188
PARTISAN REVIEW
H.
J.
KAPLAN
I'm finding it hard to say goodbye to William Phillips-talking to myself
about him, composing eulogies in my sleep. There was still so much for
us to say to each other; one always thinks there will be time. William
and his magazine have been part of my mental world since Leslie
Fiedler, an older kid on my block, introduced me to them in 1937 or
1938-a fateful occasion, since it made me a PR writer, or at least a PR
person, for the rest of my life. Not that I'd met any of the PR crowd in
the flesh at that point. But when in 1942 I stopped for a few weeks in
New York on my way to North Africa and the war, I had published
some stuff in the magazine and was received by William and his col–
leagues with all the honors due my rank. Whereupon began a long,
affectionate, and rather peculiar friendship-never intimate because
there was always at least an ocean or a continent between us.
It
was
based, I think now, partly on a folkish humor born of our shared East–
ern European background and partly on a wordless
entente
about the
importance of decency and honesty, as opposed to ideology, in cultural
matters as in the practical world.
It
endured, this friendship of ours,
through the grisliest century of recorded history, surviving many strains
and differences between us. We never quarreled, a rare thing in people
of our milieu. So I am grateful to be allowed to say goodbye to William
and, while I am at it, to bring my pebble to place on his tomb.
The pebble I have in mind is a sort of historical marker-bearing wit–
ness to William's first visits to Paris after the war. I found it quite by
accident, while making a shambles of my archives in the vain hope of
turning up something from that time-but alas there is nothing, not
even the book he sent me when I was in Beirut, shortly after the first of
the Arab attempts to destroy the Jewish state. It was inscribed "To
Kappy in Paris-and all over the world." I know it must exist, because
for some reason it was not put in storage when we left Paris. As for the
rest, everything perishable was destroyed, together with our furniture
and other worldly goods, in a fire which consumed one of our Embassy
warehouses in 1971. But wait, here is something: a tattered copy of
Par–
tisan Review,
number 3, 1945. How this escaped the general extinction
I cannot imagine, but it includes the first of the "Paris Letters" I pro–
vided sporadically until I joined the foreign service, together with
another item from Paris, a text by Jean-Paul Sartre that makes the case
for a politically involved and responsible literature-hardly a
frisson
H. J. Kaplan, a contributor to PR since 1939, lives in Toulouse, France.
