TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
189
nouveau
for Phillips and his fellows in New York. But since I had
reported in my "Letter" that Sartre's new play,
Huis cios,
was "the event
of the season," William must have asked for more. For this I need no doc–
uments; they would only cramp my style, since I have a vivid memory of
lunching with the ascendant prince of French letters-not in Saint-Ger–
main-des-Pres where we both lived and had met, but (at his suggestion)
at an American military mess on the Rue Caumartin. The upshot was a
special issue of
Partisan Review,
assembled with Sartre's help.
A squat and walleyed little man, Sartre exuded energy and wit. He
laughed readily and talked brilliantly and seemed at the moment
immune to the Marxist plague infecting the intelligentsia. I had read his
novel
La Nausee
and a remarkable collection of stories, met him in
Queneau's office at Gallimard, and had drinks with him at the Flore
where he and Simone de Beauvoir had a sort of
Stammtisch
until they
were driven out by the tourists. Just how he got on
to
the Caumartin
mess I can't recall, but he was comically enthusiastic about it, impressed
by our Spam and baked beans, and promising not only more of his own
prose for PR but Camus, Beauvoir, Leiris, Ponge, Char,
e tutti quanti.
The literary scene in Paris was lively, with many interesting new voices
yet to be heard across the channel, let alone in America. The idea was
to provide a sampling based on, but not limited to, Sartre's friends.
Alas, it was a sound idea, and we did produce an excellent issue, but
to put the matter as mildly as I can, it failed to cement our relations with
Jean-Paul and his cohorts. Indeed, it had quite the opposite effect, for the
simple reason that William and his co-editor, Rahv, chose this moment
to publish what Sartre saw as an extremely deprecatory review of his
(philosophical) magnum opus,
L'Etre et Ie Neant;
an act of utter treach–
ery, said Simone de Beauvoir, who refused to believe that I had not been
consulted about this piece or even informed that it was in the works. So,
instead of being credited as the artisan of Existentialism's conquest of
America, I was seen as responsible for this allegedly snide attack on the
movement's great man. Nor did it help to explain that I was not an edi–
tor of
Partisan Review,
that the incriminating piece had surely been
commissioned months ago, and that in America, once you gave a
philosopher a book to review, you had to let the bastard speak his mind.
This last was pure William Phillips, even if I don't have a piece of
paper to prove it. The bastard in question was Bill Barrett, who came
over to Paris soon thereafter and expressed astonishment at all this fuss .
He was becoming, already was, a serious student of phenomenology;
and he thought he had written a balanced, fair, and appreciative review.
