TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
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eager to take a course with the editor of
Partisan Review,
a magazine I
had been reading for five years, since I admired the New York intellec–
tuals who wrote for it.
Mr. Phillips, which is what I called him then (later I switched to
William), taught a course in contemporary literary criticism.
If
I remem–
ber correctly, we read Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, R. P.
Blackmur, Northrop Frye, and other well-known contemporary critics.
We met in his office at
PR,
where he sat in a deep chair-the book under
discussion on his lap. When a student presented a short paper on a par–
ticular critic, he would ruffle his hand through his white hair and make
a remark in a voice that sounded as if he were a taxi driver, not a pro–
fessor of English. He was the real thing-a New York intellectual.
William was different from the professors I had at Yale; he was
relaxed in his manner and casual in his approach to the writer we were
discussing. Students who preferred a more structured and methodical
approach to the material did not like his class, but I liked his off-the-cuff
commentary. Though sometimes he seemed to be suppressing boredom
or exasperation, he was always genial. There was a look he gave that I
realized meant "Don't give me that nonsense!" But he was never nasty.
I learned as much from his looks and gestures as from what he said.
What did I learn? In William's class I first became skeptical of radi–
cal thought. In the mid-196os Rutgers was abuzz with radical ideas. It
was home to a number of left-wing professors, including Eugene Gen–
ovese, who said he welcomed a Vietcong victory. Moreover, many Rut–
gers professors, as well as many leftist intellectuals of a previous
generation, were eager to know what made the sixties generation tick.
In June 1965, after my course with William,
PR
held a conference on
"The Idea of the Future," at which prominent literary and cultural crit–
ics discussed the sixties generation. Because my girlfriend (who became
my wife two years later) worked as a clerk for
PR
I was asked to help
out at the conference. Thus I met a few intellectual stars. I gave Frank
Kermode a ride, had a beer with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ran an
errand for Herbert Marcuse.
In the mid-sixties I admired Marcuse's
Eros and Civilization
and
One-Dimensional Man,
and two months before the conference began I
asked William if I could write a paper on Marcuse's view of literature in
advanced industrial society. He looked at me quizzically: "Do you really
want to do that?" I was annoyed with his remark. Was the editor of
PR
shallow? I wondered. Did he not take Marcuse seriously? Yet the more
time I spent thinking about Marcuse's ideas the more disenchanted I
