=== Page 1 === 2 2003 $7.00 $8.50 Canada A TRIBUTE TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS Partisan Review 31> 74851649077 === Page 2 === Anthony Hecht Melodies Unheard Essays on the Mysteries of Poetry "Anthony Hecht's vast knowledge of literature and his gift for mesmerizing argument are both amply present in Melodies Unheard. Whether defending the sestina against accusations of boredom and dolefulness or examining the structure of Shakespeare's sonnets or unraveling some of the complexity of Moby-Dick, these essays are models of civility, candor, and grace. I know of no other poet, certainly none of Anthony Hecht's stature, who sheds as much light on the intricacies and hidden designs of poems and who does it with such style." -Mark Strand "Anthony Hecht declares himself 'a poet first and only secondarily a critic,' but Melodies Unheard proves again that he is a master in both trades. His discourse on such subjects as rhyme, the sestina, and 'the music of forms' is both scholarly and delightful; his articles on individual poets are finely done; and best of all, perhaps, are his penetrating treatments of particular poems-his reading of Bishop's 'The Man-Moth,' for instance, his biographical placement of Frost's 'The Wood-Pile,' his discussion of emotional paradox in Hopkins's 'The Wreck of the Deutschland.' When Hecht goes beyond the preserve of poetry, as in his forceful pieces on Moby-Dick and St. Paul, it is always a splendid bonus." -Richard Wilbur Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction John T. Irwin, General Editor $24.95 hardcover The Johns Hopkins University Press 1-800-537-5487 • www.jhuphbooks.com === Page 3 === Forthcoming in Fall 2003 From Transaction Publishers A Partisan View Five Decades in the Politics of Literature William Phillips With a new introduction by Edith Kurzweil 0-7658-0552-9 (Paper) October 2003 323 pp. $21.95/£18.50 Since its founding in 1937, Partisan Review has been one of the most important and culturally influential journals in America. Under the legendary editorship of Philip Rahv and William Phillips, Partisan Review began as a publication of the John Reed Club, but soon broke away to establish itself as a free voice of critical dissent. It has remained such from the start. Partisan Review counteracted the inroads of cultural Stalinism and took up the fight for aesthetic modernism at a time when the latter was fiercely contested by both the left and the right. In A Partisan View, William Phillips gives a vivid account of his own part in the magazine's eventful history. As the magazine's current editor Edith Kurzweil notes in her new introduction, most of the literary and political disagree- ments that famously marked Partisan Review's history originated in the editors' initial adherence to a program of radical politics and avant-gardism. This title will be of interest to intellectual historians and literary scholars. transaction Order from your bookstore or direct from the publisher at 888-999-6778 (US only). transaction Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey 35 Berrue Circle Piscataway, NJ 08854-8042 www.transactionpub.com === Page 4 === IRAQ Its History, People, and Politics Edited by Shams C. Inati This book attempts to add some balance and depth to the misleading, superficial image of Iraq created by sound-byte journalism and political propaganda. The contributors, all specialists in Middle Eastern studies, discuss Iraq's ancient Mesopotamian archaeological heritage; Baghdad in the golden age of medieval Islam; the arts in Iraq; the role of women; the Christian, Jewish, Shi'ite, and Kurdish communities of Iraq; the devastating effects of international sanctions on the economy, health, and daily life of Iraqis; the nature and causes of the current conflict; and much more. 250 pp ISBN 1-59102-096-4 HC $26 GLOBALIZATION AND JUSTICE Kai Nielsen Philosopher Kai Nielsen persuasively argues that capitalist globalization is the means by which already wealthy interests seek to aggrandize their power and control at the expense of citizens in poor nations. Nielsen contends that dem- ocratic socialism is still humanity's best hope for achieving a classless, non- racist, and nonsexist world community. 300 pp ISBN 1-59102-054-9 HC $39 ORIGINS OF RWANDAN GENOCIDE Josias Semujanga Foreword by Tom Rockmore By some estimates more than a million and a half people were killed in Rwanda during just two weeks in April 1994. In this penetrating analysis, Josias Semujanga, a Rwandan by birth, examines the social mechanisms, the historical factors, and the "discourse of hate" that culminated in this appalling genocide. 230 pp ISBN 1-59102-053-0 HC $35 THE CULTURE OF EXTINCTION Toward a Philosophy of Deep Ecology Frederic L. Bender Global warming, air and water pollution, ozone-layer depletion, species extinc- tion-these are all the results of what philosopher Frederic L. Bender calls our "culture of extinction." In this probing analysis of the basic cultural assump- tions and historical factors that have led to the current dire ecological situa- tion, Bender argues that our only chance of avoiding imminent disaster is to recognize and then change the destructive trends in contemporary culture that will surely be our undoing if left unchecked. 455 pp ISBN 1-59102-055-7 HC $65 HB Humanity Books an imprint of Prometheus Books Call toll free (800) 421-0351 marketing@prometheusbooks.com === Page 5 === Partisan Review EDITOR-IN-CHIEF William Phillipst EDITOR Edith Kurzweil EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Brenda Pike James P. Neal III ASSOCIATE EDITOR Steven Marcus CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Stanisław Baranczak Morris Dickstein Jeffrey Herf Don Share Rosanna Warren Jacob Weisberg CORRESPONDING EDITORS Leslie Epstein Eugene Goodheart Roger Shattuck CONSULTANTS John Ashbery Frank Kermode Barbara Rose PUBLICATIONS AND ADVISORY BOARD Joanna S. Rose, Chairman Cynthia G. Colin Judith Ramsey Ehrlich Stephen Feinberg Richard Grimm Frederick J. Iseman Marjorie Iseman Nina Joukowsky Köprülü Mary Kaplan David B. Pearce, M.D. Joan C. Schwartz Tama Starr Dorothea Straus Edwin M. Zimmerman FUNDING PROVIDED IN PART BY MASSACHUSETTS CULTURAL COUNCIL PARTISAN REVIEW, published quarterly in Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall by PARTISAN REVIEW, Inc., is at Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215. Phone: 617/353-4260. Fax: 617/353-7444. Website: www.partisanreview.org. E-mail: partisano bu.edu. Subscriptions $25.00 a year, $44.00 for two years, $63.00 for three years; foreign subscriptions, including Canada, $11.00 a year, $20.00 for two years; institutions, $36.00 a year. For subscription inquiries, telephone 617/353-4106. All payments from foreign countries must be made by U.S. money order or checks drawn on U.S. account. Prepaid single issue $7.00. Add $1.50 for postage and handling. US ISSN 0031-2525. Copyright © 2003 by PARTISAN REVIEW, Inc. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, Massachusetts and additional entries. Postmaster: Send address changes to 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215. Distributed in the U.S.A. by C.M.G., 250 West 55th Street, New York, NY 10019 (Phone: 800/223-0860). Available in microfilm from University Microfilms International, 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. Indexed by the American Humanities Index. Send manuscripts (originals or clear photocopies only) to 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215. No manuscripts will be returned nor queries answered unless accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes. No responsibility is assumed for their loss or injury. === Page 6 === PR SPRING 2003 Volume LXX, Number 2 CONTENTS IN REMEMBRANCE EDITH KURZWEIL 166 TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS DANIEL BELL 172 JULES CHAMETZKY 175 MORRIS DICKSTEIN 177 HELEN FRANKENTHALER 180 EUGENE GOODHEART 181 JEFFREY HERF 185 H. J. KAPLAN 188 FRANCES KIERNAN 191 ALLEN KURZWEIL 197 DORIS LESSING 200 NORMAN MANEA 202 STEVEN MARCUS 204 STEPHEN MILLER 206 CZESLAW MILOSZ 209 CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN 210 AND JOSEPH MORRISON SKELLY === Page 7 === JULES OLITSKI 213 CYNTHIA OZICK 215 NORMAN PODHORETZ 217 JOANNA S. ROSE 219 JOHN SILBER 220 ROGER STRAUS 221 VLADIMIR TISMANEANU 223 ROSANNA WARREN 226 ARTICLES BERNARD AVISHAI Koestler's Communism 228 CLARE CAVANAGH Polish Poetry and Translation 245 FREDERICK FEIRSTEIN Trauma and Poetry 255 JOSEPH FRANK Dostoevsky and Evil 262 MICHAL GOVRIN Life in Jerusalem 274 IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ The American Conservative 298 WALTER LAQUEUR 1948-2003: Some Reflections 305 ALBERTO MANGUEL Argentina: A Private Elegy 317 DAVID SIDORSKY Sidney Hook 324 KAREN WILKIN At the Galleries 343 Editor's Note: In the Winter 2003 issue, Millicent Bell's poem "Eliane" was mistakenly cut off. It will be reprinted in its entirety in our Summer 2003 issue. We apologize for the error. === Page 8 === In Remembrance THIS 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 come 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 came 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. === Page 9 === EDITH KURZWEIL 167 they had to be able to "place themselves in history" and to use a "kind of forward-looking backward-seeing process." In the scores of tren- chant "Comments" William wrote in Partisan Review over the years, that method became, more or less, his modus operandi—which clearly was based on his earlier and thorough gobbling up of philosophy from the Greeks through the classics (including the French and German ones), his extensive range over literature and criticism, and the history of music, the arts, and the sciences. WELL INTO THE 1950S AND 1960s, William wrote some fiction and a good deal of literary criticism, in addition to commenting on the politi- cal questions of the day, always trying "to resist the conservative push, without, however, giving in to those radicals in politics and in the arts who had swung to a sectarian extreme." He paid special attention to psychoanalysis, which then was going strong. For instance, in 1957, in "Art and Psychoanalysis," he wondered whether or not "some day, the neurotic man will become the pillar of society." Eleven years before, in "Dostoevsky's Underground Man," he had noted that to Nietzsche, Dostoevsky had been the only psychologist from whom he could learn; and that to Gide he had been the greatest of all novelists. Although William concurred that Nietzsche had been "both a creature and a prophet of the pathological," he went on to ask whether the Under- ground Man's madness had impelled him to break with tradition, or his surroundings had driven him to a new version of existence. The many Freudians' scientific analyses, he noted, were about Dostoevsky's per- son, and were relevant to the fictional character, but hard as they had tried, none of their takes on the artistic personality explained the art- neurosis nexus. Even Freud, William stated, had shied away from con- necting the novelist's creations to his personal drives, as when he wrote: "before the problem of the creative artist, analysis must lay down its arms." (Joseph Frank's essay on Dostoevsky, included in this issue, was one of the last pieces I read to William.) In "Dostoevsky and Parricide," Freud had analyzed the novelist's character. But William was out to show that a genius's personality derives not only from his psychology but also from his culture. After all, William wrote, Mann, Gide, Nietzsche, Melville, Baudelaire, Proust, and Kafka, among others, had created "what might be called a domi- nant type: a morbid, frustrated, sensitive, and prophetic man, in short, a browbeaten superman [torn] from top to bottom by moral and psy- chological dilemmas." William himself was conflicted and "could not help but be more deeply impressed [than the psychoanalysts] by the fact === Page 10 === 168 PARTISAN REVIEW that conflicts, tensions, and neuroses of the literary man have become symptoms of the fate of culture in the West and are connected with at least one side-perhaps the most important one-of the modern sensibility." In his quest to better understand this sensibility, William alternatively kept analyzing what appeared to be changes in acceptable behavior of people to their responses in the culture at large. Shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, he wrote, in a "Letter from New York" (Quest, 1963), that, at least on the surface, not much was going on in politics, but that: In the so-called cultural sphere, things have been changing quite radically if not dramatically, but it is difficult to write about this, perhaps because the change has been creeping up on us for years. It is hard to define or to evaluate just what is happening and where we are heading, or even to be sure that one is observing correctly. Perhaps the main difficulty lies in the fact that one must think about new things partly in terms of old traditions and categories. But some confusion also comes from the fact that some people, particularly those who are addicted to innovations, find it easier to think about new things in their own terms. Is this a premonition of the increasing challenge to serious criticism? In 1963, William was about to take the magazine to Rutgers University and to teach there. He was not thinking about jobs in literary criticism, but foresaw the cost for future generations who would live in a culture deprived of its traditions. In 1965, in his "Notes on the New Style," William fully anticipated the consequences of what David Herman recently summarized in "Silence of the Critics" (Prospect, December 2002): the conditions that allowed for the ascendance of academic crit- ics who used arcane jargon and spoke to each other at the expense of literary criticism à la F. R. Leavis, Empson, Trilling, and Auerbach, et. al. William had stated: It's all anti these days: anti-literature, anti-art, anti-morality, anti- society, anti-ideology, anti-matter. Some people, mostly those with one foot in the past, are for something, but the young, and those who have jumped on the bandwagon of youth, are busy inventing new forms of rejection and secession. It's called cooling it or cop- ping out-depending on whether you're in or out. This is the new sensibility. . . a new life style [that] is so strong that it has taken over the functions of art. === Page 11 === EDITH KURZWEIL 169 From there, William went on to exemplify-historically, via Joyce, Mann, Kafka, and Proust, to Hemingway, Faulkner, Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, Katherine Anne Porter, Mary McCarthy, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow-that novelists used to be "committed to a genre in which the writer stakes out his claim in a society that is taken for granted." Saul Bellow's Augie March, for instance, even though announcing his new sensibility, is "still an adventurer within his own time and country," an outsider who becomes an insider. Norman Mailer, by contrast, and despite his preoccupation with politics and social causes, is straining to get beyond conventions by increasingly focusing on personal life while cutting down on involvement with soci- ety. William then names another slew of novelists who expected to set the tone of the new style-only some of whom succeeded in making a complete break. And he found that "the old development of character, which takes for granted that it is possible to grow up, is out [and] we now have instant realization, and instant destruction." I WAS STRUCK when rereading William's 1984 essay that bemoaned the passing of "four towering European intellectuals"-Manès Sperber, Raymond Aron, Arthur Koestler, and Ignazio Silone-that William probably was (unconsciously) writing about himself. He pronounced these writers the best and nearly the last of an intellectual generation that "embodied the central modern experience of fascism and commu- nism." William had been their friend. He, too, "was informed by a sense of political and cultural fate, ... was wise, and had no illusions, either Utopian or of Realpolitik." He, too, "was not seduced by nationalist creeds, was not deceived by popular fronts, Eurocommunism, emo- tional peace movements, third-world slogans, and other such contem- porary crusades." He, too, was a tough-minded anticommunist and antifascist-without "wholly embracing the one just in order to combat the other." Of course, William also was strongly "committed to a lib- eral society as the basis of freedom." And he, too, had the courage to go against the grain, not on principle but after carefully and deeply exam- ining whatever were the issues at hand. In his book of essays, A Sense of the Present (1967), in "What Hap- pened in the '30s," which originally had been published in 1962, William noted that ideas that had been written off and forgotten sud- denly were making a comeback. He foresaw a rise in radicalism that indicated a return to the left of the political pendulum-caused by the confusion created by authentic and inauthentic elements in both the political Right's advocacy of "deterrence" and the political Left's advo- === Page 12 === 170 PARTISAN REVIEW cacy of "peace." William noted that "many beliefs held in the '30s were abandoned without being refuted, so that the current revival of left- wing attitudes was bound to bring confusion. Of course, fear of nuclear war in the aftermath of Sputnik, the "missile gap," and the Soviet's con- struction of the Berlin Wall was bound to divide the country. William thought: History has a remarkable way of providing-in a Hegelian sense- the necessary (though not always the right) force for the moment. And the [anti-nuclear] peace movement looks like just such an inevitable force. It seems almost as though all the bottled-up feel- ings of wide-eyed hope and fear in the era of the missile have exploded into the "peace movement"; and through its very chaos, its spontaneity, its amateurism, the peace movement as a whole expressed the unusual combination of utopianism and practicality so typical of political idealism today. In another way, however, the '60s do mark a return to the prob- lem of the '30s, but turned inside out. For the '60s, like the '30s, are concerned with the revolutionary assault on existing society promoted by the Soviet Union, but this time the assault relies as much on military power as on political manipulation. Then he proceeded to suggest that: The avant-garde questions of the '30s have become the mass ques- tions of today, and, as has happened frequently in matters of cul- ture, Western intellectuals have lost their particular stake in them. The politics of the intellectuals has become the politics of govern- ments, which means that intellectuals today have no independent politics. Practical intellectuals are busy telling the government how to use its power; impractical ones are trying to get the government to give up its power-by disarmament. Who could dispute this assessment in the aftermath of September 11, 2001? William, who by then was extremely frail, was watching the news on CNN that morning-with a mixture of disbelief and anger, and with tears in his eyes. He was devastated, and until he passed away a year later, kept trying to figure out how the country might fight and eradi- cate terrorism. There was no limit to William's curiosity about the world around him. In the penultimate paragraph of his memoir, two decades before his death, he wrote: === Page 13 === EDITH KURZWEIL 171 As this epoch draws to a close, one has to be consumed by curios- ity about the future. The fear of death is not to be underestimated, but I can think of no better reason for surviving than to see how it all turns out, if by some miracle of human persistence, the world should become a nicer place to live in-how awful not to know about it. In a darker mood, while I was in Europe in the 1980s, and he had to argue about some manuscripts with a contributing editor and supervise the last steps in the production of the magazine, he ended his letter to me: "So you see, nothing changes. Progress is the illusion of change and the denial of retrogression." In the end, William's body gave out, but true to himself, he remained aware of everything that was going on in the world around him until the day he died, on September 12, 2002. EK CHANGE YOUR MIND Clement Greenberg Late Writings CLEMENT GREENBERG Robert C. Morgan, Editor The first collection from the period 1970 to 1990, including five interviews, and the only comprehensive resource for Greenberg's thought during the last third of his life. "Offers many new, useful and enlightening nuggets of his thought. It is the interviews which provide the most refreshing and illuminating segment of this book." -NYArts Magazine "Clement Greenberg rose to become the most important art critic the United States has produced." -Michael Kimmelman, New York Times $29.95 Cloth/jacket ISBN 0-8166-3938-8 MIN IN SO TA Mind-altering books from University of Minnesota Press www.upress.umn.edu 773-568-1550 === Page 14 === Tributes to William Phillips DANIEL BELL In Arguing the World, Joseph Dorman's remarkable film about the New York intellectuals over a sixty-year period, Nathan Glazer, standing on the plaza of City College, recalls that in 1943, classmate Seymour Mel- man (later professor of industrial engineering at Columbia University) told him, "You must read Partisan Review. It's very important." Why important? Because it was a new intellectual magazine that printed novel and provocative ideas. There were few intellectual maga- zines at the time: New Masses, the Communist magazine, discredited by the Nazi-Soviet pact; Saturday Review of Literature, a middlebrow review of books edited by Henry Seidel Canby and Norman Cousins; The New Leader, a right-wing socialist weekly, focusing on anti- Stalinism and the revelations of what Alexander Solzhenitsyn would later call the Gulag Archipelago (and of which I was then, at a preco- cious age, the managing editor); and The Kenyon Review, of John Crowe Ransom, which represented the "Southern Agrarians" and the close reading of literary texts. PR-no one seemed to know why it was called "Partisan," and what it was partisan about, and PR was the shorthand that everyone used- dealt with ideas, and in particular with modernism and Marxism, the two leading currents of the time. (Surrealism was outré, and Existentialism, to the extent that it was apprehended, was identified with the religious thought of Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel.) The "avant-garde" writers that PR introduced were Franz Kafka and Henry James: Kafka with his vision of a nightmarish world (PR printed "The Penal Colony," where a man's crimes were tattooed on his body), and Henry James, a "fuddy- duddy" whose subtle and nuanced prose showed modern relations in a new, dark light. (Lionel Trilling's introduction to "The Princess Casamas- sima" is one of the great essays on the relation of aesthetics to politics.) One of the distinctive facts about the early PR was its orientation to European culture, and the introduction of European thought to an Daniel Bell is Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences, Emeritus, at Har- vard University. === Page 15 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 173 American intellectual audience. One serendipitous artifact illustrates what I mean. A number of years ago, the American painter R. B. Kitaj produced a series entitled “In Our Time.” These were enlarged silk screen prints of book jackets, magazine covers, publisher’s announce- ments and the like. One of these was of a cover of PR. Published by Marlborough, it reproduced the familiar PR layout, and within it, said: Partisan Review 4, July-August 1943, 35 cents a copy. George Orwell: The Situation in Britain Dwight Macdonald: The Future of Democratic Values Ramon J. Sender: The Eagle (a story) Rosa Luxemburg: Letters from Prison Nigel Dennis: Evelyn Waugh and the Churchillian Renaissance I. A. Richards: Comments on “The Failure of Nerve” Controversy Poems by Karl J. Shapiro, Robert Lowell and W. R. Rodgers Reviews by Melvin J. Lasky and Daniel Bell For many years, PR ran a London Letter, a Paris Letter, a Berlin Let- ter, a Rome Letter, reporting on new novels, literary controversies and, increasingly, on the cultural wars between the pro-Stalinists and anti- Stalinists (Sartre vs. Aron; Moravia vs. Silone). When European writers first came to the U.S.—Koestler, Camus, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Sperber, Uwe Johnson—their first stop invariably was to the offices and homes of PR. But it was another singular fact that gave PR its identity—its writers. Commercial magazines are defined by their successful reach to an audi- ence. But cultural magazines are signified by the voice of their writers— Criterion, Horizon, Temps Modernes, Der Monat and, in this instance, PR. Quite quickly, PR gathered a group of writers whose regular appearance, and their intramural debates, marked it as a coherent world that other writers would seek to join, or an intellectual audience would appreciate: Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook, Mary McCarthy, and their edi- tors, William Phillips, Philip Rahv, William Barrett, Dwight Macdonald, and Clement Greenberg, though at some point the latter two resigned because of an anti-World War II stand. Of noted importance—and it is the mark of a great magazine—was the number of young writers the magazine introduced into the cultural world. I think, in this regard, of two among the many who made their first appearance in PR, namely Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz. PR printed extracts from Bellow’s earliest novels and his translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story, “Gimpel the Fool,” a story that brought Singer === Page 16 === 174 PARTISAN REVIEW to the attention of the English-speaking world (and both Bellow and Singer won Nobel prizes.) And PR printed Delmore Schwartz's indelible story, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," (a phrase taken from Yeats). Schwartz, of course, was immortalized by Bellow in Humboldt's Gift. If there is any secret, then, as to why new magazines become estab- lished and make their mark, it is because of the group of like-minded writers who appear regularly and make it their magazine-as we can witness by Dissent or The Public Interest. Inevitably, that coherence becomes a social milieu, as well. In Paris or Vienna, these center in cafés; in London, in bars or clubs. In New York, it was the parties and the homes of several writers, in particular William Phillips and Dwight Macdonald. In Arguing the World, Irving Kristol tells of an occasion where he took a plate of food and sat down on a couch. Soon after, Mary McCarthy sat down on one side of him and Hannah Arendt on the other, while Diana Trilling pulled up a chair fac- ing them. Kristol said that he sat frozen for about an hour while the three women talked about Freud or a similar fashionable subject. This may be the only occasion when Kristol sat quietly for such a period of time, without saying a word. I recall an occasion at William Phillips's when Hilton Kramer was holding forth, accusing Philip Guston of opportunistically changing his style to join the Abstract Expressionists. Adolph Gottlieb came charging in to slug Kramer when Phillips intervened. (Slugging is a major form of criticism in the art world. In the literary world it is a cutting cattiness, such as Mary McCarthy's The Oasis, or earlier, Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessed). In the end, however, what counts is the editor or editors. At PR, it was, of course, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, their curiosities and their expertise. Phillips was the "inside" man. For many years he had a "writer's block," which is not so uncommon with great editors (vide, Eliot Cohen at Commentary). Phillips, though, had a double skill: he was the ideas man and copyeditor, cutting skillfully through turgid prose to make a piece come alive. Rahv had the personal touch of embracing (or killing) a writer whom he wanted for PR. When Phillips and Rahv fell out, Rahv began his own magazine, Modern Occasions, which failed after two years. PR, with Phillips at the helm, sailed on for more than sixty years-an extraordinary achievement within the diffi- cult world of the intellectuals. === Page 17 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 175 JULES CHAMETZKY I first met William Phillips in 1952 or '53 at the University of Min- nesota, when I was a T.A. in English and he was a visiting professor for a year in that program. It was a heady time, with Isaac Rosenfeld and John Berryman also in situ, along with Phillips the smartest and most interesting people I had met in academe. William cut a romantic and somewhat raffish figure for me, in his blue workshirts and, when he wore them, thick loosely knotted woolen ties (unlike the button-down, rep tie that was then de rigeur in English Departments). Of course I was in awe of him as editor of the journal I read avidly as an undergraduate back in New York in the postwar forties. When he spoke to me, I hung on every word, often interrupted by laughter (he could be very funny). I met him again in November 1961, when I was managing editor of The Massachusetts Review, a journal I had helped found at the Univer- sity of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1958-59. The occasion was a his- toric meeting of literary magazine and journal editors in St. Paul, Minnesota, because, as Whit Burnett, the famed editor of the storied Story, said, it was the first time in American history that such a group of editors had come together, ostensibly to further the cause of little and literary magazines rather than to carp and snap at one another. Reed Whittemore, then editor of The Carleton Miscellany, had received a grant from the McKnight Foundation in Minnesota and called together about twenty-five editors to meet and talk over our common problems and hopes. Among them were Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate of The Sewanee Review; Robie Macauley of The Kenyon Review; Robert Bly of The Fifties (soon to be called The Sixties); Victor Navasky (yes!) of Monocle, the wonderful satiric journal he had begun at Yale Law School; and many others, including the editors of Poetry and The Anti- och Review. We all dutifully deplored the situation of our various jour- nals—basically, not enough money and public recognition of our importance—with the aim of coming up with ideas about how to gen- erate more public and private support and better distribution and expo- sure to the broader market. The upshot was the formation of the Association of Literary Magazines of America (ALMA). From the beginning there was a kind of split between the more pres- tigious and long-established journals and the aspiring "littles," or at least newer journals (like my own). The big-name journals-Partisan, Jules Chametzky is Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of Michigan and Editor, Emeritus, of The Massachusetts Review. === Page 18 === 176 PARTISAN REVIEW Sewanee, Kenyon, Poetry, Hudson—had started their own loose orga- nization, the Council of Literary Magazines (CLM). By 1965 it looked as if ALMA were finished, although it staggered on for two more years while I was president. Then the situation changed dramatically. William Phillips played a decisive and creative role in the next phase of propping up and supporting this important part of the literary life of America. When the National Endowment for Arts and Humanities was estab- lished in 1965, Roger Stevens called on William Phillips to set up a branch for literature, and, in a bold and unprecedented step, he appointed the poet Carolyn Kizer Director of Literary Programs. The idea was to seize the moment to try to get some money into the hands of writers by channeling some federal money to literary journals and magazines. Carolyn Kizer called a meeting of the leadership of CLM, namely William Phillips, aided by his managing editor, Carolyn Rand Herron; ALMA (me); and Reed Whittemore, who was by then the chair- man of a nonprofit, nongovernmental cultural improvement agency in Washington, D.C. We met in a restaurant in Chelsea, and Carolyn Kizer suggested we write a grant proposal to NEA. Of course, we did, and in order to more effectively represent the broader community, we agreed to merge our two organizations. Thus Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM) was born. That was to remain its name until 1990, when it was further broadened to become the Council of Literary Mag- azines and Presses. The officers of the first CCLM were William Phillips, President; Jules Chametzky, Secretary; and Reed Whittemore, Vice-Pres- ident and convener of our early meetings in Washington. Needless to say, there was not a whole lot of money to spread around. The three of us had to decide upon the small grants we were able to make. This was not the most desirable way to run the thing, even though we doled out our pittances fairly to dozens among the hundreds of magazines that began to apply for money when word got out. Led by William, we decided first of all to get out of Washington and run the headquarters from New York, and then to enlarge the Board to be more representative of the larger community. This was accomplished, not without some struggle with the Washington agency that had given us office space. (William describes all of this in more detail in his 1983 memoir A Partisan View.) The enlarged Board included people like Russell Banks, then editing his own magazine; Charles New- man of TriQuarterly out of Chicago; people from the West Coast (Kayak); and, at a later point, an adjunct board of three African-American writers and editors who were to decide upon grants for African-American jour- nals. Not a bad spread. We had lively meetings and good times. === Page 19 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 177 Another consequence of the expansion and democratization was a policy encouraged by William to hold every other meeting at different venues around the country. That was a successful and popular policy, helping to create a sense of a national literary community, a lack in our culture often felt and bemoaned over the years. On the other hand, cer- tain tendencies that had been for the most part latent or subdued- although Phillips had sensed them and had warned us about them earlier-began to surface, threatening the existence of the organization as an effective and continuing entity. Actually, it was the ancient animus, at times verging on paranoia, against a so-called "Eastern establishment." Never mind that we had broad national representation-the little "littles" often complained of this, and every so often a whiff of anti-Semitism could be detected. In fact, in the early 1980s the then-executive director of CCLM would aver that in its early days CCLM "represented the Anglo-Jewish literary estab- lishment." Oi veh. William also sensed this early on, at a meeting we had with an editor of a leading black magazine in Chicago. I pooh-poohed it at the time, but, as in many things, Phillips was prescient on that score. I left the organization and for a while retired from active editorship of MR, in 1972, in order to do more writing. 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. MORRIS DICKSTEIN In paying tribute to William Phillips's life and achievements, I've asked myself what drew me to him in the first place and what allowed us to maintain a sometimes embattled friendship for thirty years. After the mid-1980s we often disagreed about politics, though not about the shadow politics acted out on university campuses; but even earlier, when he generously published chapters of a book of mine, there were always annoying rejoinders in the little editorials he could not resist writing. More thin-skinned contributors might have balked at this. It's no news Morris Dickstein is Director of the CUNY Institute for the Humanities. === Page 20 === 178 PARTISAN REVIEW to anyone who knew him that William could be exasperating. But for better or worse, this sort of criticism was part of what gave PR its spe- cial character. For William and his circle, putting out a magazine meant not only finding good writing but taking a position. Radical politics in the 1930s was a tough school, even tougher than the streets of the Bronx where he was reared. The medium was ideology-language combat rather than physical combat-and the scene grew even rougher when you broke with the Communist Party and, worse still, set up shop on your own, as William and his talented friends did. This ceaseless combat left permanent habits of mind-the need to main- tain a "correct" line, the elevation of politics and ideas over sentiments and personal concerns. In his fine 1983 memoir, A Partisan View, William grew eloquent in his misgivings about this tendency. After describing the backbiting and recriminations that followed Hannah Arendt's report on the Eichmann trial, he writes: "I now feel . . . that our little world was defi- cient in friendship and loyalty and that objectivity often has been a mask for competitiveness, malice, and polemical zeal-for banal evils." Later he adds: "The truth is that the sophisticated, sharp-eyed, and skeptical intel- ligence that contributed to the high level of critical thinking was accom- panied by a super-rationalism, a competitiveness, an intellectual hardness that was humanly destructive." So the lumps I took from William, to which I sometimes responded in kind, had a long tradition behind them; they belonged to a rough-and-tumble style he finally came to regret. I want to praise the cogency of William's second thoughts-that rare ability to think against oneself, the basic Menschlichkeit, the gift for get- ting succinctly to the heart of the matter, something he admired in real critics. This kept me loyal to him even when we fell out. He would never have gone to the other extreme and said (with E. M. Forster) that he would sooner betray his country than betray a friend. Yet he was inor- dinately proud of the stellar crew of friends and rivals who formed the world around PR, though also astonished that posterity had come to take so much interest in them. He felt that they had all undervalued their contemporaries as if they were merely family, partly out of their awe for the modernists who preceded them. In the acknowledgments of his memoir, he writes, "I was fortunate early on in working with an unusually brilliant, vain, quarrelsome community of writers and thinkers. ... Most of them are in this book, playing their flamboyant roles." To a surprising degree, William's book is a story of these quar- relsome friends, of their lives and works rather than his own, and of the convulsive times in which they all lived. William had been an editor so long-a great editor with a keen eye for talent and a sharp ear for lan- === Page 21 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 179 guage that even in a memoir he remained the impresario of their col- orful lives, quicksilver minds, and expansive egos. William was a survivor, and as he grew older he also became a window on the past, a lens that, like the magazine itself, refracted the sensibility of a whole generation. He had a limitless fund of stories about them, espe- cially about his partner and nemesis Philip Rahv. My favorite is one he tells in his book. Rahv, whose bluster and bearish Russian growl masked a subtle critical refinement, was in the office dictating a letter to Jane Rich- mond. With his restless nervous energy, Rahv was "pacing up and down as usual, and she asked him to sit down. 'Why?' he asked, 'Does it bother you if I walk around.' 'No,' she said, 'I don't understand you. I'm lipread- ing.'" The story is at once malicious, funny, and accurate to its subject. Compared to his friends, William was strikingly "normal"-practical, sociable, sensible-yet I found it hard to know him in a personal way, even when our relationship was at its warmest. In the late 1970s, when PR had to leave Rutgers and William was looking for a new academic home, I drove him out to Queens Collège to see the administrators, and we had more than the usual time to talk. I was curious about how he managed his complicated personal life, but he deflected the question: "Who says I man- age?" I saw that there was a wall of discretion that would not be breached, certainly not by someone thirty-three years his junior. William's elusiveness made him different from the more theatrical per- sonalities of his generation. Where they were outsized egos with leg- endary quirks and fables-ranging from Clem Greenberg's pugnacity to Delmore Schwartz's paranoia, from Meyer Schapiro's encyclopedic learn- ing to Dwight Macdonald's or Mary McCarthy's slashing wit-William was notably self-effacing. Yet it was he who kept them on working terms with each other; against all odds, he raised the money, got the magazine out on time; he and his wife Edna kept the salon where they exchanged barbs, held forth, got soused. Where they often took things to paradoxi- cal extremes, which he records with relish, his memoir is a tribute to mea- sure, balance, and control. Yet he recognized, as Lionel Trilling did, that excess can be a mark of genius, just as moderation can risk blandness or be a cover for indecision. But he saw it as a risk worth taking. Defending Trilling against the charge of faintheartedness, of being insufficiently militant in breaking with the radical Left, he sketched something of a self-portrait: "He was not the kind of critic who aggres- sively pushed a single idea or method or cause.... He stood for intel- lectual sanity and an intricate but balanced view of literary and cultural matters." He adds that "far from being a forerunner of neoconservatism . . . Trilling stood for moderation and was against fanaticism of any === Page 22 === 180 PARTISAN REVIEW kind." Like Trilling, William emerged from the Communist orbit suspi- cious of all evangelical zeal. Observing in others the wild swings from radicalism to conservatism, he writes that "if we are to be saved from the blind extremes that have seduced many intellectuals, it can only be by preserving a critical attitude toward all ideologies and all organized rhetorics of salvation." This comes in his unusually stern account of the McCarthy era, and he concludes by dismissing both Stalinism and a reckless and demagogic anticommunism: "What went wrong-for the dupes of McCarthy and the apologists for the Soviet Union-was to permit one lie to be substituted for another." Elsewhere he writes that he saw no reason to become "a Utopian of the right, that is of the past, as against a Utopian of the left, that is of the future." He was not sur- prised by the fall of the Soviet Union, he once told me-he had always expected Communism to fail-but was amazed that the world now gen- erated to market capitalism as if it promised redemption. If there is any nobility to be found on the middle ground, here it is, a version of the golden mean that Aristotle saw as an ethical ideal. Over a period of some seventy years, William took many-no doubt too many-political positions, but they were invariably tempered by skepti- cism, considerable tolerance, and an amazing lack of rancor (even towards Philip Rahv). Together they not only kept the magazine open to younger writers but made it a vehicle for the talent and genius of their friends, and for innumerable others who were attracted to it as a bea- con of intellectual seriousness and exacting standards. More than any- thing he said or wrote, the magazine itself became his legacy, a template for the journal of opinion in the twentieth century, at once urban and cosmopolitan, enlacng literary and political commentary with sharply etched pieces of modern writing. Try to imagine The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Salmagundi, or The New Criterion, differ- ent as they are, without the example of Partisan Review and the con- tributors who first appeared in its pages. HELEN FRANKENTHALER William. In 1950, William's parties on Eleventh Street opened up the lit- erary and artistic world to me. The politics! The nuances. . . . Introduced by Clement Greenberg, I was more or less a saddle-shoed girl a year out of Bennington and awed by all that was going on in New York. I had a huge appetite for the "buzz" of New York. Helen Frankenthaler has her studio in Connecticut. === Page 23 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 181 There are few of us left who can remember the cast of characters that appeared in the photograph in William's excellent New York Times obituary: left to right, Fred Dupee, George L. K. Morris, Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald. When I saw it, I felt like a dinosaur and have had reveries of William ever since. William was a generous person, never treating me like a young whip- persnapper but instead like a thoughtful, serious, young artist. I think he never realized that when I was introduced to Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Sonia Orwell, Diana and Lionel Trilling, and the whole crowd, what a high it gave me (and sometimes the insecure "shakes"). New York was bursting with activity, experiment, and energy in all directions. Literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre. At the same time, everyone around me seemed to be arguing and drinking. (Good God! The drinking!) When Clem and I had our frequent dinners at the Phillips' (usually a good pot roast with all the trimmings), I sat under a mesmerizing 1940s painting by Jackson Pollock. Jackson had loaned the picture to the Phillipses, since people weren't tripping over each other to buy it. Between bites, I would stare up and study that Pollock. In the recent obituary there is mention of William's hypochondria that came from his mother. Yes! Whether we ate at home or in a reliable restaurant, he always seemed to doubt the quality of the food before him. Should he chew and swallow? Therefore, there seemed to be a pointless and interruptive drama between his plate and the conversa- tion. Those conversations were far more gripping and usually had to do with PR, the problems with Rahv and others, the side taking, the McCarthy hearings, baseball, love affairs. Actually, William chewed over a lot of things that way. He never missed an opening of mine. He was constant, wry, open, and encouraging, with a cynical humor. He was also capable of show- ing his displeasure in many situations. Recently, a friend of mine said to me, "William really liked you." I'm proud of that. I really liked him. Along with many others, I will miss him and all he stood for. EUGENE GOODHEART I was chairman of the Department of English when William brought Partisan Review to Boston University in the late seventies. I remember Eugene Goodheart's most recent book is Confessions of a Secular Jew. === Page 24 === 182 PARTISAN REVIEW some wariness on my part when we first met because I had been friendly with Philip Rahv during the last years of his life and had contributed to his short-lived magazine, Modern Occasions. Phillips and Rahv, found- ing editors of PR, had from the beginning a difficult relationship. Indeed, the history of the magazine (particularly in its early period) was marked by often bitter controversy among its editors and contributors. Though they agreed about the evils of Stalinism and the virtues of high modernist art, there were other matters, both substantive and personal, that provoked disagreement and estrangement. Of all the editors, William's tenure was by far the longest. His col- leagues over the more than sixty-year period of the magazine's existence resigned to go on to other things or died. The length of his tenure was not an accident. Strong-minded fractious characters, intellectually gifted and polemical by instinct, the editors and contributors were given to picking fights among themselves that frequently were initiated by events in the larger world. The magazine needed a steady hand at the tiller, someone at once tenacious and reasonable, who could steer it through the changing and treacherous currents of our political and cultural life and keep it focused on what was important. William was more often than not the voice of moderation and mediation with the capacity to stand up for what he believed and to assert himself. He had the ability to strike a balance and rein in unruly colleagues without taming them. The liveliness of the magazine, after all, depended upon its polemical edge. William knew how and when to speak out when controversy ran off the rails. I have in mind the furor that followed the publication of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. In an open letter to Mary McCarthy, William makes judicious discriminations about the strengths and weaknesses of the rival argu- ments. But more importantly, he notes how the animus of the controversy seems to reflect the vanity of the contestants rather than the gravity of the subject, the effect of which is not to illuminate, but to score points. A historical disaster has been transformed, I am sorry to say, into a journalistic occasion, because people have been talking not so much about the meaning of those awful events as about what other peo- ple were saying about them. And some people seemed to think that what was being said was more awful than the events themselves. The letter is a model of editorial judiciousness. More than that, it is menschlich. Not that William was all judiciousness. He had enough of the strong-minded edginess of his cohort of early PR editors to be tough and unyielding in argument. === Page 25 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 183 William's early Marxist sympathies gave way to a revulsion from Stal- inism. He did not need the purge trials of the thirties to realize what the Soviet Union had become under Stalin. He had first-hand experience of the tyranny of its version of political correctness. At the same time, he resisted the temptation of conservatism, to which other Marxist sympa- thizers succumbed, and maintained a liberal position. If one had to sum- marize in a single sentence the distinctive character of the magazine in its heyday, it would be the following: PR (and William) had a dual loy- alty to anti-Stalinist liberalism and the great modernist writers, many of whom were politically conservative while radical in their artistic vision. Articles in the journal were devoted to working out the paradoxical logic of its liberal/conservative/radical persuasion. The 1960s were an inter- lude of responsiveness to-though not a full embrace of-certain expres- sions of the counterculture. In his memoir, A Partisan View, William writes of his fascination with Susan Sontag and her essay on camp. He claims not to have fully understood it, but to have been taken by it and by her. He also expresses regret that he did not publish more of the poems of Allen Ginsberg. Whatever one's view of the sixties, there is something attractive about William's openness to what he did not quite understand but found interesting and challenging in its sensibility. Unlike Rahv, who resisted the changing treacherous currents of the time, William took the risk of going along to see where they might lead. (In retrospect, it seems to me that the quarrel with the counterculture lacked discrimination. Should a phenomenon that includes the Beatles and Bob Dylan be rejected wholesale?) William, with his deep affinity for the achievements of high modernism and the Western cultural tradition, subsequently reacted against the ascendancy of postmodernism. The memoir is a story of personal and historical change. In it, William comes across as quick-witted, down-to-earth, commonsensical, impa- tient with what he considered nonsensical, critical, and self-critical. He had a gift for seeing what made people tick, the psychology behind their views and attitudes. And he had a fair understanding of what made him- self tick. Among the pleasures of his memoir are the incisive and gener- ous portraits of the legion of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances that he knew during a long lifetime. And he had a nice ironic sense of him- self. More than once he speaks of having delivered a pompous speech at a conference, though pompous he emphatically was not. After a lecture we both attended in which the speaker said very little at great length, William echoed Hamlet: "words, words, words." It is, I think, his self- doubting and self-critical side that kept William open to new possibili- ties, prevented him from going to extremes, and impelled him to === Page 26 === 184 PARTISAN REVIEW conciliate between rivals when conciliation was possible and even when it was not. There was also William's gift for friendship. Loyalty is a word that recurs like a refrain in his memoir. Always a precious gift, friendship is a necessary virtue in a time when ideology becomes all-consuming. In the contest between ideas and friendship, when and if it arises, William, without abandoning his affection for ideas, would choose friendship. In the last decades, his openness to the historical changes that were taking place diminished, though curiosity remained strong. The conclu- sion to the memoir, published in the early eighties, foreshadows the con- servatism that he embraced till the end. As this epoch draws to a close, one has to be consumed by curios- ity about the future. The fear of death is not to be underestimated, but I can think of no better reason for surviving than to see how it all turns out, if by some miracle of human persistence, the world should become a nicer place to live in—how awful not to know about it. It is perhaps more realistic to assume that all one can hope for is that things do not get worse—that the status quo is maintained. What a contradiction one has finally arrived at: to have been brought up on the necessities of history and now to be drawn psy- chologically and politically to the stability that exists only outside of history. His conservatism was age-related and connected with an anxiety about mortality. Which is not to say that William did not have intellectual rea- sons for the positions he took, but it is to say that there is a refreshing candor in admitting to the biological roots of one's views. The person I knew was a man of strong likes and dislikes in personal, cultural, and political matters. Easily bored by longwinded people, he was charming, quick, terse, and witty in conversation. He liked social occa- sions, but could also find them tiresome. I remember a party in which someone turned on a light in a room that had beenening. William burst out: "It's not enough to be listening to these nudniks, now we have to see them." He was a football fan, and in his youth he played quarter- back, the perfect position for an editor-to-be. I can only imagine the kind of quarterback he was from his intellectual presence and his personal manner: agile and nimble in his movements, something of a scrambler and a master of the quick short pass. Despite his slight frame, he must have endured the hard knocks of his lumbering opponents. His resilience must have been remarkable. His resilience in his career was remarkable. === Page 27 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 185 Once in conversation a number of years ago, he spoke of the dwin- dling circle of friends with whom he could speak freely and easily. He didn't necessarily mean people with whom he agreed or disagreed on particular issues, though I'm sure that certain kinds of disagreement in matters of politics and culture made friendship impossible. What he meant was the kind of immediate sympathy in sensibility that expresses itself in the rhythm of conversation, in the way people speak to one another. I myself share the feeling. William had an acute sense of both the difficulty and necessity of social life. His ambivalence toward it was one of the very appealing things about him. William's life was entwined with the journal he founded and edited for sixty-plus years. It is his great legacy to American culture, for which we are all indebted to him. But there was also a dimension of personality, a charm, a quickness of intelligence and sensibility, that made him memorable and endearing, even when one quarreled with him. He will be missed. JEFFREY HERF I will always be grateful that William Phillips reached out to some of us who, like himself and the original editors and contributors to PR, began political engagement on the radical Left and then evolved to liberalism. In so doing, he eased and energized our journey of disillusionment, helped to turn us away from bitterness, and gave us assurance that changing one's mind had nothing necessarily to do with religious con- versions. Rather, William reassured me that reassessment was something that mature and sensible people should do if the circumstances called for it. He reached across several generations and in so doing helped to keep a tradition alive that he helped to establish. It is his wonderful mix of kindness, humor, courage, and intelligence that sticks in my memory. I first met William Phillips in the early 1980s after I'd published sev- eral most unfashionable essays supporting the position of the United States and the Western Alliance and criticizing the “peace movements” during the disputes over nuclear weapons in Western Europe. I had pub- lished them in Telos, a quarterly journal of at times abstruse leftist the- orizing, which was also a barometer of shifting views among intellectual veterans of the sixties New Left. William liked and agreed with my 1982 essay about NATO's “double-track decision.” He called to tell me, in his typically understated way, that the essay was “good,” perhaps even “very Jeffrey Herf is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Maryland. === Page 28 === 186 PARTISAN REVIEW good," and would I write something for PR about this issue? I did not know William then, but I knew enough about him to understand that a grade of "good" or "very good" was high praise indeed. I was honored. I took his call and our conversations in Boston and on Cape Cod as an invitation to join a great tradition of liberal political commentary extending from George Orwell and Raymond Aron through William's own essays. William expressed his admiration for my willingness to publicly express my unfashionable thoughts and offered his moral and intellectual support. To receive such support from someone who had worked with the great liberal intellectuals of the United States and Europe over half a century was one of the most important moments of validation and respect I could imagine. To get that gesture of solidarity at a time when I was truly sailing against the current meant all the more. At a time when the intellectual scene was dividing into a well-entrenched Left and Right, he gave me room to publish views that were a mélange of both. Thereby, William continued the magazine's tradition of a disillusioned, tough-minded yet kind liberalism that defied easy political labels. William understood the risks I was taking in saying anything good about American foreign and military policy and thus committing the sin of "moving to the Right." He put it well in "Stalinism of the Right," a 1985 essay in PR: The sin of moving to the right is, of course, an invention of the left, and often has nothing to do with the classic meaning of either right or left. . . . It is true that in the last few years our political emphases have shifted, but that is because the political situation has changed. In the last decade the ideology of pacifism and neutralization has reached staggering proportions, in a way somewhat reminiscent of the thirties when fellow travelers and liberals were taken in by pro- Soviet propaganda, and the media and the universities were liter- ally swamped with illusion and lies about the promise of communism. There is, however, this difference today: few illusions remain about the nature of the Soviet Union; nevertheless most left intellectuals, the left and liberal professors in the universities, and a number of media pundits, have been receptive to ideas that ques- tion the need to resist Russian aggressions and machinations. In this situation, Partisan Review and other publications have felt that this new ideological tide should be combated, just as the fel- low-traveling of the thirties had to be countered by those intellec- tuals who did not jump on the bandwagons. But this does not mean now, any more than it did then, that we must abandon our criticism === Page 29 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 187 of the inequities of democratic Western society and of those who in the name of anticommunism support the most reactionary ideas. This credo, laden with shades of gray and nuance, was not the kind of per- spective likely to inspire passionate certainties. Yet it was typical of William and of the best of what Partisan Review under his guidance has stood for. I am glad that William stuck to his priorities, just as I am disap- pointed that PR in the past two decades contained much too little criti- cism of "the inequities of democratic Western society." As a result of the criticisms of our society not appearing in the magazine, the balance that he sought in 1985 too often evolved into a message more conservative than that of the glory days. Some political intellectuals of William's generation devoted all their efforts to cataloguing and denouncing the evils of communism, while others focused on fascism and Nazism. William and PR stressed that there were two, not just one, evils of the twentieth century and that opposition to communism and then to post-communist anti-Western sentiments was a fitting task for liberal intellectuals in the 1980s and 1990s, just as it had been in the 1940s and 1950s. William did not think that support for American opposition first to communism and then to Islamic fascism and terrorism should be the monopoly of conservatives whose mantra was lower taxes and less government. William conveyed to me that passion and engagement were compatible with confronting liberalism's enemies from both the illiberal Right and Left. That PR in the 1980s and 1990s continued to be a vital and distinc- tive voice in American intellectual life was due to William and, of course, to Edith Kurzweil. Together, they made it into a bridge across which the generation of centrist liberalism of the 1940s and 1950s found common ground with some of us older and wiser veterans of the 1960s. I will always cherish the memory of those years when William reached out to me, then an untenured and unestablished scholar. He won a place in my heart and made an important difference in my life. He reassured me that my views and my willingness to express them stood in a grand tradition which he defended with pride, humor, and eloquence, but above all, with quiet, steady, and unwavering courage and intelligence. That courage and intelligence meant a great deal to those of us who remained engaged in the public events of the day but did not want to abandon old certainties for new ones. His passing is a great loss. His life was a blessing to us all. === Page 30 === 188 PARTISAN REVIEW H. J. KAPLAN I'm finding it hard to say goodbye to William Phillips-talking to myself about him, composing eulogies in my sleep. There was still so much for us to say to each other; one always thinks there will be time. William and his magazine have been part of my mental world since Leslie Fiedler, an older kid on my block, introduced me to them in 1937 or 1938-a fateful occasion, since it made me a PR writer, or at least a PR person, for the rest of my life. Not that I'd met any of the PR crowd in the flesh at that point. But when in 1942 I stopped for a few weeks in New York on my way to North Africa and the war, I had published some stuff in the magazine and was received by William and his col- leagues with all the honors due my rank. Whereupon began a long, affectionate, and rather peculiar friendship-never intimate because there was always at least an ocean or a continent between us. It was based, I think now, partly on a folkish humor born of our shared East- ern European background and partly on a wordless entente about the importance of decency and honesty, as opposed to ideology, in cultural matters as in the practical world. It endured, this friendship of ours, through the grisliest century of recorded history, surviving many strains and differences between us. We never quarreled, a rare thing in people of our milieu. So I am grateful to be allowed to say goodbye to William and, while I am at it, to bring my pebble to place on his tomb. The pebble I have in mind is a sort of historical marker-bearing wit- ness to William's first visits to Paris after the war. I found it quite by accident, while making a shambles of my archives in the vain hope of turning up something from that time-but alas there is nothing, not even the book he sent me when I was in Beirut, shortly after the first of the Arab attempts to destroy the Jewish state. It was inscribed "To Kappy in Paris-and all over the world." I know it must exist, because for some reason it was not put in storage when we left Paris. As for the rest, everything perishable was destroyed, together with our furniture and other worldly goods, in a fire which consumed one of our Embassy warehouses in 1971. But wait, here is something: a tattered copy of Par- tisan Review, number 3, 1945. How this escaped the general extinction I cannot imagine, but it includes the first of the "Paris Letters" I pro- vided sporadically until I joined the foreign service, together with another item from Paris, a text by Jean-Paul Sartre that makes the case for a politically involved and responsible literature-hardly a frisson H. J. Kaplan, a contributor to PR since 1939, lives in Toulouse, France. === Page 31 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 189 nouveau for Phillips and his fellows in New York. But since I had reported in my “Letter” that Sartre’s new play, Huis clos, was “the event of the season,” William must have asked for more. For this I need no doc- uments; they would only cramp my style, since I have a vivid memory of launching with the ascendant prince of French letters—not in Saint-Ger- main-des-Prés where we both lived and had met, but (at his suggestion) at an American military mess on the Rue Caumartin. The upshot was a special issue of Partisan Review, assembled with Sartre’s help. A squat and walleyed little man, Sartre exuded energy and wit. He laughed readily and talked brilliantly and seemed at the moment immune to the Marxist plague infecting the intelligentsia. I had read his novel La Nausée and a remarkable collection of stories, met him in Queneau’s office at Gallimard, and had drinks with him at the Flore where he and Simone de Beauvoir had a sort of Stammtisch until they were driven out by the tourists. Just how he got on to the Caumartin mess I can’t recall, but he was comically enthusiastic about it, impressed by our Spam and baked beans, and promising not only more of his own prose for PR but Camus, Beauvoir, Leiris, Ponge, Char, e tutti quanti. The literary scene in Paris was lively, with many interesting new voices yet to be heard across the channel, let alone in America. The idea was to provide a sampling based on, but not limited to, Sartre’s friends. Alas, it was a sound idea, and we did produce an excellent issue, but to put the matter as mildly as I can, it failed to cement our relations with Jean-Paul and his cohorts. Indeed, it had quite the opposite effect, for the simple reason that William and his co-editor, Rahv, chose this moment to publish what Sartre saw as an extremely deprecatory review of his (philosophical) magnum opus, L’Étre et le Néant; an act of utter treach- ery, said Simone de Beauvoir, who refused to believe that I had not been consulted about this piece or even informed that it was in the works. So, instead of being credited as the artisan of Existentialism’s conquest of America, I was seen as responsible for this allegedly snide attack on the movement’s great man. Nor did it help to explain that I was not an edi- tor of Partisan Review, that the incriminating piece had surely been commissioned months ago, and that in America, once you gave a philosopher a book to review, you had to let the bastard speak his mind. This last was pure William Phillips, even if I don’t have a piece of paper to prove it. The bastard in question was Bill Barrett, who came over to Paris soon thereafter and expressed astonishment at all this fuss. He was becoming, already was, a serious student of phenomenology; and he thought he had written a balanced, fair, and appreciative review. === Page 32 === 190 PARTISAN REVIEW Of course, the Cold War was coming on apace, Sartre and his crowd were moving towards the communists, and there would soon be other and graver matters to divide us. Memory being a lure and a delusion, I thought that William had come over at about that time, as part of a considerable procession that included Rahv, Hook, Barrett, Baldwin, and Shapiro, but there is no clear trace of his presence until 1949, the year of the Kravchenko trial. Indeed, he is listed in the indices of two book I've recently had in hand— James Atlas's biography of Saul Bellow and Living with Koestler, a selec- tion of letters from Mamaine Koestler to her twin sister, Celia, written during Mamaine's years with that tortured man. Thanks to these I can establish his presence late in 1949, when I found a charming little hotel for him and Edna at the Palais Royal and he spent a good deal more time with my wife and me in Montparnasse and with Saul Bellow and Anita on the Rue Marbeuf than with the French and other Europeans he had come over, presumably, to recruit. He had nothing of Saul's huffy com- bativity with respect to the French, who were slow to recognize Saul's genius; but he had no affinity with them either—a fact brought home to me one Sunday morning when William woke me from a deep dream of peace to ask that I come over forthwith and rescue them from a flood in their bathroom that he could fix, any damn fool could fix, if he just had a monkey wrench, a point he was unable to get over to the hotel people. It was no big deal; there was a toolbox in the hotel, but neither William nor Edna knew the French word for it, which I supplied in due course. In the end the WC was repaired, the bathroom mopped up, and all was well. It took a while, however, and the intervention of various pic- turesque persons—a long story on which I dined out for months but which I will now skip in order to go straight to the punch line, moodily reiterated by William as we had drinks together that evening—to the effect that he would never understand how the French could build a great housing development like the Palais Royal and go on and about Hei- degger and Husserl and still fail to get the hang of modern plumbing. He was partly serious but, of course, also making fun of himself, in the Viennese manner of Manès Sperber, to whom he now turned, say- ing, "Explain the French to us, Munya." Manès Sperber complied, witty as always, in his marvelous mixture of German, French, English, and Galician Yiddish, but his explanations fell short and the mystery remained, for the moment at least, unresolved. Paris at that time was full of Eastern and Central European writers— mostly poor devils and a few rich ones like Munya, who had hit the jackpot by publishing Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and winning === Page 33 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 191 the Goethe prize in Germany. William had an affinity for these people without being taken in by them, which I suppose is comparable to my feeling for the French. So maybe we failed to agree on who were the bet- ter Europeans, but we never quarreled about it, because we loved each other, each in his way, and what more is there to say at a graveside? FRANCES KIERNAN For two years, whenever I could manage it, I read to William Phillips. I read for no more than an hour, on Tuesdays, at four. I never called him William. For me, he was always Mr. Phillips. In winter it was sometimes dark when I arrived. In summer there was a break, when he and his wife Edith went to the Cape. I had never done anything like this before. Why I stayed on I was never quite sure. There was nothing heartwarming about the experience. That was not Mr. Phillips's style. I first came to know Mr. Phillips through Mary McCarthy, when I interviewed him in the spring of 1990 for a biography I was writing. He was the second person I spoke to. The first had been Alfred Kazin, who had no use for the subject of my book. Where others saw beauty and intelligence, Kazin saw a long Irish jaw and a “wholly destructive criti- cal mind." The morning I came to interview him, Mr. Phillips was not feeling well, but once I was on his doorstep, he was not about to turn me away. On the other hand, he was not prepared to linger in my com- pany. At most the interview lasted twenty minutes—long enough for me to note that the living room was more spacious than those found in most modern apartment buildings and that my host was handsomer than most of his early colleagues at Partisan Review. I did not mind his cutting short the interview. For one thing, I had been told that the state of his health had always been a source of press- ing concern. For another, I liked what he had to say. He was more for- giving of Mary McCarthy's physical shortcomings than Alfred Kazin had been. "Her legs weren't good, but the upper part was good," he told me. More important, he did not find her mind wholly destructive, even though he faulted her for confusing aesthetics with morality, a failing he believed had led her astray in Hanoi, her book on North Vietnam. On my second visit, a year later, I stayed for almost two hours. Again, he never made any pretense of being objective. But while he was tough Frances Kiernan's biography of Mary McCarthy, Seeing Mary Plain, was published in 2000. === Page 34 === 192 PARTISAN REVIEW on Mary McCarthy, he was also tough on himself-at one point insist- ing that in his battles with Philip Rahv he had never been the victim that William Barrett had portrayed in The Truants. "I was no saint," he told me. In addition, he let me know that despite his various differences with the subject of my biography, he admired her as a woman and a writer. "I guess you could say I had a soft spot for Mary McCarthy," he said. There is a lull between finishing a book and its official publication. If you are fortunate, you have already begun work on a new project. Oth- erwise, those months can seem endless. In late October of 1999, three months before my book was due out, I was having lunch with Linda Healey, who had worked at one time as Managing Editor at Partisan Review. How was Mr. Phillips? I asked. On my second visit he had been recovering from a broken hip and been forced to rely on a walker to get around the apartment, but his spirits had been better than the first time we'd met. Now, it seemed, his eyesight was failing and he was confined to bed. Once a week Linda was going to the apartment to read to him. I felt a rush of sympathy for William Phillips. Perhaps it was the sym- pathy of one longtime editor for another. But there was more to it than that. The celebrated writers I'd interviewed-from Irving Howe, Clement Greenberg, and Lionel Abel to Diana Trilling, Isaiah Berlin, Saul Bellow, and even Alfred Kazin-all had "qualities" (to use a word employed by Mr. Phillips to suggest a measure of respect without conferring whole- hearted endorsement). However, for the most part they tended to see things in black and white. While this made for quotes that suited my pur- poses, it did not necessarily make me want to know them any better. In contrast, Mr. Phillips's tone was detached, direct, and on occasion ironic. Rereading my transcripts, I had gained an appreciation for his dry wit. A friend of mine had been reading War and Peace to William Maxwell-a distinguished writer and editor of fiction and my first boss at The New Yorker-in the months before his death. Briefly, visions of a valedictory journey to the Russia of Tolstoy danced in my head. As it turned out, Linda was reading to Mr. Phillips from the galleys of Partisan Review. It was something I would never have read on my own. First of all, this was material I thought I knew cold. Second, I feared this book (quite rightly, as it turned out) was going to compete with mine for the same audience. Nonetheless, I was curious. The first afternoon I showed up to read to William Phillips was a model for all the afternoons that would come after. A young Russian woman who spoke virtually no English greeted me at the door. After I found a place for my coat, she escorted me down a mirrored hallway to === Page 35 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 193 a perfectly respectable but unprepossessing room that in better days had served as a study and was now fitted out with a hospital bed. At the end of the room was a window with a distant view of Central Park. To the right of the window was the bed. Across from the bed, on the wall to my left, was a small typewriter table piled high with books and manu- scripts. A sturdy wooden desk sat in front of the window. The desk chair had been turned to face Mr. Phillips, who was lying atop the bed, dressed in slacks and a knit sports shirt and looking much paler and thinner than I remembered. He appeared to be looking straight at me, although Linda had said he could only make out shapes. "How are you?" I asked. "Not so good," he said. (Sometimes he would say, "O.K.," implying as good as could be expected, all things considered.) His voice was strong—if anything, stronger than it had been when I'd interviewed him. I pitched my voice accordingly. "What would you like me to read?" I asked, hoping it would be Partisans, which I had spied facedown atop the pile on the little table. It was. The last reader, I saw, had drawn a line in the margin with a pencil and noted the date. (Years later I would learn that, along with Linda, there was a younger reader, Jacob Weisberg, who had first come to know Mr. Phillips while researching a college thesis and gone on to become a polit- ical writer and editor.) I noticed a gooseneck lamp on the desk. I drew the desk chair closer to the bed, switched on the lamp, and picked up where the last reader had left off. I knew from Linda that Mr. Phillips also had professional readers, but complained that they had no idea how to pronounce many key words and names. I finished the chapter in Partisans on Jean Stafford with no difficulty. Perhaps once or twice Mr. Phillips asked me to repeat a word or say it a little louder. The only time he actually interrupted me was when I came to the word formidable. I put the emphasis on the second syllable, while he insisted that it belonged on the first. In time I would realize that for him this favoring of the first syllable was a hard and fast rule. Perhaps owing to a Southern mother, I tended to place the accent later—especially when it came to words that were part of my written vocabulary but not necessarily part of everyday speech. This list of words would come to include words like intransigent, felicitous, amal- gam, admirable, temperate, affluent, elegiac, genteel, acerbic, and exi- gent. Mostly he would correct me, I would repeat his correction, and we would move on. Our first serious trouble came with the chapter on Hannah Arendt. After almost ten years of working on my book, I'd settled on a pronun- ciation of Arendt that mimicked that of Lotte Kohler, her executor, plac- === Page 36 === 194 PARTISAN REVIEW ing an emphasis on the first syllable, with the a more or less approxi- mating the first a in arrogant. When it came to emphasis, Mr. Phillips and I were in agreement. But for Mr. Phillips the a was closer to the a in jar. About this he would brook no argument. Even after I realized that I could give him what he wanted by simply saying "aren't," time and again the new a would trip me up. Rather than risk frustrating him further, I began resorting to the pronoun she whenever possible. Some- times I skipped a sentence entirely. Once I skipped a whole paragraph. When it came to most names that could reasonably be seen as beyond my ken, Mr. Phillips proved to be less intransigent. A pass or two and then he would leave me to my own devices. But when it came to names that he felt might betray my ignorance to a knowledgeable listener, he was unrelenting. Nothing would appease him—not even my rearing up one afternoon and announcing that I was fifty-five and too old to change my ways. Like any good teacher, he didn't hold this outburst against me. In return for the time I was giving him, he was seeing to my education. The desk chair was small, the light only adequate, and the room's temperature, even in winter, was stifling. Time can pass very slowly when you're reading aloud. Such reading can be exhausting, but listen- ing can be no less taxing. Rarely did we go past our allotted hour. Always Mr. Phillips seemed to know when it was time to call a halt. Before leaving I would mark my place in pencil. Never in pen. Any writ- ten material we finished was deposited on the rug in front of the typing table. Anything awaiting another reader was placed on top of the orig- inal heap. "See you next Tuesday," I would promise on my way out. If Edith was in the apartment, she would stop me in the hallway and we'd talk. Once in a while I'd have to change the day or the hour. Occasionally I'd have to skip a week. Sometimes I would return and be able to pick up exactly where I'd left off, but sometimes great progress had been made in my absence and Mr. Phillips—troubled by a phrase or idea that sounded entirely too familiar—would ask if there was another mark, farther along. Invariably there was. After my book on Mary McCarthy came out, it was harder to keep to my Tuesday schedule, but I did not say goodbye, as I'd always planned to. For one thing, I had no new project. For another, I didn't quite know how to tell Mr. Phillips I was leaving. Over the course of the next two years we covered a lot of ground. We read manuscripts up for consideration at Partisan Review. We read at least three memoirs. We read book reviews, art criticism, political commentary, and editorials === Page 37 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 195 from The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, Commentary, The New Criterion, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Weekly Standard. We read only two nov- els: one by Edith's son, Allen Kurzweil, and one by Saul Bellow. Mr. Phillips didn't seem to care much for fiction. For him the past was very much alive and also a source of enduring amusement. But at the same time that he had me read from book-length memoirs and long articles that touched on the conflicts and personalities surrounding Partisan Review, he also had me read difficult, densely written pieces examining current political and cultural controversies. He liked to keep up. When you are "sight reading," as I came to call it, you don't retain all that much in the way of content. Always you are trying to keep one jump ahead, if only so that you will know where to put the emphasis in the sentence you are grappling with at the moment. Even so, certain things stand out in memory, certain lessons learned. For one thing, if you want to get a sense of a writer—of his strength and weaknesses— just try reading him aloud. As might be expected, Saul Bellow held up fine. In the past Mr. Phillips had had his differences with Bellow, but in old age they were friends again. Bellow's latest novel, Ravelstein, which might be called a memoir masquerading as fiction, was painful to read not because of its sentences but because of its many intimations of mortality. Death was everywhere in its pages. The letters of the young Clement Greenberg, on the other hand, were pure joy. Writing to a college friend from his parents' house in Brooklyn, unable to find a decent job owing to the Depression, he was bristling with opinions, ambition, and sheer talent. "This is won- derful," I said to Mr. Phillips, who allowed as how at one time Clem Greenberg had been his best friend. Sadly, Lionel Trilling did not fare so well when read aloud. Mr. Phillips and I devoted at least three sessions to The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent, a new selection of essays with a thoughtful introduction by Leon Wieseltier praising the "variousness," the "complexity," and the "difficulty" of Trilling's criticism. The essay on Orwell's Homage to Cat- alonia was just as strong as I remembered it, as was the landmark essay on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. However, as we made our way through Wieseltier's selections, I saw little to buttress his assertion that invariably with Trilling "nuance was an instrument of clarification." Finally, I hit one essay where the sentences were like paragraphs and the point was buried in the syntax. Mr. Phillips asked where the piece had originally been published. The Kenyon Review, I said, and he gave a sat- === Page 38 === 196 PARTISAN REVIEW isfied "hmmph." Such slackness would not have been permitted on his watch. Once in a while I would ask Mr. Phillips if he agreed with what a par- ticular writer had to say. Mostly, though, I simply read what he had cho- sen. When he announced he'd had enough, I didn't argue. Sometimes he would ask me to read from a manuscript submitted to Partisan Review for editorial consideration and then ask my opinion. Here, for the most part, we tended to agree. More than once I found myself reading pub- lished articles or memoirs by writers whose political opinions I found far from congenial. Mr. Phillips seemed not to notice any change in my voice, even though I liked to believe I was conveying less than whole- hearted enthusiasm. We did not discuss politics. (I'm sure he knew I was a soft-hearted liberal.) Nonetheless, when John McCain won a surprise victory in New Hampshire we were both briefly elated. There may have been something in McCain that appealed to him, or he may simply have been pleased to be reminded that it is possible to defy the odds. Occasionally Mr. Phillips would ask about my life-my husband, our house in the country, my parents and I never mistook this for mere politeness. He was curious. I read to him through my father's stay in the hospital for internal bleeding and through my mother's successful treat- ment for metastatic cancer. I missed the Tuesday of 9/11 but walked across Central Park three days later to read to him. From the window of his study I saw a high rise go up, partially blocking my view of the Park. Finally, when it seemed as if this could go on forever, it was time for me to move on. My agent had submitted a proposal for a new biog- raphy to my publisher, who was asking for a strict two-year deadline. I waited until the end of our session to tell him. It was early Febru- ary, and Edith was out of town. He did not take the news well. As always, his response was direct. "Oh, no," is what he said. As always, I began to equivocate. I told him I would call Edith later. (I never did, fearing she might persuade me to reconsider.) He thanked me for read- ing to him and I promised to return when I had some free time. There were no tears at our parting. To the end, he was firm about what he wanted. His will was formidable. I might be ambivalent, but he never was. Confined to that hospital bed, he could be exigent and acerbic, even intransigent. His opinions might not always be temperate or his choice of reading felicitous, but to say he was admirable does not do him justice. He had qualities, and he also had great courage. I guess you could say I had a soft spot for William Phillips. === Page 39 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 197 ALLEN KURZWEIL I have to wonder how many of us could prompt so many lovely tributes, from such extraordinary and disparate worlds. As the previous recol- lections make clear, William was a friend—no, an ally—of the painter and the poet, the scholar and critic, the storyteller, editor, and educator. They—all of you—were his family. They—all of you—are his heirs. And yet William had another kind of family. Not a conventional fam- ily—perish the thought—but one that an anthropologist might call his residential kin group. It included my mother, to whom he was pro- foundly devoted, and her children, Vivien, Ronald, and me. Others have spoken of William’s gifts as an editor and as a compan- ion. I was fortunate enough to know him in both of those roles. I was privy to his sense of wit and irony, his ability to challenge and cajole, his intellectual honesty and the heated discussions that that honesty often prompted. So let’s be direct here—since William was nothing if not direct. He loved to argue. In fact, I’m convinced that arguments are what kept him going so long. William may have amassed a medicine cabinet of truly Medician scale—the pharmacist at Jaros Drugs may have offered condolences of disproportionate fervor—however, I am convinced that it is the restora- tive power of debate that kept William young and vital. At least I hope so, since I dispensed a very large dose of that life-extending remedy almost every time we sat down for a meal. Although some of our “discussions” touched on major ideological matters of the day, most of the dialectic at our dinner table focused on issues rarely covered in the pages of PR. How long to cook Minute Rice? (William’s answer: 25 minutes.) What spices to exclude from a recipe for curried chicken? (William’s answer: All.) And still, as I say, I’m convinced it’s the skirmishes and disagreements that kept William going. He never boasted of his endorsements or his efforts. Evidence of his support is recorded in the pieces he edited and published, in the corre- spondence he maintained. It is documented in sixty-eight years of PR, filling four rows of shelves. It is visible in the intemperate pieces by a young firebrand named “Wallace Phelps” and in the cogent remarks of a ninety-year-old soothsayer despairing of ideological cant. But it is also visible beyond the pages of PR, documented in nearly a Allen Kurzweil’s most recent book is A Grand Complication. === Page 40 === 198 PARTISAN REVIEW century of extra-literary gestures, as extraordinary as they are forgotten. Who will remember it was William who discretely raised funds for a PR contributor diagnosed with cancer? And who will recall outside my family how agitated William was when my five-year-old son smacked his head on a marble pillar and had to have stitches? He drove himself and everyone around him crazy with worry. And, yes, to all the other qualities we've mentioned today, I feel com- pelled to add worry. William was one of the truly great Worriers of the World, which takes some doing given how stiff the competition is for that title. During his final years, after his legs had failed him, after his eyes no longer worked, after his hearing was diminished and his lungs con- gested, the one part of William that never gave out was his extraordi- nary mind. It was every bit as nimble at ninety as it was when we first met, twenty-five years earlier. And when that exceptional mind wasn't going against the grains served in our home, it tended to be focused on literature and politics. Even after he could no longer read, William stockpiled manuscripts and journals, books and newspapers. He had the most urgent of these mate- rials loaded up on an old metal typewriter table, within easy reach of his chair, at the ready for when his readers came by. A few days after he died, I excavated that material. Its breadth was staggering. There were photocopies of Times op-ed pieces, submissions from unpublished novelists and poets, back issues of The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The London Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement, cranky letters to the editor demanding response, and back issues of The Nation, a publication that William read and criticized with equal fervor. But wait, that wasn't all. There was also a copy of the Harvard Health Letter (no doubt providing William further ammo for our ongo- ing margarine vs. butter battle) and an issue of Pro Football Weekly. (William, some of you might not know, was a diehard Giants fan. The perfect athletic complement to that other underdog-literature.) William often asked me, “What are you reading?" This was not a question he asked out of politeness. Books were too important to be debased by etiquette. I once answered that question by telling him I'd just started reading a then-obscure novel by Patrick O'Brian, a writer of high-seas adven- tures. This was around 1985, at a time when O'Brian was out of print in the States. I half expected William to dismiss my choice as middle- brow. But I was wrong. === Page 41 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 199 He said, "I remember his first novel. It had something." (This, by the way, was William's highest expression of praise. A book or an essay— or a person, for that matter—either "had something" or it didn't.) William went on: "I gave the novel to Delmore to review." Years later, when I got around to reading that early O'Brian, there, printed inside the Norton reissue, was William's editorial influence, channeled through a 1952 preface by Delmore Schwartz. William had beaten me to the punch by forty years. But, then, William was always way ahead of everyone. Early cham- pion of Orwell and Sontag, of Chiaromonte and Montale, of Bellow, and of Farrell and ... I'll stop the list there, since William's record of editorial prescience is known to us all. Instead, I will leave you a snapshot from a member of his kin group. When I close my eyes and I see William, I don't see the founding edi- tor of Partisan Review. I see instead a paternal presence at turns irrev- erent, playful, outraged, always opinionated. The William I see is sometimes shaking his head in disagreement or despair, or sucking his tooth at some meshugena comment, some nudnik, some chicken tainted by garam masala. But other times he is smiling as he looks at an essay nervously pre- sented to him, for the third or fourth time, by a fifteen-year-old de facto stepson. And in my mind's eye I see William, whether smiling or scowl- ing, holding something pointy in his hand. He's either fiddling with a wooden toothpick—William is the only person I know whose teeth got better with age! Or he's holding a Swiss Army knife—it's a little known fact that among New York intellectuals William had the most exquís- itely manicured nails. Or he's gripping a Blackwing 602, an editing pen- cil with the motto "Half the pressure. Twice the speed"—a motto that is painfully at odds with William's deliberate relationship with the writ- ten word. In fact, his personal motto as a writer should be the exact opposite: "Twice the pressure. Half the speed!" They don't make Blackwing 602s anymore, and they don't make Williams, either. And so, still in my mind's eye, I toast William by repeating the acci- dental haiku he uttered until the end. Yes, I hoist a glass of William's favorite bubbly and hear him gruffly utter a piece of found poetry that will stay with me always: I'll take ginger ale No ice, no lemon, no nothing. === Page 42 === 200 PARTISAN REVIEW DORIS LESSING In the late fifties and well into the sixties visitors came from everywhere to London because of what was being seen as a renaissance of democ- ratic socialism. The collapse of communism in Europe, given impetus by the Twentieth Congress and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, not to men- tion the foul odors that increasingly came from behind the Iron Curtain, meant that generally the Left was in trouble. But westward—look!—the land was bright: over there in Britain was a new dawn, partly because of the Aldermaston Marches, which attracted people with horizons and ideas much wider than the simple "Ban the Bomb!" and partly because of the New Left—which already had its periodical, New Left Review— was young, noisy, energetic, irreverent about the schisms of the past. William Phillips came partly from curiosity and, I think too, from a hope that at last there would be a genuinely democratic socialist party. People were asking if the New Left could develop into a political party of a sane, wholesome, non-dogmatic kind. I met William at Wayland Young’s house in Bayswater, invited there so he could meet a representa- tive of the new thinking: me. Wayland at that stage in his life was a romantic socialist, a generous soul far from the viperish or peevish intrigues of the Left. To see me as a representative showed how innocent he was. But more than once I was summoned to Bayswater or recom- mended to some visitor hungry for political enlightenment whom I was bound to disappoint, because I had been so relieved to throw off the whole murky bundle of tricks which was communism that I had perhaps gone to an extreme reaction: a plague on all your houses, leave me alone. That Wayland had become this focus was ironical enough. He was so visible because the newspapers liked to photograph him marching from Aldermaston with his lovely wife and at least some of his children. It is not only Brits who dearly love a Lord: Wayland would be Lord Kennet. Foreigners have always been intrigued by the way aristocrats in England so easily espouse the extreme left wing. There used to be a joke on the Left that the Communist Party could never get one of its own into the House of Commons, but there were always C.P. members in the House of Lords. On that first evening, sauntering back into central London along Bayswater, I was struck by the detailed and well-informed cross- questioning I was getting, by a man who knew the history of socialist Britain as well as he did the story of the labor movement in America. Doris Lessing’s most recent book is The Sweetest Dream. === Page 43 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 201 Here was a real politico, as I had known them for years now, and the best did their homework, as William was doing. There were ironies. The old joke about the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant athe- ist applied by analogy: William had been a Trot, and I a Stalinist, when I was. For years I had been impatient with all this, believing that if Trot- sky had won the battle for power he would have been as ruthless as Stalin; that pickaxe, with a slight turn of history, could well have landed in Stalin's brain. But the New Left youngsters were all Trots, in an inspi- rational warm-hearted way. I was able to tell William that their hearts were in the right place, but I doubt whether he could have approved of what must have seemed to him amateurishness: the rigorous analytical phases of New Left Review were still ahead. Years later, in New York, when the Soviet Union was no more, I asked William if he had ever thought like this: Suppose the Left every- where had never paid allegiance to the Soviet Union, had said, "That struggle has nothing to do with us" - then certain things could not have happened. The Left's support of the Soviet Union meant concentra- tion - that above all - on failure, on lying, on the defense of mass mur- der, meant, inevitably the corruption of itself, because of always having to swear that bad was good, lies the truth, failure success. A left wing independent of all that would have meant a healthy Left, instead of one mortally wounded and corrupted. Yes, said William, he had indeed pur- sued these ideas, but surely I must agree with him that this was unhis- torical thinking? Yes, yes, I admitted, true, but just suppose. . . . The fact that we could have that conversation at all shows how far we had trav- eled from those days when William came to London, telephoned me, and we met for a meal, or I took him to a meeting he thought might be interesting, or I invited some real representative of the New Left who could satisfy William's expert questioning. I was also in a false position because I had read and admired Parti- san Review for years, but for its stories, poems, and criticism, not for its politics, which struck me as sound and fury in a teacup. Over there in the States there was this minute Communist Party and an even smaller Trotskyist Party. And so what? The vast power of America would absorb these like little fleabites. How wrong I was-both had influences far beyond their formal boundaries. But what I wanted to talk about was literature, and I questioned William about the writers and poets. So there we were, agreeably strolling about London, mildly at cross pur- poses, and mostly I was listening to this urbane, clever, well-informed man, the editor of a magazine as influential in the arts as in politics. I have often been told by this or that writer how much he owed to === Page 44 === 202 PARTISAN REVIEW William's advice and help. And it is my belief that this is how William will be remembered. The politics, as happens so often, will seem increas- ingly like noisy sophisticates, but the writers and poets he published and helped will be his real monument. There aren't many people like William now, so well-read, well- informed, with such a range of interests. These days savants don't come so well-rounded, many sided. When I took to visiting New York, meeting William and Edith Kurzweil was always a high point: conversations were an antidote to whatever enthusiasm or fad was sweeping America. This was particu- larly true through the effluvia of political correctness. William was all his life at an acute angle to current conventional thinking, in minority positions, always the acerbic and level-headed critic, but never was he more at odds with his time than during political correctness. I visited William in the hospital in 1987 and found him in a room so stuffy, noisy, and hot you'd think it was impossible to retain a clear thought in your head, but he was alert and wanted to know what was going on in Southern Africa, in the Labour Party in Britain. Who were the new writers? Was it true the young were not interested in politics? How about feminism? What did I think about . . .? NORMAN MANEA I was lucky to have William Phillips among the then-unknown friends who introduced my first American book to its audience. At his initia- tive, Partisan Review soon pre-published two of my short stories and included them, afterwards, in an elegant anthology entitled Sixty Years of Great Fiction—in which I found myself not only under the presti- gious umbrella of the magazine's literary tradition, but also in the com- pany of the great prose writers of the twentieth century, promoted in the U.S. by William and his colleagues. In 1992, when I read William's precise and meaningful "blurb" on the cover of my book of essays, On Clowns, I immediately understood that he knew a lot about Nazism, communism, and dictatorship, about "intel- lectual deadening" under extreme situations, and about the "personal aggrandizement" of fellow travelers and their unfortunate evolution. This certainly was a most favorable premise for our subsequent dialogue. Norman Manea is Francis Flournoy Professor of European Culture and Writer-in-Residence at Bard College. === Page 45 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 203 During the following years I had the chance to understand William Phillips's precious mind much better. I then grasped his rich spiritual biography and the real importance of his vivid, decisive role in the his- tory of American and especially New York culture of the last century. Indeed, William Phillips was a man of letters familiar with European and Eastern European cultural and political history, with the great and sometimes bloody intellectual debates before and after the Second World War. This might have been the best premise for our connection, but it was far from being the only one. For the newcomer, which I was and still am, it was a refreshing experience, during the last decade, to converse and get close to such a knowledgeable reader of European lit- erature but also, and perhaps especially, to face his always lucid, sharp, original scrutiny, enriched by a particular sense of intellectual honesty and courage. Encountering William Phillips meant being offered that most desired confirmation that legendary people who lived in a leg- endary time and attained legendary achievements (in his case, the stim- ulating, storming, seductive-in one word, sensational-Partisan Review of the thirties and forties) are strong enough and authentic enough to reject the sacralization of the past and any embalming of their current work. William shared many jokes and ironical assessments about the past; he remained firm in his resilience against conformity, pursuing his editorial leadership with the same criteria of excellence as ever. I'm sure that if I would have asked him the old question: why are you still preaching? whom do you hope to change? he would have answered as the old Rabbi did: I'm preaching so that I don't change, that's the real and only reason, no other hope involved. Debilitated by old age and poor health, but never complaining about it, William kept alive an exemplary adventure of thinking indepen- dently, ready to risk and accept the consequences of singularity and loneliness. In his memorably sound wit, he expressed skepticism and criticism about the not-too-wonderful evolution of our contemporary life and culture. The incandescence of his intellectual passion for ideas, for social-political commitment, as well as his cool lucidity of judgment led him to ignore the frailty of his body. This forced everybody around him to ignore it, as well, and to take advantage of the ongoing dialogue and the challenges it provided. To the very end still a handsome man, despite his frailty and dimin- ished physical abilities, William was an attentive listener and a fierce debater, acutely interested and immersed in the country's and the world's affairs of all sorts. With William Phillips, a great period of American culture has disappeared, a way of life, of thinking, of behav- === Page 46 === 204 PARTISAN REVIEW ing in the public and private realms, as well as in the cultural-literary one. His adventure engraved a fascinating, unforgettable chapter in the human story and history of his country and far beyond it. I assume William may enjoy, now, at his faraway refuge, listening to a passage from Seneca, from Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium, XXX: I admit, therefore, that I have visited this dear friend of mine more frequently on many pretexts, but with the purpose of learning whether I should find him always the same, and whether his men- tal strength was perhaps waning in company with his bodily pow- ers. But it was on the increase, just as the joy of the charioteer is wont to show itself more clearly when he is on the seventh round of the course, and nears the prize. . . . It may be a way of saying that we still feel him, often, here among us. STEVEN MARCUS Historical periods in culture often have multiple endings: they may be thought to end at different moments or at a series of moments. These dates usually entail a resonating event-often such an event is at the same time the first notable phenomenon of a new era. Sometimes, how- ever, the event has the force (or effect) of a summary. It obliges us to look backward and to recognize in the interval of life or narrative that has now been concluded an achievement of meaningful form and a structure that has a central coherence and abiding significance. The death of William Phillips prompts us to consider once again the attain- ments of his life and to account for how that life and its work touched and affected our own. For well over three decades, Partisan Review occupied a unique and pivotal place in the intellectual culture of the twentieth century. Its list of subscribers never exceeded about twelve thousand, but it seems to have been read by many more, and it was generally assumed that it achieved an influence out of all proportion to the actual number of copies printed by means of a process known to students of culture as “percolation downwards.” I began reading PR when I was in my last undergraduate year, and I can truthfully say that it was as educationally formative for me as anything that I learned in a classroom. For me, as Steven Marcus is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Colum- bia University. === Page 47 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 205 for many others, it provided a singular experience of intellectual awak- ening and intensity. I did not read each issue as much as I gulped it down. And although, like any little magazine of the period, it provided a sufficiency of indigestible matter, there was also more than enough in each issue not merely to learn from but to internalize as well, and for it to become an assimilated part of oneself in more than exclusively intel- lectual senses. It brought together, first, an explicit commitment to modernism, to the modernist movements in art and culture. This meant, one soon dis- covered, an explicit commitment to the cultural life of the city and to the class of urban intellectuals who were among the chief critical spokesmen for the various modernities. And it meant as well an orien- tation toward Europe (although America was not to be overlooked) and to the avant-garde cultural and intellectual centers of Paris, London, and Rome, the counterpart creative universes of their suddenly arrived peer, New York. What was especially invigorating was that the magazine had a simul- taneous political project. It was ferociously anti-totalitarian and anti- Stalinist. And it included within its withering polemic the American and New York groups of writers, intellectuals, teachers, and public figures who were not merely adherents of Stalinist ideology, but who were fellow-travelers of it and hangers-on to it as well, and who in their turn uniformly despised PR and what it stood for (culturally as well as polit- ically) with a virulence that was only surpassed by the glee with which the PR regulars argumentatively dismembered their "progressive" antagonists. The atmosphere of uninterrupted ideological controversy and debate had its origins in the radical and communist matrix of the 1930s, out of which the magazine had risen, from which it had departed, and against whose descendants and legates it pitted itself. This compounding of a commitment to high cultural modernism along with the unmodified rejection of any politics that entailed, or even intimated, the sacrifice of intellectual freedom, is what at the time made Partisan Review an original and distinctive and, in the long run, influ- ential force. Substantial numbers of at least two generations of aspiring young intellectuals were trained by the demanding discipline of its pages in the forms of modern cultural sensibility, in the moves of ideological demystification, and in the traditions that modernism had done so much to renovate. But there were at the same time lively internal differences and debates on all sorts of matters. Some of them were carried out in the pages of the journal, often with wit and high spirits, just as often cryptically to === Page 48 === 206 PARTISAN REVIEW those new to the game or on the outside of it, but always loudly, defi- antly, and almost always with refreshingly little attention paid to good manners, decorum, or parliamentary procedures. It seemed on certain occasions as if someone were trying to produce on the printed page a representation of a room full of people all speaking at the same time. And that is what it could still seem like when, in time, I came to write for PR and become part of its world. William was one of its two cen- ters and supplied in genuine measure whatever extra-intellectual soli- darity there was that kept together the exceptionally gifted and naturally volatile gang of old and young bohemians, traveling intellec- tual salesmen, drunken poets, European exiles, and European visitors on the make, along with oddball American professors and a miscella- neous assortment of self-certified geniuses. He did it by means of his wonderfully flexible, ironic intelligence, his sociability, his willingness not to shout at the top of his lungs all night long, his natural gift of friendship—but above all by his identification with the undertaking of the magazine itself. In time it became more than evident that the two realities were for him an inseparable union, a single identity. PR was his life—he was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to keep it going. Some of those lengths were indifferently successful and some were indifferently savory, but he never wavered in his dedication to the pro- ject of the continued existence of PR. Like one of the geniuses—Dosto- evsky or Kafka—who were indispensable to his conception of the modern artist, his neurosis was indivisible from his creative, obsessive achievement. His great success in sustaining the continued life of PR could not be effectively separated from the virtual impossibility of his imagining the existence of one without the other. And, in the end, he did not have to. I knew him for forty-seven years. I loved him, and he drove me crazy. In my books, I still do, and he still does, as well. STEPHEN MILLER I met William Phillips in the mid-sixties, when I was a graduate student in comparative literature at Rutgers. In 1961-62 I had gone to Yale for graduate studies in English, but I left after a year because Yale was too scholarly and too professional for my tastes. In January 1965 I returned to Rutgers somewhat reluctantly—mainly to avoid the draft, but I was Stephen Miller is currently completing The Age of Conversation: Eigh- teenth-Century Britain. === Page 49 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 207 eager to take a course with the editor of Partisan Review, a magazine I had been reading for five years, since I admired the New York intellec- tuals who wrote for it. Mr. Phillips, which is what I called him then (later I switched to William), taught a course in contemporary literary criticism. If I remem- ber correctly, we read Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler, R. P. Blackmur, Northrop Frye, and other well-known contemporary critics. We met in his office at PR, where he sat in a deep chair-the book under discussion on his lap. When a student presented a short paper on a par- ticular critic, he would ruffle his hand through his white hair and make a remark in a voice that sounded as if he were a taxi driver, not a pro- fessor of English. He was the real thing-a New York intellectual. William was different from the professors I had at Yale; he was relaxed in his manner and casual in his approach to the writer we were discussing. Students who preferred a more structured and methodical approach to the material did not like his class, but I liked his off-the-cuff commentary. Though sometimes he seemed to be suppressing boredom or exasperation, he was always genial. There was a look he gave that I realized meant "Don't give me that nonsense!" But he was never nasty. I learned as much from his looks and gestures as from what he said. What did I learn? In William's class I first became skeptical of radi- cal thought. In the mid-1960s Rutgers was abuzz with radical ideas. It was home to a number of left-wing professors, including Eugene Gen- ovese, who said he welcomed a Vietcong victory. Moreover, many Rut- gers professors, as well as many leftist intellectuals of a previous generation, were eager to know what made the sixties generation tick. In June 1965, after my course with William, PR held a conference on "The Idea of the Future," at which prominent literary and cultural crit- ics discussed the sixties generation. Because my girlfriend (who became my wife two years later) worked as a clerk for PR I was asked to help out at the conference. Thus I met a few intellectual stars. I gave Frank Kermode a ride, had a beer with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, ran an errand for Herbert Marcuse. In the mid-sixties I admired Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man, and two months before the conference began I asked William if I could write a paper on Marcuse's view of literature in advanced industrial society. He looked at me quizzically: "Do you really want to do that?" I was annoyed with his remark. Was the editor of PR shallow? I wondered. Did he not take Marcuse seriously? Yet the more time I spent thinking about Marcuse's ideas the more disenchanted I === Page 50 === 208 PARTISAN REVIEW became with them. By the time I finished the paper I came to the con- clusion that Marcuse was a muddled thinker. Moreover, I realized that he had a foolproof method of argument: anyone who disagreed with him suffered from "false consciousness." I wrote the paper, and William said he liked it. At the conference my new view of Marcuse was con- firmed, because Marcuse not only denounced the repressive tolerance of bourgeois America, he minimized the importance of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act, he said, gave blacks the freedom to pursue the same bourgeois values as whites. He even said that he "would prefer that they did not have the freedom to vote if they are going to make the wrong use of their freedom." The highlight of the conference was Leslie Fiedler's talk on "The New Mutants." Fiedler said that the sixties generation was essentially apolít- ical: "the 'mutants' in our midst are nonparticipants in the past . . . dropouts from history." The "new irrationalists," as he called them, dis- liked both bourgeois democracies and Leninist one-party dictatorships. They "celebrate disconnection," he said, and "accept it as one of the necessary consequences of the industrial system which has delivered them from . . . that welfare state which makes disengagement the last possible virtue, whether it calls itself Capitalist, Socialist or Commu- nist." After the piece came out in PR, I asked William what he thought of Fiedler's ideas. He waved his hand impatiently, as if he were dismiss- ing Fiedler completely. I wanted to discuss Fiedler's piece, but someone called him to the phone. I am certain that William thought Fiedler's ideas were goofy, yet PR published not only Fiedler's piece but a number of similar pieces about the sixties generation. In a symposium on "What's Happening to Amer- ica?" Jack Newfield, who had recently written a book called The New Left: A Prophetic Minority, gave the following advice to older leftists: "Go talk to the kids. Listen to Dylan's lyrics, read Fanon, visit some SDS chapters, even try a little pot. Empathize with the Movement, and then criticize fraternally." Until the end of the sixties I continued to see William occasionally when I visited the PR office to pick up my wife. In our brief chats I sensed that he was not as sympathetic to the sixties generation as other older leftists were. He would never have used the word "empathize" or talk about smoking pot with students. And there was too much of the cynical New Yorker in him to say, as Irving Howe did in 1965, that there was "in our society, a profound estrangement from the sources of selfhood, the possibilities of human growth and social cohesion." I === Page 51 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 209 think he was unhappy with the turn the magazine had taken when it moved to Rutgers and Richard Poirier became co-editor. According to my wife, when a student demonstration was taking place outside his office he muttered: "What do they want now?" When I moved to Washington in the mid-1970s I no longer saw William but I continued to correspond with him-telling him what my wife and I were doing. I ran into him in the early 1990s at a conference on the Cold War sponsored by Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, but we chatted only briefly. I have said nothing about William's writings. Though I read his work when it appeared in PR, it was not as important to me as the work of Trilling or Howe. Yet if the best work of Trilling and Howe repays rereading, both of them were more gullible intellectuals than William was. Trilling, unlike William, worshiped Freud and admired Norman O. Brown's utopian version of Freudianism, Life Against Death-calling it "one of the most interesting and valuable works of our time." Howe, unlike William, remained committed to a vague and moralistic social- ism, calling everyone who disagreed with him a sell-out. When I think of William, I think of an intellectual who never lost his common sense. I also think of a remark Saul Bellow once made: "The systems fall away one by one, and you tick them off as you pass them. Au revoir, Existentialism." Thanks to William, I said au revoir to Her- bert Marcuse. CZESLAW MILOSZ In the years 1947-1950 I was an assiduous reader of Partisan Review, and I wish to pay tribute to its importance for my intellectual formation. At that time I was a young member of the Polish Embassy staff in Wash- ington, D.C.-not a communist but, to put it roughly, a heretical social- ist. The discussions I found in Partisan Review excited me, as they corresponded to my ideological contradictions. The idea of writing an anti-Stalinist book was gradually taking shape in my imagination and, in a couple of years, the idea found its implementation in my book The Captive Mind. I don't think I could have written that book without the passionate Marxist debates in Partisan Review. This fact is paradoxical yet true. Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. === Page 52 === 210 PARTISAN REVIEW CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN AND JOSEPH MORRISON SKELLY William Phillips was acutely aware of the threat that political correctness posed to free societies. In "Against Political Correctness," an essay writ- ten in the early 1990s, he ominously likened it to "ideological cleans- ing," just as its ethnic variant was taking hold in Southeastern Europe. Why did he perceive what so many others did not? He had been down this road earlier on, when, for example, he broke with the harsh ortho- doxies of Stalinism, as he recounts in his memoir, A Partisan View. In the decade just past he once again discerned the emergence of an author- itarian ideology, this time on American campuses, where political cor- rectness had traveled "far beyond the rights of intellectual advocacy. to dominate large sections of university life and to intimidate the rest of the faculty and administrators ... to silence academics and students who disagree with its premises and tactics." William Phillips's wisdom, principles, and sustained opposition to the repression of free intellectual expression retain their urgency today, especially when we consider the nexus between political correctness and political terrorism. Now, political correctness is not the father of politi- cal terrorism, but the two can be considered distant relatives. They share many traits; characteristics of one phenomenon reinforce features of the other; propensities of one permit idiosyncrasies of the other to flourish. Both, for instance, are anti-Western in outlook. William Phillips once described political correctness as "to a large extent anti- American, in some quarters anti-capitalist" and antipathetic to "West- ern cultural and political interests." Likewise, in an "Open Letter" to the West, Osama bin Laden described the United States as "the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind," a nation "without principles or manners," a society marked by licentiousness and immorality. The purveyors of political correctness generally echo this disdain. William Phillips spoke of how they "equate Western civilization with its faults, failing to concede or to recognize its achievements. They seem to deny that what we are today is the culmination of our achieve- ments in the past-unless of course we assume that ours is an evil civi- lization." And this is precisely what the politically correct presuppose. By the same token, anti-Westernism has been one of the working Conor Cruise O'Brien, the Irish statesman and scholar, is currently working on a study of George Washington's two presidential terms, entitled First in Peace. Joseph Morrison Skelly is currently writing a book on international terrorism. === Page 53 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 211 assumptions of numerous terrorist organizations, including several that have originated in the West itself. Political correctness and modern terrorism also share a relativist pre- disposition. "The politically correct movement is imbued with the idea of relativism, with the notion of absolute relativity," William Phillips lamented. "The idea is rampant that no work can be considered better than another, or that there are no truths we can accept." Yet, paradoxi- cally, we are urged to accept all cultures as equal. The result is that "[m]ulticulturalism is the battle cry of the politically correct and those under its influence." Such a formulaic admixture of multiculturalism and political correctness often works to disguise the true nature of terrorism. According to the preferred equation, since all cultures are equally valu- able, their various manifestations must be equally valid, including, to a limited extent, terrorism, whose existence, at the very least, can be ratio- nalized as being the byproduct of unique cultural circumstances. Since September 11 various commentators have detected the insidious interrelationship between political correctness, multiculturalism, and polit- ical terrorism. In his recent book, The War Against the Terror Masters, Michael Ledeen links these three phenomena with other, somewhat more admirable, tendencies in the American character to demonstrate why the country was so intellectually unprepared for September 11. Americans are never ready for war [due to] our radical egalitarianism and our belief in the perfectibility of man. . . . [H]aving turned the study of history into a hymn to the wonders of multiculturalism, we are reluctant to accept Machiavelli's dictum that man is more inclined to do evil than to do good. Throughout this generation of political correctness, it has been singularly bad form for anyone in America to suggest that there are some truly evil people, and even some thoroughly evil regimes whose fear and hatred of us are so intractable that "live and let live" (our mind set) will not do. Aidan Rankin, the author of Politics of the Forked Tongue, asserts that [t]hose who now advocate political correctness combine a starry- eyed missionary fervor with totalitarian political impulses. Gener- ally, they cut their teeth during the ideological battles of the 1960s and 1970s. They are of the generation who were pacifists who campaigned against nuclear weapons, albeit those of the West rather than those of the Soviet Union and China. They agitated against "racism," a political disease from which only white people === Page 54 === 212 PARTISAN REVIEW could suffer. They marched against wars in far-off countries, but condoned political terrorism closer to home. More recently, politically correct restrictions placed on the American intelligence community during the 1990s handicapped its efforts to combat terrorism. When the CIA was mandated by Congress to cut ties with informants with violent pasts, one of its former directors, James Woolsey, warned that "political correctness and fighting terrorism often don't work well together." He was correct. In the autobiography See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the C.I.A.'s War on Ter- rorism, Robert Baer bemoans how in the years leading up to September 11 "the C.I.A. was systematically destroyed by political correctness." Even after the cataclysmic events of September 2001, political cor- rectness and multiculturalism still inhibit people from speaking honestly about terrorism. There seems to be a collective reluctance, for instance, to discuss the religion of the nineteen hijackers, out of a misplaced fear that referring to the militant Islam of these terrorists will offend main- stream practitioners of this faith. Cathy Young, in Reason, has written about critics of this trend who claim that an oppressive impulse within Islam is "being whitewashed for the sake of political correctness." The travel correspondent Llewellyn Howell has been more forthright: "While the war on terrorism may not be a war against Islam, there is a very high correlation between attacks on tourists and instigation by Islamic terrorists, rather than Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian. No amount of political correctness can disguise this fact from tourists, tour organizers, and insurance companies." Yet academics in North America still try to hide the truth. According to a recent article by Jonathan Calt Harris of the Middle East Forum, of the more than five hundred papers and presentations at the 2002 annual meeting of the Middle Eastern Studies Association in Washington D.C., there were none specifically on militant Islam and "the topic of terror- or terrorism appeared exactly twice in the presentation titles." Daniel Pipes, one of the most ardent and effective opponents of militant Islamic terrorism in the United States, has shown that the American professor- ate has collectively promoted a benevolent, benign interpretation of the doctrine of jihad, while systematically ignoring its violent proclivities. Priorities on some campuses are clearly out of line. Tom Paulin, the British poet who said that Brooklyn-born Israeli settlers should be killed, was permitted to speak at Columbia University, while Benjamin Netanyahu, the former Prime Minister of Israel, was prevented by rau- cous crowds from speaking at Concordia University in Montreal. This === Page 55 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 213 sort of behavior would come as no surprise to William Phillips, who long ago recognized that intimidation is a favorite tactic of the apostles of political correctness: "Instead of simply arguing their case, politically correct academics have distorted and smeared the opposition." All of these episodes have been exacerbated by the fact that many people systematically resist thinking seriously about international ter- rorism. Writing several years ago, Conor Cruise O'Brien warned that "terrorism is disturbing not just emotionally and morally, but intellec- tually, as well. On terrorism, more than on other subjects, commentary seems liable to be swayed by wishful thinking, to base itself on unwar- ranted or flawed assumptions, and to draw from these assumptions irra- tional inferences, fuzzily expressed." It appears, in short, that many scholars are crippled by an intellectual syndrome that can best be described as a refusal to think seriously about terrorism. This disorder has been fueled by political correctness and multiculturalism. The cumulative effect of this syndrome has been the intellectual disarming of liberal democracies as they face ruthless, unremitting enemies, political terrorists in many guises who, for their part, think very seriously about how they can inflict harm upon civilized society. William Phillips urged his colleagues to challenge political correctness by, above all, thinking seriously. He noted that "the opposition to polit- ical correctness, in addition to independent academics, exists largely in the serious culture of writers and practicing critics." When opposing political terrorism, we must be confident in our past-without, of course, succumbing to hubris, for "no serious person denies the unsa- vory elements in the history of Western civilization." Still, the way for- ward is in "constant intellectual and political argument against political correctness by those who have not lost their faith in independent thought and in the values of Western civilization." JULES OLITSKI For many years I had not actually met William face to face. Long ago he asked me to write something about art, because he presumed I would know something about it. Writing about art, at least for myself, can be terrifying. So, instead I sent him the first chapter of a novel, and, to my amazement, Partisan Review published it. One of the fortunate things Jules Olitski is a painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer whose work is col- lected and exhibited around the world. === Page 56 === 214 PARTISAN REVIEW for me about being published in Partisan Review (a number of times since that first chapter) is that it is not a magazine some members of my family are likely to read. About three years ago, over at Jenny Greenberg’s apartment, Edith came over and said William would like to see me. Would my wife Kristina and I come to dinner? Chinese? I had not seen William since the memorial for Clement Greenberg in 1994, and then briefly, and at that time he had looked frail but not terribly unwell. I was uneasy about see- ing William in his home, for dinner, no less. What could I talk about? I felt like a kid. I was scared. I had begun reading Partisan Review in my teens and now I was to have dinner with a man whose magazine had helped lead me out of what felt at the time like a culturally primitive shtetl in Brooklyn. Edith gave Kristina and me something to drink and we waited for William to appear. I could hear him coughing as he came towards us, in a wheelchair, moved by a woman I took to be a private nurse. She helped William onto a chair next to me. He looked frus- trated, irritated. How to describe his appearance? Pale, gaunt, a shock of white hair, eyes dark and brooding, defiant, a modern-day prophet without a beard. We shook hands. He said I looked well. I think he already knew I’d been operated on for lung cancer. He wanted details. Here we were, two old men, I in my late seventies, he approaching his ninety-second year. “Ah, you’re a kid,” he said. It was a lovely evening. I was struck by the man’s liveliness, his curiosity, his sharp observations about the politics of the day, the books he was reading—a reader came several times a week—and his wit, which could be caustic when it came to some of the people he had asso- ciated with, yet none of it mean-spirited. When he spoke of Delmore Schwartz, it was with tenderness. Our visit was a delight. Edith and William, wonderful hosts, made it very easy for me. Alas, his health had dramatically declined since I had last seen him. It was clearly difficult for him to speak; when he did, his voice was hoarse. There were a number of these visits since then and they were also wonderful. The traditional Chinese takeout was terrific, even better than what we have on Third Avenue downtown. William, old and sick, had maintained a sense of wonder, curiosity, and strongly felt opin- ions delivered with a nod, a wave of hand, and two or three words. This was a man who knew everything, had seen everything, had known every- one. He’d ask me, “What do you think of so-and-so?” “What do you think of his writing?” “Her writing?” “His art?” “Her art?” William was someone to whom you told the truth. You had to. I would say, “It stinks.” And William, as often as not, would say, “I agree.” === Page 57 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 215 When we left that first time, I knew I liked the man and I liked his wife; I liked her unobtrusive caring for her husband's comfort and her quiet intelligence. Sometimes William would invite other people over. Since I tend to see very few people, having dinner with Norman Pod- horetz and Midge Decter, for example, was like meeting fabled people, like meeting Clark Gable and Gloria Swanson. Norman talked about The Prophets, a book he was writing. The conversation was spirited. Again, the wonderful Chinese takeout . . . an exotic and enchanting evening for my wife and myself. Each time we met, William and I talked, as old men do, about our ail- ments. He appeared as interested in mine as I was in his. We shared that. It was just easy, somehow, between us. Something happened. Love hap- pened. We held hands. Edith, I think I've said pretty much how I felt being in William's com- pany. I feel a great sense of loss. For you, for your loss, there are no words. Thank you for asking me to speak. CYNTHIA OZICK Rereading William Phillips's memoir, A Partisan View, the other day, I came on what struck me as an astounding act of boldness. The year was 1962, and this is what happened: I met [Susan Sontag] at a Farrar, Straus and Giroux party [William Phillips writes]. If she had published anything, I did not know about it, and I had never heard of her. She walked up to me and said, "How do you write a review for Partisan Review?" I said, "You ask." "I'm asking," she said. "O.K.," I answered, "what do you want to do?" Not long after this remarkable exchange, Partisan Review published Sontag's "Notes on Camp." I read it at the time and only dimly under- stood it, if I understood it at all. And in 1946, when I was a freshman at NYU, I understood even less. Here is how, in a confessional essay, I remembered my dimness then: Attached to a candy store, the newsstand. Copies of Partisan Review: the table of the gods. Jean Stafford, Mary McCarthy, Eliz- abeth Hardwick, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Cynthia Ozick is currently working on Lights and Watchtowers, a novel. === Page 58 === 216 PARTISAN REVIEW Clement Greenberg, Stephen Spender, William Phillips, John Berry- man, Saul Bellow, Philip Rahv, Randall Jarrell, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Shapiro, George Orwell! I don't know a single one of these names, but I feel their small conflagration flaming in the gray street: the succulent hotness of their promise. I mean to penetrate every one of them. Since all the money I have is my subway fare— two nickels—I don't buy a copy (the price of Partisan in 1946 is fifty cents).... It will be years and years before I am smart enough, worldly enough, to read Alfred Kazin and Mary McCarthy. You may have noticed that I have all along been saying "William Phillips." It's still hard for me to say "William." For a long while I had- n't earned that familiarity. Whole decades went by before I met William Phillips in the flesh, though Partisan had long since entered my marrow. In 1962, holed up in the Bronx writing my first novel-much too long and much too Jamesian-it was inconceivable that I would ever have been invited to a publisher's party. But what if, in some fantasy, I had found myself there? And what if I had walked up to William Phillips and said, "How do you write a review for Partisan Review? And what if he had replied, "You ask"? How sublimely different everything would have been! How richly other life would have turned out! Of course, since I wasn't Susan Sontag, he might not have said "You ask." He might more plausibly have said "You don't." But if that fantasy leads to a dead end, here is a darker one. What if I had been so unlucky as never to have known William Phillips at all? I would have missed seeing Shelley plain; I would have missed seeing one of the luminaries of our generation-of several generations. Not to have known William Phillips at all would mean going all one's days without encountering the Phillips wit, grit, honesty, and tenacity. It would mean going all one's life without having stood before the mind that created the political, literary, and intellectual culture that shaped who we are and how we think. I am grateful that I came at last to know William a little, so that I can, after all, presume to say "William." I am grateful for a lifetimes's edu- cation-or call it a summoning into amor intellectualis-through the always dazzling, always provocative, pages of Partisan Review. I am grateful to have finally been published in Partisan Review, though by then my hair had turned white. I did, I suppose, eventually become worldly enough to read Mary McCarthy and Alfred Kazin. And I even managed to take in and fathom the ephemera of camp-but so what and never mind. The cultural follies may shimmy and shift from season === Page 59 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 217 to season, but Partisan has had a steady history of serious and lasting criticism, of what William defined as "a constant exercise of discrimi- nation," "the ability to steer a proper course between the claims of the past and the trends that [speak] of the future." A touchstone which he, and Edith Kurzweil with him, have never failed to touch. In his 1983 memoir-an indispensable record of writers' idiosyn- crasies in tumultuous times-William laments "our present state of ide- ological confusion in which any notion, conventional or crackpot, can find some justification and rationalization." What was merely abrasive in 1983 has become terrifying in the mad era of suicide murders. Else- where in his memoir William remarks of Saul Bellow that "at his best [he] has been marvelously sensitive to the ironies of existence." The ironies of existence! These high, wry, sly, even shy words can serve as William's self-portrait. What began at the fringes of the John Reed Club nearly seventy years ago grew, under William's tutelage, into one of the most significant, the most venerable, of all intellectual periodicals. I knew William late, but not too late to comprehend that he was, both early and late, scribe, redactor, and above all enactor of the ironies of existence. NORMAN PODHORETZ I first met William Phillips nearly fifty years ago, and I can still remem- ber how surprised I was by him. Having already gotten to know Philip Rahv a bit, I foolishly and thoughtlessly took it for granted that William would be the same kind of character. Yet as it turned out, far from being gruff, William was genial and expansive; far from being malicious, William was tolerant and irenich; and far from being overbearing, William was easygoing and relaxed. The one quality that did not surprise was his surpassing intelligence. Even after a brief conversation, it became obvious that his mind was as quick, cultivated, and supple as I had expected. And yet I would dis- cover in due course that, even there, William was different, not only from Rahv but from most other denizens of the Partisan Review circle. Not for William the flashiness, the flamboyance, the razzle-dazzle so highly prized by his fellow New York intellectuals. He could juggle ideas and construct brilliant arguments with the best of them, but there was Norman Podhoretz is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and Editor-at- Large of Commentary. His most recent book is The Prophets. === Page 60 === 218 PARTISAN REVIEW a bedrock of common sense in William that always kept him from fly- ing off, all rockets burning, into the realms of unreality. Let me quote a few sentences written by William in 1964 that simul- taneously endorse and exemplify the quality of mind I have been trying to describe. They come from a piece in the form of an open letter to Mary McCarthy about the fierce controversy that had been sparked by Hannah Arendt's book on Eichmann: “I must tell you,” he begins, that I am bewildered and saddened by the confusion so many intel- ligent people have brought to issues that were clearer before they were so energetically and triumphantly clarified. Particularly depressing is the procession of polemics, with everyone arguing so cleverly, with so much wit and logic, as though those awful events were being used to sharpen one's mind and one's rhetoric. At the risk of sounding polemically sentimental and righteous, I should say my own reaction was just the opposite. On rereading the sick- ening accounts of the extermination of the Jews, the last thing I wanted to do was to trot out my dialectical skills, to show how clever I was in deploying the argument. Well, there, in William's own voice, it all is. Because William was, above all else, an intellectual, and a great edi- tor, I have thought it proper in talking about him to start with the qual- ity of his mind. But now I want to say something about his character. There are, I gather, people who found him cranky and cantankerous. No doubt, like everyone else in the world, he could be cranky and can- tankerous, especially in his last years. And yet I never saw any of that, not ever. The William Phillips I knew was a man of great and unfailing sweetness, a loving, loyal, considerate, and tactful friend. In the deepest sense he remained loving and loyal even during a temporary patch of estrangement between us that led to a public exchange of harsh words. Then, later, after we had reconciled, the sweetness prevailed over even the thousand natural shocks that aging flesh is heir to. William's speech might have become slurred, and his eyes and ears might have lost their cunning, but the luminous intelligence was still there, and so were the sweetness and the love. I still draw nourishment from the memory of that sweetness, and I still bask in the lingering sensations of that love. The world at large owes much to William Phillips, but I—having been blessed with his presence in my life for half a century—I, for one, owe him even more. === Page 61 === 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. === Page 62 === 220 PARTISAN REVIEW conducted through persuasion and argument, not by legal or administra- tive means. Ideological commitments can shut you out from reality. Orig- inal creative and critical works can resolve problems that polemics only exacerbate. I told William I would stay Chairman as long as he attended every meeting of the Advisory Board—and in over thirty years he never missed one. At our meetings he was dismissive of writers whose work he disliked, impatient with what he considered banal (a lot!), picky about his food, restless when we digressed, sparing with praise, but always forth- right. He could be cranky, though not petty. He had fallouts with his friends, but eventually usually made up. An endless stream of women adored him and his seeming lack of vanity made men comfortable with him. He admired responsible, organized, dedicated, loyal people, those without malice, guile, or envy, although he frequently found himself in the company of their opposites. He liked anyone helpful to Partisan Review. He believed in the omnipotence of argument and reason. For sixty-eight years he edited, formed, and forged an independent journal—through the Depression, World War II, the McCarthy years, Vietnam, the increasing power of the media in the arts, and the rise of mass and middle culture. His memoir of his early decades will soon be reprinted. He shepherded new writers coming up, defended old writers changing their views, and lived long enough to realize that ideological divisions cannot be bridged by talk. Yet, through it all, he kept his mag- azine afloat, alive, aware. Partisan Review has been the voice of America's intellectuals for over six decades, and William Phillips was the voice of Partisan Review. JOHN SILBER Most people in this room undoubtedly knew William Phillips better and longer than I. But by the time he and the magazine he had helped found came to Boston University, I doubt he'd changed all that much. He was a man for duration and steadiness in his person: courtesy and a certain elegance marked him. I know of his history secondhand. I knew that the New York City in which William had been born, in what he called “the poor boy's land” of the city, was a heartland of two things: politics and literature. The politics was that of the left. It was the passionate sort that came with those who saw this country as a promised land, but a land with John Silber is Chancellor of Boston University. === Page 63 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 221 imperfections which they could right. The literature of the time reflected this, and many of a great generation of roomy minds-Saul Bellow and Mel Lasky, for instance-began their literary lives in the pages of Parti- san or in the front office of Partisan, where they sometimes waited for review copies they could sell. If the place was right, so was the time. The thirties were the heyday of both literature and politics. The struggle over the Stalinist version of communism caused deep and bitter rifts, many of which were exposed, worked over, and settled in Partisan Review. But Partisan was not just about politics. It was about literature and ideas. As Encounter did later, Partisan brought the intellectual world to our doorsteps, and we were much the richer for it. The man I barely got to know was kindly, much of the time. Scattered through the reminiscences of others, this is clear, and this was also the aspect of him that emerged best in the latter part of his life that he spent at Boston University. He was also, as good men often are, at times can- tankerous and querulous-as with Hannah Arendt, of whom he said, "Who does she think she is? Aristotle?" What was preeminently clear about the William we knew at Boston University was that in a long active life there were few important lessons that he had failed to learn, and that often the lessons learned had cost him dearly. They had summoned up a form of personal courage which I find entirely admirable. A man who changed sides in the middle of one of the great battles of his century is going to be excoriated by his former friends-and sometimes, I suspect, patronized by his new friends. In that sense I can associate William Phillips with some pretty admirable figures: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and Ignazio Silone, whose stubborn honesty was similar to William's in many ways. His death is a loss. But several generations of writers and editors learned their business through Partisan Review, and several generations of readers learned to think more knowledgeably and profoundly through their encounters with his magazine. Thanks to him and those he helped educate we are not entirely bereft. For we are the beneficiaries of his legacy. ROGER STRAUS In 1946 I invented, pardon the expression, Farrar Straus. When I decided to be a book publisher-I had been in the magazine business Roger Straus is Chairman of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. === Page 64 === 222 PARTISAN REVIEW before that-I thought to myself that what I really wanted was to pub- lish the kind of writers that appeared in Partisan Review. I understood that on my friend Susan Sontag’s first voyage to New York from Cali- fornia, she went into the offices of PR without them knowing who she was and saw a man behind the desk with a pile of books next to him whose name was William Phillips. She said, “Mr. Phillips, I’d very much like to write for Partisan Review.” He said, “What kind of writing do you want to do?” She said, “Well, I want to write essays, anything. I want to write for Partisan Review. I am a big admirer.” So he said, “See that pile of books over there? Take a couple and review them.” That was the beginning of her relationship with the magazine and with prob- ably her first publisher. I very much wanted to have those kinds of authors under our imprint. I got around to meeting Philip Rahv and William, and if the expense accounts were all right we would go to Charles restaurant and sit at one of those booths and talk about life, etc. I would say that we ought to do something about the circulation of the magazine. Philip would say, “What the hell do we have to worry about that for? Half the people who read the magazine now don’t know what the hell we’re saying. So why do we need more readers?” I pointed out that maybe with more readers we wouldn’t have to raise so much money. And William would take the cool ground that maybe that was a point we should think about. So life went on, and we had many other discussions of the same kind. I finally had the good fortune to be able to publish a great number of Partisan Review’s authors. In more recent times, when William was not at his best, he was still at his best. I would go over to the apartment house at One Lincoln Plaza for supper and there would be a few people there. We’d share gossip. It was the kind of gossip that he really liked and that he was thirsty for. Fortunately, I was able to supply it because I have a nasty mind. So I was able to give him a few nutrients that way. I know that he felt very strongly that after his passing he wanted the magazine to go on. He wanted Edith to be there. He wanted the direc- tion of the magazine to go on the same. As I stand here today with you and my colleagues and hear you talking about William, his past, his pre- sent, I also want to think about the future, because I think that the peo- ple here who have been talking about him should all gather together to make sure that the magazine goes on, for it is a very important part of the American cultural life. It was in the beginning, it was in the middle, and it should be in the end. === Page 65 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 223 VLADIMIR TISMANEANU As editor of Partisan Review for almost seven decades, William Phillips was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. The range of his political and cultural interests was truly enormous. In recent decades, it was thanks to him and to Edith Kurzweil that Partisansan Review played such an important role in bringing to the attention of American readers the best of East and Central European literature and dissident writings. Let me start by saying that I first met William and Edith in Washing- ton, D.C., in the spring of 1991, when they attended an event at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. I noticed William's frail, but extremely impressive presence. At the end of the symposium (focused on the post-communist cultural tensions), Edith and William asked me to send them my contribution, which was soon published in Partisan Review—a magazine that for me, and for so many other East European friends, was truly a subject of fascination. In 1992, I partici- pated in the extraordinary conference on “Intellectuals and Social Change in Central and Eastern Europe” that Edith Kurzweil organized at Rutgers University. The result of that conference, the special issue of PR (Fall 1992), remains a landmark in understanding the revolutions of 1989 and the role of ideas in eroding totalitarianism. Among the partic- ipants, I would mention Adam Michnik, Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Adam Zagajewski, and so many others. William Phillips's participation was not ostentatious; on the contrary, as always, he preferred to listen carefully and, when needed, to punctuate and highlight a few crucial issues (see in this respect his often acerbic, always thoughtful “Comment” in every issue of PR). A few historical comments are needed in order to capture the impor- tance of PR: the magazine never went over a print run of 15,000 copies, but its reverberations were amazing. We knew about it in Eastern Europe and sometimes we could even read it (during the periods of short-lived “thaw,” always followed by new dogmatic freezes). Together with Philip Rahv, the colleague with whom he later broke for political and personal reasons, Phillips played an essential role in the founding of the magazine in the 1930s. Among the many collaborators throughout all these years, let me mention Lionel and Diana Trilling, Edmund Wil- son, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, art historian Meyer Vladimir Tismaneanu is author of Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political His- tory of Romanian Communism. === Page 66 === 224 PARTISAN REVIEW Schapiro, as well as art critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. (I first read Rosenberg’s political and cultural essays in French translation, at Éditions de Minuit, when I was a college student in Romania in the early 1970s.) Among the contributors to PR were some of America’s great fiction writers: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow. It was in PR that Susan Sontag published her controversial “Notes on Camp” (again, I read her Against Interpretation in Romania, before leaving that country for political reasons in 1981). Under the guid- ance of William Phillips, PR enthusiastically promoted abstract expres- sionism, at a time when the custodians of philistine realism were looking askance at paintings by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. The main idea that inspired the magazine from its inception was the affinity between Rimbaud’s call for “changing life” and Marx’s Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach (“change the world”). Years later, the jour- nal moved away from any kind of political, leftist radicalism, but it has remained loyal to its espousal of modernity and the avant-garde, as well as to its commitment to unencumbered political freedom. Among those who appeared in the first issue of the magazine were Wallace Stevens, Lionel Abel, Lionel Trilling, and Sidney Hook. The same issue included Delmore Schwartz’s famous story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” In a country where the very concept of intelligentsia sounded bizarre, exotic, even outlandish, PR created an intellectual environment comparable with the best journals in Europe (in some respects even more impressive). During the first years of publication, American communists tried to exert ideological control, which of course infuriated Rahv and Phillips. Challenging the ideological commissars led to the growing autonoma- tion of the magazine and the affirmation of an adamant anti-Stalinist and anti-totalitarian line. Phillips was one of the first major Western intellectuals to advocate simultaneously anti-fascism and anti-Stalinism. Utterly sensitive to the European political and cultural debates, Rahv and Phillips emphasized the right of critical thinking and opposed the obscurantism championed by Stalin’s American admirers. They denounced Stalin’s show trials in Moscow as a despicable mockery of justice. Their vision of partisanship was the negation of the Leninist straitjacket known as partiinost (party-mindedness). A Partisan Century groups together some of the seminal political and intellectual essays published in PR (among them, a fragment of André Gide’s Return from the USSR, one of the main contributions to the lit- erature of disillusionment and awakening). The volume is a collection of testimonies and analyses that shed an especially lucid light on what Hannah Arendt once called the ideological storms of the twentieth cen- === Page 67 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 225 tury. Thanks to this volume we now have the chance to read (or reread) contributions by many of the already mentioned authors, as well as those of such writers as Nicola Chiaromonte, Ralf Dahrendorf, Stephen Spender, Jeffrey Herf, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell, Shlomo Avineri, Norman Mailer, etc. Let me add among the journal's collaborators George Orwell, whose "Letter from London" (1941) is included in the volume. I admit that I have a parti pris on this issue: the volume opens with Gide's "Second Thoughts on the USSR" and ends with my essay "Romania's Mystical Revolutionaries"-rarely in my life have I been more honored by being included in a collective volume. William Phillips's intellectual biography overlapped totally with the experiences of Partisan Review. Born to a family of East European (Russian) Jewish immigrants to the U.S., Phillips discovered Marxism and the artistic avant-garde in the feverish discussions of Greenwich Vil- lage in the early 1930s. Together with Rahv, he was fast in detecting the despotic nature of Stalinism and engaged (himself and the journal) in the major ideological confrontations of the twentieth century: first, in the 1930s, between Stalinism and Trotskyism; then, between democracy and totalitarian dictatorships. During the Cold War, Partisan Review situated itself unequivocally in the first line of resistance to the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Left. The role of the journal in debunking totalitarian lies was acknowledged by many prominent figures, including Christo- pher Lasch, Raymond Aron, Arthur Koestler, and Albert Camus. In the 1960s, Rahv left the journal. To the very end, Phillips remained faithful to democratic rationalism and skeptical liberalism (even during the years when many of his friends or ex-friends decided to extol the New Left and the utopianism of the counterculture). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the journal published critical contributions by Nathan Glazer, Amitai Etzioni, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Irving Louis Horowitz, and Walter Laqueur. Especially after 1980, when PR moved to Boston University, it became a magnet for discussions on the experiences of Euro- pean communism and anti-totalitarian opposition. Let me mention here the publication of poetry, essays, book reviews, and fiction by authors like George Konrad, Norman Manea, Slavenka Drakulic, Ivan Klima, Stanislaw Baranczak, Leszek Kolakowski, Matei Calinescu, and Vassily Aksyonov; and this is just a brief list. Excellent articles came out on the origins and dynamics of anti-Semitism and the new waves of xenophobia in Western Europe (see contributions by Robert Wistrich, Marta Halpert, and Paul Hollander). I really know of no other journal that has opened its pages so generously and uninterruptedly to the voices of those who fought against any form of tyranny in the twentieth century. This was not === Page 68 === 226 PARTISAN REVIEW an accidental situation, but the result of a deliberate editorial policy sys- tematically pursued by William Phillips and Edith Kurzweil. Maybe it is right to say that Partisan Review is not what it used to be fifty or forty years ago, but the same can be said about any other publi- cation with such an enviable longevity. Times have changed and other journals have emerged (The New York Review of Books is clearly the continuation of a certain stage in the evolution of Partisan Review). However, none has surpassed the formidable performance of Partisan Review, under William Phillips's editorship, in placing itself, with courage and dignity, at the very center of the Western world's intellectual life. ROSANNA WARREN In coming to praise, to remember, and to honor William, I speak not only for myself, but also for my parents, especially for my mother, Eleanor Clark, who wrote for Partisan in its early years and in her own early years. This accident of biography—that two generations of my family have found friendship with William and with Partisan Review sustaining and intrinsic to intellectual life—points, impersonally, to something extraordinary about William himself. From the thirties until his death— that is, for almost seventy years—William's lucidity, learning, curiosity, wit, disputatious energy, and intellectual generosity have helped to shape the life of ideas in our country. It has been a changing life, requiring changing ideas, and the enduring liveliness of Partisan Review has every- thing to do with the combination of clarity and realism with which William responded to the jolts and shifts in the world around him. Since I helped to choose poetry at Partisan for thirteen years, it is about poetry I will speak. In a massively careless, distracted, and glut- ted culture such as ours, in which even supposedly educated people sometimes relegate the arts, with patronizing unconsciousness, to the realms of entertainment and decoration, Partisan Review has stood out as a valiant counterexample. In Partisan, right from the inception, the arts have been respected as modes of thought, of inquiry into reality, as serious as the discursive disciplines of history, philosophy, and social and political science. It is no surprise to see, over the years, the most probing discussion of contemporary painting and sculpture in the pages of Partisan Review; and in these same pages we find some of the most significant poetry of the twentieth century. Auden, Berryman, Lowell, Rosanna Warren teaches Comparative Literature at Boston University. === Page 69 === TRIBUTES TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS 227 Schwartz, Milosz, Heaney, Zagajewski; the list is too long to recite in any fullness, but even to run our fingers over these few names is to touch a much longer cord. We might call it a lifeline. I remember my early conversations with William and Edith, when they first invited me to rustle up poetry for the magazine. William, with his piercing glance, his hawk-like ferocious energy, was looking for poetry of large ethical and aesthetic consequence, poetry that took thinking seriously but that in no way betrayed the sensuous means of its proper medium. It has been a privilege and an education to hunt for those poems. And I think I speak for a large kinship system of poets in thanking Partisan Review for the place it has made for our art, a place where we receive that highest honor, of being read intelligently. It is not by accident that I named Czeslaw Milosz and Adam Zaga- jewski. Partisan has been influential in the United States, but its influ- ence has far transcended national boundaries. Especially for writers behind what we still remember as the Iron Curtain, Partisan offered a rare community in which to express themselves freely and to be read in the West. As early as 1951, Partisan Review was publishing Milosz's prose, pieces that would become part of The Captive Mind; in this way Partisan presented, to a somewhat uncomprehending audience here, a grimly clear analysis of the Marxist dream gone wrong. There are Pol- ish, Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, and Russian poets for whom Parti- san remains a beacon and a home abroad. When Edith told me about William's last hours, she said two things in particular that seem to characterize not so much his dying, but his entire life. "His heart was strong," she said, and, "He died lucid." What a tribute to a life well lived. I would like to say farewell to William by reading lines from "Epilogue," a poem by Robert Lowell, who cared deeply for Partisan Review and for whom the Partisan editors cared: All's misalliance. Yet why not say what happened? Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name. === Page 70 === BERNARD AVISHAI Arthur Koestler: The Consolations of Communism A RTHUR KOESTLER WRITES in his first volume of memoirs, Arrow in the Blue, that he would gladly exchange a hundred readers from his own time for just one of the next century. That's an intriguing trade for any writer, and Koestler probably meant it. But it is only about twenty years since his joint suicide with his wife Cynthia, and it is hard to see where that reader will come from. He was a Cold War literary celebrity, and the Cold War is over. His politics were shaped by the mass upheavals of the twentieth century, but the mass technolo- gies of mass upheaval have been superseded. Jaded by communism, he argued voluminously against deterministic notions of scientific discov- ery, but the epistemological wars, fought out in academic circles, have been won mainly without him. As a moral writer, Koestler warned of the dangers of devotion-to the Party, the tribe, scientific "progress"—and yet his younger and healthy wife ("utterly devoted," his friends said) was found dead by his side. Darkness at Noon was grippingly told, but his other political nov- els have the quality of a master's thesis with added characters to per- sonify arguments. His last polemical books in the philosophy of science did not quite defend, but did attack the attackers of parapsychology and Lamarckianism. And returning late in life to the Jewish question, he tried to prove were actually descended from Slavic converts. Why bother with him? Most who do have found in him a compass pointing away from the ideological claims of twentieth-century communism and cannot resist framing his life along these lines. This approach is reasonable enough but also a missed opportunity. For the appeal of communism was never simply in the way it organized the political landscape in terms of an elaborate ideology. Communism's appeal—and Koestler has been Bernard Avishai is Dean of the Raphael Recanati International School at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel. === Page 71 === BERNARD AVISHAI 229 indispensable to our seeing this-was also to a particular kind of inter- nal landscape, to a cast of mind that is drawn to the order promised by elaborate ideology itself and, indeed, may be most distinctive for the way it denies internal landscapes altogether. Communism may be gone, but the appeal of secular religions is not. Neither, for that matter, is the appeal of orderly answers to sublime questions. So now that we are in the next century, what makes Koestler worth reading, if at all, is his self-conscious exposure of an exemplary self- consciousness, something like what Koestler himself found in Rousseau's Confessions, a book he tried to emulate when writing Arrow in the Blue. With Koestler, we see the subordination of an outside to an inside, see how powerfully what we see can be absorbed into what we hope. These vexing connections are not easily teased out, except per- haps by one's analyst on a good day (and indeed, Koestler at times com- pared writing to the analyst's couch). In Koestler's case, the most interesting connection may be between his confessed emotional fragility and his romance with communist bosses-not a political dream, exactly, but the dream of an authoritative scientific community, mastering his- tory, who he hoped would exercise an engulfing political power. This was, so he would later say (when the term was still fresh and a little risqué), a “neurotic” attraction. Becoming a communist had for him the quality of a conversion to a religious orthodoxy, a positivist trance, a love of “objectivity,” which still claims many proselytes. When we review how Koestler accounts for his becoming a commu- nist, we do not find a person with (now quaint) visions of proletarian revolutionary consciousness. Rather, we find one with both the training to expose and the opportunity to oppose the scientific pretensions of communism-and who nevertheless wholeheartedly supported it. For we also find a lonely young man with an impulse to intellectual rigidi- ties and pack-fellowship. Koestler's communism, in other words, was the culmination of his hubris, a marker on his journey to what may be called, in any century, faith. I. SHRINK TO INSIGNIFICANCE REVIEW THE CASE NOTES as Koestler himself writes them in Arrow in the Blue. A young Jewish intellectual, approaching his twenty-sixth birth- day, often depressed, as accomplished as he is troubled, is living in Berlin during Hitler's rise. His conversion, though imminent, is hardly a foregone conclusion; indeed, reasonable people might think this the fur- thest thing from his mind. As a child in Béla Kun's Budapest, then === Page 72 === 230 PARTISAN REVIEW Freud's Vienna, he had been the prince of his mother's ambitions and the foil for her touchiness-both roles carrying a vaguely erotic charge. He had been little shielded by his father, whose distant, cheerful, wish- ful thinking-and botched commercial adventures-had come to seem inherently irresponsible. The child, in this retrospective account, comes into manhood with richly mixed feelings: a terror of loneliness and the fear of suffocation, leaking rages and exaggerated empathy for the underdog, a yearning for "absolute" commitments and an impulse to break vessels. He does not trust himself. The young man compensates, Koestler writes, with alternating fan- tasies of extreme moral responsibility and suicide. But there is one, unexpected source of balance. He takes as his Bible a popular philo- sophical treatise of the day, The Riddle of the Universe, by Ernst Hein- rich Haeckel, the German biologist and philosopher. This confirmed him in the opinion that scientific progress was-given the careful appli- cation of scientific method-cumulative, gradual, and inevitable. (For Haeckel, the world was unfolding inexorably toward a new order; Haeckel writes that freedom of the will was "a pure dogma, based on an illusion, and having no real existence.") Ostensibly, the young man shares the philosophical implications of scientific practice, its resistance to orthodoxy, its commitment to doubt. Even more, however, he likes the cultural prejudices of scientists, their air of impartiality, their pride in the logic of discovery and mastery. He also likes the serenity of science's vantage point, where nature is all, and people "shrink to insignificance." He consoles himself, ironically, with both parts of a contradiction: science says that everything is matter, and so a secure order is possible; but this means that we are matter, so a secure order is, at least from a moral point of view, accidental. We are matter, can we matter? The tragic and the trivial coexist uncomfortably. The self is fugitive, a drop in an ocean of causes only the self can con- template. But young men, Koestler continues the case summary, can preempt idiot drives with philosophical self-effacement for only so long. Inevitably, triumphal longings assert themselves-in this young man's case, in big-shot ideas of national power. Now an engineering student, he becomes a Zionist, a follower of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the most romantic and nationalist Zionist of them all; and he plays out the drama of self-determination, albeit from a safely abstract distance. He comes into his own, throws off his parents' conventions and even materialist neutrality. For a while he revels in acts of spontaneous will: dueling, womanizing, speechmaking, marching, spiting anti-Semites left and === Page 73 === BERNARD AVISHAI 231 right. Then he prepares to go to Palestine, leaves university, burns his bridges to a “respectable” career—panics, falls into despair. Eventually he screws up his courage and actually exchanges a failed Jewish home for a pristine Jewish homeland. But the dream of national power dissi- pates almost immediately upon its coming true. In the collective farms of Palestine, the pleasure principle is pounded by the reality principle; like the “Helenas” he will later fall in love with, the Jewish National Home quickly comes to seem a bundle of pedestrian demands. So he tries to escape again but learns, this time, that the price of freedom is an impossible self-sufficiency. He nearly starves; he relapses into depres- sion. His adventure only intensifies latent suspicions that his impulses are not to be trusted. Then the young man does something unexpected. He rebounds. He has learned, so he thinks, the difference between being free and shaking the bars. He determines to lace his ambitions with a measure of respectability and applies for a job with a foreign newspaper. He catches on as a journalist with a famous foreign newspaper chain, the German Ullstein Trust, and by and by returns to the disciplines of rigorous observation. He works hard; he excels. The young man’s life, Koestler concludes, is one of greater detach- ment, but there is the ambiguous pleasure of being taken seriously and making money—of living well in the world. So after a couple of years, he separates from the Jewish National Home and returns to Europe, the larger civilization. He still aches to belong, still resents privilege; his heart still pounds in the presence of real men and seductive women. Still, he determines not make the same mistake twice. He would never again give up the “laws of nature and history” for a “seething rage.” He presents himself to the headquarters of the Ullstein Trust in Berlin, his home newspaper chain, during the summer of 1929. II. SICK OF HOLINESS KOESTLER’S SUPERIORS TOLD HIM that if he were “sick of holiness” he could go to Paris. For Koestler this meant an end to being his own mas- ter—“venting opinions and passing oracular judgments” in the manner of Ullstein foreign reporters. It also meant a cut in salary and rank. He leapt at it. [M]y education seems always to have proceeded shock and jolt. The process of quiet maturing I can find nowhere in my past. The most wonderful of these jolts was the change in scenery from the === Page 74 === 232 PARTISAN REVIEW Judean Desert to the Luxembourg Gardens, from the Holy City to Sodom on the Seine, from the Levantine fringe of civilization to its luminous center. He arrived in Paris at what might have been its brightest moment since the Great War. Koestler does not make much of this in his mem- oirs, but William Shirer recalls that the summer of 1929 was a time of unparalleled industrial expansion in France, of an exceptionally favor- able trade balance and a grand total of 812 people unemployed. Such numbers imply many social advantages, but they also help to explain a pleasant change in Koestler’s working responsibilities. In the Judean Hills, the thought must have occurred to him, one toiled constantly to make something grow. Work in Paris was to trim things back. It was the same in journalism. Compared with the Middle East, where every story was a tour de force, covering French politics was methodical. He found himself doing a kind of journalistic shift work, and he entered the life of the city, not as a tourist, but functionally. Pro- fessional obligation consisted in reporting votes of confidence and par- liamentary speeches: Daladier’s progressive reason, Maurras’s reactionary thunder. There were the usual debates, wins and losses to be tallied among Socialists, Conservatives, and Royalists. With a govern- ment surplus of some nineteen billion francs, there were also ministerial corruptions to ferret out. At the onset of the depression, these brought the Third Republic to the brink of collapse. However, these difficulties came later. For now, the mundane quality of French politics was a relief from messianists and Islamic nationalists. Koestler took particular pleasure, ironically, in a style of work not unlike the one he fled from on the kibbutz (though, to be sure, working a paragraph was not exactly like working an orchard). A sobering reg- imen counteracted wanderlust: the same restaurant’s prix fixe, the same half liter of wine with the girlfriend from the office, the same Métro stop, the same walkway beside the Louvre. He writes that he developed an “easy affinity” (who does not?) for French paintings, buildings, and novels. He hung out with the other “smaller fry” at the smoke-filled Salle des Journalistes, a lounge in the basement of the Stock Exchange. He was in bed by midnight, up by 7:30. Orwell was down and out just now. Koestler was engaged and climbing— “a paragon of petit bour- geois virtue.” Koestler’s chief at the Paris bureau was a plodding man who ran the office with the élan of a high diplomat and, apparently, about as much political imagination. For his part, Koestler was in a pyramid of intelli- === Page 75 === BERNARD AVISHAI 233 gence gathering and copy writing. In his first three months on the job, during which he reported on it almost daily, he actually set foot in the Chamber of Deputies only one time. And only once did Koestler bungle his duties: one morning in October, he passed a story to B. Z. Am Mit- tag predicting, on wholly specious grounds, the imminent collapse of the Briand government. When nothing happened during the day, his chief was livid—except that, fortuitously, the government actually did fall that evening, for reasons Koestler knew nothing about. “It was one of the few occasions,” Koestler recalls wistfully, “when I had been right for the wrong reasons—a more cheering experience than to be wrong for the right reasons, as I mostly seem to be.” III. COZY STINK THE HOURS AT THE ULLSTEIN BUREAU were taxing, but not exhausting. His confidence provisionally restored, Koestler made time for a rather more desultory night life of bawdy-houses and cafés—especially after a change in shift required him to stay up through the night most of the week. His impressions of the French grew more true to form. He began to notice that the second-class carriage of the Métro emitted a “cozy stink,” that its riders insinuated a certain defensive meanness, that their mistresses were “unattractive.” On se défend. But he came to his senses in another way, too. This was the Paris of Hemingway and Cocteau, after all. Koestler's appetite for sex became avid. He grew curiously con- tent in his restiveness. Paris seemed to him “an adulterous town,” frigid to her legitimate masters, passionate to the passing stranger. At times, Koestler would stroll down to Les Halles and swill oysters and wine. He would watch mountains of produce being unloaded by stolid men—people, who, like him, experienced a sad comradeship, peo- ple who knew the torture of alarm clocks and felt contempt for drunks. But it was other night workers, Paris prostitutes, who particularly fas- cinated him, and he writes about them at length. There was more than the consolation of their beds here. In this crossing of sex and the mar- ket, Koestler had his first chance to make out those shadows of desire that eventually appeared on his analyst's walls. The whores, he instructs us, were only human. There were two types, Koestler writes: those who were sérieuses and those who were not. The former worked in closed houses and observed a strict code of etiquette, serving a more or less stable group of middle- class men. Their houses had parlors, with leather benches and easy crowds. Men periodically brought their wives to chatter with the === Page 76 === 234 PARTISAN REVIEW women and "study life" -pretending to both an appropriate worldli- ness and an unfamiliarity with the locale. ("At last the husband, with a demonstrative yawn, pulls out his watch and proposes that it is time to go to bed. To save his masculine pride, he accompanies the word 'bed' with a pathetically roguish twinkle. . .") The only difference between the house and a café was that the women of the night would sit through such conversations almost entirely in the nude. They were mostly aspi- rants to bourgeois respectability themselves, and many of them would reach it. Even in retrospect, Koestler saw in the civilized sex trade of the sérieuses an important symbol of civil society. The sale of any human faculty as a commodity was degrading to some degree, but trading one's embraces for money-as opposed to trading one's mind-was a differ- ence of degree, not kind. For Koestler, the fact that we abhor sexual prostitution more than literary (or political, or managerial) prostitution revealed only that people in the West are weird enough to value their bodies more than their spirit. Koestler remained so taken by this insight that, in time, he turned it into the premise of his most forgettable book, The Call-Girls-a 1972 spoof on the international academic circuit, in which writers and scholars sell their talk ("return fare economy class and a modest honorarium") for a week in Switzerland: [One] studied the faces of the call-girls along the table. Nikolai was doodling with his lower lip pushed forward like a chimpanzee's . . . . Von Halder has his right hand cupped behind his ear, a sure sign that he was not listening. Harriet kept handing notes to Tony, which he acknowledged with polite smiles. . . . Wyndham's benign smile was so sustained that he seemed to be risking cramp in his dimples. Actually, Koestler's mature view of the sérieuses was not entirely sophomoric. In Arrow in the Blue, he explains why in retrospect he favored their work over the sermons and strictures that promised to overcome the raggedness of human nature. He writes (and you can almost hear him addressing both Commissar and Mother here): "The off-spring of the marriage of Eros and Logos is tolerance, and the knowledge that the stability of society rests on its system of safety valves." Indeed, what impressed Koestler most about the brothels- both at the time and also writing about them in retrospect-was how obviously neutralizing the effect of sexual abundance was. ("In the ado- lescent's imagination the shared bed of marriage is a scene of permanent === Page 77 === BERNARD AVISHAI 235 voluptuousness; the Anglo-Saxon idea of a Paris house is equally wide of the mark.") Where sex was traded, it ceased to be a mystery and, implicitly, the focus of any grand desire. For Koestler, this insight became a pathway to understanding the sheer power of the romantic imagination. Only the unknown becomes an object of desire, a vessel to receive what is pent- up. A whore puts on her clothes and changes from a tramp to femme fatale. Koestler remembers one young woman reporting to him that men would offer her ten times more when she was on her way home than clients would pay in the house: "And they would tell me how clever I am, how spirituelle I am, and that I am the woman they've always dreamt of-so much noise for an omelet. It is because they see a mystery where there is only a corset with elastic panels. Oh les pauvres malheureux." Koestler was hardly immune himself. He explores the point, and its political implications, a little later in Arrow in the Blue-his first crack at unpacking the Helena obsession: The phantom that I was after is as old as man: victory over loneli- ness through perfect physical and spiritual union. Surely a modest aim? And certainly not an original one. Yet the pattern of one's life depends to a large extent on the manner in which one organizes one's own particular phantom chase. Nor does the chase bring diminishing returns to a man of certain character. The distinction between true and false applies to ideas, not emotions. "An emotion may be cheap," Koestler writes, "but never untrue." As the number of experiences grows, it does not really affect the power of the illusion, which is merely "withdrawn from one object and projected onto another, carrying the same luminosity." Indeed, the creation of the illusion responds to a need as deep, inexhaustible, and recurrent as the addict's craving for his drug. As for politics, the long- ing to embrace the perfect cause turned him, he writes, into a "Casanova of Causes." The quest for the secret of the arrow was fol- lowed by the search for the knowing shaman, then by the pursuit of Utopia. Koestler does not do so himself, but it is hard to resist juxtaposing these last reflections with his view of the second kind of whore, those who were not sérieuses. Here was a darker problem, which made him queasy, but drew him like a moth to fire. At the center of the life of the not sérieuses was the awful power of the pimp-the "seedy, weedy, greasy, swaggering" man, often ugly and impotent and short, devoid of === Page 78 === 236 PARTISAN REVIEW any manly stature, but who (so Koestler reports being told) thrilled his women with a touch and inspired fanatic loyalty. Koestler concluded reluctantly that the secret of this pathological relationship lay in the pimp’s very brutality: It is a calculating and nauseating kind of brutality, which has its own ritual and cant. . . . [I]ts obvious function is to satisfy the tramp’s craving for punishment—a craving the more consistent as it is mostly unconscious. . . . “Punishment” consists mostly in slaps and kicks or mere verbal abuse; overtly sadistic practices hardly ever occur. They would defeat the purpose of the whole relation- ship, which is based on the axiom that the punishment is an act of justice that the victim deserves for being “bad.” In short, the pros- titute creates her own ritual of penance; the kick on the shin or the slap in the face represent the act of absolution. The experience taught Koestler a lesson of which he became fully conscious only years later. It was derived from meeting up with the sense of guilt in its crudest, most primitive and tangible form: “The pimp is the real hero of the show. He is the false messiah of the fallen woman, who makes her suffer without offering redemption.” It was startling, he writes, to see how powerfully this complex of guilt acted on creatures apparently devoid of any sense of moral responsibility (though no more startling, we think, than Cynthia falling in love with Koestler as he dic- tated these words to her in his study at Fontaine Le Port). IV. COSMIC REJECTION KOESTLER SOLDIERED ON, preparing foreign dispatches for the Ullstein’s many papers and, discretely (like many other liberal journalists), for the Social Democratic Party’s News Agency, a relationship which soured him considerably on the Social Democrats’ aloofness and staleness. (“Their voice was the voice of the pamphlet, or the lecturer in the evening school.”) As his talents became more and more noticed, Koestler wrote features on film, the arts, politics, and science—which particularly caught the attention of his editors. His greatest triumph that year was an article on (including an exclusive interview with) the Duc de Broglie, whose theory of light had just won the Nobel Prize. Koestler’s unusually competent grasp of the new physics and obvious facility in writing about science for the general public gained him the paternal interest of Franz Ullstein, who was soon to be engaged in a === Page 79 === BERNARD AVISHAI 237 struggle with his family for control of the Trust. Koestler tried to stay out of this fight, but discovered the futility of doing so; his chief in Paris backed the other side, and Koestler was nearly fired. In the end, however, Franz Ullstein prevailed and opened a new road for his protégé. By the end of the summer of 1930, Koestler was offered the coveted job of Sci- ence Editor of the Vossische Zeitung-entailing a move to Berlin—and the equally prestigious title of Science Advisor to the whole Ullstein chain. Alternately swept by euphoria and wallowing in self-doubt, Koestler accepted. He moved to Berlin on September 14, 1930, the very day of the Reichstag elections, in which Hitler's seats jumped from 12 to 107. It was the true beginning of the Depression in Germany. The Commu- nists registered important gains as well. Berlin, to be sure, was still the stronghold of the liberal and socialist intelligentsia, and Ullstein journalists occupied the very eye of a hurri- cane. Their newspapers were the crown jewels of the Weimar Republic, and the people who worked for them by now joked nervously about the political forces which, they intuitively sensed, sealed their doom: the polarization of the political camps, old German provincialism, eco- nomic chaos, intellectual decadence. Even so, the powerful editors and media bosses—who were mainly Jews—began bending to the storm's magnetism. During the summer of 1931, editorials written over Koestler's head at B. Z. Am Mittag took on a mocking tone toward the Western powers. A year later, a regular column began to appear in the Vossische Zeitung that was devoted to German ethnic minorities outside the Reich. It is clear from Koestler's memoir that although the Nazis were not necessarily winning the national debate just yet, they were set- ting its terms: intellectuals were suddenly forced to take seriously the fate of "Sudeten-Germans," who had for ten years of Weimar never even come up in serious conversation. Once in Berlin, Koestler was himself overwhelmed by the mounting political crisis, but he turned it to his professional advantage. He deter- mined to prove his mastery of international affairs in addition to science journalism. It was characteristic of his insecure genius that he could not commit to any one area of specialty at a time; every achievement was a staging ground for a new conquest. And this time his restlessness paid off. Within a year he became Foreign Editor of B. Z. Am Mittag, in addition to Science Editor of Vossische Zeitung. This was an impressive combination of responsibilities for a man not quite twenty-six, and his combined salary came to something close to 2,000 marks a month, near the maximum any German journalist could be expected to earn. === Page 80 === 238 PARTISAN REVIEW And yet it is equally clear from Arrow in the Blue that all of this per- sonal success seemed disturbingly comic to Koestler. He had made it to the very center of German intellectual life, but he had never had a seri- ous love affair and continued to be both high-strung and retiring. He was disliked by everyone. His admittedly contrived effort to appear dashing was fairly transparent. Many years later, friends who talked with him about this time in Berlin recalled that they had found him repellently arrogant during the day, embarrassing in his drunken vul- nerability during the evening. One friend (whom Koestler described as “shrewd”) confessed many years later that he had suspected Koestler of suffering from schizophrenia. Koestler writes: At twenty-five, I had accumulated enough experience to make me into a wise and old man. . . . Yet all this seems not to have brought me an inch nearer to maturity. . . . Emotionally I was still nearly as unbalanced, naive, unsure of myself, ready to fly off at a tangent, as at sixteen. I sat behind an important desk, had a secretary, two telephones, several mistresses, and was called Herr Redaktör, but it was as if I was still surrounded by the taboo-forest of polar bear rugs and potted palms in the parental flat. In the middle of this turmoil, during the summer of 1931, Koestler undertook the single most glamorous assignment of his tenure with the Ullstein Trust. He was honored as the only journalist commissioned to accompany the Graf Zeppelin expedition to the Arctic. On his way to the polar circle, Koestler got his first look at the Soviet Union, from a height of five hundred feet—the ideal vantage point from which to con- firm the enthusiastic descriptions he had heard from communists and fellow-travelers back in Berlin. Arrow in the Blue reproduces some of his impressions of Leningrad, which Koestler committed to manuscript in 1933, after he had himself become a communist: “Look,” he would write, “that is Karl Marx Street, and over there is Engels Boulevard. In the factory whose belching chimneys you see over there, there is a black board and a red board on every wall of every workshop, and a bulletin board with friendly quips at the management.” Then, at last, he came upon the glaciers of Cape Flora and was sud- denly in the grip of a disturbing vision: Now the midnight-sun changed to red, and the glaciers of Cape Flora reflected this colour with the intensity of mirrors. Around the cape there was a stretch of open sea, and the colour of the water === Page 81 === BERNARD AVISHAI 239 was black. . . . As we came nearer, the island, glaciers, and rock constantly changed their color, from red to violet, to molten gold, and the sea from black to faint lavender. Yet this fantastic display caused no surge of elation-rather a feeling of awe and oppression; in the heavy silence which dated from the last Ice Age, the faint hum of our engines swelled to a roaring blasphemy. . . . [T]here is a psychic effect of the arctic landscape known as Eiskoller, the “glacial tantrum.” It has been responsible for many polar tragedies and seems to stem from the unbearable feeling of solitude when [one] is exposed to another, prehuman geological age—an experi- ence of cosmic rejection. One imagines Koestler dictating this portion of Arrow in the Blue in one of his morbid oceanic reveries. As a matter of fact, his diary records: “Finished boring Zeppelin part-at last.” Perhaps actually flying “like an arrow in the blue” was disappointing to him in the way the realiza- tion of a long-imagined fantasy leaves one feeling diminished: the adventure was too graphic, too full, the subtle colors and barren ice mountains might well have encroached upon his beloved metaphor, as choreography may ruin a piece of music. But—obviously, Koestler understood this—the polar landscape was also a journey into sheer loneliness, and it exposed the real shallows of his emotional reserves. If there were such a thing as cosmic acceptance, where was it to be found? V. NOT BY PROCESS OF ELIMINATION Koestler’s SWING to the Communist Party was perverse not because it was unreasonable on pragmatic grounds. In 1932, one-third of the Ger- man workforce was unemployed, and Stresemann’s Social Democratic Party was crushed between the fascist gangs and Communist cells. Civil war seemed imminent. During the summer of 1932, the Social Democ- ratic government of Prussia was chased out of office by one lieutenant and eight men, acting on Von Papen’s orders. Koestler had been sympa- thetic to the Social Democrats; now he could barely contain his revul- sion for socialist politicians: [H]atred, like love, can flourish only where there is common ground. . . . I had regarded them as the legitimate heirs and trustees of the Judeo-Christian tradition—of the Hebrew prophets and the Sermon on the Mount; of the Kantian imperative; of liberty, equal- ity, and fraternity. The Nazis were savages who remained true to === Page 82 === 240 PARTISAN REVIEW themselves; the socialists were my own kin who had betrayed their trust. You cannot hate a tiger for being a tiger; but the irresponsi- ble keeper who exposes the people to the beast's claws you would like to shoot on the spot-even before you shoot the tiger. There was some possibility of fleeing to the United States-Palestine was now out of the question for him-but this was the summer of 1932, the depth of the Depression, before Franklin Delano Roosevelt's elec- tion; and to any Ullstein Jewish intellectual, America seemed the very proof of capitalism's decadence. In Germany, one in three workers was living on the dole, near starvation, yet the German newspapers spoke laconically about millions of tons of American coffee dumped into the sea, wheat burned, pigs cremated, oranges doused with kerosene-"to ease," Koestler writes with continuing distaste, "the conditions of the market." It was an awful paradox that seemed to foretell the demise of the whole international system of market societies. Intellectuals the world over-Gide, Malraux, Auden, Isherwood, Spender, Sinclair, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, to mention only a few-seemed to concur and joined in expressing a kind of populist, if not properly proletarian optimism. "Even by a process of pure elimination," Koestler writes, "the Commu- nists, with the mighty Soviet Union behind them, seemed the only force capable of resisting the onrush of the primitive horde with its swastika totem." There was no more dignified move than to the Left, and no more serious one than to the militant Left. Still, in spite of these huge forces narrowing his choices, what made Koestler's turn to communism so contrary was the wholeheartedness with which he began to devote himself not only to the Party, but to its "scientific" claims. Koestler did not simply make an implicit contract with the Party leadership to accept their discipline so long as a winning struggle against fascism had to be waged. No, the same young man who had months before written treatises on the new physics undermining materialist assumptions of science suddenly espoused Soviet Marxism's deterministic theories of class struggle, its materialist theories of history and consciousness, in a way quite like his embrace of the strictures of ultra-nationalist Zionism a few years before. He had "fallen in love," he writes, "with the Five Year Plan": It was not by process of elimination that I became a Communist ... Tired of electrons and wave-mechanics, I began for the first time to read Marx, Engels and Lenin in earnest. By the time I had === Page 83 === BERNARD AVISHAI 241 finished with Feuerbach and State and Revolution, something had clicked in my brain which shook me like a mental explosion. To say that one had "seen the light" is but a poor description of the intel- lectual rapture which only the convert knows (regardless to what faith he has been converted). The new light seems to pour from all directions across the skull. The whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. Remember, Koestler had never brought himself to identify with ordi- nary working people when he was either in Paris or Berlin; he never socialized with them or even frequented their bars. Indeed, the political impulses he had acquired with Zionism and his kibbutz experience worked against any common Marxian ideal. He had been a disciple of the rightist "Revisionist" Zionist Jabotinsky, and had himself flirted with some of the ideological claims of fascism-Social Darwinist, if not racialist theories, militarist celebrations, anticommunist dogmas. He had remained a staunch opponent of socialist-Zionism. Nor, presum- ably, was Koestler much taken with what we might call the moral tastes of socialists, with their pure visions of sharing, classlessness-of an end to greed and self-regard. He might well have affected a love for such val- ues once he was in the Party. Yet Jabotinsky had almost certainly con- vinced him to doubt that art and bliss could survive socialism. There is even some question, I think, about whether Koestler was ever really persuaded by what Marxist intellectuals mean by "political economy." Search Koestler's memoirs and novels and you will not turn up a single reference to, say, such iconic communist terms as "sur- plus-value" or "relations of production." Significantly, Koestler did accept casting historical changes in terms of the antagonisms among social classes. He admired Marx's historical works for their focus on class conflict. But who didn't? Such varied social thinkers as Thomas More, Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, Herbert Spencer, and Max Weber had all accounted for social changes in a corresponding way. Even after many years of reflection, Koestler seems only to wink at Marx's most complex and illuminating economic theories, and certainly shows no mastery of them. The God That Failed, for instance, argues that Marx's version of the classless society was modeled on the image of a lost paradise, "a legendary Golden Age." Thus, he writes, the com- munists' revolt was also a revival, and at the end of the "dialectical spi- ral" stood virtually the same "primitive Communist society" which had stood at the beginning. === Page 84 === 242 PARTISAN REVIEW In fact, though Marx had many wistful theories about the eventual shape of communist society, the idea of a return to some primitive com- mune was, explicitly, not one of them. Marx argued rather sanctimo- niously against the pristine little communes of his day, even in that classic communist text, The German Ideology, which Koestler cites. For Marx, the proletarian revolutionist would have to embrace what was present and imminent in capitalism: the science of political economy, the revolutionary power of capitalist traders to dissolve the primitive rela- tions of feudal society, the new technologies of competing factories that promised to end scarcity, and so on. Koestler explores none of these principles, though some are just taken for granted. What did seem to draw Koestler in was Soviet Marxism's familiar and reassuring positivist ethos, so much like Haeckel's, a laboratory style of positing historical directions and making positive claims. Indeed, Koestler conceded that Marxist social-scientific rhetoric trans- ported him back to the serene state of mind he had acquired as a young- ster, when the world was in chaos, and science seemed on the verge of making it orderly. What, after all, does Engels actually write in "Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy" that Koestler would have par- ticularly latched onto? At the risk of oversimplifying an already over- simple thesis, it was Engels's view that communists should see themselves in the materialist paradigm begun by Hobbes, to which Feuerbach, an inspiration to Marx, was merely a contributor. Engels argued (again, much like Haeckel) that thinking was no more than a passive process of accepting imprints on mind, that men were a kind of matter-in-motion, affective appetites, and that their relations of produc- tion divided them into classes, which determined their thought. The only novelty Koestler would have encountered in Engels's argument was namely, an attempt to reconcile Marx's materialist version of class strug- gle and consciousness with Darwin's conception of evolution. Ever since his eulogy at Marx's graveside, Engels had begun to claim that Marx had done for the social world precisely what Darwin had done for the natural world. Communists were thus to think of classes as evolving "historically," by which he meant organically, as if endowed with the directed force of an animal species. "Irrespective of their wills," Engels writes, classes played out their part in a determinate "struggle for existence," from feudalism to capitalism, from capitalism to revolutionary crisis. It was the "irrespective of their wills" part that Koestler liked best. He conceived of the Party's brain trust === Page 85 === BERNARD AVISHAI 243 as a kind of social-scientific elite. These were people who were uniquely open to what the underlying historical laws were organizing for them, parsing the forces that made it possible to disregard wills. Communist intellectuals would penetrate and manipulate social forces in the manner of a Realschule student modeling bridges. They would make the world achieve its potential. They would bring about new and final social con- ditions that, in turn, would ultimately bring out the best in human nature. We get our best statement of this state of mind not from the memoirs, but from Darkness at Noon, when our hero, Rubashov, and his interrogator, Ivanov, begin their intellectual duel: At the time . . . what did the others know of history? Passing rip- ples, little eddies and breaking waves. They wondered at the chang- ing forms at the surface and could not explain them. But we had descended into the depths, into the formless, anonymous masses, which at all times constituted the substance of history; and we were the first to discover her laws of motion. We had discovered the laws of her inertia, of the slow changing of her molecular structure, and of her sudden eruptions. That was the greatness of her doctrine. The Jacobins were moralists; we were empiricists. We dug in the primeval mud of history and there we found her laws. We knew more than ever men have known about mankind: that is why our revolution succeeded. How could Koestler of all people have fallen for such claims? He had been among the comparatively small number of German intellectuals who understood how the philosophical implications of quantum physics undermined the materialist certainties that were of cardinal importance to communist intellectuals. Although Koestler was moving from abstract speculations to political activism when he joined the Party, he was also abandoning the new physics for a political science—Engels's treatise on materialism, Lenin's corresponding theory of the Party— which, given a little reflection, had been largely discredited by the larger implications of the new physics. Koestler applied for membership on the last day of 1931 and was deeply disappointed when Party officials demanded that his status remain a secret and that he join no cell, so as not to jeopardize his still- influential position with the Ullstein papers. For the first half of 1932, he played out his assigned role in the Party apparat. He met his contacts twice a week, in secret, and dictated Ullstein gossip along with bits of inside diplomatic news to a mysterious, unfriendly woman, who was at === Page 86 === 244 PARTISAN REVIEW times joined by a higher-up called “Edgar.” (Both paced the floor, Koestler remembers with a shudder, marching at right angles across his sitting room, which created an atmosphere of fraternal collaboration: “That is about as much warmth as I got out of the Party at that stage.") Gradually, like a suitor courting a woman who is playing hard to get, Koestler insinuated himself deeper into the Party's network. This meant slowly yielding his independence of mind. The first “bourgeois ten- dency" to go was his journalist's curiosity, which he replaced with a view of the world couched in the Party's sophistry. Koestler could see no rea- son why, for example, with Hitler's power growing, the Party fought the Social Democrats as a "class-enemy" and refused to work for a united front. However cowardly the Socialist politicians, they had some eight million supporters and—this was before the Von Papen coup—were still a considerable power in the Reichstag. From his position at the Ullstein papers Koestler knew many in the Socialist rank and file to be people of courage and sincerity. Should the communists really have been working all along to bring down the Weimar state? That question, Koestler was informed, was not to be pursued. He accepted the discipline. Morally, the Party was always right because its aims were right, in accord with history as it must unfold. It was justified in all its actions, however apparently unscrupulous. Logically, the Party was always right because it embodied—“and knew it embodied"—the will of the Prole- tariat, the active, universal class of history. Opponents of the Party on this or that issue, however cogent their arguments, were the mere prod- ucts of their perverting environment, the bearers of false consciousness. "Renegades from the Party were lost souls. The Social Democrats, while "subjectively" allies of the Party's causes, were objectively allies of the Nazis; they were always lackeys of the ruling class, "Social Fascists." None of these claims persuaded Koestler. The point is, they consoled === Page 87 === CLARE CAVANAGH The Art of Losing: Polish Poetry and Translation I VE CALLED MY ESSAY “THE ART OF LOSING” for obvious reasons: according to many critics, losing things is what translators do best. And it seems to me—although this may just be my personal bias—that trans- lators of poetry generally get the worst of it. “Why isn’t your translation faithful? Why isn’t it literal?” we’re asked—as if faithful and literal were synonyms, and as if one of poetry’s tasks weren’t to shake us loose from the fetters of literal-mindedness. “Why did you keep the form and mangle the meaning, or vice versa?” we’re queried—as if poetry weren’t forever invit- ing us to consider the forms of meaning and the meaning of forms. Trans- lating poetry, we’re often reminded, is impossible. Well, apparently so is bees’ flying—but the bees who translate poetry have been busy for a long while now, so perhaps it’s time to reconsider this particular brand of impos- sibility. What people really mean when they say this, I suspect, is that it’s impossible to translate poetry perfectly. Fair enough. But what are the other activities that we human beings perform so flawlessly against which the translation of poetry is being measured and found wanting? My title is meant to suggest a more humane vision of translation. It implies, I hope, that the losses and gains that make up the art of trans- lation are intertwined, and further, that in the case of poetry, the trans- lator’s “art of loss,” in John Felstiner’s phrase, may perhaps be akin to what Elizabeth Bishop calls the “art of losing,” in her glorious villanelle “One Art.” I want to examine not how translation violates lyric art so much as the kinship I see between the force that impels some people to write lyric poetry—the force that Osip Mandelstam calls “the craving for form creation”—and the drive that pushes others to translate it. And I’d also like to take a look at what is lost and found when you try to fol- low the poet’s form-creating impulse by recreating, however imperfectly, the original poem’s rhyme and meter. Bishop’s villanelle is a perfect starting point for what I have in mind not only because it’s one of the loveliest poems in the English language. Clare Cavanagh teaches Slavic Literatures at Northwestern University. === Page 88 === 246 PARTISAN REVIEW It's also been recreated-marvelously-in Polish by my sometime co- translator Stanislaw Baranczak, who is perhaps the most gifted and pro- lific translator from English in the history of Polish literature. And Bishop's poem served, in turn, to create a new form in Polish poetry. It inspired Baranczak's own villanelle \"Plakala w nocy,\" from his most recent collection Chirnrgiczna precyzja (Surgical Precision, 1998), which we have since translated into English as \"She Cried That Night.\" I'll turn to that poem in a moment. But first, Bishop's villanelle: The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the inten- to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. -Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. Modern poetry, Jean-Paul Sartre remarks, "is the case of the loser winning." And the tug-of-war between mastery and loss that structures Bishop's poem would seem to lend weight to Sartre's paradox. But let me turn here to another poem, one whose title appears to contradict my argument. I have in mind one of Wislawa Szymborska's best-known lyrics, "The Joy of Writing" ("Radosc pisania"). The kind of creation Szymborska celebrates might initially seem directly opposed to the "one art" that shapes Bishop's poem. Szymborska's joy of writing, though, === Page 89 === CLARE CAVANAGH 247 derives by necessity from the limitations that circumscribe and define all human existence: this joy, she writes, is "the revenge of a mortal hand" (my italics). "The twinkling of an eye," she exults, "will take as long as I say, / and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities, / full of bullets stopped in mid-flight." But "what's here isn't life," she reminds us: the poet's temporary revenge makes sense only against the backdrop of a world in which bullets can't be halted by rhymes and poetry's "tiny eter- nities" are quickly gobbled up by greedy time. Szymborska's ephemeral triumphs are tied to defeat in the same way that Bishop's shaky efforts to master loss are trailed by their inescapable rhyme word, "disaster." If poetry itself can effect only momentary "stays against confusion," then what can possibly be gained by its parasitical in-law, translation? Let's turn here briefly to Baranczak's version of Bishop's "One Art," and take a look at what's been lost and found in translation. First things first: Baranczak keeps the form, and he keeps it beautifully. He even manages, miraculously enough, to retain some of Bishop's key enjamb- ments. Polish doesn't permit him to imitate the eloquent series of rhymes and half-rhymes that Bishop builds around "master" and "dis- aster": "fluster," "faster," "last, or," "vaster," "gesture." He compen- sates, though, with a sequence of movingly imperfect rhymes in the stanzas' second lines: "przeczucie," "klucze," "uciecie," "uklucie," "nie wroce," "w sztuce." Even a rough translation of these phrases is enough to show how closely he sticks to the original poem's sense: "forebod- ing," "keys," "to flee," "pang," "won't return," "in art." He can't sal- vage the seemingly crucial rhyme of "master/disaster" in his Polish text-and it's a loss, but it isn't a disaster. And this is largely because he manages to retain the exquisite villanelle form of the original lyric. The poem's structuring patterns of continuity and slippage, repetition and change, form a perfect analogue to its concern with what is lost through time and what may be retained. Without these, the poem would indeed be lost in translation. Let me turn now to what Baranczak makes of this form within his own work. Two of Chirurgiczna precyzja's most moving lyrics are vil- lanelles, and the poems share not only the form of "One Art"; they also mirror its concern with mastery and loss, with time's inevitable depre- dations as partially countered by art. In "She Cried That Night" partic- ularly, Baranczak draws upon Bishop's psychologizing of the villanelle form, as repetition, recognition, and resistance intertwine to dramatize the psyche's efforts both to evade and accept knowledge almost past bearing. (She turns another inherited form to similar ends in her glori- ous "Sestina.") The poetic form is crucial to the forms of knowing and === Page 90 === 248 PARTISAN REVIEW loss that the poem enacts, which is why we worked to retain it, at a cost, in our English version. She Cried That Night, But Not for Him to Hear To Ania, the only one She cried that night, but not for him to hear. In fact her crying wasn't why he woke. It was some other sound; that much was clear. And this half-waking shame. No trace of tears all day, and still at night she works to choke the sobs; she cries, but not for him to hear. And all those other nights: she lay so near but he had only caught the breeze's joke, the branch that tapped the roof. That much was clear. The outside dark revolved in its own sphere: no wind, no window pane, no creaking oak had said: “She’s crying, not for you to hear.” Untouchable are those tangibly dear, so close, they’re closed, too far to reach and stroke a quaking shoulder-blade. This much is clear. And he did not reach out—for shame, for fear of spoiling the tears' tenderness that spoke: “Go back to sleep. What woke you isn’t here. It was the wind outside, indifferent, clear.” —tr. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh There is no equivalent to the villanelle in the Polish tradition; in fact, Baranczak's use of the form was seen by Polish critics as his personal contribution to Polish versification. The poetics of loss thus produce a clear gain for Polish poetry as well as giving a suggestive example of ways in which the translator's art, or at least this particular translator's art, both resembles and nourishes the lyric impulse. In Wordsworth's Prelude, Stephen Gill remarks, “all loss is converted into gain.” My hunch is that this holds true not just for The Prelude, but for much of modern poetry generally (and perhaps even at times for translation). Certainly the Polish tradition confirms Gill’s comment with a vengeance. Since the time of the great Romantics—Adam Mickiewicz, === Page 91 === CLARE CAVANAGH 249 Juliusz Slowacki, Zygmunt Krasinski-Polish poets have apparently wielded precisely the power that Shelley covets in his famous "Defense of Poetry." After Poland vanished from the map of Europe following the partitions of the late eighteenth century, these writers became their bat- tered nation's acknowledged legislators. But if modern Polish history is any example, the losses that foster acknowledged bards and prophets may not offset the gains. Poets took the place of the state when Prussia, Austria, and Russia divided Poland between them, erasing it from the map of Europe for over a century. Poets fought and died in the Home Army that opposed the Nazi invaders during World War II. And poets served as the moral "second government," in Solzhenitsyn's phrase, that countered the illegitimate regime imported from Soviet Russia following the war. They enjoyed a prestige and popularity that their Western coun- terparts could only dream of. Not surprisingly, modern Polish poetry has produced a spectacular series of poems demonstrating the possibilities of creation from loss, as poets struggled to infuse a bleak postwar reality with what Mandelstam calls "teleological warmth" by creating lyric forms to take the place of the domestic shapes and human habitations shattered by one atrocity or another. Two of the poems I'll quote here come from Czeslaw Milosz's translations in his anthology Postwar Polish Poetry. The first is Leopold Staff's "Foundations": I built on the sand And it tumbled down I built on a rock And it tumbled down. Now when I build, I shall begin With the smoke from the chimney. The next is Miron Bialoszewski's "And Even, Even If They Take Away the Stove," which he subtitles "My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy": I have a stove similar to a triumphal arch! They take away my stove similar to a triumphal arch!! Give me back my stove similar to a triumphal arch!!! === Page 92 === 250 PARTISAN REVIEW They took it away. What remains is a grey naked hole. And this is enough for me; grey naked hole grey naked hole. greynakedhole. Finally, I want to quote at least one stanza from Milosz’s exquisite “Song on Porcelain,” in the splendid translation that Milosz himself produced in collaboration with Robert Pinsky: Rose-colored cup and saucer, Flowery demitasses: You lie beside the river Where an armored column passes. Winds from across the meadow Sprinkle the banks with down; A torn apple tree’s shadow Falls on the muddy path; The ground everywhere is strewn With bits of brittle froth— Of all things broken and lost Porcelain troubles me most. The “small sad cry/Of cups and saucers cracking,” Milosz tells us in the English variant, bespeaks the end of their “masters’ precious dream /Of roses, of mowers raking, /And shepherds on the lawn.” I want to mention in passing that Milosz violates his own translatorly preference for preserving sense at the expense of form here. This poem about the fragility both of human-made forms and the human form itself retains its pathos in English precisely because Milosz and Pinsky have managed to reproduce so movingly the stanzas and rhymes of the original. (I first heard the Polish original, I should note, sung in a student cabaret in Krakow in 1981, and the melody I heard fits the English version as neatly as it did the Polish original, a tribute to the translators’ gifts.) Broken teacups and shattered pastorals: this would seem to be the land- scape occupied by the lyric generally according to many recent theorists. === Page 93 === CLARE CAVANAGH 251 I have in mind critics from every point on the theoretical spectrum, from enemies of the lyric to its defenders, from Adorno, Bakhtin, and DeMan to Sharon Cameron or Jerome McGann. The lyric, as the ideological crit- ics in particular would have it, plays host to a panoply of enticing pipe dreams conjured up by benighted idealists whose visions are doomed in advance to frustration as reality fails time and again to ratify their various Xanadus and Byzantiums. Terry Eagleton, to give one particularly egre- gious example, sees it as a chief culprit in art's alleged "refusal of life actu- ally conducted in actual society,” which amounts to “complicity with class-interested strategies of smoothing over historical conflict and con- tradictions with claims of natural and innate organization." But it's not simply the ideologists who see the lyric as aiming toward a sort of aesthetic isolationism. As Sharon Cameron puts it in Lyric Time, the poet strives to evade "the hesitations and ambiguities of a dif- ficulty reality” in his quest for “radical sameness” and the “transcen- dence of mortal vision." He thus becomes the literary equivalent of Sisyphus, as his inevitable failure to attain a definitive reprieve from the limits of mortality plunges him time and again into a kind of lyric inferno, in which he is subjected to every imaginable form of “failure,” “pain,” “despair,” “exhaustion,” “grief,” and “terror.” What do we make in this context of Bialoszewski's little poem on his vanished stove, with its puzzling subtitle: "My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy." We could, of course, read this as simple, even simple-minded irony. But I think we would be wrong. The world may well offer only, as Cameron writes, "a landscape of lost things." But Bialoszewski demonstrates that each loss also offers a new way of seeing and some- thing new to see, even if what comes into view is only a “grey naked hole." He manages to generate a new form from absence and emptiness as the "greynakedhole" takes on a life of its own. Seen this way, the world's inescapable losses generate not only pain, but also creative pos- sibility and even perhaps “inexhaustible joy.” (The poem's final lines in the original Polish read as follows: "szara naga jama/szara naga jamal szara-ra-na-ga-ja-ma/szaranagajima." They thus provide an exuberantly Bialoszewskian twist on the art of losing, as the writers Dariusz Sosnicki and Piotr Sommer have suggested to me: this is the closest a Polish poet can come to speaking Japanese). I've mentioned the rich Polish tradition of poetic creation from loss. But Bialoszewski's lyric with its unexpected subtitle suggests a different direction taken by some of post-war Poland's greatest poets. This is what I will call the tradition of "joyful failure," in which the poet is plagued not so much by the world's emptiness as by its unplumbable abundance. === Page 94 === 252 PARTISAN REVIEW "You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" the comedian Steven Wright asks. Certainly not in a single poem, or even in a single human life. This is the dilemma shared by poets like Czeslaw Milosz, Adam Zagajewski, or Wislawa Szymborska, whose lyrics are linked by their endlessly resourceful, invariably thwarted efforts to achieve at last what Milosz calls the "unattainable" or, in Polish, "unembraced" or "unembraceable earth" (nieobjęta ziemia). "There was too much / of Lvov, it brimmed the container / it burst glasses, overflowed / each pond, lake, smoked through every/chimney," Zagajewski writes in "To Go to Lvov" ("Jechac do Lwowa"), a poem that is at once both a stirring elegy to a vanished world and a paean to its inextinguishable presence: "[Lvov] is everywhere," the poem ends. No merely human vessel can hope to contain once and for all a world that precedes us, exceeds us, and will finally outlast us: Lvov "burst glasses . . . smoked through every chimney," Zagajewski warns. (I'm quoting here, I should add, from Renata Gorczynska's splendid English version of the poem.) The lyric form, with its built-in limitations, can't pretend to comprehensiveness in a way a novel or an epic poem might. It can serve, though, as a perfect embodiment or enactment of the indi- vidual's ceaselessly renewed, joyous struggle to come to terms with a world that always lies slightly beyond his or her reach. And here I want to turn to two poems, or rather two translations, in which I attempted to keep up with two poets working to keep up with the world itself. The first is Szymborska's "Birthday" ("Urodziny"): So much world all at once-how it rustles and bustles! Moraines and morays and morasses and mussels, the flame, the flamingo, the flounder, the feather- how to line them all up, how to put them together? All the thickets and crickets and creepers and creeks! The beeches and leeches alone could take weeks. Chinchillas, gorillas, and sarsaparillas- thanks so much, but this excess of kindness could kill us. Where's the jar for this burgeoning burdock, brooks' babble, rooks' squabble, snakes' squiggle, abundance, and trouble? How to plug up the gold mines and pin down the fox, how to cope with the lynx, bobolinks, streptococs! Take dioxide: a lightweight, but mighty in deeds; what about octopodes, what about centipedes? I could look into prices, but don't have the nerve: these are products I just can't afford, don't deserve. Isn't sunset a little too much for two eyes === Page 95 === CLARE CAVANAGH 253 that, who knows, may not open to see the sun rise? I am just passing through, it's a five-minute stop. I won't catch what is distant; what's too close, I'll mix up. While trying to plumb what the void's inner sense is, I'm bound to pass by all these poppies and pansies. What a loss when you think how much effort was spent perfecting this petal, this pistil, this scent for the one-time appearance that is all they're allowed, so aloofly precise and so fragrily proud. -tr. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh In the poem, Szymborska sends language scrambling, by way of her frantic wordplay, rhythm, and rhymes, to keep pace with the relentless form-creation that animates nature itself. (She also provides, if we needed one, a perfect defense against the myth that literalness equals fidelity when translating poetry. What ham-handed translator would render the poem's fifth and sixth lines as follows: "These thickets and muzzles and breams and rains, /geraniums and praying mantises, where will I put them?" The Polish text is clearly calling out for translators doing their damnedest to channel Gilbert and Sullivan or maybe Ogden Nash: "All the thickets and crickets and creepers and creeks! /The beeches and leeches alone could take weeks.") The second poem I want to quote is Adam Zagajewski's beautiful "Mysticism for Beginners" ("Mistyka dla poczatkujacych"): The day was mild, the light was generous. The German on the café terrace held a small book on his lap. I caught sight of the title: Mysticism for Beginners. Suddenly I understood that the swallows patrolling the streets of Montepulciano with their shrill whistles, and the hushed talk of timid travelers from Eastern, so-called Central Europe, and the white herons standing-yesterday? the day before?- like nuns in fields of rice, and the dusk, slow and systematic, erasing the outlines of medieval houses, and olive trees on little hills, abandoned to the wind and heat, and the head of the Unknown Princess that I saw and admired in the Louvre, === Page 96 === 254 PARTISAN REVIEW and stained-glass windows like butterfly wings sprinkled with pollen, and the little nightingale practicing its speech beside the highway, and any journey, any kind of trip, are only mysticism for beginners, the elementary course, prelude to a test that's been postponed. —tr. Clare Cavanagh It is another demonstration of the capacity to create lyric joy through apparent failure as Zagajewski, in a characteristic syntactic tour de force, breathlessly stretches one sentence out for the space of twenty-odd lines, only to conclude with the anticlimactic postponed examination that takes the place of the revelation—"suddenly I understood"—we've been waiting for. In my own conclusion, though, I want to turn to a distinctly nonpoetic analogy for what I see as perhaps the chief affinity between the poet's joy- ful frustration and that of the translator. A few years back, when my son was first learning to walk, he started playing a game that scared the hell out of us. He would take a blanket, put it over his head, run down the hall- way, bang into the walls at full speed and fall down on the floor laughing his head off. "Oh my God," we thought, "he's going to be a quarterback." But then I happened to be talking to a friend who's a child psychologist, and I told her about Marty's game. "It's a philosophical experiment," she said. "He wants to find out if the world still exists even when he can't see it, and he laughs when he hits the wall because it's still there." Form, substance, and joyful failure: these are defining elements not just in my son's game, but also, it strikes me, both in lyric poetry and in poetic translation. Of course translating poetry is impossible: all the best things are. But the impulse that drives one to try is not so far removed, I think, from the force that sends the lyric poet out time after time to master the world in a few lines of verse. You see a wonderful thing in front of you, and you want it. You try reading it over and over, you see if you can memorize it, or copy it out line by line. And nothing works; it's still there. So if it doesn't already exist in English, you turn to trans- lation; you try remaking it in your own language, in your own words, in the vain hope of getting it once and for all, of finally making it your own. And sometimes you even feel, for a while at least, for a day or two or even a couple of weeks, that you've got it, it's worked, the poem's yours. But then you turn back to the poem itself at some point, and you have to hit your head against the wall and laugh: it's still there. === Page 97 === FREDERICK FEIRSTEIN Trauma and Poetry: A Psychoanalyst's View on the Healing Power of the Arts SINCE THE EARLIEST WRITINGS of Freud and his followers, psycho- analysts and critics have tried to construct theories of creativity that link psychoanalysis and the arts. My ideas about the relation- ship between psychoanalysis and creativity come from my work as a psychoanalyst, from my writing poetry and plays, and from my advanced seminars on symbolization and creativity. They have found their way into my psychoanalytic writings and literary criticism having to do with metaphor, dramatic structure, and meter and rhyme. In thirty years of clinical work, I've learned to listen carefully for one or two key metaphors that not only express unconscious fantasies but perhaps more importantly lead to memories and repressed memories of traumatic events. By bringing these metaphors into the psychoanalytic dialogue and exploring their many permutations, I can help my patients heal what Freud called “the split in the personality," thereby revising and expanding their life narratives. The mind/brain has a natural propensity to use metaphors and dra- matic techniques for self-healing after trauma. Children usually and adults often psychically reenact traumas in their dreams. Some people get relief from such reenactments by turning its details into dream metaphors. Oth- ers dramatize their traumas by making other characters in their dreams suffer their trauma, with their “selves” watching. In our waking life we naturally try to repair trauma by writing and reading poetry and participating in the other arts. During the walling in of the Warsaw Ghetto, for instance, right up until the boxcars were sealed, there were more theatrical and musical performances, art exhibits, and poetry readings than ever before in that city. Creativity has a healing power. It gives writer and reader, painter and viewer, composer and audience a safe place to reexperience emotions that have been stunned into silence by making a bridge of metaphors connecting and Frederick Feirstein is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. His most recent book is New and Selected Poems. === Page 98 === 256 PARTISAN REVIEW creating distance between what we knew and felt and what we didn't want to know or feel. In the aftermath of 9/11, therapists had to try to heal themselves along with their traumatized patients. I tried to help my analysands articulate past personal and public traumas that were instantaneously connecting to the new one. As I helped them ward off Post-Traumatic Stress symptoms from developing, I helped myself by writing a long lyric sequence, The Unholy Dark. The sequence helped me metaphori- cally connect the 9/11 trauma with earlier ones and to complete a mourning that I had been unable to do before. But even this mourning process would turn out to be incomplete until months later, when I dra- matized the aftermath of the disaster in Dark Carnival: A Dramatic Monologue. My wife and I were home when the first plane hit. My son who lived downtown saw it and called us. We turned on the T.V. and watched transfixed as movie fantasy turned into reality. That day, and through the rest of the week as I listened to my analysands, I observed that the towers quickly became metaphors for parents who had died, or crum- bled for them in childhood and adolescence. These metaphors showed up in their dreams and just below the surface of their daylit dialogue. At the same time, I saw how the fall of the towers was also connected for me with the deaths of my parents, and the clustered deaths of my extended family. Just months after my son was born, my father died from a flu shot— an ordinary American object, like a commercial jet. Afterwards my sec- ond tower, my mother, crumbled emotionally and then died of a heart attack. As I was beginning to write The Unholy Dark, I found I was connecting the rescue efforts to my failed efforts to rescue them. (I had warned my father not to take that shot and had tried to stop my mother's long fall.) Further back the disaster and rescue efforts con- nected to my being three years old and watching my mother fall down unconscious, seemingly dead. It also hooked into another public disas- ter I was directly involved in—trying to rescue children from starvation during the Nigerian Civil War. Then, in my twenties, I realized I was also trying to rescue my mother's childhood from the pogroms she had witnessed in Russia. Here is the first poem I wrote in The Unholy Dark, "In the Restaurant": I'm served by Erica, badly exposed To Chernobyl burning in those breakfast years, Scrambling her cells to terrorist cells === Page 99 === FREDERICK FEIRSTEIN 257 Just miles from where my mother witnessed Hell. “By smell,” she says, “we’re forced to witness this Crematorium mixing bone and skin, Spreading up here like metastasis . . . And your son watched the two planes hit, and your Brother-in-law escaped from a top floor? “So eat,” she smiles like Mom, “You're getting thin.” And time and place collapse and the dust blows in. As the days following 9/11 limped on, I realized the poems I was writing were developing into a sequence connecting the present disaster with still earlier public and private traumas. I might say that precon- sciously as well as consciously, I was symbolically making bridges between this event and the fantasies it generated with split-off earlier ones whose full meaning and emotional landscape were becoming clearer as I wrote. From my own neuropsychoanalytic point of view, I might also say that I was storing as metaphors and symbols my experi- ence of 9/11 in my brain's cortico-limbic system, with the aid of the self- hypnotic effects of meter and rhyme to prevent long-term kindling of neurons that result in Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Or to put it yet another way: in the unconscious, time doesn't exist, and by using metaphors, meter, and rhyme I was trying to place the experience of this trauma and loss in the larger, more time-bound narrative of the poetic sequence, thereby revising my life narrative as I had told it in earlier poems. One of the recurring themes of the sequence and earlier poems about my life involves the loss of home—of my extended family and of my bucolic life with my wife and young son. For instance, in 1994 I had written “The House We Had to Sell”: This is the house we lived in, white as a bride. Mozart is echoing the birds outside. We're sitting at the table playing gin. My son is laughing every time he wins Because he's eight, because we're all in love, Living the future we're still dreaming of. Spring is in the mountains, green as Oz, In the fresh-cut flowers in the crystal vase, Mirroring the garden where the bees are thick. Though everyone was dying, dead or sick, These were our uncontaminated hours, Like bottled water sipped by scissored flowers, === Page 100 === 258 PARTISAN REVIEW Permanent in memory, sealed by the pain That childhood ends, and we can't go home again. Psychoanalysis and the arts teach us that we're compelled to repeat our traumas, losses, and disappointments as a means of helping us find a form for what's hurt us, for making what's passively experienced active. So this theme about loss of home would repeat itself under the impact of 9/11, and I would be compelled to write not only to help myself to stay alive emotionally but also to bring some aesthetic plea- sure and what Aristotle called catharsis to others. Two-thirds of the way into the sequence, "Half the Office" describes half of my psychoanalytic office in which are a vase from my mother's house and a painting of a house reminiscent of the house we had to sell. The poem now moves the theme of loss into one of reattachment and reconciliation: ... A store-bought painting of a farm house door, Blue like our Dutch Colonial, and land With its luscious fruit trees-apple, peach, and plum, Its grape arbor with its ancient moss-stained swing, Its violet beds and staked delphiniums, Its bluebirds, and its bluejays bickering. Below the door, irises in profusion, Stuffed in a basket colored copper, tin. We bought our house in Time for its seclusion. Our road once faced the Berkshires' oldest inn Where then only haystacks stood, their lights the stars Our son would reach on tiptoe, trying to snatch Fireflies, one hand Venus, one hand Mars. It vanished as if Time blew out a match. What is the meaning in this Chinese vase Mom left, four scenes of mother and child In daily tasks made fabulous as Oz? The child is earnest, Mom is gracious, mild. For me the meaning's green and porcelain white And red and green and black with flecks of gold, And I am seven captive to delight Though I am nearly sixty-two years old === Page 101 === FREDERICK FEIRSTEIN 259 And I can't mourn her, though I mourned the rest Who died in clumps like those who disappeared, And when she fell down dead I got depressed And lost myself in clouds of childhood fears. The vase is calm in motion, glazed like hope, Covers me blindly with these simple themes, Mother and child who will not have to cope With what's beyond the realm of quiet dreams. For months after finishing the fifty-page sequence, I was uneasy, knowing I would have to go beyond the narratives of my own life his- tory and dramatize 9/11's impact on my beloved city. I had celebrated Manhattan exuberantly in Manhattan Carnival: A Dramatic Mono- logue. Now, of course, the city had changed, its joyous mood darkened by the clouds of 9/11. So I began to write a sequel, Dark Carnival: A Dramatic Monologue searching along with my leading character for light and hope. In Manhattan Carnival, Mark Stern wakes up after an awful one- night stand to search for his estranged wife Marlene. He goes on a comedic episodic journey through 1970s Manhattan, the form couplets underscoring Mark's attempt to reunite with Marlene. Being a comedy, this dramatic poem ends with Mark and Marlene dancing to the song Yesterday and then, with rising couplets drawn in parallel, coupling to make a child. So now in the Fall of 2002, thirty years later, Mark Stern wakes up again. Bleary-eyed, in the Dark Carnival of a changed Manhattan, he says to himself: “Get up, Mark Stern, it's summer, spring, it's fall, And winter's coming fast; the caterwauling- Ing geese, heading for Miami Beach Fly in a V, perfectly out of reach, As Jack, twirling bacon on a fork, Called on his cell phone—then flew from New York Over New Jersey, south to God knows where, A soul in freedom, once a millionaire Broker with Morgan Stanley, handsome Jack, Sensitive Jack. Mourning won't bring him back." === Page 102 === 260 PARTISAN REVIEW With this awakening Mark sets out on a journey through the city, searching for Marlene and his thirty-year-old daughter Jill. Jill is in despair over the death of her husband Jack. But why did I use those nursery-rhyme names? On one level my missing character Jack referred to our loss of "handsome Jack /sensitive Jack" Kennedy, to a similar shock to our innocence when he was assassinated. In the months after I finished Dark Carnival, it came to me who Jack and Jill represented more personally. In this dramatic poem, I seemed to have reversed the generations. Jack and Jill, those nursery characters were symbolically connected through reversal with my lost parents: Jack, like my father, killed by the deadly needle of a plane, and Jill collapsing into despair like my mother: "Jack and Jill went up a hill/To fetch a pail of water/ Jack fell down and broke his crown/And Jill came tumbling after." Later I would discover a connection to a very early trauma that per- haps led me to choose not only the names of nursery rhyme characters but also the form of the poem. A psychoanalytic peer group I had joined was discussing infant research and psychoanalysis and the conviction that infants really couldn't conceptualize their feelings until two years old. A couple of comments made me feel trapped and angry. Then I had a flashback to being well under two years old, during the Second World War. I saw myself lying on my parents' bed with severe, recurrent ear abscesses waiting for the doctor to come and puncture them. I vividly remembered tapping out varying patterns of ten beats with my fingers to distract myself from the pain. Was this a basis for meter in my work, and specifically in Dark Carnival with its many varying feet and caesuras? Finally, it seemed that this doctor's needles also metaphori- cally connected to my father's flu shot and those two jets. Through this self-analysis, I learned that if metaphor and dramatiza- tion were not only practiced poetic and dramatic techniques but also derivatives of earlier traumas and fantasy, so too were meter and rhyme. Perhaps at its deepest level, my attraction to rhyme originated in a very early attempt to hold myself together then as I was doing now, and to protect the good image of my parents from the anger I must have been feeling as they held my arms down while the doctor held my head and pierced. Perhaps the rescue fantasy driving both the lyric sequence and the dramatic monologue derived at its earliest from a profound wish to have my parents rescue me. Here then is how the contemporary disaster and the series of early } traumas it called up ended with my characters in Dark Carnival: Mark finally finds Marlene and Jill sitting on the marble steps of the restored Winter Garden where Jack had proposed marriage to Jill. She and Mar- === Page 103 === FREDERICK FEIRSTEIN 261 lene have gone down to the disaster site after breakfast (N.B. "In The Restaurant") to mourn Jack. While a chamber group is playing, Jill tells Mark: "I've come to mourn him here and, as we've prayed, We've heard rock music classically played. I see Jack dancing in a masquerade With Lady Death-black dress, black hat, white plume Uptown, crosstown, and in our living room. The music swells and they are out of sight. I call him, 'Jack, come back to say Goodnight.' But I hear just this haunting melody: 'My darling, save the last ghost dance for me.'” After a few more lines of Jill's, Mark responds with end-stopped cou- plets in parallel to end the poem with a music that reunites the three of them: "Come on, let's take our baby home, Marlene. Let's flag a cab or gypsy limousine. Let's take her home, to thirty years and back Before another terrorist attack (Their bodies shaved, their eyes all deadened black) Attempts to make our skyline disappear. Let's seize the day, this night, this dying year. Let's seize Thanksgiving, Christmas.... Do you hear That segue, bows drawn slowly as they play? They innocently smile at us and sway. You know that song, since six, Jill . . . Yesterday." To sum up: Working with metaphor, plot, characters, meter, and rhyme in the lyric sequence and the dramatic monologue helped me to prevent what might have become psychic numbing or at best the for- mation of symptoms. It also helped me stay not only emotionally alive but self-analytical as I listened to my analysands talk about what 9/11 and its aftermath meant to them. In an earlier issue of Partisan Review I described how in general the arts of psychoanalysis and poetry have certain similarities. In analyzing my own experiences and their relation to my poetry, I have tried to show how creativity may turn into healing power after public trauma. === Page 104 === JOSEPH FRANK Dostoevsky and Evil IN THE SPRING OF 2002, a colloquium on the problem of evil, spon- sored by the Nexus Foundation, was held at the University of Tilburg in Holland. I was a member of a panel assigned to discuss Dostoevsky, certainly the modern writer who has given the theme of evil one of its most powerful expressions. Our keynote speaker was the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, who, however, sprung a surprise on his fellow panelists and the audience by not speaking about Dosto- evsky at all. Instead, he read a sketch supposedly written by a fictional personage already familiar from his work, a writer like himself named Elizabeth Costello, presumably invited to speak at precisely such a con- ference on precisely such a topic; and she finds herself rebelling at the task she had assumed. Her own experience with evil, as she now horrifyingly recalls, was of having been badly beaten by a would-be lover, whom she had carelessly picked up as a young student out of self-indulgence and a youthful search for adventure. After accompanying him to a rooming house, she finally refused her favors; and, his frustration then turning to sadism, he beat her so brutally and relentlessly that, among other injuries, he broke her jaw. This had been her own personal experience with evil, the release of demonic forces in a human personality—forces, she had con- cluded, that craved satisfaction in her thwarted lover even more strongly than his initial demand for sexual surrender. The encounter left her with a psychic-emotional scar that had never healed; and although she had since become a successful novelist and essayist, she had never utilized this traumatic episode in her works. It had been too painful for her to resuscitate even in some altered artistic form. Now she was wondering why she had accepted the invitation to speak as a writer at a conference on evil. For she had begun to doubt whether anyone should be encour- aged to depict its all-too-widespread ravages in the modern world and whether those who did should be approved and applauded. Joseph Frank is Professor, Emeritus, in the Departments of Slavic Lan- guages and Literature and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. === Page 105 === JOSEPH FRANK 263 This question had become acute for her because she had recently read a novel describing the trial and execution of the German army officers who had attempted to assassinate Hitler. Ironically entitled The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg—thus evoking late-medieval and Renaissance celebrations of the peaceful pursuits and glories of roy- alty—the book had finally revolted her to the core. “All was going well enough until she came to the chapters describing the execution of the plotters.” The horrifying and repugnant details employed here showed these more or less aged notables being stripped physically of any shred of human dignity and being mocked and taunted by their executioner with the most revolting particularities (“how the shit would run down their spindly old-man’s legs”). This was more than she could endure; reading such pages made her “sick with the spectacle, sick with a world in which such things took place, until at last she pushed the book away and sat with her head in her hands.” The word that came to her mind at this point was “obscene,” and she had determined to object to the generally accepted opinion that the use of such material was necessarily desirable. Was she then in favor of cen- sorship? Not at all in the usual sense—that is, of some external author- ity setting limits to what could or could not be portrayed. But, inwardly, she had now come to question the belief, indigenous to Western culture as a whole, that “unlimited and illimitable endeavor” was unquestion- ably beneficial, and the accompanying conviction “that people are always improved by what they read.” Furthermore, she is not at all sure that “writers who venture into the darker territories of the human psy- che always return unscathed.” What troubles her above all is that, while appalled and repelled by the book, she had not been able to push it away entirely. It had resisted her feelings of revulsion and disgust, and she feared that some of the “absolute evil” it depicted had, as it were, also infected her: “she felt, she could have sworn, the brush of Satan’s hot, leathery wing.” Coetzee depicts the inner debate of his feminine alter ego with all the insinuating subtlety of his talent; but he does not allow her conclusion to remain unchallenged. Indeed, after she expresses such ideas in her paper, a member of the audience arises to contest her point of view. Moreover, Coetzee undermines her even further when she recalls that, in her own work, she had no more spared the feelings of the reader than the author she is now reproving. For she had “shown no qualms about rubbing people’s faces in, for instance, what went on in abattoirs. If Satan is not rampant in the abattoir, casting the shadow of its wings over the beast . . . where is he?” Those familiar with Coetzee’s writings === Page 106 === 264 PARTISAN REVIEW will recognize to what extent the preoccupations of Elizabeth Costello intersect with some of his own. But this is not my topic, and I shall not pursue any further the question of whether the self-doubt of his female novelist can be attributed to the author himself. In any case, the issue he raises, the issue of how far an author should go in defaming the human race, so to speak, remains totally unresolved; the narrator of the sketch proposes no solution to her dilemma. The crucial question raised by Coetzee, however—one that has been debated endlessly ever since Plato exiled those poets from his republic who did not portray the gods with sufficient reverence—was taken up somewhat later by another outstanding novelist, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa. His own works are immensely varied, but some—for example, his most recent book, The Feast of the Goat—portray naked evil in images perhaps less physically degrading than those of Coetzee's imagined novel but equally ruthless. Vargas Llosa clearly felt provoked by the views of his fellow novelist and responded brilliantly in his own terms, but in fact elaborating on the argument of the questioner from the audience who had risen to challenge Ms. Costello's talk. "Perhaps we would be able to read what Mr. West [the author of the Stauffenberg book] wrote," this person had said, "and learn from it, and therefore come out stronger rather than weaker." Vargas Llosa picks up this point by remarking that the act of reading a book does not in itself make anyone better or worse. The manner in which a poem, a novel, a play works on the sensi- bility or on a character varies to infinity, and much more as a result of the reader rather than of the work. To read Dostoevsky may, in some cases, lead to traumatic and criminal consequences, while on the other hand it is not impossible that the spermatic iniquities of the Marquis de Sade have increased the percentage of virtuous readers, vaccinating them against carnal vice. Similarly, some readers of the novel that so appalled Ms. Costello might have been strengthened in their hatred of sadistic cruelty. All this being true, the question still remains of whether an author should be relieved of all responsibility for the effect created by his work. Coetzee's spokesperson perhaps goes too far by implying that certain aspects of human evil should be off-limits for literary depiction; but Var- gas Llosa perhaps also goes too far in freeing writers of any responsi- bility for the possible consequences of their works. Might not Ms. Costello's outcry of "obscenity" have been caused by the manner in === Page 107 === JOSEPH FRANK 265 which the author re-imagined the scene of execution-not so much the event itself, which could well have held the victims up for admiration, but the author's choice to stress unrelentingly an effort to humiliate and degrade them as much as possible? Indeed, there seems to be such a sug- gestion in the Coetzee text when Ms. Costello asks: “Where could West have got his material from? Could there really have been witnesses who went home that night . . . [and] wrote down, in words that must have scorched the paper, an account of what they had seen?" Manifestly not, so far as we know: West was writing a novel. The details chosen to evoke the scene are his own creation, and her horrified response cannot simply be fobbed off as a private reader-reaction. This whole discussion arose in connection with Dostoevsky; and though Coetzee never mentions his name, it may not be overly specu- lative to assume that the reflections of Ms. Costello also contain an implicit reference to his novels. Indeed, in his own day the same sort of charge was often made against Dostoevsky that Coetzee / Costello makes against Paul West. The so-called "heros" of his major novels are criminals who either commit murder themselves or motivate others (in the case of The Idiot, unwittingly) to carry out their evil intentions. In The Devils, the "hero" Stavrogin is not only guilty of incitement to murder but also of pedophilia, leading to the despairing suicide of a hapless twelve- year-old girl that he does nothing to prevent. (To be sure, the chapters containing the pedophilia episode were not published in Dostoevsky's life- time, but rumors about their scabrous content were widespread. They are now published as an appendix to every edition of the text.) In any case, there is no question that Dostoevsky was constantly skirting the moral bounds that most serious writers in the nineteenth century imposed on themselves, or the bounds imposed by the various censorships of the time. If reading Dostoevsky's novels can possibly lead to criminal conse- quences, it is thus not simply, as Vargas Llosa might lead us to believe, because readers have the option of using them any way they please. The works do, after all, grippingly portray criminal impulses and criminal deeds, and nobody depicted the horror of the murder of an innocent more unsparingly than Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment. He takes us into much the same region as Paul West; yet the effect of Dosto- evsky's unflinching explorations of evil turn out, for most readers, to be quite the opposite of those that Ms. Costello finds unbearable. They may have been brushed by Satan's wing, but only for a moment and not indelibly. How does Dostoevsky achieve this result, which neither the views of Coetzee nor Vargas Llosa help us to account for? The question is worth examining here at a little more length. === Page 108 === 266 PARTISAN REVIEW Dostoevsky's early work from 1840 to 1849, when he was arrested because of his association with the supposedly revolutionary Petra- shevsky circle, reveals no traces of the preoccupation with violent crime that would later play so important a role in his works. Rather, he depicted the minuscule torments and travails of the educated lower class of St. Petersburg, members of the huge government bureaucracy that labored to administer the vast reaches of the Russian Empire. All these were the "poor folk" that he portrayed in his first novel and early sto- ries, victims rather than evildoers. Their greatest fear was that they might, in some way, infringe the constricting social-cultural taboos that marked their place in society; that they might be considered to be "free- thinkers" by their superiors and thus ground down even more relent- lessly. All are obsessed with a pathological sense of guilt as a result of such fears, and in the most extensive portrayal of such a schizophrenic consciousness in "The Double," the character ends in a madhouse. In only one story, "The Landlady," do we come across someone possibly guilty of a serious crime-the elderly merchant Murin, who may once have been a robber chieftain of Volga bandits. But this story, an imita- tion of Gogol's Ukrainian folk-tales, is too full of Romantic trappings to be taken seriously on this level. There is one work in this period, however, hardly more than a slight sketch, in which something that might be considered a crime is commit- ted; but it is really only a pitiful misdeed. The story is called "An Hon- est Thief," and the oxymoronic title tells it all. A hopelessly destitute and incurable drunkard, in order to buy more vodka, steals a pair of breeches from a benefactor who has taken him in out of charity; and the thief becomes so filled with remorse that he dies of grief. It is a textbook example of the "sentimental Naturalism" for which Dostoevsky became known at this time, and in itself of minor importance. But there is one passage in the original text-Dostoevsky suppressed it in revision for some reason, and it is thus very little known-that is important for my purposes. The thief's benefactor is trying to explain what occurred to a third party, and asks his listener not to "despise a man who has fallen; that's what Christ, who loved all of us more than himself, told us not to do." And since "he died from grief and a bad conscience . . . he showed the world . . . he was a human being all the same." Men can struggle against vice; "it's not born with you-here today, it can be gone for good to-morrow; otherwise, if we were destined to stay depraved all through the ages because of original sin, Christ would never have come to us." This is of course the utterance of a character in a story, and I am well aware that it is a flagrant critical error to assume that it speaks for the === Page 109 === JOSEPH FRANK 267 author himself. Moreover, it is quite in keeping with the character, a simple-minded pensioner (a retired soldier, a man of the people) who would naturally use Christian references in his speech. All the same, I will risk attributing it to the author because I believe it tells us some- thing fundamental about Dostoevsky's view of human nature and its relation to evil. The Augustinian condemnation of humanity because of original sin has had much less influence in the Eastern Orthodox Church than in Roman Catholicism. There was thus very little obstacle to Dostoevsky's acceptance of the French Utopian Socialist Christianity that began to make headway at this time among “progressive” Russian intellectuals. This Christianity saw nothing in human nature to prevent translating the love-ethic of Christ into worldly, secular, and particularly social-political terms; and it was this love-ethic that dominated all of Dostoevsky's writings in this early period. Dostoevsky's arrest in 1849, and the four-year sentence he spent in a hard-labor prison camp in Siberia, marked a crucial turning point in his life. As he later wrote himself, it initiated what he called “the regenera- tion of his convictions,” a phrase that has been interpreted in a bewil- dering variety of ways. But one thing is certain: whatever the effect of these prison-camp years, it was linked to an encounter with evil for which he was totally unprepared. Nothing had provided him with any inkling of the moral anarchy that reigned, without any check, in the midst of the prison-camp world into which he was thrown. “I was astonished and upset,” he wrote in House of the Dead, “as if until then I had not suspected or heard anything about all that, and yet I knew it and had learned about it. But the reality makes quite a different impres- sion than what one learns about from books and hearsay.” Most of the convicts had committed at least one murder, if not several; they also stole from each other incessantly, lied, cheated, and drank themselves into stupefaction. Describing life among them, Dostoevsky speaks of “everything being defiled and degraded.” In some sense, these four years can be seen as a test of the view of human nature set down in “An Honest Thief”—the view that, even among those having surrendered to the temptation of evil, repentance and regeneration were always possible. And in the little-read but indispensable masterpiece House of the Dead (Tolstoy's favorite among Dostoevsky's works), he portrays, along with much else about prison-camp life that must be neglected here, the gradual passage of this test, and the reassur- ance that human nature—even among thieves and murderers—was not incurably corrupt. Mainly this is done indirectly—by indicating time and again, for example, without stating it explicitly, that many of the murders === Page 110 === 268 PARTISAN REVIEW were peasant responses to the intolerable mistreatment and injustices this class customarily suffered at the hands of their superiors. More impor- tant, perhaps, was that the atrocities of these peasant-criminals had not obliterated their moral sense. For Dostoevsky describes their behavior at the Easter services when each “brought his poor farthing,” feeling that “in God’s eyes we are all equal.” And “when with the chalice in his hands the priest read the words ‘ . . . accept me, O Lord, even as the thief,’ almost all of them bowed down to the ground with the clanking of chains, appar- ently applying the words literally to themselves.” A transformation thus took place in Dostoevsky’s relation to the peasant-convicts, one that provides the underlying thematic movement of House of the Dead. His feelings gradually evolved from the first shock of horror to that of a more sympathetic comprehension and even, at last, admiration. In a passage that misled Nietzsche, who thought Dostoevsky was providing confirmation for his own effort to go beyond conventional ideas of good and evil, Dostoevsky even wrote: “Perhaps, indeed, they [the peasant-convicts] were the most highly gifted and the strongest of all our people.” But he never describes his own evolution from within, never, for reasons that may be both external (censorship) and artistic (his aim of reporting on prison-camp life), depicts his own feelings directly. It is only seventeen years later, in a famous article of his Diary of a Writer (1876), “The Peasant Marey,” that he provided a psy- chological supplement to his prison memoirs. Here he begins with a sharp and swift evocation of an Easter week celebration in the camp, when the convicts could drink, carouse, and quarrel to their hearts’ content; and he looked on with a feeling of deep loathing at the raucous turbulence and brutality unrolling before his eyes. To escape, he walks outside the barracks and meets a cultivated Polish prisoner, who tells him disgustedly in French: “I hate these ban- dits.” Returning then to lie down on the plank bed where all the con- victs slept, he recalls a childhood incident when, frightened by the cry that a wolf was in the forest where he was strolling, he ran for succor to a peasant plowing in the fields, a serf owned by his father, named Marey. The kindly peasant calmed the frightened child with what Dosto- evsky describes as almost motherly tenderness, reassured him that there was no wolf, and sent him home after blessing him with the sign of the cross. As this recollection came flooding back, it also brought about a complete reversal in Dostoevsky’s earlier revulsion against the spectacle of peasant-convict barbarity: === Page 111 === JOSEPH FRANK 269 I remember, when I got off the plank bed and gazed around, that I suddenly felt I could look on these unfortunates with quite differ- ent eyes. . . . That despised peasant with shaven head and brand marks on his face, reeling with drink, bawling out his hoarse, drunken song-why, he may have been that very Marey; after all, I am not able to look into his heart. This is no longer the "sentimental Naturalism" of Dostoevsky's early period, the appeal not to judge the pathetic "crime" of the hopeless drunkard too harshly because he died of grief. The crimes of those in House of the Dead are instances of evil far surpassing anything Dosto- evsky could personally have met with earlier, but he still refuses to believe that such evil is immitigable and irreparable. Concealed in the human heart is also the kindness and compassion of Marey, and this contains the possibility of remorse and redemption. It is these responses that Dostoevsky now searches for (and finds) beneath the repellent exte- rior and even the horrendous crimes. Although Dostoevsky's novel and stories are filled with Christian sen- timents, imagery, and allusions, explicit firsthand statements about his religious convictions are quite rare. One of the very few is contained in a notebook entry from April 1864, written during an all-night vigil at the bier of his first wife. "To love man like oneself, according to the commandment of Christ," he scribbled then, "is impossible. The law of personality on earth binds. The Ego stands in the way." Evil is thus an inherent attribute of the human condition; only "Christ alone could love man as himself, but Christ is a perpetual eternal ideal to which man strives and, according to the law of nature, should strive." It is thus a law of (human) nature to strive to realize the ideal of Christ, and since human nature also contains another law, that of personality, it is thus locked into an eternal battle with itself. These words condense and express what Dostoevsky had learned in the prison camp, which had immeasurably broadened and deepened what may be called the honest- thief paradigm of his early years. In his Diary of a Writer (1873), Dostoevsky vividly exemplifies the same vision by citing a poem of Nekrasov entitled "Vlas." He is a reli- gious pilgrim who in the past had been a godless reprobate, flogging his wife to death and consorting with thieves and highwaymen. But after falling sick and experiencing a vision of the tortures of Hell, he takes an oath and becomes a pilgrim wandering through the land and collecting "offerings for God's church": === Page 112 === 270 PARTISAN REVIEW Filled with grief past consolation, Dark of face, erect, and tall, He passes on with gait unhurried, Through the village, through the town. *** But never word passed e'en his lips, A book, an icon at his side, Strong chains of iron round his hips, To overcome his sinful pride. This poem uses Russian peasant imagery to express the conversion of the sinner, and there is no doubt that Dostoevsky believed the Russian folk character in particular to be more amenable to such transformations than the people of other nations; but we may disregard the nationalistic slant of his ideas, which play little or no role in his artistic creations. Indeed, the intellectually sophisticated and highly cultivated characters of his novels undergo the same moral mutations as the untutored Vlas. What is com- mon to both is the struggle of moral conscience to live up to the "perpet- ual eternal ideal" of the love-ethic of Christ, despite the impossibility of ever truly accomplishing this endless task here on earth. All of Dosto- evsky's best works depict this struggle without flinching at portraying evil, but its manifestations are, if not balanced, then certainly mitigated by the torments of conscience unleashed in the psyche of his main characters. Let us open Crime and Punishment and look at the commission of the murder by Raskolnikov—a murder motivated, or so at least he believed, by "humanitarian" motives. Because she was so short the axe struck her full on the crown of the head. . . . Then he struck her again and yet again with all his strength, always with the blunt side of the axe and always on the crown of the head. Blood poured out as if from an overturned glass. . . . Her wide-open eyes looked ready to start out of their sockets, her forehead was wrinkled, and her whole face convul- sively distorted. Or let us look at the murder of the simple-minded Lizaveta, who comes into the room by accident. When she saw him run in, she trembled like a leaf and her face twitched spasmodically; she raised her hands to cover her mouth, but no scream came. . . . He flung himself forward with the axe; her lips writhed pitifully, like those of a young child when it is just === Page 113 === JOSEPH FRANK 271 beginning to be frightened and stands ready to scream, with its eyes fixed on the object of its fear. . . . The blow fell on her skull, split- ting it open from the top of the forehead almost to the crown of the head and felling her instantly. One would be hard put to match such grisly details in either Euro- pean or Russian novels of the same period, but their effect is ultimately offset by the intensity of Raskolnikov's inner suffering and his final inability to endure his total estrangement from the rest of humanity. Besides the murders, there is perhaps the even more shocking metamor- phosis, in Svidrigailov's dream, of the pitiful little five-year-old girl he stumbles on, shivering and crying, who a bit later smiles at him seduc- tively "with the face of a courtesan, the brazen face of a mercenary French harlot." This anticipates Stavrogin's pedophilia, but is immedi- ately countered by Svidrigailov's appalled reaction and his own suicide that follows shortly thereafter. Even Dostoevsky's deepest-dyed villain, himself guilty of despicable crimes, cannot endure this vision of childish innocence transformed into shameless vice. One can find example after example in Dostoevsky's works of the same boldness in depicting evil at work and the same effort to overcome its effects. But there is no point in continuing to pile up passages; we can go directly to his last and greatest work, The Brothers Karamazov, in which this issue is raised explicitly with a towering power and brilliance that makes it one of the few rivals to the Old Testament Book of Job. Nowhere else in Dostoevsky-nowhere, perhaps, since Dante and Mil- ton-can we find a panoply of horrors displayed in such profusion. The Turks who cut children from their mother's womb, or throw others who have been born into the air to catch on their bayonets while mothers look on; the "feeble little nag" mercilessly beaten "on its weeping, on its 'meek eyes'" (a detail already used in Crime and Punishment); the poor little five-year-old girl brutally beaten, thrashed and kicked by "cultured parents," then locked in an outhouse and forced to eat her excrement; the serf-boy torn to death by hunting dogs before his mother's eyes for having thrown a stone that lamed a favorite dog-all this leads Ivan Karamazov to denounce God and the world of "diabol- ical good and evil" that He created. Shortly after sending off this section of the novel, which also contains the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky wrote in a letter that Ivan's devastating accusation would be answered by the preachments of Father Zosima. But many readers, myself included, have found these worthy sentiments, no matter how impressively and movingly === Page 114 === 272 PARTISAN REVIEW expressed, to be rather weak in the face of Ivan's accumulation of moral monstrosities. Later, when the novel had been completed, Dostoevsky wrote in his notebook-more accurately, in my view-that the entire work was really the answer to these chapters. And this answer is given by the triumph of moral conscience in the three main characters, as well as in the murderer Smerdyakov. For while refusing to overlook that God permits all the evils denounced by Ivan, Dostoevsky also remained firm in his assurance that the God-man Jesus had been sent to stir the con- science of mankind in its eternal struggle against iniquity. This is hardly the place to explore in any detail the multiple ways in which Dostoevsky's great novel embodies this theme. The most obvious is Dmitry's last-minute inability, despite his seething rage and resent- ment, to strike the fatal blow against his justifiably hated father. But the most direct answer to Ivan's horror at the world God had created, and which leads to his bitterly disillusioned declaration that "everything is permitted," is given by the pages in which his own responsibility for the murder begins to pierce through his consciousness. The gradual inner awareness of his own culpability and his efforts to suppress it; the three almost somnambulistic visits to Smerdyakov to seek reassurance; the marvelous black comedy of the Devil's hallucinatory visit (a product of Ivan's own schizophrenic psyche); his final collapse and mental break- down-all this remains unsurpassed as an image of moral conscience at work, a conscience for whose injunctions, as the Devil rightly mocks, Ivan's reason offers no justification whatever. It is thus not the views of Father Zosima that give Dostoevsky's novel its enduring sublimity (quite the contrary!) but the masterly portrayal of the influence of moral conscience, an influence in each case convincingly adapted to the personality and situation of the character portrayed. Such influence can be felt and understood quite independently of Dos- toevsky's own convictions (his view, for example, that conscience can- not exist without a belief in immortality), or indeed, of those of the readers themselves. So while Dostoevsky does not spare his readers the evil that he so vividly represents, he invariably counterbalances its effects by insisting on the ineradicability of a moral conscience that even the most resistent evildoer will not be able to escape. It is time now, however, to return to Elizabeth Costello and examine her plight a little more carefully. Why has the book of Paul West brought on the crisis that had led her to the advocacy-reluctant, to be sure-of an inner censorship? Describing what the author must have intended, she speaks of it as a "wager with himself: to take as his sub- ject a handful of bumbling German officers unfitted by the very code of === Page 115 === JOSEPH FRANK 273 their upbringing to carry out an assassination, to tell the story of their ineptitude and its consequences from beginning to end, and to leave one feeling, to one's surprise, authentic pity, authentic terror." Nor had she felt any objection to the book until the scene of the hanging, with its deliberate degradation of the prisoners, and particularly the portrait of the hangman, the butcher, to whom West gives "a voice, allowing him his coarse, his more than coarse, his unspeakable gibes at the shivering old men he is about to kill, gibes about how their bodies are going to betray them as they buck and dance at the end of the rope." This, as we know, is Paul West's conception. As author he is responsi- ble for the manner in which he depicts this episode, and there is no evi- dence here of pity, only terror and even horror. It is such horror that leads Costello to level against him the charge of "obscenity," and to arrive at her extreme conclusion: "To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see (may want to see because we are human!) must for ever remain off-stage. Paul West . . . has shown what ought not to be shown." But has West shown what really ought not to be shown, or has he rather shown it in such a way that its impact leads to Costello's charge? Has she gone too far in wishing to outlaw such a scene entirely, and assuming that the only other possibility is to accept it unobjectionably as it stands (leav- ing its effect, as Vargas Llosa had insisted, to the vagaries of the reader)? Coetzee's sketch ends without any resolution, but nonetheless its final paragraph expresses an unfulfilled longing. Costello yearns for "some con- frontation leading to some final word"; perhaps, if she met Paul West in the corridor by accident, "something should pass between them, sudden as lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness." Nothing of the sort occurs, but one cannot help thinking that the person Costello really wishes to meet, rather than Paul West, is an incarnation of Dostoevsky. Is not such a wished-for sudden illumination typical of his poetics, and would it not have flared up again in the scene that so afflicted the distraught Costello? Would he not have found a spark of humanity somewhere in the sadistic ghastliness that West por- trays? And is it not possible that Coetzee, with his perfect command of the Dostoevsky corpus-as we know from his Master of St. Petersburg-and who likes to play literary games, might have read his story to lead off a Dos- toevsky panel precisely for this reason? If so, he would only have been fol- lowing in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, who so often preferred to present his positive values a contrario-by dramatizing the unhappy fates of those who disregarded or distorted them with disastrous consequences. Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the Dutch periodical Nexus. === Page 116 === MICHAL GOVRIN Martyrs or Survivors? Thoughts on the Mythical Dimension of the Story War THE WAR THE PALESTINIANS started in September 2000, right in the middle of the Barak-Arafat-Clinton talks, I spent in my city, Jerusalem, where Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, sec- ular and orthodox, Armenians, Ethiopians, and pilgrims from all over the world live together in a complex and unique texture. In my apart- ment in a residential neighborhood, on mornings of writing, in hours with my daughters, I have lived in constant fear of terror for two years-years of damage to Israeli and Palestinian societies, years of watching the dream of peace turn into a nightmare. And I have followed with dread the "story war" in print, broadcast, and electronic media, exposing the global clash between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in a complex and unprecedented triangular arena. This ferocious war's terms were sucked from the depths of the theological clash and its mythic precipitates; their extremism was preserved in disguised forms and repressed voices between violent outbursts. The story war rewrites every single day, every single event, according to its needs. It turns one reality into a "story" and prevents another from turning into one. In fact, after two years, life in Israel at the heart of the war of terror has not yet been formulated as a "story," despite the wave of global terror. It evokes worrisome comparisons, not only with the Gulf War of 1991—when, for strategic considerations, the story of Israelis sitting in sealed rooms, behind a ridiculous defense of plastic and masking tape, exposed to an attack of Scud missiles and chemical and biological threats, was trivialized-but also (in pessimistic moments of dread) with the hushing up of the Holocaust of European Jewry. So, first of all, we must "bear witness," despite the inevitable one- way blindness in all testimony, and despite the additional problem of testifying in a war in which the "witness," in its Greek etymology, "mar- tyr," is central to the story war-imposing terms of suffering and Michal Govrin's Snapshots has won the 2002 AKUM-Ashman Prize. === Page 117 === MICHAL GOVRIN 275 martyrdom on all testimony. In this context, it is hard to describe the day-to-day struggle to survive. How CAN YOU TALK about two years of incessant fear? About the constant calculations? When is it least dangerous to go to the supermarket, that is, when doesn't it “pay” to send a suicide bomber? Whether to go to the café where an armed guard sits at the door or to be afraid of a terrorist who'll shoot from outside? Whether to go downtown, despite yesterday's and last week's attacks? Or whether the Arab approaching the bus in a puffed- up jacket is a suicide bomber? How did I start to suspect the innocent? And when I can't bear it anymore and need some relief, do I dare go see the splendid blossoming in the valley, or will a terrorist lurk there as well? How can I tell about the fear when ambulance sirens split the street? One, two. On the third one, my hand reaches for the radio to hear the breaking news. Six, seven, ten killed. Then the nervous wait for their names. Maybe one of them is a relative, or a friend, or the friend of a friend—a plausible reality in such a small state. Reading the stories of the lives cut off. And already another "attack." And then a quiet week. The fear recedes under a routine that immediately grips us. Sitting in the evening around the kitchen table, we enjoy just eating together. As in the cartoon of the babysitter wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest who joyously tells the children wearing the same protective garments: “Chil- dren, today we're going out!” “Great. Where to?” “To the balcony!” And then, after a day or two, more scenes of horror. Talking with Aharon Appelfeld after one of the attacks, he remarks: “It's like the ghetto, every day more people are killed.” Constant fear. For yourself, and even more for your children. Ever since the outbreak of the war, our two daughters have traveled only by taxi, since busses, the popular means of transportation, have turned into the preferred targets of mass murder. There's a cartoon that shows pas- sengers getting out of a bus and falling on their faces to kiss the ground of the station, grateful they were saved. Our unlimited budget for taxis was an attempt to ward off this dread during the girls' wait at the bus stop after school with a group of children—as an exposed target of ter- ror—and to save the time of traveling in what can become an infernal machine. And the dread as soon as they're late. It happened this sum- mer. My older daughter was at the Hebrew University library when a bomb blew up in the cafeteria. Her phone call—“Mother, I'm fine.”— reached my cell phone before the radio in the taxi blasted the news about the many killed. Nevertheless, at home, after she phoned again, I collapsed. The next day, when she learned that two of her acquain- === Page 118 === 276 PARTISAN REVIEW tances, American students, were killed, she broke down in tears. And only at the end of summer vacation did she reveal that her classmate, a new immigrant from Russia, was badly wounded and still paralyzed. During hours of insomnia I agonize about whether I have the right to bring up my daughters here, in a war. Is this the last minute, when look- ing back we'll be able to say we got away in time and those left behind were killed? I have imaginary conversations with my dead mother, who survived the death camps. And the next morning, I need to get up and smile as the girls go about their normal day. I grow even more isolated at the sight of parades supporting “suc- cessful attacks,” row after row of inflamed masses dressed as shahids, calling for “Death to Israel.” There are parades in Gaza, Rafiah, and Jenin, in the Muslim world, but also anti-Israeli demonstrations in Europe. There are condemnations by Western politicians on the right and left, by intellectuals, artists, writers (including Saramago), boycotts of Israeli products, of Israeli intellectuals and academics, pressure on universities to withdraw their connections with Israel. How to bear witness to the moral and emotional trap in the middle of a war of two populations that for two years have been pitted against each other, in a war that has (at least in the Israeli consciousness) no opposition between absolute good and demonic evil, especially in Jerusalem, with its complex texture of life? A moment of laughter with an Arab taxicab driver, and joy at the laughter itself as a victory in some essential way. And the despair upon learning that the members of the gang that carried out the attack in the university cafeteria had worked for years as plasterers in Jerusalem. How to tell of a war of terror in a civilian population composed of old timers and new immigrants, foreign workers and Arabs, settlers and pioneers, leftists and rightists? A war that doesn't distinguish between its casualties. Whose purpose it is to rip apart the fabric of life. And in what terms to talk about the persistence of individuals in defending the fragile fabric of their society? To open the stores downtown even after repairing them after explosions two and three? To go on studying or teaching. To play an instrument, to dance. Not to give up buying books, listening to music, going to the theater. To preserve what is precious, most private. It's a long struggle for survival, as in London during the Blitz, a struggle for life. I CAN TESTIFY TO THE DEPTH of disappointment at the collapse of the peace process only in the first person, and from Jerusalem, where I set- tled after studying in Paris, to the amazement of my Tel Aviv friends. To === Page 119 === MICHAL GOVRIN 277 leave the "sexy city" for the Eros of the "woman city"? I settled down in Jerusalem's community of writers and artists, each of whom is giving his own expression to the unique reality of the city. And so, with my books and my theater work, I also raised generations of young theater directors, including Palestinians. As someone educated to believe in humanity and art in times of darkness, respect for the Arabs, and for the national aspirations of young Palestinians, was natural to me-like the belief (in the spirit of the Prophets, or with naiveté) that national stories can include respect for otherness. I helpe d my Palestinian students stage their stories and kept track of them in the theaters they founded in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Bethlehem. Even the everyday life of studying and creating together was a fascinating theater in itself. In the winter of 1991, the directing class at the School of Visual The- ater continued, despite the Gulf War. One of the students, Khamal, a graceful actor from the eastern part of the city, portrayed an unforgettable Firs in Chekhov, and read in Arabic from the Koran the story of Sarah, Isaac, Hagar, and Ishmael. After the war, a Palestinian terrorist stabbed a high school student and an enraged Jewish mob took to the streets. Khamal had to go home, and the secretary and the worried students snuck him into their car. There also was Ibrahim, the young intellectual from Gaza, and Raeda, a Christian actress and director from Beit Jalla. In the theater milieu, we all felt a change taking place in the relations of the two communities. The popular nature of the first intifada (1987-1991) shook Israeli society. Despite stormy arguments about the Madrid talks and the Oslo Agreement-until they culminated in Rabin's murder-and despite the continued settlements and violations of agreements, within Israeli society, Left and Right, there was a growing awareness of the rights of the Palestinian people and the need for a new "partition plan" instead of the one the Palestinian leadership and the Arab states rejected in 1947. No less complicated was the fast reversal in Israeli society. In the spring of 1994, in days of hope for peace, Ibrahim painted the poster for Romeo and Juliet in a Jewish-Arab coproduction by the Khan and Casbah theaters in Jerusalem. The Palestinian leadership returned from exile, the Palestinian Autonomy in the Gaza Strip and Jericho were established, and Israeli society flourished, absorbing a million refugees from the former Soviet Union and almost the entire Jewish community from Ethiopia. But in March 1996, when I was invited to tape an Israeli television program devoted to Khamal, the clouds were already begin- ning to gather. That fall, Rabin was murdered, and Israeli society raged. The transfer of government from the Israeli army to the Palestinian Authority was accompanied by a furious mob in Jenin calling for jihad === Page 120 === 278 PARTISAN REVIEW and the conquest of Jaffa and Haifa. Worried noises gradually came from Ibrahim about incidents of corruption in Gaza. The taping was at ten. At 7:30 that morning, a bomb exploded on a bus in Jerusalem. A week later, another fatal attack in Jerusalem, as well as in Dizengoff Center in Tel Aviv. Dozens were killed, hundreds wounded. From then on, the history is set, before or after the acts of ter- ror that brought Netanyahu to power, with his immediate demonization in Arab lands and in liberal circles in the West. But that morning, we were still trying to preserve our mutual respect and belief in theater. As the years of Autonomy passed, the distance grew. "We're at a dif- ferent historical moment," voices tried to explain. "Israeli society is at a stage of self-criticism, of 'post-Zionism.' They're still busy writing the Palestinian story, and they need simple terms of confrontation to create it." I was perplexed. From now on, did I have to shut my eyes to speech slipping into propaganda? Or the manipulative mobilization of suffer- ing? Did I have to justify the evasions of colleagues with the excuse that "cooperation with Israeli artists now doesn't serve their agenda"? To accept the role of "the bad one" out of self-denial or "understanding," which is necessarily paternalistic? As far as I'm concerned, a colleague is a colleague. And without complex vision, irony, self- criticism, and empathy, there is no art, only propaganda, if not incite- ment. I waited for better times. And in 1999, when Barak came to power in a massive vote of sup- port for peace, the trend wasn't reversed. Instead of a period of appease- ment, the withdrawal from Lebanon brought busses full of Palestinian refugees from the camps in Lebanon to the northern border in order to throw stones at Israel-including the "refugee" Edward Said, who took the trouble to come from New York to throw his stone. In the Egyptian press, there were unbridled attacks against Israel, and information began to be published about incitement in the Palestinian educational system and about armed forces. Still, the financial corruption in the Palestinian Authority didn't shock, nor did photos of children training as shahids, nor did the semi-official economic policy of stealing Israeli cars for the Authority. Once again we tried to explain away these events as due to the oppression of the population, the building of the settle- ments, and Israeli violations of the agreement. We told ourselves that all this was part of the story, that we had to be respectful, patient. You go with the Jerusalem bons vivants to jazz clubs in Ramallah, enjoy the pleasure of the approaching millennium, follow the hordes of tourists that fill the city with the Pope's visit. I stayed in touch with Raeda, with the closeness of women artists, a partnership holding out against the === Page 121 === MICHAL GOVRIN 279 attraction of victimhood-Raeda in her staging of "The Temple of the Valley of Hell" and I in the novel The Name. I kept track of the chil- dren's theater she set up in Beit Jalla and of her flourishing career. But in the summer of 2000, the pressure rose. In August, during the Camp David talks, and shortly before his death, Yehuda Amichai signed a petition against destroying Jewish finds in the archaeological digs on the Temple Mount. And in September, Sharon's bombastic (but not ille- gal) visit to the Temple Mount served as a pretext for the beginning of the armed Palestinian attack, which was led by the military arms of the Palestinian Authority (Force 17, the Al-Aksa Brigades, and the Tanzim) in cooperation with terror organizations (Hamas, Islamic Jihad). In October, Arafat called for a million shahids to descend on Jerusalem. In the fall of 2000, Jerusalem, especially the southern neighborhood of Gilo, was one of the Palestinian targets. Forces of the Palestinian Author- ity from Bethlehem found cover among the houses of Beit Jalla to shoot at Gilo, and the Israeli army returned fire. The lives of the residents of both neighborhoods, separated by a green valley, turned into a night- mare. The residents of Gilo tried to minimize their fear and continue busi- ness as usual. "So what if they shoot?" went the joke. "There's a problem only if the kitchen looks south and the refrigerator is next to the window. Well, then you can bend down when you take something out. Of course, when you have to take schnitzel out of the freezer there is a problem. So who says you have to take schnitzel?!?" At my younger daughter's school, where there are many students from Gilo, I heard a conversation between children. "How will you go home? They're shooting at your street," they asked one little girl. She tried to evade, to claim that the shooting wasn't really on her street, and finally she shrugged and said: "So what? I'll get off the bus and run. Anyway... I'm so skinny they won't hit me." The residents of Beit Jalla, a well-to-do Christian minority who had already been under enough Muslim pressure for many to have left, now turned into hostages in the middle of gunfire exchanges. Raeda! I thought anxiously, but I was afraid to phone, to put her in a compro- mising position, to expose her to danger. When I finally did get in touch, I told her: "You're like my relatives in the Soviet Union we were afraid to contact for years." She laughed in embarrassment and said that her children's theater had been hit by mortar fire, but they were continuing to perform. "We're mobilized for hours to put on shows for the children. They're traumatized," she said. "Very good," I commended her, with the pride of a teacher. I trusted her to maintain the obligation to humane theater, even if with a national message, without incitement. I suggested that we work together on a children's play between Gilo and Beit Jalla === Page 122 === 280 PARTISAN REVIEW or that we put on a women's reading. But she apologized: "That would be 'collaboration,'” with an echo of double entendre, theatrically and politically. Raeda went to America, and meanwhile, the violence esca- lated. When we met in the spring, a few days after the mass murder of young people in the Dolphinarium Club in Tel Aviv, Raeda came to the Jerusalem festival with an Israeli ID. We hugged warmly. "Our children are traumatized; it's awful," she said emotionally. "I can imagine," I said empathetically, and I tried to go on. "Ours too....” But she wasn't lis- tening, wasn't willing to empathize. "Our children are traumatized," she repeated, and now there was the harshness of a slogan in her words. Backstage, she didn't introduce her friends from Milan, who came to support Palestinian theater, to her teachers from Jerusalem. But Raeda (attacked doubly as a Christian among Muslims and as a woman in a militaristic male society-at least as I saw her) was not oper- ating in a vacuum or merely on a local stage. She would not have reached that point if not for the Palestinian policy and for the silence of intellec- tuals, without a peace movement, without any condemnation of vio- lence, murder, suicide bombers. Only the inflamed accusations of Hanan Ashrawi or halfhearted declarations of appeasement exclusively for export to an Israeli audience and not for domestic consumption. Only when the violence of the suicide bombers started damaging Palestinian interests did they start issuing condemnations, and even then only in tac- tical terms. For the Western European audience, Raeda and the Palestin- ian children, especially the Christians, played the role of suffering and crucified victims. In that morality play, the Israeli, the Jew, had a set role that did not evoke empathy. Raeda's studies and camaraderie with Israelis did not fit the desired image. Backstage, we returned to the sim- plified Manichean myth, without a trace of Brechtian estrangement, far from the complex sharing of fate while taping the show with Khamal. IN THE WINTER OF 2002, a Palestinian victory seemed possible. Arafat's position was not damaged, despite the capture of the ammunition ship Karin A and the exposure of direct contact between the Palestinian Authority and the terrorists. In Europe, condemnations of Israel were ratcheted up by politicians and by boycotting organizations. Out of a Machiavellian trap, calls for appeasement-from the Israeli peace camp and the movement of conscientious objectors-were seen as weakness and at once were answered by an increase of terror. In March 2002, now remembered as "the month of blood," time after time, terror struck the heart of Jerusalem. One Saturday night, news of the suicide bomber who blew himself up in the ultra-Orthodox === Page 123 === MICHAL GOVRIN 281 neighborhood of Beit Israel exploded. Pictures of Jews dressed in caf- tans and streimels stirred fears of pogroms in the national subconscious. And the following Saturday night, an explosion rocked our house, and simultaneously, the sounds of sirens burst onto the screen, along with information about a suicide bomber in the yuppie café, Moment. Twelve young people were murdered. And the last cycle of calm we imagined in the streets of our quiet neighborhood was shattered. The next day, I went with my daughter to her violin lesson so she wouldn’t be alone when discovering the ruins at the site of the murder, the mob, the television cameras, the customers of the café, the mother of a bar- man who was saved because just then he had bent down to pick up a bottle of beer. The managers of the clubs, who go on making young peo- ple dance in the strongholds of Jerusalem secularism, were distributing stickers saying “This Moment Must Not Be Stopped.” Defending sanity in their own way, with coffee and a croissant, as Ari Shavit wrote in Ha’aretz the next day. Immediately he earned hostility for self-indulgent whining, instead of protesting the “crimes of the army” or the “set- tlers.” The violence of silencing pain and empathy, silencing the self and silencing the other, is characteristic of the rigidity of the Left. For Passover, we went to Paris, and the violence pursued us. Dozens of casualties in an attack on a Passover Seder at a hotel in Netanya, a fatal attack in a restaurant in Haifa, a woman suicide bomber in a supermarket in Jerusalem. In France, synagogues burned—incitement at its height, and the Jewish community in a panic. The plane was full of a French delegation in support of Palestine, who shouted slogans all through the flight. As we were disembarking, someone mentioned, in reply, the million victims in the French war with Algeria. After a moment of silence, they shouted in standard postcolonial guilt: “So you leave too, like the French!” “Where to? Auschwitz?” I exploded. They burst out laughing. “We know that answer, too.” In line for passport control, two Orthodox Jews whispered to me: “Madame, you shouldn’t make them mad.” And then, the day after the attack on the Passover Seder, a Parisian taxi driver delivered a speech of admiration about the “courage” of the “desperate” suicide bomber, of fascination with force that raised dizzying connotations. And while the Foreign Minister, Vedrine, was sharply condemning Israel, there were calls for putting Sharon on trial; there were anti-Semitic declarations, anti-Israeli demonstrations, and petitions against academics, Israeli leftists. They were reminders of how much hatred of the State of Israel and Israelis, like anti-Semitism, isn’t because of what the Jews do, but because the === Page 124 === 282 PARTISAN REVIEW Jews exist. Only a (bold) handful of friends did not desert those who turned into pariahs, and expressed solidarity. On our return to Jerusalem, we found a traumatized society facing a society sunk in a collective barbarity of suicide for the sake of murder. The number of Palestinians offering themselves for suicide attacks was higher than the rate of explosive belts that could be prepared. The mar- tyr \textit{shahids} became elite Palestinian fighters. Their families enjoyed financial grants, Palestinian leaders and intellectuals praised their acts of murder, and in a breach of Muslim tradition, women also became \textit{shahids}. Mothers even blessed the deaths of their sons. In the ritual of sacrifice that was taking place, Hagar no longer lifted up her voice and wept, and Sarah did not die of grief at the moment of the Binding of Isaac, as described in the midrash. The silence of the mothers removed the last barrier, and murder turned from deviancy into normality. Only force could stand against the outburst of barbarity. And so, after seven years of autonomy and seventeen months of limited military response, the Israeli army again entered the Palestinian cities. A night- mare that seemed to be over was recurring! The peace process crum- bled, and an army once again faced a civilian population, with tanks in the streets, soldiers in the houses, cities under siege. And the back and forth, day after day, between attacks and warnings of more attacks; between terror for the safety of Israeli soldiers and horror and shame for the suffering and death of Palestinians. And once again, bloody attacks and mourning the dead, day after day. SIMULTANEOUSLY, "THE STORY WAR" goes on. The mobilization of reli- gious and mythic images was a deliberate strategy since the start of the Palestinian offensive in the autumn of 2000. The religious connotations of terms were activated in the triangular mythical arena according to the various target audiences-Palestinian, Israeli, or Western—and accord- ing to tactical considerations emphasized or disguised in national or humanitarian terms. Vis-à-vis the Western and Christian sensitivity, this armed, planned Palestinian offensive was presented as an outburst of popular revolt, led by stone-throwing children. But it soon became clear that standing behind the children were Palestinian armed forces exchanging fire with soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, and behind them were the habitués of cafés, who go on drinking and smoking; and with them television crews quickly transmit pictures in live broadcasts (as described by Thomas Friedman in the \textit{New York Times}). But even awareness of this careful staging does not minimize the force of the images. In national semantics: David is facing the warrior Goliath === Page 125 === MICHAL GOVRIN 283 (reversing and appropriating the biblical story); in mythical and reli- gious semantics: the innocent victim is once again crucified by the Jews. And in the mythical and historical semantics: the Palestinian child replaces the Jewish child as a victim of the Holocaust. That image, shaped at the beginning of the battles around the heart- breaking death of Mohammed Dura, who happened into the range of fire between the Israeli and Palestinian forces in the Gaza Strip with his father, illustrates the process of mythicization, as analyzed by Shmuel Trigano in L’Ebranlement d’Israël. The seconds of torment of Mohammed Dura’s death were appropriated as “a spectacle,” broad- cast over and over on French television, outside any context, without checking the source of the shooting, and affirming Israeli responsibility for a deliberate attack (which was later proved to be a lie). The horrify- ing pictures became both a Christian and a Muslim icon and inundated the Internet for months. A poem composed in his memory by the Pales- tinian poet Mahmoud Darwish appropriates expressions from the poem by the national Hebrew poet Bialik, “On the Slaughter,” which was composed in response to the Kishinev pogrom. The Hebrew translation of the poem, which appeared immediately and without any criticism, in the literary supplement of Ha’aretz, was an expression of the ideologi- cal appropriation of death and the internalization of mythic violence out of an identification with the “Other” and a delegitimation and rejection of the “I” and its story. Turning Christian Bethlehem and Beit Jalla into areas from which to shoot at southern Jerusalem, which brought the expected return fire, was staged for the Western audience. All it took was the setting of Bethlehem and the Church of the Nativity to present the return fire as Herod’s “slaughter of the innocents.” In July 2001, the mythic mutation of the story was “baptized” by the Pope during his visit to the ruined church in Kuneitra. The host, Assad, President of Syria, called for jihad against Israel, the “agent of Palestinian suffering and the torments of Jesus.” The Pope did not protest, and the Vatican did not issue any objections. That August, at the Durban Committee, Israel was singled out in an outburst of hatred that derailed the entire committee from its objectives, which revealed that the values of human rights, postcolonialism, and anti-glob- alization (with their neo-Christian sentiments) are perverted when alloyed with anti-Semitic characterizations. (That was also a warning sign of the danger of spreading Western Christian anti-Semitism—including the ris- ing popularity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the third and Muslim worlds—not only as a threat to Israel and the Jews, but also in === Page 126 === 284 PARTISAN REVIEW their clash with the West and the United States, which then turn into "Jews.") But the apogee of the story war in the "Intifada Al-Aksa" is the manip- ulation of the concepts of martyr shahid and suffering. Right after the war began, Arafat called for "a million shahids to march for the liberation of Al-Kuds." To a Muslim audience, he declared that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a holy war, in which the national fighter shahid served as an archetype shaping and inflaming Muslim masses and intellectuals. To the media shaping Western public opinion, the suicide shahid was presented as a holy martyr. With a Manichean dichotomy between absolute good and evil, which is essential to the Christian notion of martyrdom, the mar- tyr shahid instinctively evokes feelings of admiration and compassion, and the one "responsible" for his suffering and death (even if he is innocent) undergoes the process of demonization. The climax of the dehumanization and demonization was directed (in the West and in some Israeli circles) against the settlers. They were the scapegoats, bearing absolute guilt and fatality (independently of the existence of the settlements or of violence by some settlers). It was only the Palestinian "tactical error" of sending shahids to attack targets in Tel Aviv, Haifa, or Netanya that created a sense of shared fate in Israeli society, but in the world media, that blood was still permitted to be shed. Only the attacks by shahids in the West, beginning with the events of September 11, seem to shake their martyr's halo, but the loaded omission of Palestinian shahids continues. After September 11, the number of Palestinian shahids rose, and sup- port for them in the Muslim world deepened. In Europe their position was not even dimmed after America outlawed several Palestinian terror organizations. The staging and manipulation of the martyr image cul- minated in the "libel of Jenin." In April 2002, Palestinian forces entrenched themselves in the crowded alleys of the refugee camp of Jenin, known as the "terror cap- ital." Its inhabitants turned into a "human shield." Attempting to mini- mize the impact of attacks on a civilian population, the Israeli army refrained from shelling from the air, and fought from house to house. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers were killed in battle. But in the story war, the Palestinian refugees were cast as shahids, or as condemned to die as victims of a staged slaughter. The courtyards of their houses were mined, their doors were booby-trapped, and they were condemned to become "martyrs" created by public relations machines, the tortured celebrities in the story war. Right after the battles began, information was pub- lished about the "cruel slaughter of thousands of Palestinian refugees." Such information continued during the battles, accompanied by detailed === Page 127 === MICHAL GOVRIN 285 \"descriptions of horror.\" But even when the \"information\" was refuted, and of thousands of corpses there remained fifty-two, and even when \"corpses\" from the staged funeral processions stood up, the libel of the \"Jenin massacre\" continued feeding the media's imaginary descriptions. Even the report of a UN investigating committee that confirmed the facts did not quash the libel. On the contrary, it only spread. The film Jenin Jenin made by Mohammed Bakri (an Israeli Arab star in Israeli film and theater) was a caustic propaganda film disguised as a documentary. Shots of corpses were arranged as if they \"were cleared out of the ruins of Jenin,\" nonexistent wings of a hospital were presented as destroyed by shells, and fabricated heartbreaking stories supplied the human dimension. In Europe, the film was enthusiastically received, and the Arab media were filled with it. Even the inflamed audience at the screen- ing at the Cinematique in Jerusalem routed a doctor off the stage who had been at the battle in Jenin and tried to refute the lies in the film. The accusation of blood libel, the \"Jenin massacre,\" let loose a wave of hatred and an impulse for sacrifice-the disguised explosive compound of the mythical and religious abysses-so powerful that no facts can refute it anymore. It became a symbol of Palestinian martyrdom. CLEARLY, THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT has dimensions of tragedy. The attempt (seeking good will) to repress its religious and mythical roots (threatening as they may be), and to reduce it to an eco- nomic, territorial, national problem only increases the tragic blindness. It's like pretending that the plot of Oedipus Rex begins with the out- break of the plague in Thebes-ignoring the prophecy preceding the birth of Oedipus, his murder of his father, his marriage to his mother. Recognition or catharsis are only possible by exposing the roots of the tragedy and the resolution of all elements of the plot, onstage and off. The return of the Jews to history is a unique phenomenon, which demands no less than a revolution in the relations of the three Abra- hamic religions. The return of the Jewish protagonist as a national and political entity to the Land of Israel, for the first time since the destruc- tion of the Second Temple, and, simultaneously, the return to the area of the Western and Christian protagonist, for the first time since the fall of the Crusader Kingdom, are reestablishing the Land of Israel, the his- torical source of the triangular religious clash. Hundreds of years of common history created mutual influences and fertile relations between the three religions, with an infiltration and assimilation of concepts and values from among them. But at the same time, the principle of unique- ness and universal appropriation led to a history of struggles, wars, and === Page 128 === 286 PARTISAN REVIEW persecutions: Jewish isolation vis-à-vis Christianity, which established itself as a replacement of Judaism, and later on, Islam, which supercedes both Christianity and Judaism. But unlike the ancient binary clashes, the present one takes place in the triangular arena where, at one and the same time, all the three protagonists take part. Traditional patterns of clashes are once again activated in a contemporary incarnation: mythic terms are appropriated, denying their source, and their transformation projects fear and guilt, and aspirations to conquer and convert. But tem- porary collaborations are also created between two traditions against the third. Because of their indirect nature, these mythic "mutations" avoid the self-criticism and toleration developed by the individual tra- ditions and turn into the most disguised and threatening aspects of the conflict. Thus, what could have turned into mutual tolerance among the three monotheistic religions (a process whose global urgency today is clearer than ever) is directed to the rejection of the other, to violence, and to a triangular and tragic "Rashomon" story war. The West plays a double role in the conflict as both spectator and interested protagonist (with the neutral image of the first camouflaging the second). Among other things, the global stage, ruled by the hege- mony of Western terms, dictates that the story war use the notion of the victim-martyr, which is originally Christian. IN THE CONTEXT OF ANCIENT CULTURES used to the ritual of human sac- rifice, Judaism instituted a radical revolution with the Binding of Isaac. The raised knife was not lowered, Abraham did not slaughter his son, and instead of Isaac he sacrificed a ram. In this establishing event, the impulse to sacrifice was blocked. Instead, the principle of exchange and symbolism between man and God was inaugurated. The sacrifice of the oldest son, the beautiful daughter, or the youth of the community were substituted with animal sacrifice; the first born is redeemed by offering a prayer to atone for sins, express faith, and be close to God. But, as Shalom Spiegel shows in "From the Legends of the Binding of Isaac," the impulse to sacrifice, buried deep in the human soul is reawakened despite the explicit ban. The struggle against it has been present throughout the history of Judaism. In fact, the clash with sacrificing cultures led to assimilating the impulse to sacrifice, as a kind of effort "to cope with the rape." The Sanctification of the Name of those slain by decree was the Jewish response to the Roman persecutions in the arenas of public tor- tures and crucifixion. But unlike early Christianity, martyrology did not become a norm in Judaism. Indeed, the notion of sacrifice and suffering has been the focus of tension between Christianity and Judaism. During === Page 129 === MICHAL GOVRIN 287 the Crusades, entire communities committed collective suicide in response to pogroms and demands to convert to Christianity. Christian violence was internalized by its victims, and they experienced their response as acts of Sanctification of the Name, and this time the sacrifice was completed. Those slain by decree and during the Crusades reverber- ate in midrashim, liturgical poems, and prayers as mythic trauma-antic- ipating future waves of persecution, pogroms, or annihilation. The Crucifixion of Jesus restored to Christianity the human sacrifice who atones by his suffering and death. This atonement is a testimony to the grace of God, who, unlike the God of Abraham, did not have mercy on His son. The martyrs are witnesses of faith, as stated by Tertullian, one of the early Church Fathers: "The blood of the martyrs constitutes the seeds of the Church." Suffering and death, borne with humility and love and as a sign of the grace of God, evoke feelings of compassion and grace and establish it in the observing community. The holy position of the martyr does not disappear from Western culture in its secular man- ifestations, and it serves as a central stratum in the writing of the West- ern Christian myth. It is even renewed in the holy status recently granted to those murdered on September 11, especially to the members of the fire department (as Elizabeth Castelli emphasized in Sacrifice, Slaughter, and Certainty: Reflections on Martyrdom, Religion, and the Making of Meaning in the Wake of September 11). Islam, like Judaism, rejected sacrifice and adopted the principle of exchange, and in the Koran, Abraham binds his son and saves him. (The identity of the son is not Isaac, but a Muslim son, and begins the quar- rel of the first-born between Islam and Judaism.) Shahada basically defines an act of faith and self-sacrifice in mortifications and prayer, and shahid is the term for the believer. Only with the death of Hussein, Mohammed's grandson and the founder of the Shi'ite dynasty, in a bat- tle against the khalif of the Omayia family, is the aspect of war and mar- tyrology added to the term shahid (among other things, with a Christian influence). Annual Shi'ite memorial rituals in Karbala that restore Hus- sein's torment of death in battle on a mass scale have preserved the tra- dition of suffering and conflict, and have even shaped the Muslim revolution against the regime of the Shah. Ever since Islam came to power in Iran, the terms shahada and shahid have moved to the center of theology and become the model of self-sacrifice in a holy war against corrupted Arab regimes and non-Muslim sinners. (A discussion of the process of radicalization of the term in Iran and in the teachings of the Ayatollah Khomeini is in Minoo Moallem's "Transnationalism, Femi- nism, and Fundamentalism.") === Page 130 === 288 PARTISAN REVIEW But, the story of the Binding of Isaac indicates another, perhaps even deeper abyss—the impulse of sacrifice. The self-sacrifice of Abraham is supposed to be realized in the sacrifice of Isaac. The test of faith demanded of Abraham gains its realization by means of harming another. The Binding of Isaac exposes the hidden perversion of the sacri- fice as self-sacrifice. In the Talmud (Sanhedrin 89b), Abraham’s attempt is described as an act of Satan. He pushes Abraham to kill for his faith and demands that Isaac be willing to deliver his soul, in a “competition for sacrifice” (even then!) with the torments of circumcision that Ishmael has undergone. By stopping the knife, the story rejects the impulse of both “the binder” and “the bound,” and the idea of faith and holiness through killing, whether by the hand of a human being or by the hand of God. At the same time, the term martyr (defined by the dictionary as “death or torments for a purpose”) exposes the core of exactly what is being sanctified. Here, too (as opposed to the sweeping sanctification of torments in Christianity), the Talmud (Brachot 5b, echoing the Book of Job, formulates the struggle between indulging in torments or suffering and rejecting them. Rabbi Yohanan rejects the definition of “afflictions of love” as “an altar of atonement” and declares that these afflictions are not dear to him, “neither they nor their reward!” But, also, without denying the force of their attraction and aware of the difficulty of escap- ing from them, he states: “A captive cannot release himself from prison.” The revolution in the impulse of sacrifice did not produce the desired revolution in the human soul. The sanctification of the slain and the tor- mented in religious context, and in national or ideological contexts, even now produces a blood-soaked history. IN ZIONISM, WHOSE PRINCIPLES are in accordance with European nationalist doctrine, the national sacrifice, on the altar of redemption of the nation and the Land, appeared at the start-from the “Memorial” books (which already evoked concern in the young Gershom Scholem) to the status of the fallen soldiers of Israel’s Defense Forces. A few stories of Sanctification of the Name (the story of Hannah and her seven sons or the story of Masada) were moved from the periphery to the center, repressing the traditional dissension surrounding them. They now served as a base for writing the renewed myth. Appropriation of the victim for ideological needs resounds (based on the double meaning in modern Hebrew between victim and sacrifice) even in the wretched term “victims of peace,” given by the Left amid the euphoria of the Oslo Agreements to those murdered in terrorist activities in the 1990s. At the same time, rightist groups also attempt to turn those who were killed by terrorism === Page 131 === MICHAL GOVRIN 289 into national martyrs. Only in recent months has the term, "casualties of terrorism" come into use and blocked the linguistic erosion. In this context, the Jewish response to the Holocaust (during and after) again exposed the rejection of sacrifice. The tension between vic- timization in Jewish and Israeli culture and the profound rejection of the impulse to sacrifice in the Holocaust has not been emphasized enough, nor how much it formulates the core of modern Jewish myth. Despite the unprecedented dimensions of suffering and death, the Holocaust is not shaped in Jewish consciousness as a myth of sacrifice. Facing the machinery of destruction that deprived men, women, and children of the right to exist as human beings, that turned them into refuse to be removed as efficiently as possible, most Jews responded with a struggle to survive-from the armed and organized uprisings in the ghettoes and camps, to a teenage girl's diary, to those who came to cope with the divine rift in the shadow of the crematoria and the task of the human being to repair it. Above all, it was the solitary physical and emotional struggle for survival, in the depths of Hell, of women, children, and men from all groups and of all ages, as echoed in the words of Rabbi Isaac Nussbaum, who was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto: "This is the hour of the Sanctification of Life and not of the Sanctification of the Name in Death. Once, the foes demanded the soul, and the Jew sacrificed his body for Sanctification of the Name. Now, the enemy demands the Jew- ish body and the Jew is obliged to defend it, to preserve his life." In the Holocaust, there were no martyrs, only the slain and the saved. Death was not surrounded by a halo of holiness. And even those who took their own lives acted out of despair, and not as testimony to faith. That devotion to life also characterized most of the survivors of the Holo- caust, who contributed to building the State of Israel and to prosperity in the countries to which they immigrated. They, as well, did not sanc- tify death, suffering, or victimhood, but only the struggle to survive; or, as Primo Levi put it, the struggle to be among the saved and not among the drowned-not an evident struggle, as his own death testifies. THE TRADITIONAL JEWISH-CHRISTIAN TENSION surrounding the status of sacrifice, guilt, and atonement resonates in the whole history of rela- tions between Europeans and the Jewish people up to the Holocaust. Only in its wake-with recognition of the State of Israel and with the decision of the Second Vatican Council to exonerate the Jews for the Crucifixion of Jesus-was the Jewish people relieved (at least by decree) of its mythic role as pariah and as bearer of a sin whose punishment was eternal wandering or destruction. But in contrast with the change in the === Page 132 === 290 PARTISAN REVIEW position of the Church in Western Christian myth-and with it the hope of changing the Jewish people into a “people like all others”—contin- ues the myth's political and ideological metamorphoses. It also partici- pates in writing the present chapter of the story war. One way of formulating the Holocaust in Western Christian memory was in terms of martyrdom, beginning with the term holocaust-a burnt offering to God. Transforming the Jew from the accused to holy martyr was ostensibly a gesture of grace. This granted a dimension of holiness to the event and to the slain, and according to belief in the power of suf- fering and death to atone and redeem, it also allowed for the hope of changing European guilt into atonement, mercy, and compassion. But, in fact, the martyrological formulation preserved a grain of violence. Appropriating those murdered in the Holocaust as martyrs constituted a rewriting of the self-definitions of those who were murdered and who survived. In addition, formulating genocide in terms of sanctification and sacrifice was a capitulation to the violence of the impulse to sacrifice- by perpetuating the numinous quality of human sacrifice and extending its terms into the political arena. As Jacques Lacan hinted in his remarks on “the profound hypocrisy of the criticism of history,” it was capitulat- ing to “the fascination of human sacrifice to the dark gods.” The implications of the sacrifice resonate in much of post-World War II Western culture, as well as in Jewish and Israeli culture, which is molded by dialogue with and dependence on the West. It started with arguments about forming the memory of the Holocaust in Israel and in the American Jewish community, with demonstrations against accepting German repa- rations in the 1950s, and with criticisms of the political exploitation of the memory of the Holocaust, and went on in the public storm stirred up in Israel in the 1990s by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef's attempt to interpret the Holo- caust in terms of reward and punishment. Their reverberations touch on the internalization of the sanctification of the martyr in the concepts of "hostage" or "marrano" in the philosophical writings of Emmanuel Lev- inas and Jacques Derrida, on the struggle against the impulse of the victim in Spiegel's study, which was written right after the Holocaust, and on the rejection of female victimhood in Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues, among others. Perhaps it was also the traditional recoil from the public exposure of torments and their sanctification that precludes presenting the Israeli population as a sacred victim in the current story war. Moreover, the (forced and appropriated) identification of the Jew as martyr violently collided with his traditional role in the Christian myth and produced impulses of rejection that fuel many relations between the Jewish people, Israel, and the West. One of the manifestations is “envy === Page 133 === MICHAL GOVRIN 291 of the victim.” On the one hand, the Jew who wants to live despite the threats to his life (especially in the State of Israel, with its strong army) deviates from the characterization of the weak martyr, threatened and tortured to death. But, on the other hand, the open wound of guilt seeks a substitute victim. So the martyrological appropriation of the murdered Jews grew deeper, and in the mythic consciousness they left their saved brothers and their offspring far behind. The sanctification of Edith Stein, who was murdered as a Jew and sanctified as a Christian, the posthu- mous baptism by the Mormon Church of four hundred thousand slain in the Holocaust, including Anne Frank, and the counterfeit suffering of Wilkomierski serve as examples. The halo of holy suffering granted the former SS woman in Schlink's The Reader is an example of another shift of the object of holiness. But mainly it is the conflict in the Middle East that is exploited to shift both repressed guilt and martyrology. Thus, the Palestinians have been cast in the role of weak and suffering victims, and the State of Israel is cast in the role of the strong conqueror and torturer, in the Manichean dichotomy of good and evil. The apogee of the process was the reverse use of the Holocaust and its terms in the story war, turn- ing yesterday's martyr into today's Nazi. The fact that the martyrologi- cal re-mythicization of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is counted as a double return of the repressed, both of the guilt and of the myth, explains the force of its manifestations, its complexity, and the free movement of its terms in the story war between Christian, Jewish, and Muslim consciousness. Under their influence, the State of Israel and its institutions undergo a process of delegitimation—once again counted as pariah, stigmatized outside the family of nations and states. IN THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT, the mythic struggle for the sta- tus of victim plays a central role in the demographic and territorial processes of the clash. From the beginning, Zionism was the need to respond to the problem of Jewish refugees, victims of pogroms and waves of European anti-Semitism, which created the impulse for Jewish migration and its national recognition. Molding the Palestinian popula- tion as a nation occurred in response to the waves of Zionist immi- grants. The increase of Jewish immigration as the Nazis rose to power deepened the conflict until it culminated in the Arab revolt of 1936–1939. Right after the Holocaust, the humanitarian pressure and the growth of Jewish settlements, accompanied by European guilt and recognition of the Jewish people as victims, led to the establishment of the State of Israel. With the declaration of the State, refugees from Europe, from Displaced Persons camps, and from British internment === Page 134 === 292 PARTISAN REVIEW camps in Cyprus came to its shores, along with thousands of thousands of Jews who were uprooted from their homes in Arab countries. In the triangular arena, the return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel demanded a theological and mythic revolution from the Muslim nations, a recognition of both the right of the Jewish people to return and establish itself as a political entity (beyond its status as a protected com- munity, a “dimmi,” under Muslim rule) and its right to reestablish a state in a place that, since the Muslim conquest in the eighth century, had become a “land of jihad,” where there is no place to establish a “state of infidels,” either Jewish or Christian. (This is beyond the understandable fear of a massive immigration of foreigners.) The mythic revolution did not take place and did not produce the processes that would enable a profound Muslim-Arab recognition of the right of the State of Israel to exist. Instead, the destruction of the Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel under the Muslim conquest in the eighth century and the expulsion of the Crusader Kingdom by Salah-ah-Din, still fresh in Muslim memory at a mythic level, allowed Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel to be perceived as a new Christian-Jewish attack on the soil of Islam. (The Balfour Declaration of the British Mandate, which came about at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, was a crucial incentive for the establishment of Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel.) The Jews are seen alternately as agents of Christian expansion in its modern form (colonialism, capitalism, global economics) or as an “export” of the Jew- ish-Christian problem to the damaged and exploited Arab world that now has to pay the price of European guilt (while repressing the emigra- tion of Jews from Arab countries). Beginning with the invasion of the armies of seven Arab states right after the State of Israel was declared in 1948—and with the rejection of the UN partition plan of 1947—the Arab states have conducted most of the military struggle against Israel. In that struggle, the Palestinians turned into the tip of a spear. But beyond the demographic and territorial struggle, identifying Jews as victims in the Western Christian post-Holocaust discussion constituted a new kind of ethical and religious threat to the demands of the Pales- tinians. In the mythic triangle, they tried to oust Jews from the role of the victim, competing for it themselves. Hence, the systematic and prolonged denial of the Holocaust in the Arab world, and the metamorphosis of the war of 1947-1949 into a substitute Holocaust (in its Arabic name, Nakba, destruction). Beyond the trauma of destruction and uprooting, Palestinians were cast as the real victim (verus martyr) of the real Holo- caust, ostracized and holy pariah. This role is at the root of the tragedy. === Page 135 === MICHAL GOVRIN 293 The manipulation of the status of victim climaxed in the Arab states' immortalization of the fate of the uprooted in the war of 1947-1949. The war in which I percent of the inhabitants of the State of Israel were killed resulted in a victory that saved the young state from destruction. As a result of the battles, six hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians were uprooted from their homes; about 60 percent of these left volun- tarily with the encouragement of the Arab states, and about 40 percent were expelled. Arab villages were destroyed in battles; Jewish settle- ments were occupied and destroyed and their inhabitants uprooted. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from transit and Displaced Persons camps, and from Arab states, were settled in an effort at absorption, their humiliation and death are still present in Israeli soci- ety. The uprooted Palestinians were left in internment camps, sometimes only dozens of kilometers from their original homes, for three genera- tions now. In the twentieth century, of the hundreds of millions of uprooted immigrants and refugees, the Palestinians are the only group still penned up, "refugees" for fifty years. In Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan (which has a Palestinian majority), they are not granted citizen- ship or any other identity, not allowed to leave the barbed wire of the camps for another life and future. In the words of the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), "Arab armies entered Palestine to defend the Palestinians from Zionist tyranny, but instead, they aban- doned them, forced them to emigrate and leave their homeland, forced on them a political and ideological siege, and put them between prison walls." What was a trauma as a result of war turned into eternal forced suffering, and the "right of return" became the basic credo and the focus of the national identity of the Palestinian people. Realization of the "right of return" for the uprooted and their children, a mass of four million people today, to the State of Israel, which has six million citi- zens, including more than a million Arabs, means its dismantling as a Jewish state and its becoming a Jewish minority within a Muslim major- ity of two hundred million Muslims stretching as far as Indonesia. The refusal to settle the problem of the refugees by means of reparations or exchange and the turning of the refugee camps into a harsh scene of martyrdom became the most loaded subjects in the Israeli-Arab conflict. The conquest of Egyptian and Jordanian territories in 1967 exposed the million refugees living in camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to direct contact with the Israeli army, and turned them, especially since the first intifada of 1987, into the central targets of violent clashes. In the decade of the Palestinian Authority's existence, despite the understandings in the Oslo Accords and the amounts of money it === Page 136 === 294 PARTISAN REVIEW accepted, it has not dismantled even one of the fenced refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and has not offered their inhabitants any future or any hope. Nor did it relieve them—and Palestinian soci- ety—of the role of the forced victim. Instead, the conditions for residents of the camps have grown worse, the budgets allotted to them have been shifted, independent initiatives for welfare programs have been rejected by UNRWA authorities—all of which immortalizes the status of the refugees. (The residents of the camps have even been forbidden to pop- ulate the few neighborhoods that have been built for them, according to Palestinian activists at a symposium at the Yakar Institute in November 1999.) Even the spontaneous offers of peace activists to improve the conditions of life in the camps, to plaster, paint, remove the “splendor of the garbage,” encountered a firm refusal. On the contrary, one of the first decisions of the Authority in 1994 turned the demand for “the right of return” into the central slogan and closed its eyes to the continuation of the extremist Islamic incitement to shahid-ism among the residents of the camps. The devotion to “the right of return,” more than the territo- rial dissension, is also what blew up the Camp David peace talks. I believe that, along with territorial and security arrangements, all negotiations will have to settle the problem of the Palestinian refugees as a condition for accepting the complexity of reality, of mutual injury and loss, and as a genuine expression of freedom, hope, and human dig- nity. But first of all, there must be an opening in the physical and emo- tional prison fence for millions of human beings. Giving up “the right of return” and settling the refugees would constitute a basis for Pales- tinian independence from the prison of victimhood and fanaticism. Cooperation of the Arab and Muslim world in settling the refugees would constitute recognition, in actual fact, of the establishment of the State of Israel as a national home for the Jewish people. Recognition by the State of Israel of its share of responsibility in uprooting the Pales- tinians from their homes, and its participation in restoring them, will extricate Israeli society from sediments of guilt, and the manifestations of fear and violence stemming from them, and will realize her aspiration for justice. The Christian world also needs to recognize its share in the story and its responsibility for the solution, and the ways of love and grace that do not need the spectacle of the martyr to evoke them. CLEARLY, THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT has dimensions of tragedy, but its settlement can only come from daring to face all its com- ponents, and progress can be made only in stages. Now, two and a half years after the outbreak of the war, Egypt is attempting to have the === Page 137 === MICHAL GOVRIN 295 Palestinian organizations declare an end to terror. This is the necessary breakthrough for a truce, for getting the Israeli army out of the areas of the Palestinian Authority and returning to the negotiating table. But it is just as much of a breakthrough for escaping from the impulse of sac- rifice, victimhood, and murder, and perhaps also for their rejection from the triangular arena of conflict. The story of the Binding of Isaac involves, in the name of Jerusalem, the profound revolution from sacrifice to exchange, and from fanatic faith to concession. Settling the problem of the refugees by giving up "the right of return to all of Palestine" demands a similar revolution of myth and consciousness from the fanaticism of direct realization to the principle of symbolization and exchange. Not an eye for an eye, a tree for a tree, a sacrifice for a sacrifice, but a ram instead of Isaac-accepting a substitute sacrifice and reparations in exchange for grief, harm, and shame. This is also the condition for territorial compromise, which demands that each society formulate terms of ownership, beginning on the mythic level, that allow a lack of exclusivity. The Jewish notions of the Sabbat- ical year and the Sukkah served as my inspiration in writing the novel Snapshots. A parallel Muslim move would allow giving up the Arab notions of tsumud (clinging to the land) and jihad. Returning the mythic triangular arena to Jerusalem, the woman city, desired by the exclusive fanaticism of monotheism, and in a male voice, which has governed all three versions of the story and turned her into an arena of wars of pos- session, will demand moving from the fanaticism of ownership to a principle of exchange and hearing the female voice in the mythic and political revolution that is required. MY WORDS, LIKE ALL PERSONAL TESTIMONY, are personal-like the swing of my feelings about the Palestinian people, between empathy and hope, fear and despair. My words are sealed by my experience as a woman and mother who lives in Jerusalem. But I am also the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, one of the "second generation of the Holocaust." A person's suffering can never be fully described through the suffering of another. But maybe the lesson of survival can be communicated. Confronted with the tragedy that binds us, I read the lesson I got from my late mother, while turning to the Palestinians, companions in fate, children of the "second and third generation of the Nakba." It was mostly a silent les- son, told briefly, a constant lesson in the long struggle against the role of victim. With a group of women, she survived Auschwitz, the death march, and Bergen-Belsen after she lost her first husband and her son. Among human skeletons afflicted with typhoid fever and covered with === Page 138 === 296 PARTISAN REVIEW lice, they succeeded in preserving freedom by clinging to the Hebrew cal- endar, singing, even laughing—the most anarchic force. And after the Liberation, despite her exhaustion, she volunteered to work as a nurse and then as an activist in the illegal immigrant organization. She came to the Land of Israel in 1948 with a children's transport. She immediately had plastic surgery to remove the number tattooed on her arm. She refused to be a victim, refused to be a refugee. As a child, I didn't even know that my mother was in the Holocaust, the most awful thing they talked about in kindergarten and school. I was never afraid when Mother walked around with bare arms in summer dresses; I never averted my eyes when she took off her blouse in the dressing room at the seashore. I never saw the number tattooed on her at the gates of Auschwitz and never was haunted by it in dreams. I didn't even know what it was. The shadow of the Holocaust was passed on to me, as to the other members of the second generation, as a legacy. But along with it, in a special silence, was also the lesson about the strength needed to choose a life of dignity. Not to live in Displaced Persons camps as refugees, and not as martyrs. It's a lesson about the struggle to survive day after day, an ashen, persistent struggle, without a halo of sanctity. Fear of the prison of victimhood returned to me recently when I read the story of a Tel Aviv bus driver who got out to help a person who was hurt as he tried to board the moving bus. The driver bent over the wounded man with the aid of a nurse whom he had approached to help. They took off his shirt to let him breathe. After the third button, the ammunition belt on his body appeared. At that moment, they turned from a first aid team into a terror-fighting one. They clasped the hand of the wounded man so he wouldn't activate the explosive and shouted to the passengers to run away. Simultaneously, the driver tried to per- suade the terrorist in his fluent Arabic, to save his own life now that all his victims had fled. But the man was silent, imprisoned in the impulse to commit suicide and murder. The driver and the nurse decided to save themselves, counted to three, released his hands together, and escaped. The terrorist got up, dragged himself to the bus stop, and blew himself up, along with a great-grandmother who hadn't managed to flee. AND MEANWHILE? How does one survive in an ongoing war in the heart of two societies filled with threats of terror? How does one stand against violence, against fear, against a fragility of the fabric of life more present than ever? Recently, my admiration of the subversive genius of Jewish humor has increased—its anarchic freedom, its power to cut the tragic maze === Page 139 === MICHAL GOVRIN 297 from within, to dismantle both the righteousness and the vain accusa- tion, with a twist of self-criticism. There is a blend of despair and hope in jokes, a power to accept the incomplete relativity of reality. But to yearn today for that Jewish humor is an admission that Zionism did not “redeem” us from the Jewish fate, that we are not “a nation like all other nations,” and that we’re stuck deep in the mud. Amid false accu- sations and fanatic beliefs, impulses to deny and reject sometimes can be pierced only by jokes. And maybe the legacy of humor has been trans- formed into the continuing vitality of Israeli society in the last two years, despite the despair and fear and economic distress—with festi- vals, concerts, and performances which draw masses, with pubs that attract young people to dance. Café Moment has reopened, with a stain- less steel and glass design and a memorial plaque for the dead. This stubbornness of survivors, not with British understatement, but with a Jewish temperament, is responsible also for the internal debate, the scandals and the ongoing fights even in the middle of the war. I can only hope that the Arab sense of humor, headed by the poor, shrewd, anarchical Jukha, will soon be resurrected. That would be the most lethal weapon against the self-pity, the sanctification of suffering, and the abomination of self-sacrifice and murder. Humor can also be an effective instrument of struggle against occupation or against corrupt governments and a source of vitality in the heart of despair, needed today just as much for the Palestinians as for the Israelis. The day we will again be able to trade jokes between these two vehement peoples, those possible-impossible neighbors, will be the beginning of reconcili- ation. And then perhaps the European jester will once again emerge and, jingling his bells, will mock the media’s fascination with martyr- dom, and its sanctified mendacity. At my last meeting with Raeda, we exchang- ing on both sides and, beyond a mutual admission of despair, we dreamed of a theater, and we laughed. On my mornings of writing in the midst of the war, when I finished writing, I fantasized with the architect heroine of Snapshots about renewing the flow of water in the ancient aqueduct that led the spring waters from Hebron to the Temple in Jerusalem. As the war intensified, so did the imaginary flow between the square of the mosques to the Saint Sepulchre, in a continuing cascade cutting across borders of holiness and hatred in a gushing of life. In Jerusalem at the beginning of the millennium, this no longer looks like utopia, but almost like a joke. Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav === Page 140 === IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ The American Consensus and The American Conservative F OR THE PAST TWO DECADES it has become apparent that an implo- sion has taken place within the ranks of American conservatism— that ideological tendency which emphasizes liberty over equality, national interest over global commitments, and moral principles over pragmatic policies. For once we move from the abstract to the concrete, the weakness of this ideology, as indeed all ideology, begins to show. Real interests trump general guides. In the case of the rift between “paleo” conservatives and “new” con- servatives, long-standing shared animosities, ranging from the existence of the Soviet Union abroad to the preeminence of the Democratic Party and its post-Vietnam syndrome at home, served to paper over the dif- ferences. But with profound changes in the international and national scene alike, these conditions have also changed. The divisive issues now become war with Iraq, mass immigration, and the status of the free enterprise system in advanced capitalist conditions. But going one step further toward the specific, it has become appar- ent that the flashpoint is the status of Israel and the power of the Jew- ish community in the United States. Old-line conservatives, who did little but pay lip service to the “Judeo-Christian tradition” to start with, began to emphasize the hyphen rather than the tradition. At the fore- front of what might be called the post-Russell Kirk wing of traditional conservatism is Patrick J. Buchanan, who far from taking his electoral bearings for the presidency in sullen silence, decided instead to establish a new publication, The American Conservative. Traditionally one should wait at least three years before assessing new publications and new editors. My own view is that one might bet- ter wait thirty years to perform such a task. But The American Conser- vative is no ordinary magazine, and Patrick J. Buchanan is no ordinary editor. Although it may seem premature, after only three issues, this Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt Distinguished University Profes- sor Emeritus at Rutgers. === Page 141 === IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ 299 publication merits assessment. Appearing every other week (October 7, October 21, and November 4, 2002) it calls for nothing short of a pro- found shift in ideological fault lines within American culture. And for his role in this effort, Buchanan deserves our sincere recognition. To reject is a right. To dismiss is folly. Nothing could be more risky than to underestimate Buchanan's vision. He is by journalistic background sharply attuned to popular sen- timent, unscrupulous in his alignments, and has no commitment to old labels and alliances. Buchanan is an intellectual figure to be reckoned with. He is the voice of an ideology that never quite dissolved—a voice that speaks from the pre-World War II era of America First and foreign entanglements last: The blood of patriots must only be shed in defense of our country and our people. But Democrats and Republicans want to take our country into a war far away. Our sons and our daughters must never die on foreign fields to defend the honor of the United Nations or decide who rules over a foreign land. To defend our people against the madmen who would destroy us we must first secure our borders. Nativist persuasions that underwrite the neo-isolationist thrust of The American Conservative permit editors and authors to tap into long- standing sources of discontent. These sentiments are neither Right nor Left. They are better described as an extension of the Left fascism that has nibbled at the edges of American politics since World War II. The Lyndon LaRouche National Caucus of Labor Committees phenomenon of the 1960s, and even before that, the Charles Coughlin Social Justice wing of the America First movement of the 1930s, embodied many of the causes espoused by Buchanan. In an earlier essay on left-wing fascism I noted that “the history of fascism in the United States mirrors that of Europe. Socialism, far from being dropped, becomes incorporated into the national dream, into the dramaturgy for redemption, for a higher civ- ilization that will link nationhood and socialism into a move forward." This also helps explain how Buchanan could enlist an avowed “revolu- tionary socialist" like Lenora Fulani, his vice-presidential running mate on his 1996 Reform Party ticket. They share a belief that the higher goals of Americans are not served by the capitalist economic system, but by the nation-state as such. As with Nazis and communists, linking capitalism with the Jewish impulse to aggrandize the wealth of the nation helped to cement this otherwise inexplicable alliance in seamless fashion. === Page 142 === 300 PARTISAN REVIEW The very physical design of The American Conservative reminds the reader of The Nation. The paper is of newspaper quality. Layout and format likewise are similar to that critical organ of the Left. Imitation is indeed the highest form of flattery. Beyond that, the contents also invite comparison to The Progressive and The American Prospect. In addition to appearance, these four publications have in common dedicated oppo- sition to American military strikes against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The rhetoric of each publication shades off into the others. In the first three issues of The American Conservative we start with themes that have become staples of the Left in the period of its post-Soviet decline. Justin Raimundo writing on the American imperium is quite frank in identifying Buchanan with "the conservative movement of the 1930s on up through the early 1950s [which] was anti-imperialist and anti- interventionist." Eric Margolis in "Iraq Invasion: The Road to Folly" tells us in the litany of the Left that President Bush lacks a strategic plan. He is trapped by the neoconservatives, and can only move the nation toward a "quagmire." Margolis represents a world dominated by Pen- tagon hawks, obsession with Iraq, and lust for oil. The highlight of the first issue harkens back to C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite. Kevin Phillips tells us why he is no longer a conservative: "The power struc- ture Washington conservatism now represents can be described as Wall Street, Big Energy, multinational corporations, the Military Industrial Complex, the religious Right, the Market Extremist think tanks, and the Bush/Limbaugh Axis." In this fashion Phillips calls forth an America that needs a new leader-and who better exemplifies that push toward salvation than does Patrick Buchanan? Buchanan himself speaks in his own voice from the outset, properly raising the question not of victory or defeat in Iraq, but the price of managing the victory. But by the third issue, empirical concerns dissolve into editorial shouts. He hammers away at a theme that has become his staple: an attack on the Israeli lobby "for which The New Republic has been a conscious echo." He then moves to a defense of Al Gore's pre- sumed "opposition to pre-emptive war," a stand which already paid dividends for Gore in harnessing the support of Edward Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and "the Hollywood Left, whose cash and concerts will be cru- cial when campaign reform takes hold." Apparently, the Jewish con- spiracy for war with Iraq ends at the gates of the movie actors, actresses, and moguls solidly aligned against such a war. With the third issue, Buchanan moves into high gear, in a voice of unre- lenting hatred for the president and the Grand Old Party that nurtured him. But now sees fit to live without him. His complaints are manifold: The === Page 143 === IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ 301 White House has become "a virtual fortress" due to the anthrax scare. If the U.S. economy were not dependent on imports to maintain production, then America would not have to worry about the West Coast shipper strike. Open borders and free immigration have made the nation vulnera- ble to terrorists and illegal aliens. The folly is compounded in the wars of intervention from Panama to Haiti to Somalia to Kuwait to Bosnia to Kosovo. Buchanan views the World Trade Center as a "blowback"—by which he obviously means a payback. America is left with a single ally: Sharon's Israel. "The occupation of the West Bank" is a finishing touch. Washington and Jerusalem become the vortex to which Congress has capitulated, and thus it shares the blame with President Bush. The world of Pat Buchanan is one that has been turned upside down. Cause and effect are reversed, for the enemy is to be found within. Amer- ican efforts to enforce a plethora of resolutions to prevent nuclear prolif- eration in the Middle East become little more than naked displays of American imperialism. Near-complete Palestinian intransigence to any sort of peaceful solution that recognizes the sovereignty of a Jewish State is understood as a response to an Israeli warrior instinct. American efforts to guard the vital shipping lanes of the world become examples of how we violate our own capacities to build a self-contained economy. A day will come, we are ominously informed, in which "we will settle accounts with those who sacrificed God's Country on their pagan altar of empire." If Buchanan puts forward an oversimplified model of the universe, it nonetheless makes for compelling rhetoric. It identifies an easy enemy: the imperial president, whose view of the world corrupts "God's Coun- try" by trying to tell other people how to live. As a bonus, Buchanan's model provides a scenario for the paranoid class, a universe of Jewish manipulators in Israel and the United States angling to take command of the levers of economic power, while new barons of the Southwest con- trol the political process. Add to this a dose of conspiracy theory, namely that the electoral process itself is being sacrificed and debased by new military adventures that direct American attention away from economic problems at home to Pyrrhic adventures overseas, and the political- ideological syllogism within which Buchanan works becomes complete. It is a superficially appealing universe in which a virtuous America is beset on all sides by a corrupt world, extending from Europe and Asia to the Middle East. Buchanan's premise is an America that is self- sustainable and resistant to the blandishments or the cares of the world. For Buchanan, the deeper we proceed into the first decade of the new century the more evident it becomes that the issue is not terrorism, but the presumption that such acts of terror are brought about by the === Page 144 === 302 PARTISAN REVIEW United States itself, by its voracious appetites to rule the world unilat- erally. As a result, old categories like Right and Left, conservative and liberal, dissolve under the guise of a choice between a New World Order Party (which for Buchanan implies both the Democrats and Republicans for the most part) and an America First Party. The latter is an amor- phous group comprised of native-born Americans, dedicated to Christ- ian fundamental values, for whom the rest of the world is a cross between a cesspool and a diabolical conspiracy trying to engage a vir- tuous nation in its schemes. That he is on to something is suggested in his ability to round up a wide range of contributors-from Scott McConnell from the traditional Right to Nicholas von Hoffman from what used to be gratuitously called the New Left. They all sound a com- mon theme-animus for Ariel Sharon, respect for Saddam Hussein. But the specific villains and heroes of the moment are less important than the ideological alliances that are being formed. Buchanan's vision, however carefully embroidered, comes upon some severe contradictions not so easily generalized. The pseudo-populism of his appeal resurrects a leadership principle in which elites impose order and justice on a nation by curbing excess. These may be anything from an urban impulse in cultural expression to the unrestricted effort to innovate. The central villain remains an economy that in its nature has become global in structure and therefore no longer confined by the nation-state. In Buchanan's world, problems may be universal, but solutions are always national and hence controllable. Anything that smacks of reduction of national power through loss of sovereignty, from the Hague to Brussels, from world courts to the European Union, is seen as dangerous and inim- ical to American interests. Buchanan and his army see a world of Hobbe- sian menace without Hobbes's vision. As with the fascist vision, the promise of social justice depends upon the commitment of all to a state system. And as a result, the appeal to the people falls on deaf ears, as it becomes evident that the guarantor of national health is America First and its singular charismatic leader. The traditional conservative assault on totalitarianism is conspicuously, nay ominously, noticeable by its absence. Buchanan's co-editor, Taki Theodoracopulos, underwrites the anti- Semitism that runs like a dorsal spine through all of these utterances. Conrad Black, his former editor at The Spectator, described Theodora- copulos as a man whose "expressed hatred for Israel and . . . contempt for the United States and its political institutions . . . were irrational and an offence to civilized taste." Black sadly remarked that Taki added, "a blood libel on the Jewish people wherever they may be" to the pile in asserting that "the way to Uncle Sam's heart runs through Tel Aviv and === Page 145 === IRVING LOUIS HOROWITZ 303 Israeli occupied territory." Taki said this in relation to the Marc Rich pardon by former President Clinton. He also added that Israeli intelli- gence knew more about U.S. Air Force activities than the Pentagon did, and that such information was routed through Rich, who bought Israel's favor. In this way, Taki tendered himself to Buchanan's crusade. Indeed, money from Taki's father and his shipping profits, hardly a native Amer- ican enterprise, generates funding for The American Conservative. In exchange for such angelic services, Taki is entitled to his own sound-off page in the magazine. Most recently this featured a meandering attack on The National Review's Victor Davis Hanson, and the "obsession" with security shared by ancient Greece and modern Washington. The moral lesson for Taki is clear: Greece was spread thin because of the "greed of her elite." Now it is the likes of oil companies, the Israeli lobby, and Bill Kristol who want a war, but who will never be able to win the peace. Such stream-of-consciousness ramblings may be freewheeling, but they are a small price to pay for a place in Pat Buchanan's literary world. It is a dangerous mistake to scoff at the ravings of the political extremes. To start with, we are obligated to do what Buchanan as ideologist cannot do: examine each overseas activity and each domestic policy choice, as well, to determine where right and wrong exist. The antidemocratic char- acter of the political extremes does not reside in its errors about any par- ticular event so much as in its denial of debate and dialogue before decision. What makes the position of Left fascism, or if one prefers, Right communism, so compelling is precisely its simple-minded model of the world. This simplicity is the source of both the appeal of America First and its preordained disastrous outcome. The world conspires to be more com- plex than all models, especially simplistic ones like Buchanan's that refer to such ultimates as good and evil rather than to right and wrong, or to better and worse. Demagogic appeals to national sentiment carry great weight. But when a nation is undergoing travails of the sort we are experiencing in the economic realm with a market down- turn, and in the social realm with the emergence of state-religious spon- sorship of terrorism to weaken American resolve, there is a risk of irrelevance to his emphasis. The intriguing challenge of our times is not only the resurrection of the regnant creed of neo-isolationism, but also the capacity of the American consensus to hold. Buchanan's attack on publi- cations like The New Republic, The National Review, The Weekly Stan- dard, Commentary, and a host of other publications that in the past held high their respective flags of conservatism and liberalism is a profound if inadvertent recognition that the old order is vulnerable. === Page 146 === 304 PARTISAN REVIEW There is a growing liberal-conservative alliance in general ideological terms, and no less a growing Democratic-Republican continuum in mat- ters of fundamental integrity to system survival and political legitimacy. The rise of Muslim extremism with its reliance upon a worldwide network of terrorism has made such a broad consensus within American life neces- sary. The sense of a common enemy can be as strong a bonding device as a belief in shared values. The task of the coming period will be to deter- mine the extent to which this systemic consensus can hold, and in so doing move beyond ideological cliches and conventions that dotted the late-twen- tieth-century landscape. If it can, The American Conservative will remain a useful, but minor irritant in the world of political opinion magazines. If the broad consensus that has been tenuously stitched together in the post-September 11 terror bombing fails to hold, then look for Mr. Buchanan or a more credible look-alike to emerge as a potent force in the years to come. It is a well-known truism, and in this case, a solid truth, that if and when fascism comes to the United States, it will be wrapped about in an American flag. Nativism, anti-immigration legislation, fueling rival- ries between Jews and Gentiles, blacks and whites, will be done with a cer- tain cleverness. Jewish socialists like Norman Mailer will be celebrated for their anti-Israeli stance as evidence of an absence of malice or bias. But the essential ethnic and racial ingredients of such publications will not be too far from the surface. Under such circumstances, it will take more than faith, hope, and charity to survive a strange realignment of extreme reac- tion and marginal radical figures. The high political fallout from frontal assaults on American institutions and values will probably limit the dam- age of the resurfaced "paleoconservatives." Perhaps the greater challenge will be the need of this new democratic majority to continue carrying to new levels vigorous debates on our institutions and values. For a consen- sus that hardens into a bleak set of majoritarian platitudes that simply dries up dissent and disguises basic differences is arguably a greater challenge to the American system in the long run than anything advanced by Buchanan and his frontal assault on our civilization and our culture. POSTSCRIPT: The next four issues of The American Conservative con- tinue the "tradition" of bigotry and bias established in its initial phase. They include articles on "Bush's War for Oil," anti-Israeli material by Buchanan himself on "Ariel Sharon's Shakedown," and the anti-immi- gration theme with articles attacking the Refugee Act of 1980 and "The 'Nation of Immigrants' Myth." Whatever their merits, the themes are entirely consistent with the first three issues. === Page 147 === WALTER LAQUEUR 1948-2003: Some Reflections C OUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY (what would have happened if . . .) has its uses but, for obvious reasons, it has almost always been applied to political, seldom to cultural and intellectual, history- genius is of no country nor is stupidity. The zeitgeist comes and goes, often for no obvious reason, and accident plays a considerable role. For the last thirty years large segments of the American intelligentsia and of academe have been convinced that-with some notable exceptions- U.S. foreign policy has been wrong, and this went for Democratic administrations as well as for Republican. Broadly speaking, patriotism has been out of fashion. It may not be an obvious political option in the twenty-first century but nor is its opposite, hatred of one's own country. In Europe, on the other hand, there has been a resurgence of nationalism accompanied by anti- Americanism and anti-anti-terrorism-more in Germany than in Britain, more in Italy than in Eastern Europe. Is it all the result of the arrogance of power, as Senator Fulbright put it many years ago and as it is echoed to this day? But America is not really that powerful, and, in any case, the complaints of America's over- bearing attitude have been accompanied for an even longer period by predictions of its imperial overreach and decline. Some one hundred and fifty years ago a great Russian poet wrote that Russia could not be ratio- nally understood (Tiutchev's "Umom Rossii ne poniat . . ."). In truth, America is at least as difficult to understand as Russia, probably more so, especially by foreigners; perhaps the whole world has become more difficult to understand. The other day more than 3,500 students came to listen to Mr. Noam Chomsky in the city of Göteborg, Sweden. A combined appearance of Marx, Freud, and Einstein would not have attracted a crowd of this size. It is a phenomenon that ought to be stud- ied just as the Children's Crusade was. Walter Laqueur's most recent book is Generation Exodus. === Page 148 === 306 PARTISAN REVIEW PATRIOTISM, LEFT AND RIGHT: Once upon a time the left-wing intelli- gentsia was patriotic, and no one was more patriotic than the Jacobins. George Canning (1770-1827) wrote of the "The Jacobin": "A steady patriot of the world alone/The friend of every country but his own." He referred to British sympathizers with the Jacobins rather than the French who invoked, after all, l'amour sacré de la patrie in their anthem. True, at the time of the French revolution it was said among the educated classes in Europe that everyone had two homelands-one's own and revolutionary France. And the Soviet Union became the "sec- ond fatherland" for its admirers, to use a phrase now forgotten but widespread at the time. The attraction exuded by the French revolution and even the Russian one is easy to understand; it is more difficult to fathom the Taliban or Saddam's Iraq as a second fatherland. The French Right became patriotic only much later, and it will be recalled that it was not very patriotic during the 1930s, when it stood for appeasing Hitler and later for collaboration. In the postwar years when William Phillips and Philip Rahv edited Partisan Review, American intellectuals supported the "Cold Warish policy" of their government, as a perusal of the volumes of the maga- zine shows. Why did most American intellectuals not find extenuating circumstances for political and cultural Stalinism or at least take a posi- tion of equidistance? (It is, up to a point, an autobiographical question; my first article expressing premature anti-Stalinist views in Partisan Review appeared, under a pseudonym, in 1947. My views were very much to the left but having lived through the age of the dictators I could not possibly share the conviction, widespread at the time, that the supreme political and moral commandment of the hour was to show sympathy to Soviet communism.) True, Sartre was published in these pages, but Raymond Aron was even more often. The symposium "America and the Intellectuals" pub- lished in the late 1940s showed that the professional thinkers had embraced "greater American" patriotism. Why was Truman not attacked as a moron and warmonger in the years of the Truman Doc- trine and the Korean War? Truman, after all, had never attended a uni- versity and his cultural tastes were middlebrow at best. Why did Partisan Review not follow an anti-anti-communist line? Was it a con- ditioned reflex generated by World War II and the battle against Nazism? According to mainstream thinking fifty years later it is the rai- son d'être and the moral duty of intellectuals to be critical, and critical means opposition to one's government. It is the assignment of the politi- === Page 149 === WALTER LAQUEUR 307 cians to conduct policy and to accept responsibility; it is the task of intellectuals to oppose. Why were there no mass demonstrations and only few editorials against American interventionism in the early 1950s? What opposition there was came mainly from the Republican isolationists and only to a lesser extent from the radical Left. I. F. Stone, the Noam Chomsky of his time, claimed that South Korea had attacked the North, but not many people were willing to follow his lead. It had, of course, to do with the lessons of the Second World War and the fact that there was a Democ- ratic administration in Washington. Fifty years later Stone's successors and their conspiracy theories are dominating the public discourse. True, there were disturbing similarities between the totalitarianism of the Left and the Right-the one party state, the lack of individual free- dom, the propaganda and terror machine. But it could have been argued in 1948 and '49 (as it was in the 1970s) that there was a profound dif- ference between reactionary and progressive violence, that the similari- ties were, after all, superficial and that the very concept of totalitarianism was reactionary. Perhaps the liberal anti-communists were led astray because they were a little naive. However, the attitudes of the intelligentsia in Europe were similarly "conformist" in supporting their governments-with the notable exception of France and (in part) Italy, which beginning in 1947 took a strong pro-Soviet, or at the very least neutralist, position. But why Italy and France, and why did the British and the Germans react differently at the time? Perhaps one has to go back in history a little fur- ther to understand the mainsprings of post-World War II thinking. INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICAL COMMITMENT: Political attitudes of the intelligentsia in all major European countries and the United States were on the whole bien pensant before World War I. Historically it is not quite true that intellectuals were revolutionaries par excellence as Schumpeter had maintained. Russia under Tsarism was the one major exception, and it need not be explained why. But in Russia, too, the intelligentsia did not support the Bolsheviks, and at the time of the rev- olution of 1917 the old intelligentsia emigrated or, with a few excep- tions, was destroyed inside Russia. Between the two world wars the European intelligentsia was split between Left and Right, and the same was true for the United States. In most countries, certainly in Central and Eastern Europe, the Right was stronger: The Nazis emerged as the leading party in university elections in Germany well before they achieved a predominant position in the === Page 150 === 308 PARTISAN REVIEW general elections. Whether to count undergraduates of, say, departments of veterinary medicine is a moot point. (It has been different in the third world.) It is even more doubtful now, eighty years later, when universi- ties produce twenty or thirty times as many graduates, or even more. But whether intellectuals are defined in a narrow or wider sense does not greatly affect their political orientation. Very few non-Jewish intel- lectuals left Germany after Hitler came to power (or Italy under Mus- solini). The record of the French intelligentsia during the Nazi period was no page of glory. Collaboration in the smaller West European countries was less marked. But there had been sneaking admiration for fascism (more for Italian than German) even in the 1920s; the ambivalent attitude of G. B. Shaw, H. G. Wells, and others is well known. To the extent that there was a critical attitude it was directed against democracy, and in particular the parliamentary system, which was widely believed to have failed. There were appeals for strong leadership and contempt for polit- ical parties. Anti-Americanism was not confined to the extremists; Robert (no relation to Raymond) Aron and Arnaud Dandieu wrote a book in 1931 entitled The American Cancer, which gave rise to a whole literature along these lines. A swing to the left came in the wake of the world economic crisis, the rise of fascism, and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a world power. There was support for Spain and protests against the dictators. But to support the Soviet Union at the time of the great purges and the blatant cult of personality of Stalin was not easy for intellectuals, and it became less easy with every year that passed. After the Hitler-Stalin Pact only hardliners could muster the enthusiasm to stick by the party line. During World War II a great deal of sympathy for the Soviet Union was generated in France, Italy, and the United States. The Soviet Union, after all, played the decisive part in the war against Nazism. But credit rapidly dwindled as Stalin pushed the Soviet sphere of influence west- wards and, more important, perhaps, as it appeared that the great dawn of freedom which so many had expected in the Soviet Union did not materialize after the war. Why did this bother French and Italian intellectuals much less than Americans? Germany was an exception at the time because it was in the forefront of the Cold War. Britain was less affected by the wave of pro- Sovietism than France and Italy, partly perhaps because of the less ide- ological character of British society, partly because there was no bad conscience with regard to collaboration and passivity during the war, and partly because Britain still tried to play a role in world politics and === Page 151 === WALTER LAQUEUR 309 therefore was bound to clash with Soviet ambitions in Europe and else- where. In Italy those who had been part and parcel of the fascist cultural life (which included, for instance, the entire Italian film industry) rushed into the Communist camp. It is doubtful whether Orwell would have found a publisher in France and Italy at the time; translating Orwell, once he had been published elsewhere, was a different story. In 1950 Partisan Review published an essay by Raymond Aron on the French intellectuals, which was part of his Opium of the Intellectu- als-an important book to this day, even though its political impact at the time was quite limited. Most French intellectuals bitterly opposed him not because he was wrong but because they suspected that he was right. Aron tried to account for the anti-Americanism then prevalent in France and for the fascination with Soviet Communism of so many of his Parisian contemporaries, To explain anti-Americanism was not at all difficult. Which super- power has ever been popular? Certainly not the Roman Empire, not Spain and Portugal at the height of their power, not the British Empire, nor France under Napoleon, not Russia nor China nor the Japan of the Coprosperity Sphere. There is an unending literature about the subject: superpowers are always dangerous even when polite and considerate. They are threatening simply because they are strong. They cease to be unpopular not when they try to make friends but when they cease to be powerful. Aron's analysis, in any case, cannot account for American anti-Americanism. Nor does the ideological situation in 2003 resemble in any way that of 1948. The Soviet Union no longer exists; the attraction of commu- nism is now limited to a few sects with hardly any intellectuals. The var- ious relativist postmodernist, postcolonialist fashions can account perhaps for anti-Westernism, but they are no more an opium of West- ern intellectuals than bin Laden's fundamentalism. Anti-globalism ral- lies radicals of many countries and doctrines from the far Left to the extreme Right, but it is infinitely stronger on rejection than on a vision of a better world. And it is not a movement of the intelligentsia, except perhaps of the very young. PARATAXIC DISTORTION: Back to 1948-there were other reasons, as well, for the rejection of communism. Important sections of the Ameri- can intelligentsia, including the founders of Partisan Review, had been through the Marxist school in the 1930s, whereas in France and Italy Marxism was discovered only after the war. In some respects Marxism was a good school (it is easy to imagine what Marx and Lenin would === Page 152 === 310 PARTISAN REVIEW have made of postcolonial studies), and it also preached the unity of the- ory and practice. But there could be little doubt that there was in the real world a great and growing distance between the theory and prac- tice of communism-such as Stalinism with its purges and the many unattractive features of post-Stalin regimes even after the thaw. Com- munism as a doctrine lost virtually all attraction decades before it ceased to exist as a political system. With Vietnam and its aftermath attitudes changed. Pro-Sovietism was no longer in fashion, but it was replaced first by third worldism and later by various political-intellectual fashions in the academic world which had shared the belief that in world affairs America was seldom if ever right. Harry Stack Sullivan developed a concept called parataxic distortion. In less fancy terms this means that a cat having burned its behind on a hot stove will not sit on another stove, even if it is cold. This is an insight of considerable wisdom in understanding political attitudes of the intelligentsia. The fact that-as some saw it-the wrong side had won the Cold War (triumphalism!) only caused further embitternment. It was considered either a temporary victory only or an unfortunate his- torical accident. Developments in Western Europe proceeded on different lines. In France fellow traveling had been the prevailing fashion during the 1950s and '6os, but then Sartre went out of fashion, and it was reluc- tantly accepted that Raymond Aron had been right. In part it was a gen- erational issue, with young philosophers discovering the crimes of Stalinism and the writings of Solzhenitsyn (whose impact was greater in France than in any other country), which proved that there had been a thing called the Gulag. In Britain it took another thirty years for this message fully to percolate. POLITICAL PREDICTION: Orwell once wrote that some ideas are so crazy that only an intellectual can believe them. But this does not account for the reasons why. It frequently seems to be correct not just with regard to litterateurs, but also to "clerks" such as regional specialists, as the balance sheet of academic area studies tends to show. In the field of Chi- nese studies up to the 1960s, there was a great deal of sympathy for Maoism even though it should have been clear that many things had gone wrong in Communist China. In Soviet studies in the 1970s and '80s, "revisionism" was the leading fashion, and the same is true (to give but one specific example) for the study of Communist East Ger- many in West Germany. Not only was there sympathy for these regimes, they were also thought to be far more deeply rooted and popular than === Page 153 === WALTER LAQUEUR 311 they really were. Students of international affairs and the Cold War fre- quently believed in the wisdom of equidistance. The most recent example has been Middle Eastern and Islamic Stud- ies, which paid little attention to the emergence of militant Islamism and instead exuded optimism with regard to the future of freedom and democracy in these regions. In all these fields a great many voices were arguing that if things had gone wrong it was largely the fault of West- ern and, above all, American policymakers, who had not listened to what the experts had been saying. Needless to say, there were dissenters, but they were in a minority. What caused these deeply rooted, systemic misapprehensions- ideological prejudice, the impact of the zeitgeist in academe, or perhaps a lack of distance, or too emotional an involvement in the countries studied? Psychology no doubt played a part (le moi est haïssable) but many questions persist. According to all comparative statistics, Americans are the people most proud of their country. Could it be that the negative reaction of many intellectuals came as a reaction to the patriotism of their fellow citizens that they resented on both aesthetic and philosophical levels? Could it be that the miscalculations of the area experts have more to do with their resentment about the state of affairs at home than the situa- tion in China, Russia, the Middle East, etc.? It is not, to be sure, an exclusively American phenomenon. How do we account for the fact that prior to its collapse there was sneaking admiration for the East German regime among left-wing West German intellectuals? And the East German leaders were paragons of freedom and enlightenment compared with North Korea-a hereditary monar- chy of a special kind-but this has not prevented many thousands of left-wing South Korean students for a long time now to demonstrate ardently their friendship and solidarity with Kim Jong-il and the other North Korean rulers. What about the enthusiasm of many Arab intel- lectuals (especially from the Left) for the dictators in the Middle East who were not left-wing at all? What fascinating topics for further research and reflection. It is one thing to have been mistaken about Maoism before the Cul- tural Revolution or about the viability of the Soviet system in Khrushchev's days and to claim even now that these were the correct views all along. But there is that other fascinating phenomenon which remains to be studied-the inability to learn from experience. To admit a mistake is never easy, but prudence makes it imperative in certain sit- uations. Quite often a more or less elegant retreat can be beaten from === Page 154 === 312 PARTISAN REVIEW positions that clearly have become untenable. This is true, for instance, in the field of "declinism”: a recurrent fashion predicts the imminent decline and fall of the United States, or indeed all other great powers. When these predictions do not come true, it is always possible to claim that while the thesis was basically correct, the time frame was not. And if one waits long enough, almost every such prediction does come true— later rather than sooner. But there are some who find the admission of error beyond their endurance. TALMUD FOR TROTSKYISTS: One recent example should suffice. Before September II it was fashionable among mainstream Middle Eastern experts to play down the existence of radical groups engaging in terror- ism. It was argued in these quarters that Western observers who per- sisted in drawing attention to the terrorist phenomenon were not just ignorant but deliberately malicious in pointing to the existence of groups like bin Laden's, that this was a sensationalist industry fabricat- ing false and even ludicrous information and deliberately trying to poi- son relations between the West and the Muslim world. This inclination to ignore the terrorist phenomenon is easy to under- stand in retrospect; it is more difficult to find explanations for declara- tions of this kind after September II, Bali, Mombasa, Moscow, and so on. Professor Joel Beinin of Stanford University is the president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), a leading professional organi- zation in the field. (MESA has 2,600 members. It calls itself "non-polit- ical," but those perusing its web site may not be entirely convinced by this statement.) It has become somewhat embattled in view of its record but has apparently retained the support of most of its members. In his recent presidential address Beinin had angry words about what he called the new field of terrorology, which is sensationalist and disseminates ridiculous explanations about alleged global networks of terrorists. These terrorologists, whom he considers almost as bad as the neocon- servatives, had their own journals, conferences, and research institutes. Fortunately, he went on, members of his organization did not take part in this endeavor, and there was great wisdom in this abstention. For all the terrorologists did was to draw attention to mere symptoms, thus impeding genuine and informed research into the deeper roots of ter- rorism. Thus, in the final analysis, the terrorologists accomplished vir- tually nothing of intellectual or practical significance: "Their studies have not noticeably decreased the acts of violence against civilians throughout the world." === Page 155 === WALTER LAQUEUR 313 Professor Beinin belongs to the generation of post-Trotskyists who no longer quote Marx but the Mishna, which may be all to the good except that one misses some of the common sense of the Mishna, and the Day of Atonement does not seem to exist in his political calendar. He is per- fectly correct noting that the few people who were interested in the ter- rorist phenomenon have not brought about a decline in terrorist attacks. But he does not mention that these handful of men and women at least alerted a wider public to the existence of a certain problem, which is more than can be said about his own organization. They were perhaps not very successful-there is not a single terrorism research cen- ter in an American university, they got no financial support worth men- tioning, and their two periodicals were read by a few hundred people. But at least they did not claim, as Beinin and his colleagues did, that vio- lent Islamism was a figment of the imagination. Their impact was limited, but then the Middle Eastern and Islamic experts who got countless millions have not brought about a marked improvement in the social, economic, cultural, or political state of affairs in the Middle East either, and even medical researchers who got billions have not yet found a real cure for the common cold, let alone for cancer. One feels more than a little embarrassed having to make such obvious points, but it is on this level that the discourse takes place. It is puzzling, for there is no good reason to assume that area specialists of this kind are intrinsically more foolish than other mortals. If so, a mechanism must be at work leading them time and again to manifestly nonsensical beliefs and statements. Some of the reasons for going astray so often and so deeply are obvious and have been adduced a thousand times-common sense, empathy, experience, and a certain detachment are not and cannot be taught in colleges, whereas the most abstruse doctrines are. But this cannot be the whole explanation. How do we explain that a dismal track record of political prediction usually has little or no effect on reputations in academic fields? It was said in Paris a few decades ago that it was bet- ter to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron, and a similar syndrome seems to prevail in American academe. An art historian who frequently misattributes Renaissance pictures will not be greatly trusted, but in the field of international relations (and some related disciplines) other rules seem to prevail. And one wishes to know why. EUROPE-THE NEW NATIONALISM: I am spending the present year in Europe, and it is fascinating to watch a resurgence of nationalism among intellectuals in Europe at a time when it is out of fashion in the === Page 156 === 314 PARTISAN REVIEW United States. True, the Haider Party in Austria suffered a disaster and Chevenement in France, who tried to combine left-wing socialism and pronounced nationalism, has not fared too well. Möllemann in Ger- many, who tried to make Israel a major issue in the recent German elec- tions, did fatal damage to himself and his party. But the whole political spectrum has moved towards patriotism/nationalism. It takes moderate as well as extreme forms. Martin Walser, the well-known German writer who joined the German Communist Party in the 1970s, has now become the most eloquent spokesman of the intellectual Right; his recent demand to stop talking about Auschwitz was widely welcomed. Walser is not alone; one could name in this context Botho Strauss and a dozen others. Günter Grass, whose fear of a resurgence of German nationalism once went so far as to oppose German reunification, writes in his last novel about the horrible suffering of German civilians during the last year of the war. Other best-selling books deal with the same theme; the authors are usually Maoists or New Leftists of 1968 vintage. There is, of course, nothing wrong in dealing with the suffering of mil- lions of Germans who had nothing to do with Hitler and Nazism. But quite often it goes a little further and the question is raised whether Churchill and Roosevelt were not war criminals. But there are also the more rabid neo-Nazi ideologues like Horst Mahler, once a leading terrorist among the Baader Meinhof gang, who after years in prison has become a proponent of views that would have fitted without difficulty into doctrinal parameters of the Third Reich. He wants to liquidate the United States and Israel and claims that the New Left movement of 1968, while basically anti-capitalist, was not Marxist in inspiration but anti-Semitic and anti-American. It is, at best, a gross exaggeration, but Mahler is by no means an isolated figure. He has considerable support expressed in a somewhat more moderate way. All over Europe militants of the extreme Right try to establish a com- mon front with the far Left under the umbrella of antiglobalism and anti-Americanism. They call it "third way" (or terza posizione or troisième voie) and claim, not without some justice, that their opposi- tion against globalism antedates that of the Left. For good measure they want to bring Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden into this alliance, even though they do not really qualify as pure Aryans; but then the Japanese during World War II, despite their racial origin, became acceptable allies for Hitler. Some of the European patriotic wave is only natural and was to be expected. There is no reason why Germans should not mourn the civil- ian victims of the Allied bombings during the Second World War. The === Page 157 === WALTER LAQUEUR 315 reaction in even the most tolerant European countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark against too many immigrants (most of whom are not political refugees at all) cannot surprise anyone. These are densely populated countries that want to preserve their traditional way of life. American pressure to bring Turkey into Europe, however politically justified, is bound to face stubborn opposition because of the fear of being swamped not by members of the Turkish secular elite but by Islamists from Anatolian villages. European newspapers such as the Guardian, Le Monde, and Sued- deutsche Zeitung (and quite prominently also British and German tele- vision) have featured during the last two years damning, sometimes scurrilous, contributions and manifestoes about the United States, often by American writers, academics, and artists of whose existence even usually well-informed people were often unaware. But it has been an elite phenomenon. As far as sales are concerned Oriana Fallaci has been doing far better—there seems to be a chasm as wide as in the United States. If there is a great fear in Europe it is not of being swamped by McDonald's and inferior movies and pop culture, it is the fear of being mugged-not by Americans-when walking the streets of their home- towns. It is the fear, justified or not, of becoming a minority in their own neighborhood. And it is for this reason that in the long run, despite valiant attempts by European and American intellectuals (with some help from India and the Middle East and the protagonists of the Third Way), anti-Americanism has no great future in Europe. COME HOME, AMERICA: The advice to mind one's own business in for- eign affairs sounds eminently sensible, but it is not always selfless and disinterested. Who wrote the following? What the American people lacks is the remembrance of its own destiny which most certainly is not the responsibility for world order. The world creates its own order, America is only part of it, even though an important one. The role of an international police- man fits America remarkably badly and it is incompatible with its own best traditions. American interventionism into the affairs of other nations is economically ruinous. The U.S. government per- manently confuses causes and consequences. It boasts that the American people has to pay a price for maintaining its freedom and democratic institutions. In fact, the American people pays a great, too great a price for the follies of its government, for blindly fol- lowing its leaders. The American people has no interest to impose === Page 158 === 316 PARTISAN REVIEW on others its political system—and to impoverish itself by doing so. Nothing contradicts the character of the American people as much as the arrogant, unmotivated and dangerous intervention into things which are not its business. It is America's tragedy that its own history is for it a closed book, and that it has learned nothing from the destructive consequences of a policy of intervention. The hectic armament, inspired by the Jews, accounts for about half of economic activity and creates a mentality of hostility against the outside world. It has led the country to the belief that democracy should be exported and thus to plans of world domination. Despite the failure of their policy at home they give good advice to others. What does America really want? We watch developments with deep concern. We have nothing against the American people. But the American leadership has persuaded itself that the power of the United States is so enormous that any resistance against it seems hopeless. They really believe that America is the world's pace- maker, its moral conscience. These words of wisdom did not emanate from the stable of Pat Buchanan, nor from John Le Carré, Arundhati Roy, Jean Baudrillard, or the other usual suspects. They are quoted here from two sources: from an article by Dr. Josef Goebbels in the Voelklischer Beobachter on Janu- ary 21, 1939 and Werner A. Lohe's Roosevelt-Amerika, published in 1939 and again in 1942 by Franz Eher, the central publishing house of the NSDAP (the Nazi Party) in Munich. The fact that a certain thesis was propagated by Goebbels and his acolytes does not automatically end a debate. But it certainly proves food for thought. WE MOURN THE PASSING OF LESLIE FIEDLER 1917-2003 AN EARLY CONTRIBUTOR === Page 159 === ALBERTO MANGUEL Argentina: A Private Elegy Argentina! In my dreams, with half-shut eyes, I search for her once again within myself—with all my strength. Argentina! It is strange and all I want to know is this: Why did I never feel such passion for Argentina in Argentina? Why does it assault me now, when I am far away? —Witold Gombrowicz, 1963 NE OF THE COMMONPLACES of baroque literature declares that nothing is as it was: the traveler seeks Rome in Rome and all he sees are its ruins. The great Francisco de Quevedo concluded: "That which is solid has vanished! Only the transient remains and lasts." The ruins of the sacked cities of Argentina—the looted super- markets, the burnt cars, the shattered windows, the broken remains of trends and fashions—are hastily patched-up in the oppressive present; in the past lies a country we once agreed to call Argentina. I was born in Argentina, but did not actually live there until the age of seven, when my family moved back in 1955, shortly before the fall of Perón, whom my father had served as ambassador to Israel. I left again, for good, in 1968, just before the beginning of the horrors of the mili- tary dictatorship. I remember those thirteen years with astonishment. In spite of the insidious economic degradation, in spite of the regular mil- itary coups which brought the lumbering tanks into the streets by our school, in spite of a gradual sale of all the national industries, Argentina was in those years an extraordinary place in which to grow up, and Buenos Aires a metropolis of immense intellectual richness and inven- tion. There was a style of thought unique to this society, capable of broaching (in the same idea) the great metaphysical questions and the realities of grassroot politics, discussed around dinner tables, on park benches, in cafés. In Buenos Aires, the café was the neighborhood agora. Different from the quiet, bourgeois cafés of Mittel-Europa, grittier, noisier, filled with a Alberto Manguel is author of A History of Reading, Reading Pictures, Into the Looking-Glass Wood, and others. === Page 160 === 318 PARTISAN REVIEW mingling of smoke and comforting smells, closer perhaps to the Italian or Spanish cafés that many of the immigrants had known in their native cities, the Buenos Aires café gave rise to a peculiar breed of customers, distinguished by their attitudes and habits. The retired politician, the soccer fan, the conservative lawyer, the unpublished poet, the union leader, the local madman, the card shark, the student who either opened his books on the palimpsest tabletops or escaped from his studies into the world of will and representation. Also, a character defined by the essayist Raúl Scalabrini Ortiz: the man who is alone and waits, no one ever knew what for, nursing a cup of coffee and a never fully consumed cigarette, a character closer to Schopenhauer than to Beckett, listening in silence to discussions on God, goals, César Vallejo, horse-racing, Che Guevara, Swedish films, the novels of Pavese, the Cold War, national politics, the fifth dimension, ghosts, the hips of Gina Lollobrigida. A peculiar humor permeated all these social transactions: irony tinged with sadness, playfulness with gravitas. Argentineans seemed to possess the capability of enjoying the smallest casual offering and feel- ing the most subtle moments of sadness. They had a passionate sense of curiosity, a keen eye for the revealing notion, a respect for the intelligent mind, for the generous act, for the enlightened observation. They knew who they were in the world and felt proud of that identity (which Borges called “an act of faith”). Most important, there was in all this the possibility of a blossoming, a ripening, a giving fruit. Economic con- straints and their attendant politics, imposed from abroad by foreign companies not yet multinational, dictated much of the codes of society, and yet the questioning spirit of Argentineans, their particular wit, their melancholic bravery, held for their society something greater and better, beyond what seemed like passing spells of fraudulent government. If misfortune struck, as it did sometimes anywhere on earth, then (Argen- tineans believed) it wouldn't last long: the country was too rich, too strong, too full of promise to imagine an endlessly bleak future. Since the nineteenth century, Argentina had expected an influx of northern immigrants, especially from Britain, an empire that seemed, in the eyes of the Argentinean intelligentsia, the source of civilization. However, it was mainly immigrants from continental Europe who flocked to Argentina after World War I: Italians and Spaniards above all, but also the Jews from Russia and Poland and the Syrio-Lebanese from the Levant. For these exiles, it became impossible to buy the best land in the fertile plains of Argentina, since most of it was already in the hands of a few immensely rich families. Many became farmhands, poorly paid; others drifted towards the cities where they opened small === Page 161 === ALBERTO MANGUEL 319 businesses or became manual workers. And yet, for almost all, Argentina was emblematic of the promise of the New World in contrast with the betrayal of the Old. A vast optimistic vocabulary appears in the political discourse of the thirties and forties: “vision,” “horizon,” “new beginnings,” “golden future.” But by then, the future had already been corrupted, and the language attempted lamely to dress up the begin- nings of the chaos. In 1930, the Argentinean landowners set up the first of a series of military governments to serve their own interests, during what came to be known as “the infamous decade.” When Perón appeared, he seemed to be the only hope for the workers to obtain fairer work measures and social benefits. They were wrong. Some of these benefits they obtained, but at the cost of a further loss of freedom. Perón’s political movement, the justicialismo, co-opting the word for justice, merely changed one nefarious reign for another, oligarchy for demagogy. And yet, even, by the end of Perón’s regime, the qualities that defined Argentina’s spirit were not lost. They certainly survived throughout my schooling, from 1955 to 1966, and I believe they could have allowed for a change towards democracy. It is not out of nostalgia that I mourn for those lost capabilities; it is out of the belief that they could, indeed, would have flourished, had they not been poisoned by successive ban- dits who took over the government of the state. Sometime in the forties, Witold Gombrowicz, who lived in Argentina for more than twenty years, wrote this in his journal: What is Argentina? Is it perhaps a dough that has not yet become bread, is it simply something that has not quite succeeded in coagu- lating, or is it a protest against the mechanization of the soul, a dis- dainful and angry gesture of someone who refuses the hoarding become too automatic, the intelligence become too intelligent, the beauty that is too beautiful, the morality that is too moral? In this climate, under this constellation there might come into being a truly creative protest against Europe. If the softness found a way to turn hard. If the lack of definition might become a plan, that is to say, a definition. What happened? Essentially, in the midst of the economic rampage fostered by the United States, the European banks, and the International Monetary Fund, Argentina, as a society, stopped believing in itself. Every society is an invention, a combination, according to Ernest Renan, “of memory and amnesia” (“every French citizen has to have === Page 162 === 320 PARTISAN REVIEW forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew"), an imaginary construct based on the agreement between individuals who have decided to live together under common laws. These laws are a belief system: lose faith in the system and the notion of society disappears, like water in water. The American Pledge of Allegiance, the Marseillaise, the motto "Liber- dade o morte," the infamous "Deutschland, Deutschland über alles," the Canadian "True North Strong and Free" are ritual incantations to lend sound, if not sense to our beliefs. Written on the stone slabs of Hammurabi, recited by the elders of the Orixás, engraved over the door of the temple at Delphos, or printed in the thousands of registers of the Law Courts of today, these common agreements that order our lives together are like the Red King's dream in Alice in Wonderland: wake him, and our illuminated society will go out, "bang, like a candle." In Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, Thomas More's son-in-law argues that in order to get at the Devil, he would willingly knock down every one of England's invented laws. And More, the lawyer, angrily answers: "And do you think you'd be able to stand in the wind that would blow?" More couldn't know it, but he was talking about my Argentina. This loss of ideology and of faith in a legal structure was carefully nursed by the economic giants. Admittedly, it was not difficult to cor- rupt the upper classes, the military, even the leaders of the workers' unions to whom smaller or larger cuts were offered de facto in every business transaction. At the same time, the usurers were mindful of not losing their interests. Even after the horrors of the military dictatorship, when it seemed that Argentina had been bled of every one of its finan- cial and intellectual powers, the usurers made huge profits. Between 1980 and 2000, (according to the World Bank's World Development Indicators, 2001), the private lenders to Latin American governments received 192 billion dollars above their loans. During those same years, the IMF lent Latin America 71.3 billion dollars and was reimbursed 86.7 billion, making a profit of 15.4 billion. So much for their com- plaint about not being paid back. But I am neither an economist nor a political historian: those bare numerical facts speak for themselves. The elements that allow me, as an individual, to try to understand the world are my experience of society (which is not much) and my reading of books (which are too many). And both teach me that no human group, whether a family or a nation, can exist without the common accord of its members. Whether in Ham- let's dysfunctional family at Elsinore or in the sorry France of Louis XV, the end is visible the very first time the common accord is broken and === Page 163 === ALBERTO MANGUEL 321 no voices are raised in protest. Chesterton remarked that there can be no hope for a society in which the pronouncement by the Lord Chief Justice that "murder is wrong" is considered a dazzling epigram. Today, in Argentina, this demand for honesty (a primordial feature of our national heroes, according to our banal school books) seems, if not daz- zling, disingenuous. Granted, the skepticism began many decades ago, and we have never been rid of it. I remember that when the military tanks invaded the streets at the outset of the dictatorship, in the late six- ties, the cartoonist Quino published a strip in which the face of his char- acter, Mafalda, occupied the full frame, asking the question: "And everything we were taught in school?" There exists a frame of mind, which we have (erroneously) called Machiavellian, that leads us to believe that anything is permissible for the sake of self-aggrandizement, including the breaking of the law. Greek tyrants, Roman Caesars, popes, and emperors possessed it; in its sparked wars, justified atrocities, caused unspeakable suffering; in the end, it has always led to the collapse of the societies within which it became rooted. In Argentina, it began at the very dawn of the Republic, with the murder of the young revolutionary Mariano Moreno. It became official in the nineteenth century with the tyranny of Juan Manuel de Rosas, acceptable with the oligarchs and landowners of the early twentieth century, popular with Perón. Finally, with the military dictatorship, it undermined every aspect of society, ignored every legal- ity, made torture and murder everyday government weapons, infected both language and thought. By the late eighties, this frame of mind had become so ingrained that it was feasible for President Menem to pardon the foulest of the Junta's criminals and for most Argentinians to justify, in some sarcastically clever way, the crapulous dealings of their govern- ment. Thanks to the military, in the Argentina of the nineties, it became impossible to use the words "honesty," "truth," and "decency" without a tinge of irony. Today's institutional crisis is, as well as an economic crisis, a crisis of thought. Argentinean thinkers from the nineteenth century onwards (Mariano Moreno or Bernardino Rivadavia) have held as their dogma the Droits de l'Homme enshrined by the French Revolution as the national basic accord on which to establish a just society. Those who opposed the dictatorship of Rosas in the 1850s believed in these rights, and so did those who struggled against the military dictatorship of the 1970s. Exemplary figures among these believers were, at the end of the nineteenth century, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, responsible for estab- lishing the rules of state education, secular and free, and, in our time, === Page 164 === 322 PARTISAN REVIEW Ernesto Sábato, who set aside many months of his life as a writer to com- pose the Report on the Disappeared (published under the title Nunca Más) that should have served to reestablish a system of justice for all. But the military dictatorship demolished such a system of beliefs, and the Droits de l'Homme, following the world tendency towards absolute egotism, became the droits de l'homme in the lowercase singular: the right to set oneself aside from the rest of society, the right to save one's own skin, the right to offer preferential treatment to friends and family, the right to look after one's own interests against the interests of the community. In such a climate, President De la Rúa's task was hopeless. To restore balance to a society that effectively no longer exists because it no longer believes in its own integrity is a trick no magician can per- form. It is as if the members of the audience refused to enter an implicit contract of respect and suspension of disbelief with the performer, as if they decided not to sit and watch a rabbit being pulled out of a hat, and tried instead to run away with both the hat and the rabbit. Certain that if they don't, the magician will steal them both first. Under such cir- cumstances, no performance can take place and the theatre might as well fold. The famous tango “Cambalache” (“Junk Shop”) foresaw it all in 1935: “No one cares if you were born honest,” it sings. It's all the same: the one who slaves All day and night like an ox, the one who lives off others, the one who kills, the one who cures, or the one who's broken the law. During his long regime, Perón liked to boast that, like Uncle Scrooge, he could "walk on the gold bars in the Treasury House"; once he had fled, there was no gold left to walk on and Perón appeared on interna- tional financial lists as one of the richest men in the world. After Perón, the thefts continued and increased. The money lent to Argentina, several times, by the IMF was pocketed by the same well-known ruffians: min- isters, generals, businessmen, industrialists, congressmen, bankers, sen- ators. Their names are familiar to every Argentinean. The IMF's refusal to lend more was based on the safe premise that it would simply be stolen again (thieves know one another's habits all too well). But the fact that there remains nothing left to steal is no consolation to the hun- dreds of thousands of Argentineans who have nothing to eat and no roof under which to sleep. In Argentina today, nineteen million people live beneath the poverty level. Every day some fifty children die from === Page 165 === ALBERTO MANGUEL 323 malnutrition. In the month of January of last year, half a million people joined the soup kitchen queues set up by the privately run Caritas Foun- dation to aid the starving. Starving, in a country known, barely a few decades ago, as “the bread basket of the world”! The question asked now is, of course, what next? What possible solu- tion is there for a country bankrupt financially and morally, with the same lot of corrupt politicians fighting over what is now nothing but bare bones, with a murderous military waiting in the wings, with no justice system, no economic program, no efficient industrial activities to speak of? What can Argentina expect when one of the early interim presidents, a native of the town of La Quebrada, who first replaced De la Rúa, in a gesture out of a Cortázar story, closed his inaugural speech by dedicating his short mandate “to the Christ of La Quebrada”? What can the citizens of Argentina hope for when the latest in the half-dozen presidential replacements (President Duhalde) has a notorious criminal record for fraud, and his wife believes she’s inhabited by the spirit of “saint” Evita? Is there hope? Argentineans have long bragged about their so-called “viveza criolla” or endemic cunning. This trickster mentality is a dou- ble-edged weapon. In world literature, its incarnation is Ulysses, who was, for Homer, a clever hero, savior of the Greeks, scourge of Troy, vic- tor over Polyphemus and the Sirens; and for Dante, a liar and a cheat condemned to the eighth circle of Hell. Though lately Argentineans seem to have confirmed Dante’s dictum, it may still be possible to revert to Homer’s vision and use this dangerous gift to vanquish monsters and overcome obstacles. But I am not optimistic. In the Argentinean national epic poem, the gaucho Martín Fierro, in order to escape the unjust system that has betrayed him (the system that recruited him into the army and bereft him of his land, his house, and his family), becomes a deserter and the acknowledged hero of the Argen- tinean imagination. But for the Argentineans of today, there is nothing left to desert, there is no “other place.” In 1938, Odón von Horváth wrote: “A state never disintegrates, or perhaps only its social structure disintegrates to allow for a new one. The state itself always remains, even when the people who constitute it die, because then another people appear.” I would say that the exact opposite is true. The state dies, the people survive and, perhaps, in the best of cases, succeed in creating another, different state upon the debris of the one that has crumbled. The country imagined by my ancestors, the extraordinary country that educated me and made me who I am, exists no more among its ruins. Argentina is no longer, and the bastards who destroyed it are still alive. === Page 166 === DAVID SIDORSKY Charting the Intellectual Career of Sidney Hook: Five Major Steps THE CENTENNIAL OF SIDNEY HOOK’S BIRTH provides a unique vantage point for surveying the main intellectual movements of the twentieth century. These movements can be observed from the perspective afforded by each of the five major steps of Hook’s intel- lectual career. He was, to a degree probably unparalleled by any other philosopher of his generation, actively involved in the cultural and polit- ical conflicts of his time. Pragmatism, which is generally considered to be the first indigenously American philosophical movement, was born just after the turn of the century. Sidney Hook became a partisan of this philosophy, whose themes provided the substance for the first major step of his intellectual career during his graduate studies at Columbia University with John Dewey in the early 1920s. In the five decades in which Pragmatism was the dominant philosophy of the United States, Sidney Hook emerged as a primary figure in the justification and defense of Pragmatic views. He earned the title, among both Pragmatism’s proponents and critics, of “Dewey’s bulldog.” Yet Hook sustained a continuing interest in Marxism, which formed the second major step in his intellectual career. He sought to unite his interpretation of Marxism with Deweyan Pragmatism in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This interpretation developed the affinities between the Pragmatic methodology, with its commitment to scientific method as an instrument of human knowledge, and Marxist theory, understood as a scientifically based program for historical transformation. Hook’s Marxism brought him to a deep involvement in the political and cultural movements of the Left. These movements were riven by opposition and support for the Soviet Union and for the official line of the Communist Party. In the third major step of Hook’s intellectual career, his analysis of the conflicting grounds of this rift and its moral David Sidorsky is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. === Page 167 === DAVID SIDORSKY 325 implications became the defining factor of his position within American cultural and political life. Thus, Hook's original effort at uniting Prag- matic philosophy with Marxism led him to combine, for several decades, a belief in democratic socialism with a dedication to the cause of anticommunism. In the 1960s, however, in response to the New Left's attack upon many American historical institutions, including the university, Hook reexamined the priorities of his personal and Pragmatic moral views regarding the values of American society. This reexamination led him to an activist defense of pluralism and balance among competing inherited social values, including a defense of the traditional university. Accord- ingly, in the fourth major step of his intellectual career, Hook became identified with aspects of the American neoconservative movement, par- ticularly in the "culture wars" that were generated by the "revolution- ary" 1960s and their aftermath. Hook's continual commitment to Pragmatism was also expressed in the more general, and personal, idiom of Enlightenment naturalism, a motif which represents a fifth major step of his intellectual career. As a naturalist, Hook did not believe that there could be any divine guaran- tee either for human triumph and redemption in history or for spiritual transcendence and liberation from the forces of nature. As a partisan of the Enlightenment, he believed that human intelligence might succeed in progressing toward the perfectibility of the human condition and the scientific transformation of natural processes, since the ultimate defeat of mankind was also not religiously ordained or inevitable. The course of Sidney Hook's intellectual career can be charted by a survey of these five major steps. Some of these steps remained constant commitments throughout while others shifted, changed, and developed during a life which was continually engaged in theoretical social inquiry as well as in public forums for the exchange of ideas. The advent of the Pragmatic movement in American philosophy, which gained Hook's lifetime loyalty, was heralded in a remarkable let- ter from William James, the author of Pragmatism, to his younger brother, the novelist Henry James, dated May 4, 1907. In the opening of that letter, William James praises with characteristic ambivalence Henry James's study of the United States, The American Scene, as "supremely great... in its peculiar way." It is relevant in the context of Hook's birth in 1902 to an immigrant family in New York to note Henry James's comments in The American Scene on his visit to the Lower East Side of New York at about that time. === Page 168 === 326 PARTISAN REVIEW James's response to this visit included the speculative comment that the new energy and vitality of this strange society of immigrants would soon make its way into the mainstream of English-speaking theater, thought, and letters. Henry James could not refrain from expressing his concern about the future sounds and accent of the English language, once this happy event will have taken place. After a number of “elder brother” remonstrations against Henry James's excessively mannered style, despite the acknowledged “para- doxical success” of his later novels, William James moves on to the communicative point of the letter about his own forthcoming work, Pragmatism: I have just finished the proofs of a little book called Pragmatism, which even you may enjoy reading. It is a very “sincere” and, from the point of view of ordinary philosophy-professorial manners, a very unconventional utterance, not particularly original at any one point, yet, in the midst of the literature of the way of thinking which it represents, with just that amount of squeak or shrillness of if ten years hence it should be rated as “epoch-making,” for of the definitive triumph of that general way of thinking I can entertain no doubt whatever. I believe it to be something quite like the protestant reformation. If we replace the European reference to the “Reformation” with the more American idiom that Dewey introduced of a “Reconstruction” in philosophy, then James's prophecy seems to have been vindicated. This reconstruction was hailed as marking a new philosophical beginning after the dead end of the main fin-de-siècle philosophical tendencies of Materialism and Idealism. Pragmatism was to provide a thoroughgoing reconstruction in major areas of philosophical thought, and Sidney Hook, like William James, was confident of the “definitive triumph of that general way of think- ing.” More specifically, Hook supported Pragmatism in four significant areas: an interpretation of metaphysics; a methodology that placed great value on scientific method; an epistemology that stressed the instru- mental role of knowledge in reshaping the human environment; and a moral theory that required the application of critical intelligence to “problematic situations." Sidney Hook's doctoral dissertation was on the “metaphysics of Pragmatism” and examined various Pragmatic theses about the most === Page 169 === DAVID SIDORSKY 327 pervasive and general features of Experience and Existence. Yet Hook recognized that in the Pragmatic tradition the truths of metaphysics can- not transcend the boundaries of the empirical truths of science. Accordingly, in the second area, that is, methodology, Pragmatism considered the methods of science to be paradigmatic for all reliable knowledge. John Dewey argued for the application of scientific method to issues of education, democracy, or societal reconstruction. Hook shared the Deweyan desire and hope for methods analogous to scientific inquiry in public policy. But he recognized the significant distance between experimental research in the natural sciences and research on educational issues, or between the progression of knowledge in the nat- ural sciences and the limits to progress in historical studies or social thought. Hook emphasized the narrower but still optimistic thesis that "critical intelligence" could arrive at better confirmed and, conse- quently, more adequate beliefs on political and social issues. Third, in its epistemology, Pragmatism rejected prevailing accounts of knowledge as a passive process in which individuals "mirror" or "cohere" the objects of a given world. Rather, knowledge was an active process which necessarily involved prediction and its verification by future experience. Consequently, Truth for the Pragmatist was an instru- ment both for adaptation to the environment and for the control and future change of the "given" realities. Finally, the moral theory of Pragmatism interpreted moral decisions as hypotheses about what policies or actions would optimally and effec- tively resolve the needs and conflicts within a concrete "problematic sit- uation." This interpretation, with its rejection of the traditional absolutism of ethical imperatives, requires great confidence in the abil- ity of human beings to exercise critical intelligence in evaluating moral conflict and in developing social norms. Sidney Hook's career found its greatest fulfillment in attempting to use critical intelligence on the most important moral issues confronting the society in which he lived. Alongside his continuing commitment to Pragmatic philosophy, Hook emerged as a major interpreter of Marxism. He traced the devel- opment of Marxist thought through a series of precursors to its Hegelian roots in From Hegel to Marx. Subsequently, in Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, Hook examined the grounds for reconcil- iation between Marxism and Pragmatism. Hook emphasized two elements of affinity. First, Marx had been the philosopher of scientific socialism as opposed to Utopian socialism. Accordingly, Hook presented Marx's theory in the form of a scientific hypothesis that represented a prediction-subject to confirmation or === Page 170 === 328 PARTISAN REVIEW refutation by future historical experience that socializing the means of production would greatly advance the technology and productivity of a cyclically depressed capitalist economy. If the rhetorical slogan that Marxism is scientific socialism represents the acceptance of the scientific method for socio-economic transformation and excludes the dogmatic thesis that history is governed by dialectically materialist laws of inevitable revolutionary progress toward socialism, then the bridge between Pragmatism and Marxism can be established. Consequently, Hook's presentation of Marxism as a scientific experiment and his scathing critique of Dialectical Materialism strengthens the thesis of compatibility between Pragmatism and Marxism. A second basis for Hook's proposed reconciliation between Marxism and Pragmatism was the similarity of their views about the relationship between knowledge and action. Hook cited Marx's theses on the phi- losophy of Feuerbach, in which Marx asserted that all previous philoso- phies had sought to understand the world, while his sought to change it. This indicated that Marxism, like Pragmatism, rejected a theory of knowledge in which men were "passive spectators" of the "given" world. This aspect of Marxism shared the perspective of Pragmatic epis- temology, according to which knowledge is an instrument for the con- trol and transformation of the antecedent problematic situation. Such an interpretation has the additional advantage of not ascribing to Marx himself the responsibility for the ways in which his theory was subsequently used as dogma that brooked no heresy in the Leninist, Trotskyist, Stalinist, or Maoist interpretations. Further, Hook's Marx- ism did not embrace the normative Marxist view of history as a kind of monistic science that explained the course of all past history and pro- vided dialectical laws about the inevitable future development toward socialism. Thus, in The Hero in History, Hook argued against the claims of historical determinism, in which the actions of great individu- als are irrelevant because they merely reflect the working out of the underlying dialectical laws that govern historical structures. Hook's studies in Marxist thought led him to a period of residence in the Weimar Republic and, for a short time, in the Soviet Union. His experiences in these two countries had a lasting impact on his political philosophy. In Germany, Hook observed firsthand the dilemma of a liberal democracy that offered the protection of civil liberties and electoral par- ticipation to antidemocratic movements like the National Workers' Socialist Party. The challenge for a democracy was to adopt procedures that without undermining its own constitutional institutions, would === Page 171 === DAVID SIDORSKY 329 appropriately constrain and resist subversion by antidemocratic move- ments that exploited opportunities afforded by a free society in order to achieve political power and to end future democratic processes. In the Soviet Union, Hook's writings on Marxism brought him in contact with the scholarly work of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. The Institute's director, David Riazanov, was a very early vic- tim of Stalin's purges. Thus, Hook's political radar, which was always sensitive to the abuse of individual rights, received an "early warning signal" of the nature of the emerging totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. In a 1932 essay, Hook expressed his hope for the possibility of a social- ist transformation of history that would have been catalyzed by the achievement of the "Revolution" in Russia. (This rhetoric contrasted sharply with a standard anticommunist view in which the "Revolution" is characterized as a "coup" or "putsch" carried out by Lenin and a small cadre of followers against the reformist and democratically oriented gov- ernment of Alexander Kerensky.) Yet even though this essay still held out hope for revolutionary socialism, Hook concluded, with reference to what he termed a series of "horrendous excrescences" in the Soviet Union during Stalin's recent consolidation of power. His awareness and focus on these "horrendous excrescences" led to his anticommunism. This third major step in Hook's intellectual career, anticommunism, provides the basis for the title of his autobiography: Out of Step. For when Marxism was unpopular, Hook was in the vanguard of its inter- preters: he taught the first college course on Marxism in the United States. When, in the 1930s, support for the Soviet Union and for social- ism became widespread and was a major force in the intellectual, liter- ary, and artistic cultural circles of the West, including the United States, Hook was among the very small group of dedicated anticommunists. Anticommunists then were on the fringe of American political cul- ture. Their explicit critique of the Soviet Union represented a minority view, even in comparison to the Communist Party, which had expanded its influence through networks of "fellow travelers," liberal supporters of "antifascism," and numerous "fronts" or movements for "progres- sive culture." During that period, the most significant forum for anticommunist views was Partisan Review. That journal, which had originally been founded as a pro-communist, high culture alternative to The New Masses, sought, under the editorship of William Phillips and Philip Rahv, to explore the possibilities of a union between Marxism and mod- === Page 172 === 330 PARTISAN REVIEW ernism, while serving as a catalyst for the critical analysis of the Stalin- ist regime in the Soviet Union. In the mid-1930s, Stalin's purge trials of the original Kremlin leader- ship were the single most dramatic development that generated the greatest passion between pro-Soviet supporters and anticommunist crit- ics. A well-known incident indicates Hook's sense of the injustice of these show trials. Hook had hosted a party in his apartment in Green- wich Village at which Bertolt Brecht was the most identifiable literary celebrity. Brecht, an exile from Hitler's Germany, had become a promi- nent figure in the "antifascist" movement and in theatrical circles in New York. He brought off a characteristically sardonic quip about the purge trials, saying that if the prominent defendants were not guilty, then they were all the more guilty, meaning that if they were not legally guilty at the bar of judicial justice, then they were guilty at the more important bar of historical justice. The dialectical basis for Brecht's quip is the view that these former leaders of a historically progressive revo- lution had now been cast in the role of opponents to the next phase of the development of the forces of historical progress, so that they were being judged by the standard by which they had lived. Hook recognized that Brecht was saying that even if they had been framed by Stalin, they should be considered guilty-which rationalized the abuse of legal jus- tice by ceding the right to render the "verdict of history" to the Soviet state. Hook had placed the coats of the guests in an adjoining room. Now he went there, collected Brecht's coat, and handed it to him. Brecht took his coat and left without comment, either chagrined by the rebuke to the moral flippancy of his own remark or, more probably, conceding the right of a host to decide upon his own guest list. Hook's participation in the argument about the nature of the com- munist revolution was joined with his support for Dewey's views on the nature of democracy and freedom. Thus, he sought to persuade Dewey to become the chairman of a Commission of Inquiry that would inves- tigate the charges against Leon Trotsky. Despite the opposition of some of Dewey's closest family members, Dewey went to Mexico for the pub- lic hearings of the Commission of Inquiry. After assessing the evidence, Trotsky was found not guilty of the various charges of treason and con- spiracy that had been used to force him into exile. Despite the "legal exoneration" of Trotsky, the inquiry into Trotsky's position on political and economic issues, where Dewey had suggested that Trotsky's mind was "locked in absolutes," did mark a turning point in the development of Hook's anticommunism. For Trotsky's views indi- === Page 173 === DAVID SIDORSKY 331 cated that Marxist theory carried within itself the seeds of an antide- mocratic approach to the question of political authority. Critical analy- sis refuted both the Marxist and Leninist-Trotskyist thesis that the political leadership within a capitalist democracy is nothing but the executive committee for bourgeois class interests. In the anticommunist community, the debate over Trotskyism was carried out primarily in the pages of Partisan Review. As the "dismal decade" of the thirties neared its end, one of the central issues of that debate was the legitimacy of American political action against Nazi Ger- many at the risk of entry into a second World War. In terms of the Trot- skyist analysis of that period, the struggle between the Western democratic polities and Germany was interpreted as a struggle between one oppressive domain of imperial, corporate capitalism in England and the United States against another, more oppressive domain, which was categorized as the decadent "last phase of capitalism," in Nazi Ger- many. In this view, there was little to choose between these two forms or phases of repressive capitalist society. The argument that there was no essential moral difference between American capitalism, despite its formal institutionalization of democra- tic freedom, and the German capitalist regime, despite its restructuring as the instrument of the National Workers' Socialist Party, was formu- lated in a last pro-Trotskyist editorial in Partisan Review. This argu- ment continued to be supported by the young Trotskyist literary critic, Irving Howe, as well as in the pages of Politics, a breakaway from Par- tisan Review founded by Dwight Macdonald. For Sidney Hook, as for the changing view of Partisan Review, the struggle of the Second World War was essentially between the imperfect societies of democratic free- dom, which merited protection, and the evil polities of totalitarian expansionism, which ought to be ended. This contest between democratic freedom and totalitarianism has sig- nificant implications for theoretical political philosophy. For Hook, it indicated, in general terms, that contrary to Marxism, political institu- tions are not simply epiphenomenal to an economic substructure. Rather, the difference between the institutions of a free democratic soci- ety and their totalitarian negation is far more important than the issue of capitalist or socialist ownership of the means of production. Within a few years after the Second World War, Hook defined the struggle between the Soviet and Western blocs in its moral aspect as rep- resenting a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism. Accord- ingly, Hook's enlistment for the cause of democracy led to his characterization as a "Cold War warrior." === Page 174 === 332 PARTISAN REVIEW The current acceptance of the historical reality of a Cold War waged between the Soviet bloc and the West between 1947 and 1989 has gone far toward erasing the historical memory of the actual usage of that term in the late 1940s and 1950s. The contemporaneous use of the phrase "Cold War warrior" was a pejorative term for a person who sought to foment an unnecessary war with a nonexistent enemy because of his paranoiac belief that socialist countries, as supporters of an alternative, noncapitalist society, represented a hostile threat to the West. Thus, Sid- ney Hook's anticommunism was portrayed as an ideological vision whose moral absolutism overrode the arguments for prudent policies in pursuit of peace with the Soviet bloc in an age of nuclear arms. A por- trait that moved further than the criticism of anticommunism as a species of ideological zealotry was its dramatic representation, as in Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, as a form of moral Puritanism which sought to repress the communist movement, paralleling the paranoiac Puritanical suppression of the practice of witchcraft in an earlier age. Hook, who had observed the triumph of totalitarian forces in Ger- many, recognized that democratic societies could, in principle, and, in appropriate circumstances, must restrict the activities of antidemocratic political groups. He formulated this view in Heresy Yes, Conspiracy No. To the extent that Communist Party activities in democratic countries represented the expression or even the advocacy of heretical ideas and competing points of view, their rights ought not to be abridged on pain of violation of democratic principles. Yet, to the extent that these activ- ities represented a conspiratorial organization against the procedures and methods of democracy, it would be legitimate for a democracy to pass legislation that would restrain the freedom of action of the con- spiracy. Hook's distinction does not, of course, govern the application of this theoretical principle to particular cases and their adjudication in specific circumstances. The dispute over the nature of the Soviet Union in both its domestic and foreign policy emerged from the place it had occupied in the 1930s on the fringes of American political culture to become a central feature of the intellectual, media, and policy issues of the 1950s. Thus, Partisan Review, the journal of the anticommunist writers, including such gifted novelists as Silone, Orwell, Koestler, and Malraux, was recognized as the most significant intellectual journal of the period. In these years, Hook was a member of Partisan Review's editorial board, along with James Burnham, his colleague in the Philosophy Department at New York University. Another board member was Lionel Trilling of Columbia University, whose novel The Middle of the === Page 175 === DAVID SIDORSKY 333 Journey included a central character based on Whittaker Chambers, the most significant anticommunist "witness" of the 1950s. The founding co-editor of Partisan Review, William Phillips, had steered it beyond the limiting boundaries of political discussion to focus on the spectrum of contemporary literary and cultural movements that included Phillips's own special interests in the modernist literary criticism of T. S. Eliot and the literary theory of Sigmund Freud. Yet as the Cold War deepened, the issues associated with anticommunism retained their central position within American intellectual and political culture. In this context, the mercurial rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had emerged as a leading protagonist of an alternative type of anticom- munism, had to be confronted by the longtime supporters of the anti- communist movement. Senator McCarthy's tactics led to a split among the members of the editorial board of Partisan Review. There was a division between Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling, and William Phillips, on the one hand, and James Burnham, who argued that it was a fallacy of moral equivalence or a false moral symmetry to equate the millions of murders which the communists had carried out with the handful of errors made by Senator McCarthy in his charges against communists. For Burnham, this would seem to be analogous in contemporaneous terms to an equation between deaths caused by terrorism and deaths that result from collateral damage caused by counterterrorism. Hook, Trilling, and Phillips, among others, believed that the anti- communist cause must dissociate itself completely from the activities of Senator McCarthy, for both prudential and moral reasons. In prudential terms, the failure to dissociate would facilitate the agenda of the Left to use the epithet of "McCarthyism" to condemn any kind of anticommu- nist activity. Burnham's argument was that the Left would condemn anticommunists as "McCarthyites" no matter how strongly they criti- cized the tactics of Senator McCarthy. Further, "McCarthyism," as a cherished intellectual construct of the Left, was developed to indicate a portent of an incipient nativist Amer- ican fascism. This construct would be exploited by the Left to develop a politically useful, broad front of anti-McCarthyism or antifascism in which hard-core Communists would be mixed with anti-Cold War neu- tralist, anti-anti-Communists, advocates of peace, and true believers in civil liberties. A forceful rejoinder, however, was advanced on moral grounds. The moral argument was that since the anticommunist movement had its roots in a protest against the injustice of Stalin's methods, it was unten- able that this movement should fail to reject any abuse of individuals' === Page 176 === 334 PARTISAN REVIEW legal and civil rights: no innocent person should be charged for reasons of politics or propaganda in the absence of the highest standard of evi- dence. Thus, procedural fairness ought to be maintained regardless of the ways in which the political Left would exploit the anticommunist movement's criticism of Senator McCarthy. This position was accepted by Partisan Review's board and led to James Burnham's resignation from that board. The significance of McCarthyism has remained a contested issue for both the Left and the Right, even though the fall of McCarthyism was as rapid and spectacular as its meteoric rise had been. At the apparent peak of his power, Senator McCarthy had adopted the self-destructive strategy of attacking the presidency of General Eisenhower as "soft" on communism. This attack soon brought about his political demise. At the opposite ideological pole, even after McCarthy's mortal polit- ical wounds, McCarthyism continued to be portrayed as the growing threat of American fascism. In Paris in late 1954, for example, I heard Jean-Paul Sartre develop this analysis of American politics and galvanize his audience with the rhetorical refrain of "À bas le McCarthyisme! À bas le fascisme!" In Sartre's view, the greater threat to French political and cultural autonomy did not originate from the position of Soviet armed forces in the heart of Europe, but from the potential for American fascism. To me, this seemed an extraordinary response by a French intellectual who had himself lived through the German occupation and had witnessed General Eisenhower's liberation of France and Paris, including the mag- nanimous and politically astute ascription of that liberation to the forces of the Resistance and of Free France. Sartre's expressed tilt toward Soviet communist policies in the 1950s in opposition to Eisen- hower and American "proto-fascism" also suggests an impulse to self- destructiveness. This tendency to self-destructiveness makes McCarthy's pale in comparison, for the stakes were not the rise or fall of an indi- vidual political career, but whether the freedom of French cultural and political life would suffer the fate of Warsaw, Prague, or East Berlin. Hook's characterization of the conflict between the West and the Soviet Union as a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism resulted in his role as an ideological and intellectual leader in the 1950s, not only in the United States but throughout what was referred to as the "free world." He organized the American Committee for Cultural Free- dom, which sponsored a series of symposia and conferences in the United States, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Western Europe, which also sponsored a number of publications, including === Page 177 === DAVID SIDORSKY 335 Encounter in the United Kingdom, Der Monat in Berlin, and Les Preuves in France. Although each of these journals had its own distinc- tive style and approach, each had, as its dominant moral theme the opposition between democracy and totalitarianism. In a sense, Partisan Review was the model for each of them in its successful combination of aspects of cultural modernism, artistic avant-garde criticism, and the recognition of the significance of anticommunism for the politics of the period. Despite this international expansion of Hook's influence in the anti- communist movement, he remained constant to both Pragmatism and socialism. Hook reasserted the justification of Pragmatism, which Dewey had formulated against metaphysical anti-empirical views in The Quest for Certainty, with a parallel criticism of Heideggerian Existen- tialism in The Quest for Being. Hook's support for socialism did not imply any view about the rela- tionship of free market economics and political democracy. In a front page essay on von Hayek's Road to Serfdom for The New York Times Book Review, he criticized von Hayek's thesis that free-market plural- ism leads to democracy and that socialism's concentration of economic and political power leads to the denial of freedom. For Hook, who had rejected Marxist economic determinism, there was no necessary con- nection between the economic and the political order. Consequently, he believed in the possibility of democratic socialist governments, just as he recognized the reality of dictatorial socialist regimes. He also believed that there could be democratic capitalist governments, contrary to the standard Marxist view, and that capitalist societies might not be demo- cratic, but authoritarian or even dictatorial. Hook's subsequent turn toward neoconservatism did not originate from a new belief in the importance of free-market economies for polit- ical freedom. Nor did it derive from any fundamental change in his sec- ular and naturalist opposition to religious views. Thus, Hook did not become, in contemporaneous political terms, either an economic or a religious conservative. Yet he did represent and strongly express the voice of cultural conservatism. The rise of the New Left in the 1960s, with its attack on academic freedom and academic integrity in major universities, provided the impetus for the fourth major step in Hook's intellectual career-in which his views were to be linked with the neoconservative movement in American political thought. Hook remained “out of step.” For as uni- versities shifted to compromise with and absorb the onslaught of the New Left with a series of changes in their standards and curricula, === Page 178 === 336 PARTISAN REVIEW Hook stressed his loyalty to the essential aspects of the traditional free university. By this time, Hook had abandoned his self-identification with Marx- ism, partly because it had become evident to him that the Marxist cor- pus had been interpreted in ways that differed significantly from his own preferred interpretation of Marxism as an empirical hypothesis about scientific socialism. In contrast to this interpretation, Marxism included a theory of Existentialist Marxism derived from a reading of Marx's youthful 1848 manuscripts, as well as the construction of a Nietzschean Marxism derived from the rejection of the primacy of eco- nomic theory combined with the Romantic attractiveness of revolution- ary transformation of social institutions. In a 1975 essay signaling this abandonment, Hook recognized that Marx's texts and legacy had per- mitted these diverse interpretations, as well as those of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao-which had been used to legitimate totalitarian power. In theory, it would have been possible for Hook to continue his advo- cacy of socialism even as he shifted to a conservative position on current cultural issues. Yet he appears to have changed his position. At an interview for Hook's oral biography, Professor Diane Ravitch began by asking him whether he had always been a socialist. He replied that in his boyhood, the family had voted for William Howard Taft, and he had shared the family's political loyalty. This surprised Professor Ravitch, and Hook explained that his father had been a worker in the garment industry and at that time there had been two seasons: "employ- ment" and "slack." William Howard Taft was perceived as supporting tariffs on imported textiles, thereby helping employment and reducing "slack." Accordingly, the family supported his candidacy. After this reminiscence, Hook pointed out that he had always prided himself on his ability to apply logic and critical intelligence to political and social issues. Yet he declared that embarrassing as the confession might be in respect to this ability, he had concluded that he had been guilty of a fallacy in the logic of practical reasoning. That fallacy was embedded in his comparison of the realities of the capitalist system as he had himself experienced them in the Williamsburg neighborhood of his youth and in the Depression with the ideal portrait of socialism as envisaged in Marxism and in other theoretical projections of the social- ist economy. He had never corrected this bias by comparing the realities of capitalism with the economic realities of socialism as they had emerged in country after country where socialist governments had come to power. Alternatively, he had not adopted a perspective in which the ideal theory of socialism, with its vision of unfettered production for === Page 179 === DAVID SIDORSKY 337 use, would be compared with its ideal counterpart in the theory of a capitalist free market society in which the invisible hand works to bring forth optimal prices, wages, and rates of economic growth, and never allows equilibrium to be permanently established at depressed levels of economic performance. Hook's cultural conservatism was expressed in his criticism of the radical perspectives which absolutized some values like civil liberty and neglected the importance of correlative values like civic order or national security. He founded the newsletter Measure, whose title reflected his effort to stress the importance of balance among compet- ing, plural values. In the 1970s, an important confrontation was taking place in the uni- versity over the value of equality. Egalitarians were seeking to achieve virtual universality of access without considering the price to be paid in the loss of standards in American education. Thus, the open enrollment that was introduced-in order not to increase student frustration and failure-necessarily implied that a large proportion of work in post-sec- ondary school institutions would not take place at historical levels of college achievement. Generally, it is a truism that social institutions require the recognition or reward of hierarchical duties and of differ- ences in performance among persons engaged in the work of the insti- tution. Hook's focus upon "measure" sharpened the realization that the attempt to obliterate all relevant distinctions for the sake of the maxi- mization of equality could violate a value like excellence and deny fair- ness in standards of admission, employment, or promotion in any human enterprise, including the university. Consequently, Hook's criticism of a lack of balance among maximal- ist advocates of egalitarianism led him to become an opponent of those interpretations of affirmative action policies that involve group quotas. He did not oppose affirmative action as the positive search for able per- sons among minority groups, just as he did not oppose the development of educational and training programs for minorities and disadvantaged groups. But Hook opposed interpretations of affirmative action or of the extension of equality that would undermine or ignore standards of talent, merit, or achievement in the workplace and particularly in the academy. Hook's concern in the educational confrontation of the culture wars-a legacy of "Sixtysm"-was the issue of multiculturalism. Hook had always supported the Deweyan emphasis upon free inquiry that is critical of inherited traditions in any domain of experience, including some of Dewey's innovations in progressive education. Yet he also rec- === Page 180 === 338 PARTISAN REVIEW ognized that a valid conception of liberal education must also transmit the major cultural monuments of the tradition from one generation to the next. In many of the areas of cultural studies that had developed since the 1960s, the class becomes a shared community of faith organized around a search for group identity in which there is little room for skeptical intelligence or critical inquiry, particularly about the assumptions of the common faith. This is especially true where the cultural studies are of a group which is assumed to have shared the fate of victimhood, so that the academic study of its condition is often fused with an advocacy for an activist agenda. Hook's criticism of this kind of multicultural educa- tion was to assert the standards of critical discussion and research in all areas of university teaching, rejecting any politicized instruction, even in such academically sacrosanct fields as black studies, women's studies, or gay and lesbian studies. Hook's criticism of these ideological multicul- tural tendencies was conjoined with his opposition to efforts to delegit- imate the teaching of Western classics. He welcomed the introduction of nonpoliticized courses that would increase knowledge of non-Western cultures. Yet the university curriculum required balance between the introduction of new areas of study in non-Western cultures and the appreciation and critical interpretation of the Western and American cultural heritage. Thus, Hook's views as a cultural conservative were compatible with the approach he had adopted in support of Dewey's lib- eral Pragmatism. He continued to stress the importance of freedom of inquiry, the use of critical intelligence, and the need for measured eval- uation among plural values, along lines that were consistent with the systematic formulation he had published in 1946 in Education for Mod- ern Man. Hook's continuous defense of the Pragmatic philosophical perspec- tive was expressed, in terms of his personal beliefs, as a position that can be characterized as Enlightenment naturalism. This position represents a fifth aspect of his intellectual career. Hook's naturalism assumed that nature was neutral with respect to human endeavor. Nature was not malicious or hostile with an ultimate sentence of doom for human aspiration. Nor was it beneficent, even though natural events had given rise to human life and intelligence. Thus Hook rejected any place for the supernatural in accounts of human experience. Unlike James or Dewey, who had explored positively the possibilities of a naturalistic theism in which God may be consid- ered, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, as a name for "the power not our- === Page 181 === DAVID SIDORSKY 339 selves that makes for good in the Universe," Hook excluded any rein- terpretation of theism within the confines of naturalism. Similarly, Hook rejected as "anti-naturalistic" any interpretation of human nature which considered mankind to be irremediably evil, as in the Christian doctrine of original sin, or even in the Kantian dictum, canonized by Isaiah Berlin, that "out of the crooked timber of human- ity, nothing straight can be made." For Hook, the neutralization of nature left open the question of the possibilities of human perfectibility through the melioration of the human environment or the scientific mastery of psychological motivation. Hook's naturalism included a belief in the possibilities of the trans- formation of nature and of human nature. This Enlightenment faith in the possibility of progress through science was reinforced by the Prag- matic methodology that stressed the systematic application of scientific method to human affairs. Consequently, if Hook's naturalism viewed any divine guarantee of human triumph to be wishful, it also led to his optimistic belief that any interpretation of human history as tragically fated to destruction went beyond the empirical record of a neutralist naturalism. He was sensitive to the counter-claim that this version of nat- uralism could be characterized as projecting an excessively optimistic vision of the future of the human condition. For his Enlightenment natu- ralism rejected any ultimate pessimism that was derived either from the view that the immensity of nature, with its potentialities for catastrophe, was bound to overwhelm the transformative capacities of human intelli- gence or from the view that the perverse and self-destructive tendencies of human nature were irremediable and imperfectable. Hook was acutely aware that his optimistic projection was required to confront the twentieth-century phenomena that moved beyond the "hor- rendous excrescences" of the nascent Soviet state to the subsequent development of the "Gulag archipelago" and to the unimagined concen- tration camp universe with its death camps. Moreover, recent scientific and technological development indicated, in Winston Churchill's memo- rable phrase about the bombing of London by unmanned rockets, that "the Dark Ages return on the winged tips of Science." Hook confronted this challenge in several essays on evil in history, and in his presidential address to the American Philosophical Associa- tion, when he chose to question whether Pragmatism had an adequate "tragic sense of life." Hook's Pragmatic view of tragedy allows for innumerable sites for human failure and defeat. He also stressed that history is not simply a drama of good against evil, but involves a tragic conflict between one good and another good, between the good and the === Page 182 === 340 PARTISAN REVIEW right, as well as between one form of the right and another form of the right. Yet Hook remained adamant in his denial of the inevitability of the defeat of human ideals in history. With a characteristic Enlightenment optimism whose roots can be traced to Condorcet or even to Descartes, he speculated whether science, which seemed to be on the brink of tech- nological achievements so that "the poor" would not "always be with us," would also be able to realize progress in biology that eradicated sickness. Hook ended his address by stating: "Pragmatism, as I interpret it, is the theory and practice of enlarging human freedom in a precarious and tragic world by the arts of intelligent social control." And he went on to conclude that this practice may not be a lost cause "if we can summon the courage and intelligence to support our faith in freedom—and enjoy the blessings of a little luck." This naturalistic profession of faith in the possibility of the remedia- tion of human nature and the transformation of human history, which Hook found to be compatible with the Pragmatic sense of the tragic, stands in sharp contrast to Hellenic naturalism with its sense of tragic Necessity that insists that any lasting human triumph is unattainable. This Pragmatic faith also stands in ironic contrast to those texts of Bib- lical naturalism, like Job and Ecclesiastes, which assert limits to the human condition. Thus, Job recognizes the ways in which the immensi- ties of nature overwhelm any human aspiration for just rewards in this life. Similarly, Ecclesiastes can only counsel resignation to the tragic cir- cumstance that human endeavor is ultimately futile and vain in a world "under the sun" where "Time and Chance happen to all of mankind." Hook's Enlightenment naturalism was the complement of his own per- sonal optimism and feistiness. These formed the ground for his faith that whatever the numerous setbacks to human progress, the realistic acceptance of these facts does not logically permit an inference about the ultimate defeat of human ideals in history. This sequential survey of the five major steps of Hook's intellectual career calls for an epilogue that considers that career as a whole. Two contrary perspectives can be sketched. Some would characterize Hook's career as a kind of "autumnal" work, stressing his disillusionment with the transformative vision and radical zeal of his early views that led him to retreat to activities in defense and conservation of imperfect, tradi- tional institutions. From this perspective, the narrative constitutes a tragic fall from the promise, ardor, and idealism of his youth. === Page 183 === DAVID SIDORSKY 341 Others would represent Hook's career within the genre of the works of "spring." In these works, like Twelfth Night or As You Like It, the quixotic lover is initially infatuated with an impossible or absolutely inap- propriate object for his yearning. The happy outcome takes place only when a disillusioning discovery is made and the lover is rematched to an appropriate, true, and lasting object for his affection. The decision in favor of the latter perspective seems straightforward. It rests upon the unavoidable facts about the illusory character of those idealistically visionary, yet catastrophically regressive, political construc- tions which Hook came to oppose. It also rests upon the recognition of the paramount importance and resilient endurance into the twenty-first century of the institutions of democracy, cultural freedom, and scientific inquiry that gained Hook's loyalty and support through most of the past century. Hook's intellectual biography would be incomplete, however, with- out the realization that his thought and writing were constantly accom- panied by his teaching and self-identification as a teacher of philosophy. He was continuously energized by his activity as a teacher, whether in the undergraduate classroom, the graduate seminar, the public lecture, or the forum of controversial and polemical debate. As a teacher of introductory philosophy, one of his favorite books was a work with which he disagreed greatly: Plato's Republic. Hook enjoyed drawing out the "contradiction" between Plato's detailed con- struction of the imperatives for the ways of life of the citizens of his Republic and his concluding theme in the Myth of Er that each person must and should be free to make his own choices for the next stage of his life or reincarnation. One class assignment required the students to examine their own choices for a future life. The range of personal projections for an alternative life surprised Hook, and he discontinued this assignment as risking an invasion of pri- vacy. For it is a private question whether Sidney Hook himself would have chosen to be born again in a career that pursued the steps of Prag- matism, Marxism, anticommunism, cultural conservatism, and Enlight- enment naturalism. In Er's account, for example, of the choice made by Ulysses, as Plato envisaged it and Joyce later renarrated it, that great adventurer, who was "never at a loss," chose to be reincarnated as an Everyman who set forth for no venture beyond his native city and sought to enjoy the homegrown pleasures of the quiet life. The related public question, however, is whether the kind of intellec- tual career that Hook pursued provides a form of life which can serve as a model for later generations as they make their own choices in the === Page 184 === 342 PARTISAN REVIEW new century. It would appear that the model of Hook's life, as a philoso- pher and public intellectual, does provide a guide for making the right choices about greatly contested issues, so that in the final words of the Republic, "Both for this life and for the journey of a thousand years that may follow, we shall fare well." The last two words of the Republic, which are commonly translated into English as "fare well," contain an ambiguity which combines the idea of "acting well" with the connotation of an ending. Yet I am informed (by my colleague Professor Katja Vogt) that the words which are thus translated do not contain any reference to an ending, even though they retain an ambiguity. That ambiguity is found in the fact that the Greek phrase "eu prattomen," that is, literally "acting well," combines both the idea of being well or happy and the idea of doing good. The intellectual career of Sidney Hook represents a life in which his well-being was related to the moral causes and purposes to which each of the five steps of that career were dedicated. Editor's Note: This is a shortened version of a lecture delivered at the Sid- ney Hook Centenary Conference at the City University of New York. A poem from SORROW/SAUDADE by Claribel Alegría IT CANNOT Sadness cannot cope with me I lead it toward life and it evaporates. Translated by Carolyn Forché ask for this & other Curbstone books at your local bookstore CURBSTONE PRESS www.curbstone.org === Page 185 === KAREN WILKIN At the Galleries “T HE NEXT ISSUE IS A TRIBUTE TO WILLIAM,” Edith Kurzweil said. At the time, I couldn’t imagine how “At the Galleries” could be made into a proper homage to the awe-inspiring Mr. Phillips, but by what can only be called serendipity, two exhibitions this winter turned out to have special connections with the history of Part- san Review and its now-legendary, uncompromising editor and founder. The first, “The Park Avenue Cubists,” at New York University’s Grey Gallery, presented the work of A. E. Gallatin, Charles G. Shaw, and the husband and wife team of Suzy Frelinghuysen and George L. K. Morris, a fascinating quartet of sophisticated, patrician New Yorkers who used their considerable inherited fortunes to further the cause of modernism. All four were, with different degrees of emphasis, patrons, collectors, and proselytizers, as well as serious, ambitious painters. Gallatin, for exam- ple, played an important role in introducing New Yorkers to European vanguard painting when he exhibited his collection as the Gallery of Liv- ing Art (later the Museum of Living Art) at NYU, on the site of the uni- versity’s present Grey Gallery—in 1927, two years before the Museum of Modern Art was inaugurated. All four exhibited with American Abstract Artists, a group that Morris helped found, dedicated to fostering geo- metric, “non-objective” abstraction, so elevated in its thinking that the exacting Piet Mondrian joined when he came to New York. The connection with Partisan Review? Morris was the magazine’s first art critic, an editor, and an important backer in its early years, after it severed its connections with the American Communist Party to become a forward-looking, anti-Stalinist, independent literary journal dedicated to supporting modernism in the arts. Morris’s funding, which allowed the magazine to break with its origins and reject the Party line, was crucial to the newly reconceived Partisan Review’s existence. (He also served as curator of the Gallery of Living Art.) Just as directly linked with Partisan Review’s history was “Clement Greenberg: A Critic’s Collection,” at the art gallery of Syracuse Univer- sity (Greenberg’s alma mater). This touring show, circulated by the Port- The Gonzalo Fonseca exhibition, with catalogue text by Karen Wilkin, opened at Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, in Valencià, Spain, in March. === Page 186 === 344 PARTISAN REVIEW land Art Museum, Oregon, was selected from a much larger exhibition, held in Portland in 2001, celebrating the museum's acquisition of a large number of the controversial critic's holdings. Greenberg, of course, sup- planted Morris as Partisan Review's art critic in the 1940s, and it was William Phillips who first encouraged Greenberg, whose initial aspira- tions were aimed towards poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, to con- centrate on writing about art. Part of Greenberg's strength as an art critic, Phillips once told me, came from his having approached the task from this background. "Clem brought a breadth of experience and ref- erences to what he looked at-like a literary critic," he observed. I can't write about the Syracuse show as a reviewer. I haven't yet seen the traveling version of "A Critic's Collection," although I am familiar with much of what it includes, both from frequent visits to Greenberg's New York apartment, in the years when we still spoke, and from seeing the Portland exhibition. But since I contributed the principal essay to the book published in connection with the show, I am clearly not an uninvolved observer. What I can say, however, is that the collection con- sists of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper by artists from many different countries, all of whom Greenberg knew, some better than oth- ers, and had usually written about. Many works are abstract-no sur- prise, given the critic's prescient support of abstract expressionism and the "cooler" color-based abstraction that followed, but there are also fine figurative paintings, including spontaneous landscapes by the Cana- dian Dorothy Knowles and a ravishing nude by the Uruguayan-born Horacio Torres. I can also say that the show must be approached with caution as the collection was not assembled in the usual way. Rather, it was an accu- mulation of gifts from artists grateful for Greenberg's friendship and his pitilessly honest, demanding responses to their efforts. Therefore, the fact of the distinguished critic's having owned a work doesn't always mean that he chose it, although many artists say that they always offered things he had seemed particularly enthusiastic about. What the ensemble offers, then, (even, I suspect, in the reduced form at Syracuse) is a portrait of Greenberg's connections with several generations of artists, some celebrated internationally, some with purely local reputa- tions. They range from his contemporaries, such as Jackson Pollock, David Smith, and the brilliant Canadian abstract painter Jack Bush, to a younger generation, including Helen Frankenthaler, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Anthony Caro, to even younger artists such as Susan Roth, Darryl Hughto, and William Noland. Yet even here there are caveats. The picture of Greenberg's relationships is not complete. Even === Page 187 === KAREN WILKIN 345 though, at various times, he owned important examples of their work, some of the artists he was closest to, such as Morris Louis, are wholly absent from Portland's acquisitions, while other intimates, such as Pol- lock and Smith, are represented only by small scale works on paper. The explanation is simple. Never sentimental about the art he lived with, Greenberg, despite his notorious frugality and modest way of living, had sold works that had been given to him when he needed money. "Life before art," he was fond of saying. I'm certain, though, that the Syracuse incarnation of the show will be worth seeing, based on my earlier experience of the larger version. In Port- land, I was struck by the freshness, energy, and often sheer beauty of the works on view. It was refreshing, too, to encounter a group of first-rate paintings and sculptures that, without exception, sprang from a belief in the power of the visual to be deeply expressive, without resorting to text, explanations, or irony. "No soundtrack," Clem used to admonish ner- vous artists who attempted to tell him about their intentions. I'd like to know what Greenberg would have made of "The Park Avenue Cubists" at NYU. It's plain that Gallatin, Frelinghuysen, Shaw, and Morris were passionate fans of Picasso, Braque, Gris, and some- times Miró—whose work they frequently lived with—and that their own art was deeply informed by what they had learned from the painters they admired most. The flat, opaque planes, frontal structure, and stylized patterns of Synthetic Cubism form the basis of all of their efforts. Such dedication to modernist abstraction was a progressive stance when these works were made, in the 1930s and '40s, when the social realism of the American Scene painters was widely praised. But Synthetic Cubism was hardly a vanguard movement at the time. Mor- ris's unwavering faith in the significance of Cubism fueled a public falling out with Greenberg. Both the younger critic's enthusiasm for Abstract Expression and the question of what constituted originality entered into the argument. Morris was not impressed by what he saw as the random efforts of the artists Greenberg was beginning to champion, believing that Cubism had not been exhausted and could still provide a stimulating basis for American modernism. Greenberg, on the contrary, came to use "late Cubist" as a pejorative term. Still, some years ago, when Greenberg lectured on a survey of Amer- ican abstract art of the 1920s and '30s at the Whitney—which included the Park Avenue Cubists—he publicly acknowledged that he found much of the exhibited work far better than he had thought when he encountered it initially. "I was wrong," he said. "I missed a lot." Would he have dismissed the quartet at the Grey Gallery as "late Cubists" or === Page 188 === 346 PARTISAN REVIEW would he have revised his opinion? Gallatin, Frelinghuysen, Shaw, and Morris each emerges as a distinct personality, an accomplished artist and sometimes a very inventive one. Gallatin's compositions, with their elegant, subdued palette, are the most disciplined and unyieldingly geo- metric of the group, yet some later works with curved shapes seem— oddly-to flirt simultaneously with the implications of Miró and Russian constructivism. Shaw's shaped paintings on wood are the most individual and original works in the show, and among the strongest. They are at once autonomous, slightly mysterious objects and potent distillations of urban experience. By contrast, his Miró-inspired later works seem overly polite and rather dated, though an arresting canvas with a giant pack of Wrigley's gum flying against an abstracted skyline, would look right at home in present-day Chelsea, although it's better than most of what you usually find there. Frelinghuysen's spirited, engaging pictures sometimes depart from quotations from Braque and Picasso, without losing any sense of the personal. I've been a fan of her work for years and the selection in "The Park Avenue Cubists" simply reinforced my admiration for her unfail- ing sense of scale, her energetic compositions, and her subtle sense of color and pattern. The surprising Frelinghuysen, who also had a more than respectable career as an opera singer, always credited her husband with having introduced her to modernist art, but even though one might have expected Morris, who studied with Ozenfant and Léger, to be the more sophisticated artist of the couple, at the Grey Gallery Suzy more than held her own. Morris, despite his commitment to abstraction, aspired at some level to amalgamate Cubist structure and symbols evocative of Native American culture and the life of his time. Unfortu- nately, he lacked his wife's ability to orchestrate arrangements of frontal planes into lively structures and lacked, too, her trust in the big, eco- nomical gesture. Morris all-too-often allowed his compositions to become overcomplicated spatially and embellished them to the point of fussiness. (To my eye, his best works, impossible to incorporate in the exhibition at NYU, are his generously scaled murals for the radically modern house he and his wife had built in the Berkshires.) Since he preferred to let art speak for itself, Greenberg might not have appreciated the curators' efforts to set the work of the Park Avenue Cubists in context, but the artists' biographies and the milieu in which they worked are so interesting that the exhibition's well-chosen docu- mentary material is very welcome. Such fascinating morsels are on view as Gallatin's photographs of the artists that he knew in their studios- revealing portraits of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Miró, and Mondrian, === Page 189 === KAREN WILKIN 347 among others and a series of endearingly amateurish abstract films (in pioneering color) "choreographed" by Morris, plus tantalizing images of the four protagonists including an economical drawing of Gallatin by Braque often in glamorous settings. The cumulative effect is extremely impressive and strengthens the persuasive argument made by the Park Avenue Cubists' work itself for awarding them a far more prominent place in the history of American modernism. William Phillips not only encouraged me to write about a wide range of shows, but he also seemed pleased when I discussed the work of lesser known artists, rather than reviewing the well-publicized museum exhi- bitions that received ample coverage elsewhere. I take this as license not to write about the Leonardo da Vinci drawing show at the Metropoli- tan, ravishing and illuminating as it is, but I'm not sure whether William would have liked my choosing to itemize a trio of shows by young artists in Williamsburg. They might have interested him and horrified him, in equal measure. At Pierogi, Lee Etheredge IV showed recent examples of his "typewriter drawings": blocks of densely packed letters that suggest what Agnes Martin might have done if she'd been locked in a room with nothing but an old Olivetti and an unlimited supply of paper. There's high risk of the method turning into pure device, but so far, Etheredge is pretty convincing. (This is his second show at Pierogi.) Recently, he has explored possibilities of randomness and all-overness through his unlikely medium, eliciting surprising tonal subtleties and varied inflections according to whether or not sequences of letters repeat from row to row-which determines the existence of vertical inci- dents or whether or not there are spaces between letters-which dra- matically interrupts the surface. A series of landscape photos with superimposed letters seemed gimmicky, as did a work with readable words, but some large drawings made up of multiple floating blocks, each composed of a relentlessly reiterated single letter, were among the most arresting things in the show. Repeating a block, itself generated by repetition, offers Etheredge a logical way to vary the scale imposed by the typewriter, as well as to break out of the centralized structure dic- tated by his method. In addition, the delicate tonal shifts of the single letter "grid," which are further modulated by occasional changes of let- ter from block to block, offer him further scope for widening his reach. I'm curious to know where he'll go from here. At Parker's Box, the Madrileña, Beatriz Barral, created "Superacces- space," a zingy, exuberant environment with vague associations of the psychedelic sixties, with a nod at Emilio Pucci, via architectural space and the tradition of illusionistic painting. This slightly raucous, sleek === Page 190 === 348 PARTISAN REVIEW installation was the perfect antidote to January's glacial weather. Intended as, among other things, a painting that can be entered, expressed in the materials of hi-tech design, the energetic "Superacces- space" seemed about to burst the ample confines of the gallery. Barral flung overscaled, crisp-edged discs of saturated pinks and purples across the walls, distributed a selection of generous mattresses, poufs, and domes in white plastic of various degrees of translucence (plus one hot pink mattress with nifty grommets) across the floor, scattered some small chunks of contrasting color, and punctuated the resulting super- heated environment with round security mirrors. The slightly distorted reflections, which dramatically altered the space of the flat, painted wall, read, in this context, as relatively traditional abstract paintings with particularly slick surfaces; the mirrors' collapse of real spatial rela- tions—the meeting of wall and wall, or of wall and floor—and the way images shifted as you moved, provoked interesting considerations not only of the legacy of color-based abstract painting, but also of the legacy of modernism and the nature of illusion. And on a less exalted level, it was just plain fun to be in Barral's exhilarating space. At Roebling Hall, a chilly walk towards the Williamsburg Bridge from Parker's Box, a truly puzzling exhibition titled "Good Company" demanded even more rumination on these subjects. Nancy Drew (which may or may not be a pseudonym) showed a series of very odd pictures that may or may not be intended as homage to some of the icons of modernism. She has taken familiar paintings by such revered modern masters as Mondrian, Gorky, Still, Louis, and Newman and replicated them, sometimes full size, sometimes slightly smaller, with admirable fidelity, except that she loads her painted surfaces with colored glitter. The result is rather like those tapestry rugs based on designs by well- known abstract artists: stiff, airless, a bit rigid, with fluent gestures expressive of the particular qualities of liquid paint frozen into immo- bility. But then there's that glitter, which makes that inert expanse of sta- tic shapes dance and levitate. It's like hearing a lean, spare poem that you know well set as a particularly overwrought song; it doesn't enhance the poem, but it makes you think about it differently. Drew's pictures are one-liners, yet they have curious ramifications. Gorky, oddly enough, holds up very well to her extravagant efforts, especially when she lets cursive drawing dominate, leaves some air between the zones of glitter, and allows them to fray off the way Gorky's paint does. (Don't ask me why this works.) The Rothko and Mondrian "translations" made me think more about fashion than about the paint- ings that were Drew's starting point. But applied to Still, the glitter === Page 191 === KAREN WILKIN 349 treatment raised engaging questions. In the originals, you are always acutely aware of the sheer cussed labor involved in spreading thick, recalcitrant pigment across a large surface with a tool that seems delib- erately and perversely too small for the task; your eye gets caught in those crabbed edges where colors reluctantly meet. Ms. Drew turns all this into a cheerful, light-struck brocade, reducing crankiness and solemnity to sheer decoration. It's hard to resist the short-term charm of this kind of deflation of pompous high-mindedness, but most of the other works, based on other artists, seemed merely exercises in ques- tionable taste, like those tote bags and coasters with images of major paintings that they sell in museum gift shops; a Newman zip, its color changed to electric blue against a sour pink ground, was not so much transformed by wit as trashed. But "Good Company," too, turned out to have unexpected links with Partisan Review, or at least with its most distinguished art critic; it sent me back to reread Greenberg's seminal essay, the piece with which he established his presence at the magazine, in 1939, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Back in Manhattan, a superb survey of Thomas Nozkowski's works on paper, at the New York Studio School Gallery, was a happy reminder that the Nancy Drews of this world notwithstanding, serious, intelligent art that requires and rewards long attention is still being made. Selected from about three decades worth of intimate works in media ranging from ink or gouache to colored pencil or graphite, the show presented a remarkably broad spectrum of Nozkowski's enigmatic images, brought to life through a wide vocabulary of marks and surfaces, and a quirky palette. Some of Nozkowski's drawings are linear and graphic; others are painterly. Some are clean-edged, almost cartoon-like; others, equally animated, are primordially organic. All resist identification, but seem pregnant with elusive meanings. (Since Nozkowski says his con- figurations are based on things he "read or said or did or saw," it's not surprising that his imagery conjures up rich but hard to verbalize asso- ciations.) If you had followed the painter's work, being confronted by a hard-to-grasp, but slightly familiar image in the drawing show made you think you might be glimpsing the genesis of one of the frontal, spa- tially ambiguous forms that populate Nozkowski's paintings, but that's probably presumptuous and a simplification. Nonetheless, in addition to the pleasure afforded by the power and excellence of individual works, the show did widen your understanding of the work of one of the best abstract painters working today. That's a lot. And finally, an even more intimate show at Tibor de Nagy: a selec- tion of the late Donald Evans's exquisitely rendered miniature paintings, === Page 192 === 350 PARTISAN REVIEW his life-sized, fantasy postage stamps for imaginary countries. Evans's single-minded intensity, patience, and skill convince you of the reality of his invented world. At the same time, the paintings' washy colors and delicate drawing, which suggest the effect of time, the simplifications and minute scale of his images, along with the wry names he bestowed on the nations issuing the stamps and the choice of subjects depicted (there's a series dedicated to bar drinks and one of excerpts from Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons) remind you of the artifice of the whole project. There are clearly secret references, both personal and perhaps more general, embedded in these compelling, delightful little pictures. The stamp conceit draws you in, but it's the richness of Evans's imagi- nation and the seductiveness of his touch that keeps you looking. His tiny, multicolored images of the fruits of fictional tropical islands could convince you that the temperature had climbed above freezing, despite all evidence to the contrary. Q: What is the aesthetic of Dalkey Archive Press? Avant-garde? Experimental? Innovative? 100 books: $5 each Special Sale: Select any 100 Books from the Dalkey Archive catalog for $5 each works I don't like ones that basically go through the mo- reader to find anything engaging in them. tions, ones that almost defy a Several years ago someone in an interview tried to get from me a one-word descrip- tion for the kinds of books we publish, and she suggested "subversive," which is still the word I would use. finally said that the correct word was "subversive," which is still the word I would use, though I know it's rather useless in terms of trying to pigeonhole what it is we pub- lish. My point was that the books, in some way or another, upset the apple cart, that they work against the expected, that they, in some way, challenge received notions. CELINE - QUIN - MOSLEY - CREELEY - BARNES - O'BRIEN WHITE - SORRENTINO - HUXLEY - DAITCH - MOTTE - MARKSON for more information and details about free shipping or additional free books, visit: www.dalkeyarchive.com Dalkey Archive Press === Page 193 === A few (more) words about The PUSHCART Prize as we begin our next quarter century: "America's best fiction, poetry and essays for over twenty-five years" - BILLY COLLINS "I am always pleased and astonished by The Pushcart Prize" - CHARLES SIMIC "Pushcart is where you go to learn the state of the literary arts" - FREDERICK BUSCH "For years I have looked forward to every Pushcart Prize and I have never been disappointed" STEPHEN DUNN "When the future wants to know about our arts and letters, this is the publication it will turn to" - SHEROD SANTOS "A very big bang for very small bucks" MADISON SMARTT BELL "A genuine measurement of the current 2003 state of American letters" PUSHCART PRIZE XXVII BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES HA JIN "I am fiercely loyal to and grateful for the Pushcart Prize editions" WALLY LAMB "I hope The Pushcart Prize lives forever" PHILIP LEVINE "A Pushcart Prize selection is one of the very best things that could happen to a writer" CHARLES WRIGHT "An amazing asset for readers of serious literature" DANIEL HALPERN "A revolution, a Great Ear, a voice braiding many voices" CYNTHIA OZICK "A labor of love and excellence" MARVIN BELL EDITED BY BILL HENDERSON WITH THE PUSHCART PRIZE EDITORS "Must reading for anyone interested in the present and future of America's arts and letters." KIRKUS REVIEWS Just published: America's best fiction, essays and poetry 632 PAGES HARDBOUND $35.00 ISBN-1-888-88933-0 PAPERBACK $16.95 ISBN-1-888-88935-7 PUSHCART PRESS P.O. Box 380 Wainscott, N.Y. 11975 67 selections from 52 presses === Page 194 === A Book of Common Praise By Robert Boyers A VOLUME OF 92 VERY SHORT ESSAYS ON CONTEMPORARY WRITERS NOVELISTS INCLUDE: RUSSELL BANKS SAUL BELLOW NADINE GORDIMER NORMAN MANEA JOYCE CAROL OATES DARRYL PINCKNEY ANDREA BARRETT J.M. COETZEE MARY GORDON JAY MCINERNEY MICHAEL ONDAATJE SUSAN SONTAG & OTHERS ANN BEATTIE ANITA DESAI WILLIAM KENNEDY RICK MOODY CYNTHIA OZICK ROBERT STONE POETS INCLUDE: FRANK BIDART CAROLYN FORCHE ROBERT HASS ROBERT LOWELL ROBERT PINSKY JOSEPH BRODSKY LOUISE GLUCK SEAMUS HEANEY HOWARD NEMEROV C.K. WILLIAMS & OTHERS CARL DENNIS JORIE GRAHAM RICHARD HOWARD JANE SHORE ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI "Robert Boyers is one of the few critics writing today who, by keeping his head about the claims of this or that modern poet or novelist, keeps our interest in them alive." - John Bayley "Originally written as introductions to public readings of poetry and fiction, these miniature essays are masterpieces of the art of criticism... informed by a lifetime of reading and response. In a few pages, Boyers can encapsulate an entire career, charting a writer's structural, musical, philosophical, and political evolution by tracking the subtle ghost of the human imagination. What comes across page after page is his sheer delight in reading and listening, and in thinking and talking about literature." - ChaseTwichell A AUSABLE PRESS 1026 HURRICANE ROAD, KEENE NY 12942. WWW.AUSABLE PRESS.COM SMALL PRESS DISTRIBUTION:800-869-7553 (www.spd.org) Also available at AMAZON.COM === Page 195 === "It operates as a refuge for a civilizing element in short supply in contemporary America: honest criticism." The New Criterion December 2001 A monthly review edited by Hilton Kramer Notes Of Comments. I. "Anti-Americanism: a special section Refined by Roger Kimball, & Gerald V. V. D. A. D. Michael Mnnteifer. Ovidius Linderian, The biographies in art by Jeffrey Meyers, Poems by Harvey Shapiro & Valeri Webbfield. 43 $6.75 - The Wall Street Journal A monthly review edited by Hilton Kramer Notes Of Comments. 1. Anti-Americanism: a special section Refined by Roger Kimball, & Gerald V. D. A. D. Michael Mnnteifer. Ovidius Linderian, The biographies in art by Jeffrey Meyers, Poems by Harvey Shapiro & Valeri Webbfield, 43 The Wall Street Journal a weekly review edited by Frederick Taylor. The 1960's: a symposium on the decade by Paul Cantor, T. S. Eliot, the critics & a few others, by John W. Aldridge, etc. THE NEW Criterion Subscribe today by calling 1-800-783-4903 or visit our website at www.newcriterion.com Volume 20, Number 4, $7.75 === Page 196 === A TRIBUTE TO WILLIAM PHILLIPS Bernard Avishai Doris Lessing Daniel Bell Norman Manea Clare Cavanagh Alberto Manguel Jules Chametzky Steven Marcus Morris Dickstein Stephen Miller Frederick Feirstein Czeslaw Milosz Joseph Frank Conor Cruise O'Brien Helen Frankenthaler Jules Olitski Eugene Goodheart Cynthia Ozick Michal Govrin Norman Podhoretz Jeffrey Herf Joanna S. Rose Irving Louis Horowitz David Sidorsky H. J. Kaplan John Silber Frances Kiernan Roger Straus Allen Kurzweil Vladimir Tismaneanu Edith Kurzweil Rosanna Warren Walter Laqueur Karen Wilkin Partisan Review Published at Boston University Printed in the U.S.A.