DEATH OF A PARTISAN:

William Phillips, Co-Founder and Soul of Partisan Review, Dies at 94 (JOSEPH BERGER, September 14, 2002, NY Times)

William Phillips, the co-founder and longtime editor of Partisan Review, the forum for the brilliant and contentious stable of writers who became known as the New York Intellectuals, died yesterday in Manhattan, where he lived. He was 94.

Partisan Review's circulation never exceeded 15,000, but Mr. Phillips and his co-editor, Philip Rahv, kept it at the forefront of the great ideological and cultural currents of their time with an extraordinary knack for discovering hungry and talented writers and critics who were to make an indelible mark on American culture and politics. [...]

He insisted on engaging Partisan Review in the great ideological debates: the battle between Trotskyites and Stalinists in the 1930's, the backlash against Communism in the late 40's and 50's, and the 70's disputes between neoconservatives and the dwindling corps of deep-dyed liberals. The social historian Christopher Lasch said Mr. Phillips and Rahv "earned from American intellectuals a lasting debt of gratitude by exposing the totalitarian character of Soviet Communism." [...]

In its heyday, mostly as a quarterly, the magazine published landmark essays like Leslie Fiedler's "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey," which drew attention to the issues of race and homosexual overtones in American literature; Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch"; and Macdonald's "Mass Cult and Mid-Cult." In politics, it remained consistently anti-Stalinist and in 1946 published a blistering editorial against left-wing thinkers at The New Republic and The Nation, calling them a "Fifth Column" that was "licking Stalin's boots."

The McCarthy era presented a difficult test, which Lillian Hellman said Mr. Phillips failed by not defending her and other writers when they were attacked by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Mr. Phillips countered that Partisan Review did oppose McCarthyism in several editorials, but argued that Hellman and others did not deserve a defense because they were silent when countless Soviet intellectuals were arrested and tortured by Stalin.

Any enemy of Lillian Hellman is a hero to us. You can find the magazine on-line here. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 14, 2002 12:44 PM