TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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William's early Marxist sympathies gave way to a revulsion from Stal–
inism. He did not need the purge trials of the thirties to realize what the
Soviet Union had become under Stalin. He had first-hand experience of
the tyranny of its version of political correctness. At the same time, he
resisted the temptation of conservatism, to which other Marxist sympa–
thizers succumbed, and maintained a liberal position.
If
one had to sum–
marize in a single sentence the distinctive character of the magazine in
its heyday, it would be the following: PR (and William) had a dual loy–
alty to anti-Stalinist liberalism and the great modernist writers, many of
whom were politically conservative while radical in their artistic vision.
Articles in the journal were devoted to working out the paradoxical logic
of its liberal/conservative/radical persuasion. The 1960s were an inter–
lude of responsiveness to-though not a full embrace of-certain expres–
sions of the counterculture. In his memoir,
A Partisan View,
William
writes of his fascination with Susan Sontag and her essay on camp. He
claims not to have fully understood it, but to have been taken by it and
by her. He also expresses regret that he did not publish more of the
poems of Allen Ginsburg. Whatever one's view of the sixties, there is
something attractive about William's openness
to
what he did not quite
understand but found interesting and challenging in its sensibility.
Unlike Rahv, who resisted the changing treacherous currents of the time,
William took the risk of going along to see where they might lead. (In
retrospect, it seems
to
me that the quarrel with the counterculture lacked
discrimination. Should a phenomenon that includes the Beatles and Bob
Dylan be rejected wholesale?) William, with his deep affinity for the
achievements of high modernism and the Western cultural tradition,
subsequently reacted against the ascendancy of postmodernism.
The memoir is a story of personal and historical change. In it, William
comes across as quick-witted, down-to-earth, commonsensical, impa–
tient with what he considered nonsensical, critical, and self-critical. He
had a gift for seeing what made people tick, the psychology behind their
views and attitudes. And he had a fair understanding of what made him–
self tick. Among the pleasures of his memoir are the incisive and gener–
ous portraits of the legion of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances that
he knew during a long lifetime. And he had a nice ironic sense of him–
self. More than once he speaks of having delivered a pompous speech at
a conference, though pompous he emphatically was not. After a lecture
we both attended in which the speaker said very little at great length,
William echoed Hamlet: "words, words, words."
It
is, I think, his self–
doubting and self-critical side that kept William open to new possibili–
ties, prevented him from going to extremes, and impelled him to
