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PARTISAN REVIEW
a bedrock of common sense in William that always kept him from fly–
ing off, all rockets burning, into the realms of unreality.
Let me quote a few sentences written by William in
1964
that simul–
taneously endorse and exemplify the quality of mind I have been trying
to describe. They come from a piece in the form of an open letter to
Mary McCarthy about the fierce controversy that had been sparked by
Hannah Arendt's book on Eichmann: "I must tell you," he begins,
that I am bewildered and saddened by the confusion so many intel–
ligent people have brought to issues that were clearer before they
were so energetically and triumphantly clarified. Particularly
depressing is the procession of polemics, with everyone arguing so
cleverly, with so much wit and logic, as though those awful events
were being used to sharpen one's mind and one's rhetoric. At the
risk of sounding polemically sentimental and righteous, I should
say my own reaction was just the opposite. On rereading the sick–
ening accounts of the extermination of the Jews, the last thing I
wanted to do was to trot out my dialectical skills, to show how
clever I was in deploying the argument.
Well, there, in William's own voice, it all is.
Because William was, above all else, an intellectual, and a great edi–
tor, I have thought it proper in talking about him to start with the qual–
ity of his mind. But now I want to say something about his character.
There are, I gather, people who found him cranky and cantankerous.
No doubt, like everyone else in the world, he could be cranky and can–
tankerous, especially in his last years . And yet I never saw any of that,
not ever. The William Phillips I knew was a man of great and unfailing
sweetness, a loving, loyal, considerate, and tactful friend . In the deepest
sense he remained loving and loyal even during a temporary patch of
estrangement between us that led to a public exchange of harsh words .
Then, later, after we had reconciled, the sweetness prevailed over even
the thousand natural shocks that aging flesh is heir to. William's speech
might have become slurred, and his eyes and ears might have lost their
cunning, but the luminous intelligence was still there, and so were the
sweetness and the love. I still draw nourishment from the memory of
that sweetness, and I still bask in the lingering sensations of that love.
The world at large owes much to William Phillips, but I-having
been blessed with his presence in my life for half a century-I, for one,
owe him even more.
