Books: The Not-So-Advance Guard

Underneath the active literary world is another busy world of which the average reader seldom hears: that of the “little” magazine. Traditionally the little magazine serves two purposes: it offers a haven to the experimental, and it also gives early publication to new talent (which is not always the same thing). To keep an eye on the little magazine is to keep an eye on both the future and the futureless.

On the Frontier. How goes the avantgarde? A survey of the present leaders in the little magazine field (Evergreen Review, New World Writing, Contact, Noble Savage, Paris Review) suggests some unexpected findings: 1) There is no longer much interest in experimenting in form; Joyce (with Finnegans Wake) and e. e. cummings tried everything worth trying, pushing human comprehension to its last frontier. On balance, the new writers seem to have concluded that there is nothing very much there. 2) The fires of radicalism have grown cold. Thirty years ago, the little magazines were militantly leftist as a matter of course; today nothing is of less concern than politics of any stripe. The bohemian revolutionary, like the collegiate John Reed Club, seems to have died with World War II.

In fact, for purely literary reasons, the avant-garde seems self-consciously in search of a revolution. It is full (as Noble Savage itself notes) of “young men with fringe beards and triple goggles looking for something to subvert which hasn’t already been overturned by the restless and discontented middle class.”

The latter-day little magazine has developed its own stereotypes, on hand in these pages as if answering a roll call. There is the tough-guy-meet-Zen school, whose usually quite high priest is William (Naked Lunch) Burroughs. There is the mumbling, imagist-naturalist prose that reflects life as if seen through a speckled barroom mirror. There is a scattering of earnest erotica. Much of all this displays the four-letteracy with which very young authors prove to the world that they are grown up.

Sliced Cliché. But after all the tired titillation, freak free verse, exhausted experiment are sifted away, some gold dust and a few sizable nuggets remain. Sanford Friedman’s Salamander (in New World Writing) is a sweet, sad, perceptive story of how a seven-year-old New York boy becomes a philosopher. B. H. Friedman’s Whisper (in Noble Savage) is a softly sizzling portrait of the big-town big shot caught in the rat race and insisting he loves it. Joseph Kostolefsky, in the same magazine, refashions arty cliché with a lethal satire called An All-Purpose Serious Sensitive Prize-Winning Story. In Contact, John Phillips, son of J. P. Marquand, writes a mordant story of an ex-G.I. and his wife, who tour the Southern France where he once fought.

There is a surprising amount of good poetry, most of it—like the prose—in conventional forms. New poets like X. J. Kennedy, Daniel J. Langton, James Wright, established poets like Donald Davie, Howard Nemerov, Louis Simpson are well represented by well-wrought verse. One newsworthy item (in Evergreen Review): a strong anti-oppression poem by jailed Soviet Poet Yesenin-Volpin, natural son of the Yesenin who was one of Isadora Duncan’s lovers.

Backroom Gossip. Some of the most rewarding material are autobiographical reminiscences by writers who would not deign to confide to the slick-paper mass magazines. Thus, in effect, the little magazines form a kind of intellectual backroom where earnest highbrows can eaves drop on literary gossip. Seymour Krim (in Noble Savage) is scathingly honest about the pitfalls for a young writer desperate for integrity. Herbert Gold, in the same issue, takes a real cool look at death in the tinselly heat of Miami Beach.

Norman Mailer does some more public paddling in the diminishing pool of his soul (in Paris Review). In Evergreen’s all-German issue, Marianne Kesting reminisces about a seven-year-old visit to the late German playwright Bertolt Brecht.

The interview with the famous writer has been developed almost into a literary form by Paris Review. In recent issues Frederick Seidel draws Robert Lowell into revealing angular lights in his prismatic mind, and Olga Carlisle lets Ilya Ehrenburg reveal his rich store of platitude. In Contact the bitterly brilliant Philip O’Connor presents a series of capsule interviews with aging writers of the British Establishment, “gentlemen in and out of letters,” ranging from Bertrand Russell to Poet-Essayist Herbert Read. And in Evergreen Robert Stromberg shows another side of the late maligned (and malignable) Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Scattered through these pages are gleanings from many a bottom drawer: an early nature essay by Proust, a radio play by Brendan Behan (both in Evergreen), in which he continues to re-Joyce, a shrewdly funny story by Israel’s Isaac Babel (Noble Savage).

The reader who wants to spot the comers can plunge into these pages and make his bets. But he will have to pick his way past a host of the noncomers, who can be divided roughly into two types: beatnik flashes-in-the-pad and talented people who, because they prefer assault on convention to communication, will spend their lives out of earshot.