TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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guage-that even in a memoir he remained the impresario of their col–
orfullives, quicksilver minds, and expansive egos.
William was a survivor, and as he grew older he also became a window
on the past, a lens that, like the magazine itself, refracted the sensibility of
a whole generation. He had a limitless fund of stories about them, espe–
cially about his partner and nemesis Philip Rahv. My favorite is one he
tells in his book. Rahv, whose bluster and bearish Russian growl masked
a subtle critical refinement, was in the office dictating a letter to Jane Rich–
mond. With his restless nervous energy, Rahv was "pacing up and down
as usual, and she asked him to sit down. 'Why?' he asked, 'Does it bother
you if
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walk around.' 'No,' she said, 'I don't understand you. I'm lipread–
ing.'" The story is at once malicious, funny, and accurate to its subject.
Compared to his friends, William was strikingly "normal"-practical,
sociable, sensible-yet
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found it hard to know him in a personal way, even
when our relationship was at its warmest. In the late 1970s, when PR had
to leave Rutgers and William was looking for a new academic home, I
drove him out to Queens College to see the administrators, and we had
more than the usual time to talk. I was curious about how he managed his
complicated personal life, but he deflected the question: "Who says I man–
age?" I saw that there was a wall of discretion that would not be breached,
certainly not by someone thirty-three years his junior.
William's elusiveness made him different from the more theatrical per–
sonalities of his generation. Where they were outsized egos with leg–
endary quirks and fables-ranging from Clem Greenberg's pugnacity to
Delmore Schwartz's paranoia, from Meyer Schapiro's encyclopedic learn–
ing to Dwight Macdonald's or Mary McCarthy'S slashing wit-William
was notably self-effacing. Yet it was he who kept them on working terms
with each other; against all odds, he raised the money, got the magazine
out on time; he and his wife Edna kept the salon where they exchanged
barbs, held forth, got soused . Where they often took things to paradoxi–
cal extremes, which he records with relish, his memoir is a tribute to mea–
sure, balance, and control. Yet he recognized, as Lionel Trilling did, that
excess can be a mark of genius, just as moderation can risk blandness or
be a cover for indecision. But he saw it as a risk worth taking.
Defending Trilling against the charge of faintheartedness, of being
insufficiently militant in breaking with the radical Left, he sketched
something of a self-portrait: "He was not the kind of critic who aggres–
sively pushed a single idea or method or cause.... He stood for intel–
lectual sanity and an intricate but balanced view of literary and cultural
matters ." He adds that "far from being a forerunner of neoconservatism
... Trilling stood for moderation and was against fanaticism of any
