New York, NY, February 21—The New School for Social Research announces the establishment of an endowed lectureship to commemorate the remarkable life and work of William Phillips, the founding co-editor of Partisan Review. He remained at the helm of the fiercely independent magazine from 1934 until his death in 2002.
Cynthia Ozick, one of the most revered American novelists and critics alive today, will give the first annual lecture, “The Rights of History and the Rights of Imagination.”
Ozick will speak on March 8, 2006 at 55 West 13th Street, second floor, from 6:00-7:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.
After the death of Phillips, his wife Edith Kurzweil, editor emerita of Partisan Review, formed a committee to determine how his achievements could be remembered by future generations. It was agreed that yearly lectures at The New School for Social Research was the best way to keep his legacy alive. “It is the most hospitable institution, firmly established in the tradition of open-minded debate and social and cultural advancement that characterized the aims of William Phillips and the magazine,” said Kurzweil.
Partisan Review was founded by William Phillips and Philip Rahv in the spring of 1934, under the auspices of the John Reed Club, which was affiliated with the Communist Party of America. Phillips was then a graduate student at NYU. He taught there and occasionally at The New School. By the time the John Reed Club closed down, in 1936, Phillips and Rahv realized the American Party was taking its orders from Moscow and wanted them to publish what amounted to propaganda. So they launched Partisan Review again, in 1937, this time declaring that “the magazine will be unequivocally independent . . . [and] is aware of its responsibility to the revolutionary movement in general, but disclaims any obligation to any of its organized political expressions. Indeed, we think that the cause of revolutionary literature is best served by a policy of no commitments to any political party.” They further stated that they would adhere to Marxism and modernism and remain on the lookout for new and independent writing.
Talented writers—literary and political, unknown and established—were ready for them. In the first issue of the new version of the magazine, Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” a poem by Wallace Stevens, and pieces by Lionel Abel, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Sidney Hook and others appeared. But American communists denounced Phillips and Rahv as “running dogs of imperialism,” as Trotskyists, and so on. Their former friends refused to talk to them and the establishment did not trust them. They could not secure regular teaching positions. Yet they saw themselves, as Phillips later remembered, “as a rallying ground or center, where the best of intellectuals could come.”
During the postwar period, Phillips worried about the liberal anti-Stalinism of those intellectuals drowning in the sea of right-wing anti-communism. Before Joseph McCarthy fully brandished the political sword of anti-Americanism, Phillips recognized the threat of McCarthyism. “The Left must not permit the struggle against Stalinism to be appropriated by the Right,” he wrote to Arthur Koestler in the late 1940s. In his view, “the defense of Western democracy against the Soviet threat should not present any special problems, since the recognition of one’s roots does not preclude the free play of the imagination or the dissident spirit either in literature or in politics.”
Because paranoia and provincialism defined American politics in the 1950s, dissidence and imaginative freedom migrated to the arts and culture at large. A new fusion of the modern and the mainstream took hold. That meant, for Phillips, the radicalism of the Partisan Review milieu risked losing its edge. He observed at the time that “the avant-garde questions of the 30s have become the mass questions of today…. Even a genuine avant-garde would be in danger of becoming immediately fashionable because what we have today is not so much an outright opposition to anything serious or extreme as a zeal to make it palatable.”
By the 1960s, however, Phillips realized that Partisan Review could retain its maverick character. The cultural developments within the new Left could be examined without forsaking seriousness. Even though modern culture had become common culture, how intellectuals thought and wrote about it could still defy convention and achieve considerable sophistication. “In particular,” writes Alexander Bloom in Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals & Their World, “Philips’ approach allowed PR to become a vehicle for many of the new critical pieces which appeared, ranging from intellectual assessments of the Beatles to numerous contributions by Susan Sontag.”
In the years that followed, this new sensibility associated with the cultural criticism of the second generation of Partisan Review influenced the style and content of many then-fledging magazines like The New York Review of Books, where Philips himself was an early and valued contributor. When he died, he was celebrated, both here and abroad, as “the soul of Partisan Review” and as having shaped the careers of such outstanding writers as Susan Sontag, Czeslaw Milosz, Saul Bellow, and Hannah Arendt.
Partisan Review may be gone, but the sensibility and spirit of Phillips lives on in many contemporary magazines that value intelligence and independence above all else.
For the past forty years, Cynthia Ozick has been publishing beautifully complex works of fiction and nonfiction whose historical sensitivity, literary prowess, and moral compass are second to none. Her first novel, Trust, appeared in 1966 to wide acclaim, which continued to grow with each subsequent publication. Her novels and story collections include The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Bloodshed and Three Novellas (1976), Levitation: Five Fictions (1982), The Cannibal Galaxy (1983), The Messiah of Stockholm (1987), The Shawl (1987), The Puttermesser Papers (1997) and Heir to the Glimmering World (2005). Her nonfiction and essay collections include Art & Ardor (1983), Metaphor & Memory (1989), Fame & Folly (1996), and Quarrel & Quandary (2000). Her next book, The Din in the Head, will appear in June 2006.
Over the years, Ozick has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, Esquire, New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review. Andshe’s commanded some of the highest honors in the writing profession. For her nonfiction, Ozick has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (2001), the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism (1998), the PEN/Spiegel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the Essay (1997), not to mention other awards. For her fiction, Ozick has won the Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature (1973), the Rea Award for the Short Story (1986), the John Cheever Award (1989), the Lannan Foundation Award for Fiction (2000), among many others. In 2005, Ozick was a finalist for the International Man-Booker Award.
The New School for Social Research was founded in 1919 by a distinguished group of intellectuals, some of whom were teaching at Columbia University in New York City during the First World War. Fervent pacifists, they took a public stand against the war and were censured by the university's president. The outspoken professors responded by resigning from Columbia and later opening their own university for adults in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. It became a place where people could exchange ideas freely with scholars and artists representing a wide range of intellectual, aesthetic, and political orientations.
During the 1920s, Alvin Johnson, the school's first president, collaborated regularly with colleagues in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. They made him aware of the danger Hitler presented to democracy and the civilized world, alerting him to the seriousness of the problem before many in the United States had grasped it. With the financial support of enlightened philanthropists like Hiram Halle and the Rockefeller Foundation, Johnson responded immediately and in 1933 created within The New School a University in Exile to provide a haven for scholars and artists whose lives were threatened by National Socialism. The University in Exile sponsored over 180 individuals and their families, providing them with visas and jobs. While some of these refugees remained at the New School for many years, many others went on to influence institutional life in the United States. Today The New School for Social Research remains a place where intellectuals take risks for their commitments, values, and beliefs.