A partisan view: five decades of the literary life.

A Parisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life

ACROSS THE FIERY BROOK

THE EDITOR of Partisan Review for almost fifty years, William Phillips has written an absorbing, self-deprecating memoir of great interest and value. Perhaps the best of the many good things in this book is its revelation of the character of the author himself. With his apparently scrupulous insistence on honesty and balance; his muted, almost elegiac tone; his personal modesty; and a kind of moral stoicism in the face of a century largely consisting of nightmare and chaos, Phillips emerges in this account as a man of oddly old-fashioned decency and honor.

"Oddly,' because "the angels who presided o'er his birth,' as he readily admits, were literary Modernism and Marxism, though the former, and stronger, influence turns out on closer inspection to have a distinctly conservative and traditional ballast and meaning. Born the child of pathetically poor and unsuccessful Russian-Jewish immigrants, Phillips grew up in the New York of the Twenties and Thirties, a city which for him, and for many others of similar background, "acquired the qualities of a nation; it was not only the homeland; it took the place of the rest of the world.' Yet City College provided access for him--as for so many others before it was destroyed --to the life of the mind and the world of literature, a world in which Phillips confesses he has largely remained. Despite the Depression and the Marxianization of the New York intellectual life in which he lived, Phillips's loyalties remained essentially with the "modern masters' he first read in the Twenties--to Dostoyevsky, Proust, Mann, Joyce, and Kafka, surely; but especially to T. S. Eliot and his idea of literary and cultural canon and tradition. "Eliot's conception of the relation of tradition to individual talent,' Phillips writes, "actually defined the prevailing assumption about the relation between the two; for while original work, according to Eliot, modified the tradition, it did not destroy it.' However, he continues, "beginning with the Forties, there has been a steady decentralization of art and an erosion of the very idea of tradition itself.'

If anyone should know, Phillips should. Under his guidance Partisan Review attempted to remain open to the new while not being enthralled by it. Among the people it published were Wallace Stevens, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Clement Greenberg, Saul Bellow, Flannery O'Connor, and Robert Lowell, as well as Europeans such as Sartre, Camus, Orwell, and Koestler. Yet by the Sixties Phillips had come to feel "assaulted not only by the contempt for the past on the part of the new radicals, but by the cultural fragmentation that made tradition look like an outdated custom.' He goes on to argue that "the notion of novelty' was itself "elevated into a value' (what Christopher Booker called neophilia). "To resist in any way the artistic and intellectual nonsense that was flooding the market and being celebrated by the media was dismissed as a sign of reaction.'

Phillips has a fine ear for the cant he calls "the common style of aesthetic mystification,' and he documents his detestation for the "use of the idea of pluralism to destroy traditional standards and to justify all new adventures in the arts' (in politics too for that matter): what Raymond Aron in a lapidary phrase called "aesthetic nihilism.' Phillips is capable of stinging, exact, and memorable formulation and phrasing, as when he writes about "the perverse and decadent complexities that we identify with modern culture' and about our "chaotic times that constantly wipe out traditional standards of behavior.' These he largely ascribes, like his friend and colleague Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, to the "chaos of the marketplace' and its libertine and Social Darwinist ethic of "self-aggrandizement,' which, he argues, has "produced the anarchy neoconservatives lament.'

Socialist though this analysis sounds, Phillips is a dogged and unrepentant anti-Communist, one of a noble breed of old-line radical anti-Communists that includes Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and, in some ways, Lionel Trilling, all of whom forded the "fiery brook' of Marxism and remained permanently affected but also deepened by the experience.

Some of the most valuable parts of the book show Phillips as a witness against Stalinism and fellow-traveling, and against the revisionism that would deny or whitewash them, especially as represented by Lillian Hellman's self-serving memoirs and Garry Wills's propaganda journalism, and "the current tendency on the Left to denigrate any concern with American national interest and security as reactionary.' The durability and doggedness of Phillips's convictions about both free speech and truth are frequently evident, as when he talks about pro-Communist censorship at The Nation in the late Thirties, or when he writes: "McCarthyism has not suffered from lack of publicity, but the other side of the equation, the vilification and persecution of anti-Communist liberals and radicals by the Communists, has been played down.'

As in the case of Daniel Bell, what remains of Phillips's radicalism is his position, oddly echoing Burke and Eliot, against laissez-faire materialism, smugness, greed, and careerism; against libertarian hedonism; against complete faith in the vulgar "democracy' of the market; and against the inadequacy and ultimacy of "market outcomes,' especially in the cultural and moral spheres, where he sees them as embodying and promoting nihilism. And indeed much of our contemporary commercial wasteland and pornotopia ought equally to give distress and cause for thought to the conservative, aware of the richness and integrity of traditional visions and landscapes--physical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, architectural, even commercial--a richness that properly inspired the Gothic Revival as well as the achievements of writers such as Tennyson, Chesterton, Eliot, C. S. Lewis, and Solzhenitsyn.

Finally, Phillips is an opponent of barbarism and "the chaos of modern life,' whether these derive internally from radical ideology and nihilistic libertarian hedonism, or externally from authoritarianism and totalitarianism. No cheers, then, for socialism or Communism; but only one cheer for capitalism.

Of many good things in this rich and honest memoir, one haunted this reader. Arguing against Norman Podhoretz's turn to neoconservatism, Phillips writes that Podhoretz's recent argument "has been that America is losing its will to defend not only its values but its very existence. In the larger perspectives of history, this may well be true. . . .' What an admission!