TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
193
a perfectly respectable but unprepossessing room that in better days had
served as a study and was now fitted out with a hospital bed. At the end
of the room was a window with a distant view of Central Park. To the
right of the window was the bed. Across from the bed, on the wall to
my left, was a small typewriter table piled high with books and manu–
scripts. A sturdy wooden desk sat in front of the window. The desk
chair had been turned
to
face Mr. Phillips, who was lying atop the bed,
dressed in slacks and a knit sports shirt and looking much paler and
thinner than I remembered. He appeared to be looking straight at me,
although Linda had said he could only make out shapes.
"How are you?" I asked. "Not so good," he said . (Sometimes he
would say, "O.K.," implying as good as could be expected, all things
considered.) His voice was strong-if anything, stronger than it had
been when I'd interviewed him. I pitched my voice accordingly. "What
would you like me to read?" I asked, hoping it would be
Partisans,
which I had spied facedown atop the pile on the little table.
It
was. The
last reader, I saw, had drawn a line in the margin with a pencil and noted
the date. (Years later I would learn that, along with Linda, there was a
younger reader, Jacob Weisberg, who had first come
to
know Mr.
Phillips while researching a college thesis and gone on
to
become a polit–
ical writer and editor.) I noticed a gooseneck lamp on the desk. I drew
the desk chair closer
to
the bed, switched on the lamp, and picked up
where the last reader had left off.
I knew from Linda that Mr. Phillips also had professional readers, but
complained that they had no idea how
to
pronounce many key words
and names. I finished the chapter in
Partisans
on Jean Stafford with no
difficulty. Perhaps once or twice Mr. Phillips asked me to repeat a word
or say it a little louder. The only time he actually interrupted me was
when I came to the word
formidable.
I put the emphasis on the second
syllable, while he insisted that it belonged on the first .
In
time I would
realize that for him this favoring of the first syllable was a hard and fast
rule. Perhaps owing to a Southern mother, I tended to place the accent
later-especially when it came to words that were part of my written
vocabulary but not necessarily part of everyday speech. This list of
words would come to include words like
intransigent, felicitous, amal–
gam, admirable, temperate, affluent, elegiac, genteel, acerbic,
and
exi–
gent.
Mostly he would correct me, I would repeat his correction, and we
would move on.
Our first serious trouble came with the chapter on Hannah Arendt.
After almost ten years of working on my book, I'd settled on a pronun–
ciation of Arendt that mimicked that of Lotte Kohler, her executor, plac-
