Living with Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks 'Sewanee,' 'Partisan,' 'Kenyon' and 'Hudson' Reviews: A Brief Analysis Among the so-called little magazines, the big four are the Sewanee Review, the Partisan...
...Although I have read with profit some pieces I would otherwise have missed, I cannot deny that the experiment has required considerable fortitude...
...Taking the quarterlies that way, I haven't minded them much, but I have always felt that I would like to check my impressions and the criticisms voiced by others, and this fall I decided to go the whole hog, to read the autumn issue of each from cover to cover...
...And, sure enough, we find Austin Warren talking about Emily Dickinson's symbols in Sewanee, Northrop Frye analyzing Wallace Stevens's symbols in Hudson, and Alfred Kavin in Partisan examining Faulkner's symbols in Light in August...
...I look in vain for anything comparable in Kenyon and Hudson, but in Sewanee, appearing as a review of Mass Culture, there is a noteworthy venture into social theory by Edward Shils...
...Two of them are published by educational institutions: Sewanee, now 45 years old, by the University of the South in Tennessee...
...Miss O'Connor's "A View of the Woods" is one of her best, saturated with fury and terror...
...They were passionately excited about what was happening and what was going to happen...
...There are in the four magazines 18 reviews commenting on 37 books...
...They were often enough wrongheaded in their rebelliousness, but at least the editors and contributors saw literature as a going concern and were on the side of the creators...
...Bv contrast, William Carlos Williams's "The Farmers' Daughters" seems diffuse and offhand, but the precision of his observations and the depth of his sympathy make it a fine and powerful story...
...Although they have had different histories, the four magazines have come to be a good deal alike...
...And in Hudson John Holloway comments on Kingsley Amis, John Osborne and the rest of England's "angry young men...
...There are 72 pages of poetry...
...The statistics tell at least part of the story: 227 pages given to articles on literary subjects...
...118 to reviews of books, all literary—a grand total of 391 pages for the critics as against 76 for the short story writers, 72 for the poets, and 66 for visitors from outer space...
...I am not thinking about the symbolist criticism now...
...If they do rather well with poetry, the quarterlies' strong point, in quantity if not in quality, is criticism...
...Unless one is willing, as I am not to classify Kenneth Burke's "The Anaesthetic Revelation lof Herone Liddell" as fiction, Kenyon has only a single story, Wayland Young's ingenious "The Admirer...
...There are critical studies that don't adopt the symbolist approach: Robert Martin Adams's short essay on Ibsen in Hudson, John Peter's "The Fables of William Golding" in Kenyon, and Partisan's translation of Proust's "Sainte-Beuve and Balzac," a vigorous though apparently un-revised comment on Balzac's vulgarity and his genius...
...Mr...
...Martin Turnell, on the other hand, offers such a ponderous analysis of Flaubert's symbols that the novel as a novel, as a work of the imagination, simply vanishes...
...They write on the safe subjects, the approved authors...
...and there are also poems, a story, two essays, an art letter, and seven reviews...
...So far as arts other than literature are concerned, we have one article on music (an essay-review), ope dance chronicle, and three art chronicles (all devoted to Picasso...
...Fifteen books of criticism are reviewed, and four other books more or less directly concerned with literature...
...Partisan and Hudson share the honors...
...Finding two such articles in one issue reminds me of the Partisan of ten and fifteen years ago...
...Hudson has one story by William Carlos Williams, four critical essays, a dance chronicle, an art chronicle, four reviews, and 30 pages of poetry...
...Who ever bothered to look at the picture after putting together a jigsaw puzzle...
...None of these three writers, I want to make it clear, bogs down as Turnell does in the discussion of symbolism...
...that is only a symptom...
...The quantity of criticism is made obvious by a glance at the tables of contents, but what about quality...
...What bothers me is the stamp of the academy...
...Of the poetry I speak with some hesitation, because yl do not read as much contemporary poetry as I ought to and would like to...
...Sewanee's poetry section seemed to me nondescript and Hudson's distinguished, but I found poems I liked in all four, and I name names: Louis Simpson, Lysander Kemp, James Wright, Leonard Wolf, A. R. Ammons, Howard Nemerov, David Ferry, John Hollander, Theodore Weiss, Jean Garrigue and W. S. Merwin...
...Total pages devoted to fiction, 76...
...But the approach, as Marius Bewley, of all people, points out in Hudson, of all places, has its dangers...
...Surely the proportions are extraordinary...
...Seven novels are reviewed, one of them, Andrew Lytle's The Velvet Horn, three times...
...Bewley's "The Cage and the Prairie" is excellent, and Kenneth Burke's unclassifiable piece in Kenyon has entertaining autobiographical trimmings as well as a characteristic study of semantics, epistemology and esthetic theory...
...In the '20s and '30s, the little magazines spoke for the advance guard...
...They are not really little, for they run to 150 pages or so, but with the intelligentsia of the 1950s they seem to have the kind of prestige that transition, Broom and Secession enjoyed in the '20s and such magazines as Blast and Anvil in the '30s, and since their bulk is not built out of advertising, and since no other magazines have challenged their right to speak for the avant garde, they get by as our little magazines...
...It seceded from the Stalinist camp in 1937, becoming an independent political and literary review with Trotskyite leanings, and grew to be less and less political...
...If the quarterlies have ever published an article about an American novelist or poet with a reputation to make—about a Saul Bellow, say, or a Wright Morris, about a Robert Lowell or a Randall Jarrell—I missed it...
...There could he more stories and poems...
...The quarterlies' critics write better, as a rule, than the contributors to the Publications of the Modern Language Association and American Literature, but they are no more venturesome...
...The critics deal, happily and securely, with Men of Letters, and that is probably why the reviewers, who are compelled to examine what is currently being written, so often act as if they were dealing with impudent pretenders...
...Hudson has a lot of poetry, Partisan not very much, Kenyon and Sewanee the normal amount...
...Turnell's lapse, if it is a lapse, isn't of great importance, but anyone who ever runs through the quarterlies knows how frequently their critics are concerned with symbolism...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks 'Sewanee,' 'Partisan,' 'Kenyon' and 'Hudson' Reviews: A Brief Analysis Among the so-called little magazines, the big four are the Sewanee Review, the Partisan Review, the Ken-yon Review and the Hudson Review...
...That is why Dwight Macdonald acrimoniously resigned from the staff in 1943 and founded Politics...
...Partisan began life in 1934 as the organ of the John Reed Club of New York City, with Philip Rahv and William Phillips, its present editors, as members of a large editorial board...
...In any issue of any one of them, you are likely to find one or two long critical articles and two or three short ones, one or two short stories, from ten to twenty pages of poetry, and quite a lot of book reviews...
...Add Shils to Hook and Wollheim, and you have 66 pages in the four quarterlies devoted to political and social questions...
...46 to the other arts...
...The quarterlies, no matter how many good things they have published, concentrate on what has happened—and what a difference it makes...
...Hudson will have its tenth birthday next year...
...They are much alike, and they are all praised and blamed for the same reasons...
...Sewanee contains two essays on Flaubert, an essay on Emily Dickinson, two essay-reviews, a story, some 15 pages of poetry, and five reviews...
...Frederick J. Hoffinann's "Psychology and Literature" in the same magazine is what the title implies, with Hoffman defending Freud and criticizing Jung...
...My impression, for what it is worth, is that the quarterlies reflect with reasonable accuracy the present state of American poetry...
...That's 10 per cent and better than we would do in most quarters...
...These are, I grant, literary magazines, and are to be judged by their fiction, poetry and criticism...
...One of them, by Stratton Buck, seems appropriate to such an occasion, a straightforward account of Flaubert's aims and accomplishments...
...But my complaint is not so much against the predominance of literary criticism as it is against the kind of criticism that prevails...
...Kenyon has a long, not easily defined piece by Kenneth Burke, part autobiography, part fantasy, chiefly essay...
...All this has been said before, and I can do no more than to affirm that what has been said is, alas, true...
...Let us start with Sewanee, which, in observance of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Madame Bovary, has two articles devoted to that novel...
...Sewanee has a mildly interesting story by a beginner, Marvin Caplan, and Partisan, in addition to the O'Connor story, has -a brief story by Lenore Marshall, also mild|y interesting...
...I digress to call attention to the exceptional nature of this issue of Partisan, which has two political essays: Hook's "Socialism and Liberation," which is stimulating and may be influential, and Wollheim's lively and informative discussion of the new conservatism in England...
...There are also more general essays...
...Eleven volumes of poetry are reviewed, one of them three times, two of them twice...
...I regularly see the four of them, but my reading has always been spotty—a story here, an article there, reviews of books in which I was interested...
...Furthermore, as the current Partisan proves, political and social ideas can be appropriately and usefully discussed in literary magazines...
...Kenyon, about to enter its 20th year, by Kenyon College in Ohio...
...So far as short stories are concerned...
...Before I get into statistics, here is a general summary: Partisan, which leads off with a story by Flannery O'Connor and an article by Sidney Hook, also has an article by Richard Wollheim, a critical essay by Alfred Kazin, a translation of an essay by Proust, another story, a few pages of poetry, and art, fiction and poetry chronicles...
Vol. 40 • December 1957 • No. 49
