TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS
219
JOANNA S. ROSE
As Chairman of
Partisan Review's
Advisory Board, I worked with the
indomitable William Phillips for over thirty years. Long before I met
William, I knew
Partisan Review.
As a freshman at Bryn Mawr, I would
bury myself in the Periodical Room of the library devouring each issue,
already dog-eared and smudged by several hands before I found it. In
1950,
when it printed Malamud's
The Magic Barrel,
I bought my first
copy of the magazine and still have it.
Partisan Review
was used as a
text by our teachers. I can still rattle off the names of fifty of its con–
tributors.
Fast forward fifteen years: my friend Dick Poirier invites me to meet
William Phillips with a view
to
my joining the magazine's Advisory
Board. William asked only one question (one I discovered he asked
every potential Board member) : Was I sympathetic
to
the aims ·of
Parti–
san Review?
Of course I was. I joined the Advisory Board.
In those years, William and his friends still believed in an idea of
intellectual community where literature and politics could coexist with–
out either trying to absorb or destroy the other. The magazine then, as
now, opposed demagoguery on the right and on the left. Ideological
extremes play themselves out, William said, and in the long run only tal–
ent and genuine ideas survive.
His yearning for the intellectual electricity of those early days, when
writers would sit in Stewart's Cafeteria on Sheridan Square over coffee
and cake for ten cents and argue for hours solving the problems of the
world, led him to several unsuccessful attempts
to
bring differing fac–
tions together. But the cultural fragmentation had become too great.
The radical politics of the thirties led to a split within the magazine in
the forties.
PR
continued as a literary and cultural quarterly with a
political dimension and a concern with social questions.
By the late sixties when I met William, he was distressed at the grow–
ing gap between writers with academic and scholarly interests and those
adapting to a larger market, but his primary worry was how to keep
Partisan Review
alive. Other magazines could and did pay greater fees
to
writers, and only through a productive association first with Rutgers
and now for over twenty years with Boston University could
PR
survive,
steering a course between an increasingly polarized Left and Right.
So what did I learn from William? One should always be true to one–
self. The end never justifies the means. The battle of ideas must be
Joanna S. Rose is Chairman of
Partisan Review's
Advisory Board.
