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conciliate between rivals when conciliation was possible and even when
it was not. There was also William's gift for friendship . Loyalty is a word
that recurs like a refrain in his memoir. Always a precious gift, friendship
is a necessary virtue in a time when ideology becomes all-consuming. In
the contest between ideas and friendship, when and if it arises, William,
without abandoning his affection for ideas, would choose friendship.
In the last decades, his openness to the historical changes that were
taking place diminished, though curiosity remained strong. The conclu–
sion to the memoir, published in the early eighties, foreshadows the con–
servatism that he embraced till the end.
As this epoch draws to a close, one has to be consumed by curios–
ity about the future . The fear of death is not
to
be underestimated,
but I can think of no better reason for surviving than to see how it
all turns out, if by some miracle of human persistence, the world
should become a nicer place to live in-how awful not to know
about it.
It
is perhaps more realistic to assume that all one can hope for is
that things do not get worse-that the status quo is maintained.
What a contradiction one has finally arrived at:
to
have been
brought up on the 'necessities of history and now to be drawn psy–
chologically and politically to the stability that exists only outside of
history.
His conservatism was age-related and connected with an anxiety about
mortality. Which is not to say that William did not have intellectual rea–
sons for the positions he took, but it is to say that there is a refreshing
candor in admitting to the biological roots of one's views.
The person I knew was a man of strong likes and dislikes in personal,
cultural, and political matters. Easily bored by longwinded people, he was
charming, quick, terse, and witty in conversation. He liked social occa–
sions, but could also find them tiresome. I remember a party in which
someone turned on a light in a room that had been darkening. William
burst out: "It's not enough to be listening to these
nudniks,
now we have
to see them." He was a football fan, and in his youth he played quarter–
back, the perfect position for an editor-to-be. I can only imagine the kind
of quarterback he was from his intellectual presence and his personal
manner: agile and nimble in his movements, something of a scrambler and
a master of the quick short pass. Despite his slight frame, he must have
endured the hard knocks of his lumbering opponents. His resilience must
have been remarkable. His resilience in his career was remarkable.
