A Mugging in the Groves: The Story of the Yale Literary Magazine
Brookhiser, Richard
I U Q D 6 t Q . . . . . . . * U U _9 _9 * _9 . . . . . . . . . m _9 I . . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....
...Across the Ivy League, conservative student newspapers, funded by many of the same institutions which backed Navrozov, had begun twitting teachers, administrators, and generally raising hell...
...True enough...
...Each issue had cost between twenty and thirty thousand dollars to print, and the Lit was over $70,000 in debt...
...In the sixties, there was a tremendous destruction of institutions," argues David Frum ('82), a former columnist for the Yale Daily News...
...The following kinds of verse," the Lit announced on a campus poster, "have the poorest chance of being published: . . . verse imitating, the moderns because it would give itself away by imitation of the classics...
...verse scenes of horror or s e x . . . " "I look on them," Navrozov says of bigname best-sellers like Rabbit is Rich or Ancient Evenings, "as generic products: 'Highbrow Book with Smut.' " The new Lit mixed art and politics in its next major subscription drive...
...Subscribing to it was one of the things you did...
...Along the way, it delivered drop kicks to the CIA, the New Yorker, George Kennan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud...
...Eight hundred new subscribers came in...
...Navrozov, faced with open enemies, responded in the manner of his father: a two-page letter, fortissimo, to the Courant, six pages to the News...
...In its palmy days, it was a campus institution of importance...
...In November, he was back in the Yale Daily News...
...Yale was more circumspect...
...Lev, it should be noted, had published a book on the Soviet Union (The Education of Lev Navrozov), as well as articles in Commentary, and so might well have been picked out by an editor of Andrei's 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 predilections, even if they had not possessed common genes...
...But the Yale bureaucracy allowed itself to be bent...
...That week the Lit sent out a thirty-page press release entitled "The Making of a Political Crime...
...No doubt there was genuine interest in giving the old mag another try...
...But Long told him to be more trusting...
...sold the copyright, assets, and good will of the Yale Literary Magazine to Navrozov, Schwarz, and Liberman for one dollar...
...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984...
...Clearly, it was time to adopt some new ones...
...The Yale Literary Magazine is the oldest collegiate periodical in America, indeed the oldest continuously published magazinemsince 1821--of any kind...
...Hollander won't talk about the Lit now, but in 1981 he talked to anyone who would listen...
...Its political stance is irrelevant to the central issue . . . " The art drew as much flak as the politics...
...Critics of the Lit's literature confined themselves to generalities, "pretentious" and "precious" probably being the favorites...
...The heroes of American v~riting classes are not cool miniaturists like Philip Larkin...
...One of the eeriest features of the controversy is the total silence, from Navrozov's critics, on this aspect of his efforts...
...What changed...
...parents, taking advantage of a Jewish ancestor, had left the Soviet Union during the ddtente emigrations, and come to New York in 1972...
...In the critics' eyes, however, the culpable party was not Navrozov, but Yale...
...The way that was found--the passive voice seems appropriate to the bureaucratic process--came out of Navrozov's 1980 negotiations with Charles Long...
...But not to the administration...
...In the common marketplace, his particular free thoughts are readily identified as conservative...
...But the immediate problem was the Lit...
...The magazine Navrozov wanted to work for began with its weakest feature, "Leader," an editorial which read like a foreign-language "Talk of the Town," imperfectly translated into English...
...They drive Rolls Royces--or so the Lit's ads would indicate...
...I don't believe in movements...
...Yale had been remiss in allowing the magazine to change hands in THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1984 19 the first place...
...With a Connecticut lawyer...
...Navrozov was not your typical Yalie (no one is supposed to be, but some are less typical than others...
...He spoke in headlong rushes, unfinished sentences piling into each other, like skidding cars...
...Lee Liberman ('79) clerks for a judge on the Court of Appeals (D.C...
...By then time had run out on the magazine, at least as far as its publishers were concerned...
...He had a smallish circle of friends, to whom he stuck closely, among them Liberman and Schwarz...
...In October 1982, Navrozov filed suit against Yale, Giamatti, and three other administrators, for trying to suppress his publication...
...Maynard Mack complained of excessive "glossiness," MacLeish of "parlor room vulgarity...
...He had a mustache, which he has since, mercifully, shaved off...
...Or they are received-which makes them worthless...
...Navrozov balked only once, over the wording of the revocation clause...
...Navrozov's backers, the Yale Daily News editorialized, "are rich...
...In the seventies, the Yale chapter of Young Americans for Freedom had proposed a debate between conservative columnist William Rusher and the bizarro geneticist, William Shockley, then enjoying a vogue de scandale...
...There followed, during the spring, servative foundations have supported it: Olin, the Institute for Educational Affairs, the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts...
...Money wasn't all it lacked...
...The administration was also alarmed by the growing professionalism of the senior singing group, the Whiffenpoofs, particularly by the time off from school its members were taking, the better to concertize...
...The battle over the Lit has moved outside the academic world in which it began...
...For the trial, he had secured, pro bono, the services of Robert D'Agostino, a former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Reagan Administration...
...The reverie was suddenly and unexpectedly within reach...
...We once gave the Banner [the yearbook] $1,000 to help them survive...
...Navrozov gave him a copy of the latest issue, Giamatti admired the graphics...
...No doubt, Navrozov's success with it also piqued desire...
...In his free time, between fitful bursts of schoolwork, he translated Russian poetry...
...He also agreed that the University could revoke the Yale name if he broke its rules...
...They discussed the Lit's finances...
...Hollander taught courses in writing and was thus in contact with the kind of Yalies who had once sustained the Lit...
...They are conservative...
...A general revision of the undergraduate regulations had been in the works for some months...
...The prejudices that control taste are the more stringent for being unspoken...
...Only he rubbed Yale too many wrong ways...
...Charles Long testified that the Navrozovs were not the only family with literary ties...
...A clean bill of health, from Yale's own examiner...
...They gave up a comfortable, indeed a privileged, life...
...Henson later denied, and the student affirmed, the story under oath...
...Yale had worries about several student groups, past and potential...
...In the spring of his senior year, Navrozov gave three of his translations to the floundering Lit...
...The question of legal title is thus purely a matter for speculation...
...That of course was exactly what Andrei Navrozov did...
...When the squalling started, however, the same motives impelled them to side with the loudest lungs...
...I cannot imagine," he wrote, "that the Secretary's Office would act precipitously or arbitrarily...
...In the early days of the controversy, Long said, Professor Hollander had complained to him "that a group of students, which included his daughter, thought they should have the right to the magazine, and what was Yale College doing about that...
...There will be no more Yale Literary Magazines," Henson explained...
...The Yale Literary Magazine has traditionally been an organ of undergraduates at Yale," says Peter Brooks, professor of French and Comparative Literature...
...The lustiest of these, the Dartmouth Review, waged war on black studies, gay rights, and the Dartmouth hierarchy...
...Giamatti testified that the extracurricular undergraduate experience was "very important...
...Andrei had never had to attend a Soviet school...
...that student authors were not excluded from its pages...
...Politically, he insists, he is a "free thinker...
...The Banner had offered it to the Elizabethan Club, a campus literary society, which wouldn't touch it...
...To others, Navrozov successfully portrayed himself as a brash underdog, Yale as a ponderous Goliath...
...What was needed in the last decade was "somebody with a little vigor to take hold of the thing and put it on the map again...
...One internal Yale memo, a brieTing paper for Giamatti, noted the Lit's "rather curious right-wing support...
...I first met Navrozov when he was a freshman...
...In June 1981, Henry Chauncey, Secretary of the University, sent Giamatti a report on the Lit...
...Giamatti, a professor of English and Comparative Literature specializing in the Renaissance, had become president of Yale the same summer Navrozov bought the Lit...
...Later that month, a student interested in starting up a conservative newspaper asked David Henson how the new regulations affected the Lit...
...One of the most vocal critics was the poet and professor of English, John Hollander...
...In the Winter 1980 issue, the third under Andrei's tenure, Lev reviewed an issue of the New York Review o f Books...
...In the spring of 1979, they got the first issue of the new editors...
...Both agree that the new president advised the young editor to get in touch with the university administration...
...It was in their interests, he and the Lit's other critics claimed, that they were protesting...
...Maybe it was...
...Either ideas are selfgenerated...
...Sometimes the denials of partisanship almost overtook the original polemics...
...This division of labor satisfied the Secretary of the University as late as 1981...
...They envisioned full color art reproductions, and combed the back issues of American and English magazines for congenial writers...
...Circuit...
...Yet, strangely, the theme of politics, like a Wagnerian motif, kept popping up...
...Three days before Navrozov's case opened, in October 1983, the judge ruled that D'Agostino could not argue the case, throwing the entire burden on the local lawyer who was to have acted as an assistant...
...Andrei's father, Lev, was a successful translator, and Gromyko had been one of the neighbors...
...But Yale's concerns at this point were legal, and financial (the magazine, besides running a deficit, had gotten some sizable contributions from Yale alumni, which irked the university's fund-raisers...
...In January 1982, Howard Lamar, the Dean of Yale College, wrote to a disgruntled English professor that he and David Henson, Dean of Student Affairs, were "trying to find ways to return control of the Lit to a proper Yale constituency...
...We wanted to make it into the sort of magazine that we would want to work for...
...We challenged," says Mary Schwarz, "the s a l o n s . ' ' Politics completed the recipe for a campus explosion...
...Students had largely stopped reading it, or writing for it...
...Navrozov's efforts have changed the magazine...
...Yale made one investigation of Navrozov's compliance...
...Henson and his student interlocutor, as noted above, contradicted each other...
...All this time, the Lit was registered with the university as an undergraduate organization...
...During our conversation Maynard Mack mused on the Lit's ups and downs...
...When the new rules finally came out, in September 1982, Navrozov's walking papers were presented in Appendix C, section K, subsection 3 ("Publications"): " . . . decisions about the contents of each periodical, the editorial policy, and the business policies and practices are to be controlled by enrolled Yale College undergraduate students...
...Navrozov remembers Giamatti suggesting that the Lit incorporate...
...Imaginative editors--John Hersey in the thirties, Mack himself-had always managed to pull it out of previous declines...
...The Lit got from Yale a small office, a phone, and an account into which supporters could pay tax-deductible contributions...
...Chauncey found that the student staff of the magazine in fact knew what was going on...
...In the early eighties, they're starting to come back...
...That is still the claim today...
...Cioran...
...one that came in over the transom...
...The Lit is appealing...
...Navrozov and his colleagues have put out twelve issues, raised and spent nearly a million dollars...
...the early days of National Review...
...The new editors compiled a list of Lit alumni from old mastheads and sent out a solicitation...
...Students on the staff, the occasional student poem-five, by the fall of 1981--these were not enough to make it a true undergraduate organization...
...ConGiamatti recalls, had a "nice chat...
...The Lit went bankrupt in 1969, and was acquired by the onceindigent Banner...
...Pens~es by the French essayist E.M...
...I U Q D 6 t Q . . . . . . . * U U _9 _9 * _9 . . . . . . . . . m _9 I . . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The publicity generated by the struggles of the Yale Literary Magazine with Yale University is, in part, a testament to the American caste system...
...Schwarz was slated to be editor in the fall of 1978, but, Liberman recalls, "there wasn't going to be a next edition, unless the Banner managed to sell it...
...Under Connecticut law, defendants must show "good cause" for employing an out-of-state lawyer, which D'Agostino was--a request routinely granted in most cases...
...Back in April, he told the Yale Daily News Magazine that the Lit was "becoming increasingly political," with "rightwing tendencies...
...At this juncture three students took an interest in the moribund magazine...
...more, because he had transformed an old Yale fixture to do so...
...Navrozov-less, the trial produced little drama...
...In court Navrozov's brashness served him less well...
...Navrozov had no legal advice, scarcely any editorial advice--Schwarz and Liberman had left New Haven the year before...
...The paying circulation in the spring of 1978 had sunk to 25, all of it off campus...
...In July 1978, Yale Banner Publications, Inc...
...Conservatives--James J. Kilpatrick, M. Stanton Evans, National Review--adopted him as one of their own...
...The magazine's debts have been paid...
...We do not condemn the Lit's conservative, anti-Soviet ideology...
...four translated by Navrozov (he has not contributed to the magazine since...
...The third student was Andrei Navrozov...
...My conscience tells me this has been a denial of my right of due process," he told the court...
...Giamatti told the News the matter would be studied, and he told the News's editorial board to cool it...
...Epigonic snobbery _ 9 stewing in platitudes.., cultural name-dropping.., ghastly spiritual tatters...
...Then there was the matter of Navrozov's literary judgment...
...Brooks complained in the Courant that "the name of Yale has become an illegitimate banner for a group of people and their ideologies...
...It was a pan...
...Privately, Yale considered its options...
...This is specious...
...Heavy stock, beautiful colors, ads for galleries, a bank, saddlery...
...Yale filed a counterclaim, to enjoin Navrozov from using the name, Yale Literary Magazine...
...seven that were solicited...
...We worked eighteen hours a day...
...Half the solicited articles and poems in the last issue of 1983 were brought in by Navrozov, half by Kate Dalton, a staff member in the senior class...
...We were immediately in a state of panic," Navrozov remembers...
...in response, an enraged administrator bit one of the editors...
...Mary Schwarz (class of '79) now works as a program coordinator for the John M. Olin Foundation...
...Often, in his open letters and press releases, he blurs this fact, arguing that the Lit has always published pieces by real world literati, as well as students...
...Giamatti and his subordinates did not care about politics or art, or even, at first, undergraduates...
...The incorporation papers bound Navrozov, on pain of losing the Yale name, to abide by the regulations and policies "adopted from time to time" by Yale...
...The journalistic brouhaha reached the rural solitude of Archibald MacLeish ('15...
...U n t i l the fall of 1981, there was little private criticism of these arrangements, and almost no public complaint...
...Tonally, it was scored in its lighter passages for kettle drums, in its heavier ones for pneumatic drills...
...A dull document, it nevertheless puts in perspective much that followed...
...But it was definitely outr...
...One of their daydreams, hardly a plan, was to run a journal...
...And what were Navrozov's predilections...
...Hollander denied saying any such thing...
...on the cover, four women, skating among gold and silver tree trunks (the author of the accompanying piece was--this author...
...A fight over the Yellow Book of a land-grant college or a Baptist seminary would probably not make "Sixty Minutes" and the New York Times...
...It's being controlled by outside hands and used for sectarian and political reasons...
...The notion that Yale somehow bent itself out of shape," says Giamatti in his own defense, "is a red herring...
...The two of them, and stretching into the summer, a series of meetings between Navrozov, Associate Dean Charles Long, and a lawyer from Yale's General Counsel's office...
...The aged poet laureate of the establishment wrote Giamatti asking how it was that the Lit was now in the hands of "right-wing propagandists...
...prose written as verse to sound significant...
...By the sixties, the palmy days had long gone...
...New management, odd poems, cold warfare--any one might have been tolerable, even any two...
...It has also been treated, with some justification, as a political issue--liberals quashing conservative dissent...
...Art work by Igor Galanin, a fellow ~migr...
...In the end, acting on Yale's advice, Navrozov set up a nonprofit corporation to publish the Lit, which he promised to keep registered as an undergraduate organization...
...One poem by a Yale junior...
...Both factors account for the bitterness of the ensuing criticism...
...The Lit had paid for its use of the alumni list...
...With the money that came in they paid a deposit on a four-color brochure, which went to the entire Yale alumni list...
...They were not doing themselves or anybody any good by objecting to the content," he remembers saying...
...It seemed like it would be a good way to spend my life," Liberman recalled later...
...The storm that now broke over the Lit and the university struck some noncombatants as part of a larger phenomenon...
...When critic Maynard Mack (Yale '32) worked on it, there were twelve hundred paying student subscribers...
...The Lit rented the Review's subscription list and sent Lev's bouquet to each reader...
...William Styron, side-swiped in Lev's New York Review o f Books piece, called it "an extremely right-wing hatchet job...
...These were parlous...
...The News urged it to get the Lit back...
...Giamatti doesn't...
...the thought of James Burnham...
...The magazine's aesthetic polemics were, if anything, even sharper...
...That February he ran into A. Bartlett Giamatti on the train to New York...
...All the staff, except Navrozov, were students...
...I would be able to do interesting things with friends...
...that there was "ample precedent" in other organizations for nonundergraduates like Navrozov having a role...
...Whereupon Navrozov refused to take the stand...
...Nowadays, it is the student work (eight poems in twelve issues) that is thin...
...The backbone of the issue was a 37-page essay by Lev Navrozov, on the West and the Soviet Union...
...He and his Richard Brookhiser is Senior Editor at National Review...
...The proportion of contributions in the old Lit by non-Yalies like Rudyard Kipling or Ezra Pound was tiny...
...Their plans required large infusions of cash...
...Their goal was a high-brow journal with a national audience, and a top quality format...
...It should not be alienated from them...
...All three were bound to give offense...
...We were well-heeled...
...Mostly, it offers a window into the world of the academy: a view of how things happen, and to whom...
...Navrozov won the PR war hands down...
...We knew genius when we saw Philip Larkin's twelve-line poem 'The Trees.' We rushed off in search for more novities of the same k i n d . . . ") Things improved considerably thereafter...
...The Yale professoriat not only scorns to weigh the competing interpretations of contracts, it does not even acknowledge the labor theory of value...
...I ' d be just as cross," Hollander assured the Courant, "if a left-wing group took it over and didn't really include students...
...Still, the magazine is a Yale publication...
...Besides Navrozov p~re on the Soviet Union, the new Lit has run pieces celebrating the free market...
...The issues raised by the Lit were both less and more parochial-less because Navrozov conceived himself to be taking on the tastemakers of the outside world...
...But the Left did not want Shockley on campus, even to be challenged, and their threats of disruption, and YAF's persistence, gave Yale numerous headaches...
...One thousand old Blues paid up front...
...Their overriding concerns throughout were those of good housekeeping--tidying ragged edges and loose ends, keeping peace at the table...
...Navrozov's only brush with officialdom occurred in 1980...
...The American Literary Society, publishers of the Yale Literary Magazine, was incorporated at the end of August 1980, and Navrozov went back to work on the fourth issue, featuring an attack on the New York Times...
...After a Thanksgiving recess to consider the evidence, the judge ruled down the line for Yale...
...In September, he was quoted by a story in the Hartford Courant ("Literature, Politics Mix Poorly at Yale"): "It's outrageous that the Yale Lit has become something personal and ideological...
...The judge further denied a motion for a stay...
...People disliked the ads, the aphorisms, the poetry, the paper...
...Literary journals, it would seem, grow like stalagmites, or mold, spontaneously...
Vol. 17 • June 1984 • No. 6
