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PARTISAN REVIEW
William's advice and help. And it is my belief that this is how William
will be remembered. The politics, as happens so often, will seem increas–
ingly like noisy sophistries, but the writers and poets he published and
helped will be his real monument.
There aren't many people like William now, so well-read, well–
informed, with such a range of interests. These days savants don't come
so well-rounded, many sided .
When I took to visiting New York, meeting William and Edith
Kurzweil was always a high point: conversations were an antidote to
whatever enthusiasm or fad was sweeping America . This was particu–
larly true through the effluvias of political correctness. William was all
his life at an acute angle to current conventional thinking, in minority
positions, always the acerbic and level-headed critic, but never was he
more at odds with his time than during political correctness.
I visited William in the hospital in
I987
and found him in a room so
stuffy, noisy, and hot you'd think it was impossible to retain a clear
thought in your head, but he was alert and wanted to know what was
going on in Southern Africa, in the Labour Party in Britain. Who were
the new writers? Was it true the young were not interested in politics?
How about feminism? What did I think about .. . ?
NORMAN MANEA
I was lucky to have William Phillips among the then-unknown friends
who introduced my first American book to its audience. At his initia–
tive,
Partisan Review
soon pre-published two of my short stories and
included them, afterwards, in an elegant anthology entitled
Sixty Years
of Great Fiction-in
which I found myself not only under the presti–
gious umbrella of the magazine'S literary tradition, but also in the com–
pany of the great prose writers of the twentieth century, promoted in the
u.S. by William and his colleagues.
In
I992,
when I read William's precise and meaningful "blurb" on the
cover of my book of essays,
On Clowns,
I immediately understood that
he knew a lot about Nazism, communism, and dictatorship, about "intel–
lectual deadening" under extreme situations, and about the "personal
aggrandizement" of fellow travelers and their unfortunate evolution. This
certainly was a most favorable premise for our subsequent dialogue.
Norman Manea is Francis Flournoy Professor of European Culture and
Writer-in-Residence at Bard College.
