Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers

William Phillips

35 William Phillips After William’s death his wife Edith Kurzweil, editor for a short time of Partisan Review (PR), asked me to contribute something to a 2003 memorial issue of PR. I wrote a three-page tribute to William, a respectful piece about the liberating impression he made upon me and of our work together on the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM) from 1967 to ’72. I opened that essay with the following paragraph: I first met William Phillips in 1952 or ’53 at the University of Minnesota, when I was a T.A. in English and he was a visiting professor for a year in the Humanities Program. It was a heady time, with Isaac Rosenfeld and John Berryman also in situ, along with Phillips among the smartest and most interesting people I had met in academe. William cut a romantic and somewhat raffish figure for me, in his blue work shirts and, when he wore them, thick, loosely-knotted woolen ties (unlike the button-down rep tie that was then de rigueur in English Departments). Of course I was in awe of him as editor of the journal I read avidly as an undergraduate in New York in the post-war forties. When he spoke to me, I hung on every word, often interrupted by laughter (he could be very funny). I then went on to discuss in some detail the history of 36 CCLM, from its origins in 1961 at a meeting of twenty-five editors of various journals meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota, that created the Association of Literary Magazines of America, CCLM’s forerunner, to my leaving the organization in 1972. I concluded the piece with the following: William continued to try to hold the organization together for many years, as it grew in budget and numbers. But finally he had to leave CCLM to its own destiny. CCLM and its successor have continued to struggle to achieve some of the goals we had originally, and somewhat successfully , set for ourselves and the community of literary journals. William Phillips’s contributions to the American literary community were unparalleled and central, as they were to many of the deeper issues of our collective intellectual life. All of the above remains true, but of course there is more to add. During that CCLM time I remember taking a long walk with William from his house on West 12th Street through the Village, with him in a reflective mood. He pointed out houses and apartments where people he had known, many celebrated in the academic and literary world from the thirties on (when PR began), had lived. “There’s where Margaret Mead lived,” he said, for example, and shortly thereafter, “I knew a lot of crazy people here.” And it came to me then that he was certainly not crazy. Neurotic probably, nervous, obsessive, manipulative, thin-skinned, quick to take offense or sense an enmity or hostility—but not a Delmore Schwartz by any means. All of his “symptoms and characteristics” came William Phillips 37 out of a long, engaged life “making it” in New York, that toughest arena. He was an excellent editor, from whom I learned a lot, seeing him cut through to the heart of a piece of writing or argument, and watching him run meetings. On that walk he said he was looking for a new managing editor and I was able to recommend Mary (Mel) Heath, our cherished managing editor—and later co-editor—at The Massachusetts Review, who wanted for personal reasons to leave Amherst. She was hired, spent a most interesting year at PR, which was then coming out of Rutgers. She was part of an entourage, mostly of women, who, in her words, took care of William— he was an attractive man, after all, and a sympathetic one, cosmopolitan charm combined with down-to-earth directness . She wasn’t there for the imbroglio with Rutgers about who owned the journal, when the university, among other things, challenged William’s spending on literary lunches and dinners. It wasn’t all that much, about $1500 over the year, I heard, which William thought a right and a necessity for the literary high culture. After all, he once explained to me, business spent vastly more than that on their notorious expense accounts, and what was more important for the life of American culture? Who could argue...