I first met Philip in the mid-1950s at a dinner party in rural Connecticut, only a few years after my first novel had been published. Mine was a book which, for a first novel, had received considerable acclaim in the popular press; although in terms of what I conceived to be the New York literary establishment—most notably Partisan Review—my Southern gothic tragedy may as well have been printed on water. That evening, therefore, I felt myself dining, if not precisely among the enemy, then with a species of intellectual so high-powered and demanding that I could not help but feel intimidated, and a little resentful. I had of course read much of Philip's admirable and brilliant criticism, which made it all the more painful to feel something of a nonentity in his presence. And what a presence it was! There Philip sat across the table, heavy-lidded, glowering, talking in nearly unfathomable polysyllables—not so unfathomable, however, that I might fail to understand that he was cutting some poor incompetent wretch of a writer to shreds. But how devastating and deserved was that demolition job, how pitiless was his judgment upon that star-crossed nincompoop so misguided as to ever have taken pen in hand! I think I shivered a little, and after dinner sidled away. Later, though, when goodbyes were being said, I was dumbstruck when Philip approached me and took my hand, saying in that voice which was such a strange amalgam of fog and frog, “Hope to see you again. I liked your book.” And then, as if to endorse this stunning statement, he added with a negligent flap of his arm, “It was a good book.” When he was gone, the enormous astonishment lingered, along with an unabashed and immodest satisfaction. Even then, before I knew him, I was powerfully aware that you had passed a crucial muster if, in the eyes of Philip Rahv, you had written “a good book.”
In retrospect, I can understand that my initial discomfort in Philip's presence had to do in part with a mistaken prejudice. At a time when the urban Jewish sensibility was coming to the forefront of American literature, and the writing of Southerners was no longer the dominant mode, I shared some of the resentment of my fellow WASPs over what we construed as the self-conscious chauvinism often displayed by the literary establishment. Thus, in an awful momentary lapse, I had confused Philip with somebody like Leslie Fiedler. Certainly, I should have known better—should have known that among the things that characterized Philip's approach to literature were his utter lack of parochialism, his refusal to be bamboozled by trends or fashionable currents, and, most importantly, his ability to appreciate a work in terms of difficult and complex values which he had laid down for himself and which had nothing to do with anything so meretricious as race or region or competing vogues. If one knew this—as I had after college and postcollege years during which Partisan Review was required reading—then to have earned the respect of Philip Rahv was exhilarating. I shudder to think what it must have been to experience Philip's disfavor.
Some years later I got to know Philip very well. Strangers often found it hard to understand how one could become a good friend of this brusque, scowling, saturnine, sometimes impolite man with his crotchets and fixations, his occasional savage outbursts and all the other idiosyncrasies he shared with Dr. Johnson. But I found it easy to be Philip's friend. For one thing, I was able almost constantly to relish his rage, which was a well-earned rage inasmuch as he was an erudite person—learned in the broadest sense of the word, with a far-ranging knowledge that transcended the strictly literary—and thus was supremely competent to sniff out fools. I discovered it to be a cleansing rage, this low, guttural roar directed at the frauds and poseurs of literature. He had, besides, an unerring eye for the opportunists in his own critical profession, where he vented his contempt in equal measure on the “trendy”—a word he virtually coined—and those who were merely windy and inadequate, the pretentious academics who might have had a simple-minded taste for novels but lacked utterly the acquaintance with politics, philosophy, and history which was essential to the critical faculty and a civilized perception of things. If any critic had the right to be magisterial, it was Philip Rahv.
But if Philip was angry much of the time, there was beneath it all an affecting and abiding gentleness, a real if biting sense of humor, and throughout, a strange vulnerability. One felt that his arduous grappling with the world of men and ideas had caused him anguish, and that a sense of the disparity between the scrupulous demands of his conscience and vision—whether reflected in literature or life—and the excesses and lunacies of modern society had laid actual hands on him, wrenching him with a discomfort that was nearly intolerable. At the same time, I delighted in his ease and pleasure in preparing good food, in being a host for the men and women he respected and chose to charm. He was often a difficult and prickly soul, at once outgoing yet so secretive as to be almost unknowable. I was proud to be a friend, if only because he was a man who, steadfast to the end, held to those principles and ideas that he felt to be liberating, humane, and—Philip, I can almost see you flinch at the word—eternal.
[Speech delivered at a memorial service, Brandeis University, January 1974.]