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to the attention of the English-speaking world (and both Bellow and
Singer won Nobel prizes .) And PR printed Delmore Schwartz's indelible
story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," (a phrase taken from Yeats).
Schwartz, of course, was immortalized by Bellow in
Humboldt's Gift.
H
there is any secret, then, as to why new magazines become estab–
lished and make their mark, it is because of the group of like-minded
writers who appear regularly and make it their magazine-as we can
witness by
Dissent
or
The Public Interest.
Inevitably, that coherence becomes a social milieu, as well. In Paris or
Vienna, these center in cafes; in London, in bars or clubs. In New York,
it was the parties and the homes of several writers, in particular William
Phillips and Dwight Macdonald. In
Arguing the World,
Irving Kristol
tells of an occasion where he took a plate of food and sat down on a
couch. Soon after, Mary McCarthy sat down on one side of him and
Hannah Arendt on the other, while Diana Trilling pulled up a chair fac–
ing them. Kristol said that he sat frozen for about an hour while the
three women talked about Freud or a similar fashionable subject. This
may be the only occasion when Kristol sat quietly for such a period of
time, without saying a word.
I recall an occasion at William Phillips's when Hilton Kramer was
holding forth, accusing Philip Guston of opportunistically changing his
style to join the Abstract Expressionists. Adolph Gottlieb came charging
in to slug Kramer when Phillips intervened. (Slugging is a major form of
criticism in the art world. In the literary world it is a cutting cattiness,
such as Mary McCarthy's
The Oasis,
or earlier, Tess Slesinger's
The
Unpossessed) .
In the end, however, what counts is the editor or editors . At
PR,
it
was, of course, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, their curiosities and
their expertise. Phillips was the "inside" man . For many years he had a
"writer's block," which is not so uncommon with great editors
(vide,
Eliot Cohen at
Commentary) .
Phillips, though, had a double skill: he
was the ideas man and copyeditor, cutting skillfully through turgid
prose to make a piece come alive. Rahv had the personal touch of
embracing (or killing) a writer whom he wanted for
PRo
When Phillips
and Rahv fell out, Rahv began his own magazine,
Modern Occasions,
which failed after two years .
PR,
with Phillips at the helm, sailed on for
more than sixty years-an extraordinary achievement within the diffi–
cult world of the intellectuals.
