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PARTISAN REVIEW
some wariness on my part when we first met because I had been friendly
with Philip Rahv during the last years of his life and had contributed to
his short-lived magazine,
Modern Occasions.
Phillips and Rahv, found–
ing editors of
PR,
had from the beginning a difficult relationship.
Indeed, the history of the magazine (particularly in its early period) was
marked by often bitter controversy among its editors and contributors.
Though they agreed about the evils of Stalinism and the virtues of high
modernist art, there were other matters, both substantive and personal,
that provoked disagreement and estrangement.
Of all the editors, William's tenure was by far the longest. His col–
leagues over the more than sixty-year period of the magazine's existence
resigned to go on to other things or died. The length of his tenure was not
an accident. Strong-minded fractious characters, intellectually gifted and
polemical by instinct, the editors and contributors were given to picking
fights among themselves that frequently were initiated by events in the
larger world . The magazine needed a steady hand at the tiller, someone at
once tenacious and reasonable, who could steer it through the changing
and treacherous currents of our political and cultural life and keep it
focused on what was important. William was more often than not the
voice of moderation and mediation with the capacity to stand up for what
he believed and to assert himself. He had the ability to strike a balance
and rein in unruly colleagues without taming them. The liveliness of the
magazine, after all, depended upon its polemical edge. William knew how
and when to speak out when controversy ran off the rails. I have in mind
the furor that followed the publication of Hannah Arendt's
Eichmann in
Jerusalem.
In
an open letter to Mary McCarthy, William makes judicious
discriminations about the strengths and weaknesses of the rival argu–
ments. But more importantly, he notes how the animus of the controversy
seems to reflect the vanity of the contestants rather than the gravity of the
subject, the effect of which is not to illuminate, but to score points.
A historical disaster has been transformed, I am sorry to say, into a
journalistic occasion, because people have been talking not so much
about the meaning of those awful events as about what other peo–
ple were saying about them. And some people seemed to think that
what was being said was more awful than the events themselves.
The letter is a model of editorial judiciousness. More than that, it is
menschlich.
Not that William was all judiciousness. He had enough of
the strong-minded edginess of his cohort of early PR editors to be tough
and unyielding in argument.
