TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
173
American intellectual audience. One serendipitous artifact illustrates
what I mean. A number of years ago, the American painter R. B. Kitaj
produced a series entitled "In Our Time." These were enlarged silk
screen prints of book jackets, magazine covers, publisher's announce–
ments and the like. One of these was of a cover of
PR.
Published by
Marlborough, it reproduced the familiar PR layout, and within it, said:
Partisan Review
4,
July-August
1943, 35
cents a copy.
George Orwell: The Situation in Britain
Dwight Macdonald: The Future of Democr"atic Values
Ramon
J.
Sender: The Eagle (a story)
Rosa Luxemburg: Letters from Prison
Nigel Dennis: Evelyn Waugh and the Churchillian Renaissance
1.
A. Richards: Comments on "The Failure of Nerve" Controversy
Poems by Karl
J.
Shapiro, Robert Lowell and W. R. Rodgers
Reviews by Melvin
J.
Lasky and Daniel Bell
For many years, PR ran a London Letter, a Paris Letter, a Berlin Let–
ter, a Rome Letter, reporting on new novels, literary controversies and,
increasingly, on the cultural wars between the pro-Stalinists and anti–
Stalinists (Sartre vs. Aron; Moravia vs. Silone). When European writers
first came to the U.S.-Koestler, Camus, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Sperber,
Uwe Johnson-their first stop invariably was to the offices and homes
of
PR.
But it was another singular fact that gave PR its identity-its writers.
Commercial magazines are defined by their successful reach to an audi–
ence. But cultural magazines are signified by the voice of their writers–
Criterion, Horizon, Temps Modernes, Der Monat
and, in this instance,
PR.
Quite quickly, PR gathered a group of writers whose regular
appearance, and their intramural debates, marked it as a coherent world
that other writers would seek to join, or an intellectual audience would
appreciate: Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Mary McCarthy, and their edi–
tors, William Phillips, Philip Rahv, William Barrett, Dwight Macdonald,
and Clement Greenberg, though at some point the latter two resigned
because of an anti-World War II stand.
Of noted importance-and it is the mark of a great magazine-was
the number of young writers the magazine introduced into the cultural
world. I think, in this regard, of two among the many who made their
first appearance in
PR,
namely Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz. PR
printed extracts from Bellow's earliest novels and his translation of Isaac
Bashevis Singer's story, "Gimpel the Fool," a story that brought Singer
