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PARTISAN REVIEW
to anyone who knew him that William could be exasperating. But for
better or worse, this sort of criticism was part of what gave PR its spe–
cial character. For William and his circle, putting out a magazine meant
not only finding good writing but taking a position. Radical politics in
the
1930S
was a tough school, even tougher than the streets of the Bronx
where he was reared. The medium was ideology-language combat
rather than physical combat-and the scene grew even rougher when
you broke with the Communist Party and, worse still, set up shop on
your own, as William and his talented friends did.
This ceaseless combat left permanent habits of mind-the need to main–
tain a "correct" line, the elevation of politics and ideas over sentiments
and personal concerns. In his fine
1983
memoir,
A Partisan View,
William
grew eloquent in his misgivings about this tendency. After describing the
backbiting and recriminations that followed Hannah Arendt's report on
the Eichmann trial, he writes: "I now feel . . . that our little world was defi–
cient in friendship and loyalty and that objectivity often has been a mask
for competitiveness, malice, and polemical zeal-for banal evils." Later he
adds: "The truth is that the sophisticated, sharp-eyed, and skeptical intel–
ligence that contributed to the high level of critical thinking was accom–
panied by a super-rationalism, a competitiveness, an intellectual hardness
that was humanly destructive." So the lumps I took from William, to
which I sometimes responded in kind, had a long tradition behind them;
they belonged to a rough-and-tumble style he finally came to regret.
I want to praise the cogency of William's second thoughts-that rare
ability to think against oneself, the basic
Menschlichkeit,
the gift for get–
ting succinctly to the heart of the matter, something he admired in real
critics. This kept me loyal to him even when we fell out. He would never
have gone to the other extreme and said (with E. M . Forster) that he
would sooner betray his country than betray a friend. Yet he was inor–
dinately proud of the stellar crew of friends and rivals who formed the
world around
PR,
though also astonished that posterity had come to
take so much interest in them. He felt that they had all undervalued
their contemporaries as if they were merely family, partly out of their
awe for the modernists who preceded them. In the acknowledgments of
his memoir, he writes, "I was fortunate early on in working with an
unusually brilliant, vain, quarrelsome community of writers and
thinkers . . . . Most of them are in this book, playing their flamboyant
roles." To a surprising degree, William's book is a story of these quar–
relsome friends, of
their
lives and works rather than his own, and of the
convulsive times in which they all lived. William had been an editor so
long- a great editor with a keen eye for talent and a sharp ear for lan-
