TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
195
from
The New Republic, The N ew York Times Book Review, The New
York Review of Books, Commentary, The New Criterion, The Times
Literary Supplement,
and
The Weekly Standard.
We read only two nov–
els: one by Edith's son, Allen Kurzweil, and one by Saul Bellow. Mr.
Phillips didn't seem
to
care much for fiction. For him the past was very
much alive and also a source of enduring amusement. But at the same
time that he had me read from book-length memoirs and long articles
that touched on the conflicts and personalities surrounding
Partisan
Review,
he also had me read difficult, densely written pieces examining
current political and cultural controversies. He liked to keep up.
When you are "sight reading," as I came to call it, you don't retain
all that much in the way of content. Always you are trying to keep one
jump ahead, if only so that you will know where to put the emphasis in
the sentence you are grappling with at the moment. Even so, certain
things stand out in memory, certain lessons learned. For one thing, if
you want to get a sense of a writer-of his strength and weaknesses–
just try reading him aloud . As might be expected, Saul Bellow held up
fine. In the past Mr. Phillips had had his differences with Bellow, but in
old age they were friends again.
Bellow's latest novel,
Ravelstein,
which might be called a memoir
masquerading as fiction, was painful
to
read not because of its sentences
but because of its many intimations of mortality. Death was everywhere
in its pages. The letters of the young Clement Greenberg, on the other
hand, were pure joy. Writing
to
a college friend from his parents' house
in Brooklyn, unable to find a decent job owing to the Depression, he
was bristling with opinions, ambition, and sheer talent. "This is won–
derful," I said to Mr. Phillips, who allowed as how at one time Clem
Greenberg had been his best friend .
Sadly, Lionel Trilling did not fare so well when read aloud. Mr.
Phillips and I devoted at least three sessions
to
The Moral Obligation to
be Intelligent,
a new selection of essays with a thoughtful introduction by
Leon Wieseltier praising the "variousness," the "complexity," and the
"difficulty" of Trilling's criticism. The essay on Orwell's
Homage to Cat–
alonia
was just as strong as I remembered it, as was the landmark essay
on Mark Twain's
Huckleberry Finn .
However, as we made our way
through Wieseltier's selections, I saw little to buttress his assertion that
invariably with Trilling "nuance was an instrument of clarification."
Finally, I hit one essay where the sentences were like paragraphs and the
point was buried in the syntax. Mr. Phillips asked where the piece had
originally been published.
The Kenyon Review,
I said, and he gave a sat-
