IN REMEMBRANCE
T
HIS ISSUE
OF
Partisan Review
is dedicated to William Phillips,
"the soul of
Partisan Review."
The following tributes by writers
and friends testify to his outstanding intelligence, his ideas and
vision, his strength of character and integrity, and his loyalty and sweet–
ness, although not to what it took out of him to "be one of the nobod–
ies who were
to
become somebodies" on the intellectual firmament of
the last century.
When asked about his youth, William often would recall that while
in high school and City College, his mind "had been in an emotional
and intellectual fog," which, I concluded from other reminiscences, he
had spent, for the most part, at New York's Forty-second Street library.
Only while taking graduate courses at New York University, and having
corne upon T. S. Eliot's
The Sacred Wood,
did he decide to become a
writer and literary critic; and while taking Sidney Hook's course in phi–
losophy, in
1933,
he began to embrace Marxism and to take note of the
impact the Depression had on everyone around him. That was when he
began to go to the John Reed Club-a writers' and artists' organization
that was under the umbrella of the Communist Party.
There, he met Philip Rahv, and in the following year they founded
Partisan Review.
Fairly soon, they carne to realize that the American
Communist Party was directly controlled by Moscow, and then man–
aged to break away. In
1937,
Phillips and Rahv restarted the magazine,
resolving to stay independent of all factional politics, while holding on
to Marxism and publishing the best of modernism. With the wisdom of
hindsight, I would maintain that most of the subsequent literary and
political disagreements were caused by the contradictions inherent in
these two
-isms,
along with clashes of the strong personalities, and the
egos and ambitions, of the bright individuals who joined them.
WILLIAM'S ESSAY, "Categories of Criticism," had been printed in
The
Symposium
in
1933.
In it, he argued persuasively that in order for crit–
ics to deal with ·discrete academic disciplines in a comprehensive way,
Edith Kurzweil, Editor of
Partisan Review,
most recently has written about
Nietzsche and Freud.
