New Worlds and Old Writers

...Look, for a moment, at the list of those responsible for The Noble Savage: Saul Bellow, Keith Botsford and Jack Ludwig, editors...

...By contrast, the cover of New World Writing #16 (the first issue under the Lippincott imprint) is a ghastly orange and green, with 1930-modern (and virtually illegible) type and no list of contributors, most of whose names would be unfamiliar anyway...

...Their writing, while on a very high level, is not quite as accomplished perhaps, and often the ideas are rough, still germinal, still searching...

...For even if their accomplishments are not always as smooth and professional as those of the established writers, their attempts are so often more exciting to watch...

...There are nice things from the Savage writers, of course, and no one could fail to be impressed with Savage editor Jack Ludwig's rambling story of Ivy and Beat in California, or Harvey Swados' essay on the Patterson-Johansson title fight last June...

...And in this first match, the newcomers win handily over the oldtimers...

...But it is matched in perception and intelligence, if not in style, by Diana Butler's "Lolita Lepidoptera," the first published piece of criticism by a young woman who leads a fascinating treasure hunt for the "hidden butterfly pattern" in Nabokov's bestseller...

...The other three pieces—Pynchon's "Low-lands," Richardson's "The Credence Table" and John F. Gilgun's "A Penny for the Ferryman"—are all by virtually unknown writers (the first 22 years old, the others 24) who show a willingness to delve into complicated modern problems and relationships which the Savage writers, for the most part, do not share...

...They have a perfect right to publish the big names and sell thousands of copies and let the lesser fry stump along for themselves...

...But an argument could be made that the editors do have some sort of responsibility to the younger writers, some sort of obligation, as long as they're putting out a new magazine, to get into its pages those people who are not represented on the pages of all the other literary magazines in the country...

...Yet the best measure of how successfully NWW has accomplished its goal is to set it against The Noble Savage...

...Perhaps the most impressive...

...Reviewed by J. Kirk Sale Associate Editor, "The New Leader" Why anyone would want to name a periodical The Noble Savage I can't imagine, but the editors have put the title in inch-high letters on both front and back covers of their first issue apparently without embarrassment...

...Under the title, on a slick purple background, they have placed the names of the contributors —Mark Harris, Wright Morris, Herbert Gold, etc.—all the best-selling names of what are still called the "new young writers...

...Why is it necessary to have still another periodical for these writers...

...Gilgun's is a sensitive treatment of a family marked by tragedy and failure as seen by the one member who has finally managed to hang on to happiness...

...They point perceptively to the heart of the problem, the very problem emphasized by a new magazine full of old writers: "We deplore the fact that many literary magazines persist in publishing from a pool of a dozen or so old-new writers instead of gambling on untried authors and ideas," and they attempt to meet the problem by opening their periodical to material "by those whose work, until now, has been known only to their friends, relatives and teachers...

...That's why The Noble Savage, for all its superficial slickness and talented contributors, is a just-another literary collection, while New World Writing #16, for all its unevenness and inexperienced contributors, is a more valuable and important part of contemporary writing...

...John Berryman, Ralph Ellison, Herbert Gold, Arthur Miller, Wright Morris and Harvey Swados, contributing editors...

...but what they have to say is in most instances far more exciting, far more textured with thought and perception, than the more polished, style-for-the-sake-of-style work of the big names...

...By contrast...

...Of the five superior pieces in NWW, only one, Kingsley Amis' essay on modern England as he sees it after a 10-month visit to the U.S., is by an established and well-known writer, and it is as perceptive and entertaining in its insight into the tight little isle ("If the old girl is getting more horrible all the time, she is in the same proportion getting funnier too") as one would expect from a writer of Amis' stature...

...All but one has been published extensively before and by my count the 12 contributors have a total of more than 50 books to their names...

...The editors of NWW, Stewart Richardson and Corlies M. Smith, seem to be moving in to assist the younger writers where the older writers, now comfortably established, have failed...

...Every single one has a piece in the first issue (the contributing editors certainly took their titles literally), except Botsford, who must have been out selling subscriptions...

...I don't think there's anything magic in publishing lesser-known writers, but I do think that their invigorated search for new answers to old problems (both literary and ideological) demands that they be given a larger platform than they have now...

...It reflects not only the separate aims of the two periodicals, but the kind of writing as well: Savage is apparently dedicated to minor works of established writers, NWW to "untried authors and ideas...

...The Noble Savage has only three really first-rate pieces: Mark Harris' "The Self-Made Brain Surgeon" (done with his usual high humor and wry awareness), Swados' "Exercise and Abstinence" and Lud-wig's "Confusions: Thoreau in California...

...There is no reason to demand that the editors of a new magazine like The Noble Savage print only un- or lesser-knowns and let the well-knowns publish in The New Yorker or Esquire...

...This last is a wildly funny story of a transplanted Ivy Leaguer fascinated by the strugglings of a Thoreau-inspired Reichian ("Because I live the American life of Second Things First doesn't mean I don't know better"), and it is the one story in Savage written, strikingly enough, by a writer who has not yet published a novel...

...Now this certainly can have its pitfalls, as the death of many a magazine devoted to unknown writers can testify...

...But nothing in Savage struck me as being as impressive, as striking—in short, as interesting—as Jack Richardson's tale of love and duty between a master and servant, or Thomas Pynchon's story of the offbeat suburbanite who goes to live in a garbage dump...

...This difference is not casual...