TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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Here was a real politico, as I had known them for years now, and the
best did their homework, as William was doing. There were ironies. The
old joke about the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant athe–
ist applied by analogy: William had been a Trot, and I a Stalinist, when
I was . For years I had been impatient with all this, believing that if Trot–
sky had won the battle for power he would have been as ruthless as
Stalin; that pickaxe, with a slight turn of history, could well have landed
in Stalin's brain. But the New Left youngsters were all Trots, in an inspi–
rational warm-hearted way. I was able to tell William that their hearts
were in the right place, but I doubt whether he could have approved of
what must have seemed to him amateurishness: the rigorous analytical
phases of
N ew Left Review
were still ahead.
Years later, in New York, when the Soviet Union was no more, I
asked William if he had ever thought like this: Suppose the Left every–
where had never paid allegiance to the Soviet Union, had said, "That
struggle has nothing to do with us"-then certain things could not have
happened . The Left's support of the Soviet Union meant concentra–
tion-that above all-on failure, on lying, on the defense of mass mur–
der, meant, inevitably the corruption of itself, because of always having
to swear that bad was good, lies the truth, failure success. A left wing
independent of all that would have meant a healthy Left, instead of one
mortally wounded and corrupted . Yes, said William, he had indeed pur–
sued these ideas, but surely I must agree with him that this was unhis–
torical thinking? Yes, yes, I admitted, true, but just suppose.. .. The fact
that we could have that conversation at all shows how far we had trav–
eled from those days when William came to London, telephoned me,
and we met for a meal, or I took him to a meeting he thought might be
interesting, or I invited some real representative of the New Left who
could satisfy William's expert questioning.
I was also in a false position because I had read and admired
Parti–
san Review
for years, but for its stories, poems, and criticism, not for its
politics, which struck me as sound and fury in a teacup. Over there in
the States there was this minute Communist Party and an even smaller
Trotskyist Party. And so what? The vast power of America would
absorb these like little fleabites. How wrong I was-both had influences
far beyond their formal boundaries. But what I wanted to talk about
was literature, and I questioned William about the writers and poets . So
there we were, agreeably strolling about London, mildly at cross pur–
poses, and mostly I was listening to this urbane, clever, well-informed
man, the editor of a magazine as influential in the arts as in politics. I
have often been told by this or that writer how much he owed to
