A PARTISA V w I VIEWED. Five Decades of the Literary Life William Phillips BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive 2015 in https://archive.org/details/partisanviewfiveOOphil A PARTISAN VIEW A PARTISAN VIEW Five Decades of the Literary Life William Phillips STEIN AND DAY/Publishers!New York Materialonpages 15-16,37,and51waspublishedin TriQuarterlyandalso in The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History , edited by Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie, Pushcart Press, 1979, and reprinted by permission of the publishers. Material on pages 19, 20, 30, 34, 35-41, 47-48, and 51-53 was published previously in somewhat different form in Commentary and reprinted by permission of the publisher. First published in 1983 Copyright © 1983 by William Phillips All rights reserved, Stein and Day, Incorporated Designed by Louis A. Ditizio Printed in the United States of America STEIN AND DAY/Publishers Scarborough House Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. 10510 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Phillips, William, date A partisan view. Includes index. 1. Phillips, William, date. 2. Editors — — United States Biography. 3. Partisan review (New York, N.Y.: 1934) 4. Partisan review (New York, N.Y.: 1936) I. Title. PN149.9.P44A37 1983 070.4T0924 [B] 83-42828 ISBN 0-8128-2931-X Acknowledgments — — For this memoir, thanks are due for different reasons to many people. I was fortunateearlyoninworkingwith an unusuallybrilliant, vain, quarrelsomecommunityofwriters and thinkers. Andit isto this extraordinary community withwhom I grew up thatI mustacknowl- edge an intellectual debt. Most of them are in this book, playing their flamboyant roles, telling the resonating stories of their lives and works. I also want to thank several people for reading the manuscript and giving me more work to do with their suggestions: Steven Marcus, who urged me to be tough-minded; Kay Agena, who almost spread herenthusiasmto me; Edith Kurzweil, who, inadditiontogoadingme to writethe book, reread and mademeredo many parts; Daniel Bell, whose total recall had me correct some of my facts; Edna Phillips, who was at once sympathetic and critical; and Joan Daly, who read the manuscript through a microscope. I am grateful, too, to Dr. Yela Lowenfeld, who tried to impress on me that being up is better than down, to Robert H. Montgomery, Jr., to Joan Schwartz, and to Joanna Rose and my other friends on the Advisory Board of Partisan Review for helping to make the whole thing possible. I must also thank the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment forthe Humanities, andtheRockefellerFoundation, for generous grants that kept me away from teaching. The rest, for better or worse, is my own doing. Contents 1. History Remade 11 2. The Center and the Fringes 15 3. Growing Out of the Twenties 19 4. The Thirties 33 5. The New Partisan Review 47 6. Writers on the Left 55 7. The New Talent 65 8. The Painters 85 9. The Forties 93 10. A Charmed Circle 103 11. European Connections 121 12. The Big Time 137 13. Cultural Freedom Abroad 147 14. Cultural Freedom at Home 161 15. Victims and Critics 169 16. Discovering Europe 185 17. An American in London 201 18. Writers in the Fifties 213 19. Realpolitik 221 20. Writers and Politics 235 21. The Sixties 251 22. Friends and Arrangements 259 23. Coexistence 271 24. D-Day 281 25. Then and Now 289 26. Index 301