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PARTISAN REVIEW
Clement Greenberg, Stephen Spender, William Phillips, John Berry–
man, Saul Bellow, Philip Rahv, Randall Jarrell, Simone de Beauvoir,
Karl Shapiro, George Orwell! I don't know a single one of these
names, but I feel their small conflagration flaming in the gray
street: the succulent hotness of their promise. I mean to penetrate
everyone of them. Since all the money I have is my subway fare–
two nickels-I don't buy a copy (the price of
Partisan
in
1946
is
fifty cents) .. ..
It
will be years and years before I am smart enough,
worldly enough, to read Alfred Kazin and Mary McCarthy.
You may have noticed that I have all along been saying "William
Phillips." It's still hard for me to say "William." For a long while I had–
n't earned that familiarity. Whole decades went by before I met William
Phillips in the flesh, though
Partisan
had long since entered my marrow.
In
1962,
holed up in the Bronx writing my first novel-much too long
and much too Jamesian-it was inconceivable that I would ever have
been invited to a publisher's party. But what if, in some fantasy, I had
found myself there? And what if I had walked up to William Phillips
and said, "How do you write a review for
Partisan Review?"
And what
if he had replied, "You ask"? How sublimely different everything would
have been! How richly
other
life would have turned out! Of course,
since I wasn't Susan Sontag, he might not have said "You ask." He
might more plausibly have said "You don't."
But if that fantasy leads to a dead end, here is a darker one. What if
I had been so unlucky as never to have known William Phillips at all? I
would have missed seeing Shelley plain; I would have missed seeing one
of the luminaries of our generation-of several generations. Not to have
known William Phillips at all would mean going all one's days without
encountering the Phillips wit, grit, honesty, and tenacity.
It
would mean
going all one's life without having stood before the mind that created
the political, literary, and intellectual culture that shaped who we are
and how we think.
I am grateful that I came at last to know William a little, so that I can,
after all, presume to say "William." I am grateful for a lifetimes's edu–
cation-or call it a summoning into
amor intellectualis-through
the
always dazzling, always provocative, pages of
Partisan Review.
I am
grateful to have finally been published in
Partisan Review,
though by
then my hair had turned white. I did, I suppose, eventually become
worldly enough to read Mary McCarthy and Alfred Kazin. And I even
managed to take in and fathom the ephemera of camp-but so what
and never mind. The cultural follies may shimmy and shift from season
