Books: Obit In Baton Rouge

That distinguished literary quarterly, the Southern Review, has announced that its spring issue of 1942 will probably be its last. Louisiana State University decided it can no longer afford the $10,000 a year the Review costs. Back to full-time teaching in the English department will go Review Editors Cleanth Brooks Jr. and Robert Penn Warren (Night Rider). Says L.S.U.’s prexy, Major General Campbell Blackshear Hodges (ret.):

“They tell me the Southern Review is a fine publication, but I think its chances are damn poor. . . .”

The Southern Review was founded in 1935 on a cut from the millions “that moral idiot of genius” Huey Long lavished on the university. In its seven years’ existence Southern Review has steadily enhanced its standing as the South’s most literate magazine. The high standard of its writing and its editing, its interest in younger writers and avant-garde literature made it influential far beyond the South. With Europe too busy with war to be busy with literary experiments, the Southern Review became almost the only magazine of its kind left in the world.

Bitterly the Review’s admirers observe that football at thrifty L.S.U. last year cost the student body a special subsidy of $61,000; that the football team’s mascot, a tiger named Mike, requires ten pounds of choice beef daily while his specially constructed, steam-heated home is carried on the books at $6,692.02. But football is part of the life of the Delta. Says the budget committee of the Southern Review: “The committee does not feel that the university can continue to support so heavily an activity which relatively reaches so small a number of people. . . .” Said a military member of the faculty: “I don’t like the looks of anybody who reads it.” Said a student: “What’s the Southern Review? I never heard of it.”

For the people of the Sugar Bowl and the oil and sulfur wells, there was little meaning in an article about the influence of Danish Philosopher Spren Kierkegaard and Swiss Theologian Karl Barth on the novels of neurotic Czech Author Franz Kafka. What could the busy people of the Delta make of this stanza by Andrew Chiappe:

When riveters come to the nursery,

And microscopes reveal the unsuspected horror,

There may not be time then

For words furred with love like summer’s caterpillars.

The gap between the U.S. intelligentsia and U.S. life was just too wide.