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PARTISAN REVIEW
those new to the game or on the outside of it, but always loudly, defi–
antly, and almost always with refreshingly little attention paid to good
manners, decorum, or parliamentary procedures. It seemed on certain
occasions as if someone were trying to produce on the printed page a
representation of a room full of people all speaking at the same time.
And that is what it could still seem like when, in time, I came to write
for PR and become part of its world. William was one of its two cen–
ters and supplied in genuine measure whatever extra-intellectual soli–
darity there was that kept together the exceptionally gifted and
naturally volatile gang of old and young bohemians, traveling intellec–
tual salesmen, drunken poets, European exiles, and European visitors
on the make, along with oddball American professors and a miscella–
neous assortment of self-certified geniuses. He did it by means of his
wonderfully flexible, ironic intelligence, his sociability, his willingness
not to shout at the top of his lungs all night long, his natural gift of
friendship-but above all by his identification with the undertaking of
the magazine itself. In time it became more than evident that the two
realities were for him an inseparable union, a single identity. PR was his
life-he was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep it going.
Some of those lengths were indifferently successful and some were
indifferently savory, but he never wavered in his dedication to the pro–
ject of the continued existence of
PR.
Like one of the geniuses-Dosto–
evsky or Kafka- who were indispensable to his conception of the
modern artist, his neurosis was indivisible from his creative, obsessive
achievement. His great success in sustaining the continued life of PR
could not be effectively separated from the virtual impossibility of his
imagining the existence of one without the other. And, in the end, he did
not have to. I knew him for forty-seven years. I loved him, and he drove
me crazy. In my books, I still do, and he still does, as well.
STEPHEN MILLER
I met William Phillips in the mid-sixties, when I was a graduate student
in comparative literature at Rutgers . In
1961-62
I had gone to Yale for
graduate studies in English, but I left after a year because Yale was too
scholarly and too professional for my tastes. In January
1965
I returned
to Rutgers somewhat reluctantly-mainly to avoid the draft, but I was
Stephen Miller is currently completing
The Age of Conversation: Eigh–
teenth-Century Britain.
