shorthand that everyone used–
dealt with
ideas,
and in particular with modernism and Marxism, the two
leading currents of the time. (Surrealism was
outre,
and Existentialism, to
the extent that it was apprehended, was identified with the religious
thought of Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel.) The "avant-garde" writers
that
PR
introduced were Franz Kafka and Henry James: Kafka with his
vision of a nightmarish world
(PR
printed "The Penal Colony," where a
man's crimes were tattooed on his body), and Henry James, a "fuddy–
duddy" whose subtle and nuanced prose showed modern relations in a
new, dark light. (Lionel Trilling's introduction to "The Princess Casamas–
sima" is one of the great essays on the relation of aesthetics to politics.)
One of the distinctive facts about the early
PR
was its orientation to
European culture, and the introduction of European thought to an
Daniel Bell is Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences, Emeritus, at Har–
vard University.
