TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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During the following years I had the chance to understand William
Phillips's precious mind much better. I then grasped his rich spiritual
biography and the real importance of his vivid, decisive role in the his–
tory of American and especially New York culture of the last century.
Indeed, William Phillips was a man of letters familiar with European
and Eastern European cultural and political history, with the great and
sometimes bloody intellectual debates before and after the Second
World War. This might have been the best premise for our connection,
but it was far from being the only one. For the newcomer, which I was
and still am, it was a refreshing experience, during the last decade, to
converse and get close to such a knowledgeable reader of European lit–
erature but also, and perhaps especially, to face his always lucid, sharp,
original scrutiny, enriched by a particular sense of intellectual honesty
and courage. Encountering William Phillips meant being offered that
most desired confirmation that legendary people who lived in a leg–
endary time and attained legendary achievements (in his case, the stim–
ulating, storming, seductive-in one word,
sensational-Partisan
Review
of the thirties and forties) are strong enough and authentic
enough to reject the sacralization of the past and any embalming of their
current work. William shared many jokes and ironical assessments
about the past; he remained firm in his resilience against conformity,
pursuing his editorial leadership with the same criteria of excellence as
ever. I'm sure that if I would have asked him the old question: why are
you still preaching? whom do you hope to change? he would have
answered as the old Rabbi did: I'm preaching so that I don't change,
that's the real and only reason, no other hope involved .
Debilitated by old age and poor health, but never complaining about
it, William kept alive an exemplary adventure of thinking indepen–
dently, ready to risk and accept the consequences of singularity and
loneliness . In his memorably sound wit, he expressed skepticism and
criticism about the not-too-wonderful evolution of our contemporary
life and culture. The incandescence of his intellectual passion for ideas,
for social-political commitment, as well as his cool lucidity of judgment
led him to ignore the frailty of his body. This forced everybody around
him to ignore it, as well, and to take advantage of the ongoing dialogue
and the challenges it provided.
To the very end still a handsome man, despite his frailty and dimin–
ished physical abilities, William was an attentive listener and a fierce
debater, acutely interested and immersed in the country's and the
world's affairs of all sorts. With William Phillips, a great period of
American culture has disappeared, a way of life, of thinking, of behav-
