TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
199
He said, "I remember his first novel.
It
had something." (This, by the
way, was William's highest expression of praise. A book or an essay–
or a person, for that matter-either "had something" or it didn't.)
William went on: "I gave the novel to Delmore to review."
Years later, when I got around to reading that early O'Brian, there,
printed inside the Norron reissue, was William's editorial influence,
channeled through a
19
52 preface by Delmore Schwartz. William had
beaten me to the punch by forty years.
But, then, William was always way ahead of everyone. Early cham–
pion of Orwell and Sontag, of Chiaromonte and Montale, of Bellow,
and of Farrell and . ..
I'll
stop the list there, since William's record of
editorial prescience is known to us all.
Instead, I will leave you a snapshot from a member of his kin group.
When I close my eyes and I see William, I don't see the founding edi–
tor of
Partisan Review.
I see instead a paternal presence at turns irrev–
erent, playful, outraged, always opinionated. The William I see is
sometimes shaking his head in disagreement or despair, or sucking his
tooth at some
meshugena
comment, some
nudnik,
some chicken tainted
by garam masala.
But other times he is smiling as he looks at an essay nervously pre–
sented to him, for the third or fourth time, by a fifteen-year-old de facto
stepson. And in my mind's eye I see William, whether smiling or scowl–
ing, holding something pointy in his hand. He's either fiddling with a
wooden toothpick-William is the only person I know whose teeth got
better
with age! Or he's holding a Swiss Army knife-it's a little known
fact that among New York intellectuals William had the most exquis–
itely manicured nails . Or he's gripping a Blackwing
602,
an editing pen–
cil with the motto "Half the pressure. Twice the speed"-a motto that
is painfully at odds with William's deliberate relationship with the writ–
ten word. In fact, his personal motto as a writer should be the exact
opposite: "Twice the pressure. Half the speed!"
They don't make Blackwing
602S
anymore, and they don't make
Williams, either.
And so, still in my mind's eye, I toast William by repeating the acci–
dental haiku he uttered until the end. Yes, I hoist a glass of William's
favorite bubbly and hear him gruffly utter a piece of found poetry that
will stay with me always:
I'll take ginger ale
No ice, no
lemon, no nothing.
