TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
209
think he was unhappy with the turn the magazine had taken when it
moved to Rutgers and Richard Poirier became co-editor. According to
my wife, when a student demonstration was taking place outside his
office he muttered: "What do they want now?"
When
I
moved to Washington in the mid-I970S
I
no longer saw
William but
I
continued to correspond with him-telling him what my
wife and
I
were doing.
I
ran into him in the early I990S at a conference
on the Cold War sponsored by Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, but
we chatted only briefly.
I
have said nothing about William's writings. Though
I
read his work
when it appeared in
PR,
it was not as important to me as the work of
Trilling or Howe. Yet if the best work of Trilling and Howe repays
rereading, both of them were more gullible intellectuals thall William
was. Trilling, unlike William, worshiped Freud and admired Norman O.
Brown's utopian version of Freudianism,
Life Against Death-calling
it
"one of the most interesting and valuable works of our time." Howe,
unlike William, remained committed to a vague and moralistic social–
ism, calling everyone who disagreed with him a sell-out.
When
I
think of William,
I
think of an intellectual who never lost his
common sense.
I
also think of a remark Saul Bellow once made: "The
systems fall away one by one, and you tick them off as you pass them.
Au revoir, Existentialism."
Thanks to William,
I
said
au revoir
to Her–
bert Marcuse.
CZESLAW MILOSZ
In
the years I947-I950
I
was an assiduous reader of
Partisan Review,
and
I
wish to pay tribute to its importance for my intellectual formation .
At that time
I
was a young member of the Polish Embassy staff in Wash–
ington, D.C.-not a communist but, to put it roughly, a heretical social–
ist. The discussions
I
found in
Partisan Review
excited me, as they
corresponded to my ideological contradictions. The idea of writing an
anti-Stalinist book was gradually taking shape in my imagination and,
in a couple of years, the idea found its implementation in my book
The
Captive Mind .
I
don't think
I
could have written that book without the
passionate Marxist debates in
Partisan Review.
This fact is paradoxical
yet true.
Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in I980.
