A Brave New Entry
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
A Brave New Entry NEW AMERICAN REVIEW. NO. 1 Edited by Theodore Solatoroff New American Library. 288 pp. Hardcover $4.95; paperback $.95. Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN The welcome appearance of...
...Hospitality to artistic experiment, emphasis upon writers rather than editors, even limitation of editorial judgment to matters of "taste, relevance, freshness," these are the new editor's objectives...
...It is a demand that credits the journal's readers with an alert, sophisticated grasp of complicated problems and language...
...Wishing to appeal to as large a readership as possible, it deliberately eschewed the tendencies toward cult and coterie by which literary magazines usually define their particular territory and assert their standards...
...The list is scarcely longer than the Partisan Review, the New York Review of Books, Dissent, the New Republic, Commentary, National Review, the Nation, and this periodical...
...expertly written though it is, is in an excessively familiar vein of contemporary Jewish fiction...
...All these publications mix in various proportions politics, cultural commentary, and current events...
...Which brings us to the brave new entry at hand...
...My own emphasizes only slightly the subjects examined...
...Possibly the very best of the articles is Richard Gilman's "MacBird...
...So, for that matter, do Time and Newsweek...
...This I take to be a very auspicious beginning for a new magazine...
...As one who was certainly put off by Mrs...
...In partial contrast to its predecessor, though, New American Review will strive to provide "somewhat more explicit and topical connections between contemporary literature and the culture-at-large...
...In the intellectual firmament, what is the position of the New American Review") The editor, Theodore Solatoroff, worked for Commentary and more recently was editor of the late and lamented Book Week...
...As a social scientist, I could hardly agree with Roszak more...
...It is equally misleading to equate seriousness with a single political position...
...On occasion most of the periodicals on my list print verse, short fiction, or even plays...
...Benjamin De Mott's "But He's a Homosexual" is a humane, subtle, and original exploration of the relationship between sexual deviation and artistic accomplishment...
...Is it possible to be repelled by this charade and escape opprobrium as a square, a hawk, or both...
...Thus entertainment is a bonus, a by-product of the higher journalism, not its principal object...
...It is, one must concede, in principle equally possible to be a serious reactionary, a serious liberal or a serious radical...
...Naturally, different items succeed in varying degrees...
...A gap, if not a gulf, separates the editors of Partisan Review from their flame-throwing colleagues of the New York Review of Books?and both groups are more widely separated from William S. Buckley's serial yearnings for a blessed state of reaction that never was...
...Reviewed by ROBERT LEKACHMAN The welcome appearance of the New American Review, to be published triannually, is a reminder of just how few in number are the various American intellectual journals that reach even a modest national audience...
...Garson's verse, taste, and apparent objectives, I am delighted to say that in impeccable, dovish, non-square prose, Richard Gilman demonstrates conclusively that in beating Lyndon Johnson with a dirty stick, admirers of MucBird...
...To sum up then, of 21 separate entries, I considered six absolutely first-rate, and none of the remainder unreadable...
...On the whole, it is the articles which come off best...
...Since, as McLuhan and his friends keep telling us, print media are obsolete and linear arrangements of words are barely tolerable to the young?the nonreaders of the future??it is not entirely astonishing that intellectual journals have their troubles staying alive in the stormy electronic atmosphere...
...Stanley Kauffmann's wry memoir of his brief service as the New York Times drama critic is an exemplary tale of today's conflict between commerce and culture, a trifle marred for some tastes by Kauffmann's extraordinary magnanimity toward a management that treated him shabbily...
...and its Audience...
...What distinguished New World Writing, says Solatoroff, "was its hospitality...
...But so also do the Saturday Evening Post and Esquire, not to mention Playboy...
...In his brief introduction, he recalls with approval the 1952-59 career of New World Writing, also sponsored by the New American Library...
...Theodore Roszak's "The Complacencies of the Academy" is a sharp assault upon the deliberate, complacent, and well-rewarded irrelevance of far too much academic research to artistic, political, or social issues...
...Among the short stories, Victor Kolpacoff's horror tale from Vietnam falls short of its intention, particularly in the denouement, and Philip Roth's "The Jewish Blues...
...Faithful to this prospectus, the first issue is a lively mixture of short fiction, poetry, memoirs, and cultural and political commentary...
...Still magnanimity is so very rare a virtue among literary men, I suppose I should not reveal a more typical preference for a touch of malice...
...His essay is a superb rendition of the relationship between art, politics, and the bad behavior of intellectuals...
...May it prosper in the future...
...cannot avoid defiling themselves...
...But the entries by Grace Paley and Mordecai Rich-ler (an excerpt from a forthcoming novel) display their authors in excellent form...
...Among them I particularly esteemed four...
...Any list obviously depends on one's definition of a serious intellectual journal...
...What counts heavily in my selections is an attitude toward issues: The editors demand that artistic or political themes be explored with the complexity and at the length they require...
...Serious readers enjoy a capacity to concentrate upon unadorned expository prose for some substantial length of time...
Vol. 50 • October 1967 • No. 20
