Ozick did not say so, but this is similar to what Anne Frank’s father, Otto, and the various people who worked on her diary and on the play about her, also did. It obsessed the novelist Meir Levin – or so he told me on a long walk we took together on an Israeli beach in the mid-1970’s. Eventually, Ozick herself confirmed what Levin told me in a piece for The New Yorker.
So the novelist’s intentionality might be factored into the question. In the discussion afterward, Ozick referred to an op-ed piece that Styron had published in The New York Times in which he described his desire to “universalize” the Holocaust. Ozick believes that ultimately we can, and perhaps must, also judge a novelist by whether or not his intention” is to “deflect” us from the larger truth, the objective truth.
After Ozick finished speaking, the first question posed was whether she believed that “a novelist cannot or should not portray Hitler fictionally with sympathy, pity, and understanding.” It was a good question but it gave me a headache. The questioner was without feeling – coldly logical, removed, precise, devilishly clever. I do not understand why so many audience members, hungry for culture, have no manners. First, one should congratulate the speaker for having delivered a magnificent speech. Then, respectfully, one should ask spontaneous, not pre-packaged, questions.
No matter. For a brief while, the cutting-edge intellectual excitement that Partisan Review had brought into the world with each and every issue was remembered and re-created. I began reading PR in the 1950’s; Phillips began publishing it in 1937, three years before I was born.
For those too young to remember, PR introduced to an American audience the work of Franz Kafka, Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Nobel Prize winners Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It also published Susan Sontag’s essay about “Camp” which essentially launched her career. Politically, PR straddled the Great Divide between Marxism and Modernism; it remained both anti-fascist and anti-communist.
Many writers, such as Doris Lessing, Czeslaw Milosz, Conor Cruise O’Brien, Helen Frankenthaler, Roger Straus, Frederick Feirstein, Walter Laqueur, Irving Louis Horowitz, Norman Podhoretz, and Ozick herself all contributed to a tribute to William Phillips which was made available at the lecture. Edith Kurzweil introduced this last volume of PR which people eagerly took.
Let me give Norman Podhoretz the last word. He remembers Phillips as “brilliant,” as someone whose mind was “quick, cultivated, and supple” – but also as a man who was “easygoing and relaxed,” a man of “great and unfailing sweetness, a loving, loyal, considerate, and tactful friend.”
Phillips himself would have enjoyed the evening. Perhaps he did, perhaps he was also there.