TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
175
JULES CHAMETZKY
I first met William Phillips in
1952
or '53 at the University of Min–
nesota, when I was a T.A. in English and he was a visiting professor for
a year in that program. It was a heady time, with Isaac Rosenfeld and
John Berryman also in situ, along with Phillips the smartest and most
interesting people I had met in academe. William cut a romantic and
somewhat raffish figure for me, in his blue workshirts and, when he
wore them, thick loosely knotted woolen ties (unlike the button-down,
rep tie that was then de rigeur in English Departments). Of course I was
in awe of him as editor of the journal I read avidly as an undergraduate
back in New York in the postwar forties. When he spoke to me, I hung
on every word, often interrupted by laughter (he could be very funny).
I met him again in November
1961,
when I was managing editor of
The Massachusetts Review,
a journal I had helped found at the Univer–
sity of Massachusetts at Amherst in
1958-59.
The occasion was a his–
toric meeting of literary magazine and journal editors in St. Paul,
Minnesota, because, as Whit Burnett, the famed editor of the storied
Story,
said, it was the first time in American history that such a group
of editors had come together, ostensibly to further the cause of little and
literary magazines rather than to carp and snap at one another. Reed
Whittemore, then editor of
The Carleton Miscellany,
had received a
grant from the McKnight Foundation in Minnesota and called together
about twenty-five editors to meet and talk over our common problems
and hopes. Among them were Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate of
The
Sewanee Review;
Robie Macauley of
The Kenyon Review;
Robert Bly
of
The Fifties
(soon to be called
The Sixties);
Victor Navasky (yes!) of
Monocle,
the wonderful satiric journal he had begun at Yale Law
School; and many others, including the editors of
Poetry
and
The Anti–
och Review.
We all dutifully deplored the situation of our various jour–
nals-basically, not enough money and public recognition of our
importance-with the aim of coming up with ideas about how to gen–
erate more public and private support and better distribution and expo–
sure to the broader market. The upshot was the formation of the
Association of Literary Magazines of America (ALMA) .
From the beginning there was a kind of split between the more pres–
tigious and long-established journals and the aspiring "littles," or at
least newer journals (like my own) . The big-name
journals-Partisan,
Jules Chametzky is Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of
Michigan and Editor, Emeritus, of
The Massachusetts Review.
