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PARTISAN REVIEW
ing in the public and private realms, as well as in the cultural-literary
one. His adventure engraved a fascinating, unforgettable chapter in the
human story and history of his country and far beyond it.
I assume William may enjoy, now, at his faraway refuge, listening to
a passage from Seneca, from
Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium,
XXX:
I admit, therefore, that I have visited this dear friend of mine more
frequently on many pretexts, but with the purpose of learning
whether I should find him always the same, and whether his men–
tal strength was perhaps waning in company with his bodily pow–
ers. But it was on the increase, just as the joy of the charioteer is
wont to show itself more clearly when he is on the seventh round
of the course, and nears the prize....
It may be a way of saying that we still feel him, often, here among us.
STEVEN MARCUS
Historical periods in culture often have multiple endings: they may be
thought to end at different moments or at a series of moments. These
dates usually entail a resonating event-often such an event is at the
same time the first notable phenomenon of a new era. Sometimes, how–
ever, the event has the force (or effect) of a summary.
It
obliges us
to
look backward and to recognize in the interval of life or narrative that
has now been concluded an achievement of meaningful form and a
structure that has a central coherence and abiding significance. The
death of William Phillips prompts us
to
consider once again the attain–
ments of his life and to account for how that life and its work touched
and affected our own.
For well over three decades,
Partisan Review
occupied a unique and
pivotal place in the intellectual culture of the twentieth century. Its list
of subscribers never exceeded about twelve thousand, but it seems to
have been read by many more, and it was generally assumed that it
achieved an influence out of all proportion to the actual number of
copies printed by means of a process known
to
students of culture as
"percolation downwards ." I began reading PR when I was in my last
undergraduate year, and I can truthfully say that it was as educationally
formative for me as anything that I learned in a classroom. For me, as
Steven Marcus is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Colum–
bia University.
