TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
205
for many others, it provided a singular experience of intellectual awak–
ening and intensity. I did not read each issue as much as I gulped it
down. And although, like any little magazine of the period, it provided
a sufficiency of indigestible matter, there was also more than enough in
each issue not merely to learn from but to internalize as well, and for it
to become an assimilated part of oneself in more than exclusively intel–
lectual senses.
It
brought together, first, an explicit commitment to modernism, to
the modernist movements in art and culture. This meant, one soon dis–
covered, an explicit commitment to the cultural life of the city and to
the class of urban intellectuals who were among the chief critical
spokesmen for the various modernities. And it meant as well an orien–
tation toward Europe (although America was not to be overlooked) and
to the avant-garde cultural and intellectual centers of Paris, London,
and Rome, the counterpart creative universes of their suddenly arrived
peer, New York.
What was especially invigorating was that the magazine had a simul–
taneous political project.
It
was ferociously anti-totalitarian and anti–
Stalinist. And it included within its withering polemic the American and
New York groups of writers, intellectuals, teachers, and public figures
who were not merely adherents of Stalinist ideology, but who were
fellow-travelers of it and hangers-on to it as well, and who in their turn
uniformly despised
PR
and what it stood for (culturally as well as polit–
ically) with a virulence that was only surpassed by the glee with which
the
PR
regulars argumentatively dismembered their "progressive"
antagonists. The atmosphere of uninterrupted ideological controversy
and debate had its origins in the radical and communist matrix of the
193
os, out of which the magazine had risen, from which it had
departed, and against whose descendants and legatees it pitted itself.
This compounding of a commitment to high cultural modernism
along with the unmodified rejection of any politics that entailed, or even
intimated, the sacrifice of intellectual freedom, is what at the time made
Partisan Review
an original and distinctive and, in the long run, influ–
ential force. Substantial numbers of at least two generations of aspiring
young intellectuals were trained by the demanding discipline of its pages
in the forms of modern cultural sensibility, in the moves of ideological
demystification, and in the traditions that modernism had done so much
to renovate.
But there were at the same time lively internal differences and debates
on all sorts of matters. Some of them were carried out in the pages of
the journal, often with wit and high spirits, just as often cryptically to
