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PARTISAN REVIEW
kind ." Like Trilling, William emerged from the Communist orbit suspi–
cious of all evangelical zeal. Observing in others the wild swings from
radicalism to conservatism, he writes that "if we are to be saved from
the blind extremes that have seduced many intellectuals, it can only be
by preserving a critical attitude toward all ideologies and all organized
rhetorics of salvation." This comes in his unusually stern account of the
McCarthy era, and he concludes by dismissing both Stalinism and a
reckless and d·emagogic anticommunism: "What went wrong-for the
dupes of McCarthy and the apologists for the Soviet Union-was to
permit one lie to be substituted for another." Elsewhere he writes that
he saw no reason to become "a Utopian of the right, that is of the past,
as against a Utopian of the left, that is of the future ." He was not sur–
prised by the fall of the Soviet Union, he once told me-he had always
expected Communism to fail-but was amazed that the world now gen–
uflected to market capitalism as if it promised redemption.
If
there is any nobility to be found on the middle ground, here it is, a
version of the golden mean that Aristotle saw as an ethical ideal. Over
a period of some seventy years, William took many-no doubt
too
many-political positions, but they were invariably tempered by skepti–
cism, considerable tolerance, and an amazing lack of rancor (even
towards Philip Rahv). Together they not only kept the magazine open to
younger writers but made it a vehicle for the talent and genius of their
friends, and for innumerable others who were attracted to it as a bea–
con of intellectual seriousness and exacting standards. More than any–
thing he said or wrote, the magazine itself became his legacy, a template
for the journal of opinion in the twentieth century, at once urban and
cosmopolitan, enlacing literary and political commentary with sharply
etched pieces of modern writing. Try to imagine
The New Republic, The
New York Review of Books, Salmagundi,
or
The New Criterion,
differ–
ent as they are, without the example of
Partisan Review
and the con–
tributors who first appeared in its pages.
HELEN FRANKENTHALER
William. In I9 50, William's parties on Eleventh Street opened up the lit–
erary and artistic world to me. The politics! The nuances ... .
Introduced by Clement Greenberg, I was more or less a saddle-shoed
girl a year out of Bennington and awed by all that was going on in New
York. I had a huge appetite for the "buzz" of New York.
Helen Frankenthaler has her studio in Connecticut.
