Books, Arts & Manners: Across the Fiery Brook

A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life, by William Phillips Stein & Day, 312 pp., $19.95 The editor of Partisan Review for almost fifty years, William Phillips has written an absorbing, self-deprecating memoir of great interest and value. Perhaps the best of the many good things in this book is its revelation of the character of the author himself. With his apparently scrupulous insistence on honesty and balance; his muted, almost elegiac tone; his personal modesty; and a kind of moral stoicism in the face of a century largely consisting of nightmare and chaos, Phillips emerges in this account as a man of oddly old-fashioned decency and honor.

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

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).

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A Partisan View: Five Decades of the Literary Life, by William Phillips Stein & Day, 312 pp., $19.95 The editor of Partisan Review for almost fifty years, William Phillips has written an absorbing, self-deprecating memoir of great interest and value. Perhaps the best of the many good things in this book is its revelation of the character of the author himself. With his apparently scrupulous insistence on honesty and balance; his muted, almost elegiac tone; his personal modesty; and a kind of moral stoicism in the face of a century largely consisting of nightmare and chaos, Phillips emerges in this account as a man of oddly old-fashioned decency and honor.

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

About the Author

M.D. Aeschliman

M.D. Aeschliman is professor emeritus of education at Boston University and author of The Restoration of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Continuing Case Against Scientism (3rd English-language ed., Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2019 and French-language rev. ed., Paris: Pierre Téqui, 2020).