• U.S.

The Press: Wild Flowers

3 minute read
TIME

As a seedbed for little magazines, the American soil is fertile but thinly spread. Of the hundreds that have sprouted since 1912, only a handful have put down roots. Some of the best (Hound & Horn, the Dial, etc.) have withered and died. Last week a cluster of new ones bravely poked their heads above ground.

The most promising was Hudson Review, edited by three young Princeton alumni. It also promised the most, notably, never to fall into pedantry or opportunism, nor to “open its pages to those whose only merits lie in their anguish, their fervor, and their experimentation.”

Editors Frederick Morgan, 25, an ex-G.I., Joseph Bennett, 26, a Navy veteran working as an investment analyst in Wall Street, and William Arrowsmith, 23, a 1948 Rhodes scholar, have been two years launching Hudson Review. As a nonprofit literary venture, they got $6,600 in working capital from friends (who hoped to deduct the contributions from taxes), and for a mailing address used the Manhattan home of Morgan’s father, Sapolio Soapmaker John Williams Morgan.

Their first issue (4,500 copies), out this week, had poetry by E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens and Josephine Miles; critical pieces by Mark Schorer, Herbert

Read and R. P. Blackmur; a short story of the war by Alex Comfort that was a good grenade throw above most slick-magazine fiction. The editors regard “evaluating currently dominant literary reputations” as part of their charter. Accordingly, Vol.1, No.1 gave the back of its hand to the “dreary wastes” of homosexuality in Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, and Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. Some other little magazines, just popped up or popping:

¶Tiger’s Eye, going into its third issue with a press run of 5,000, was the expensively printed quarterly of Artist John Stephan and his wife, Poet Ruth Walgreen Stephan. Because she thinks it a shame that poets get such paltry pay, Mrs. Stephan, daughter of the late Drug Magnate Charles R. Walgreen, pays a princely $2 a line for poetry.

¶ Masses & Mainstream, reincarnating the late New Masses (TIME, Jan. 12) and the Communist literary quarterly Mainstream, was blue-serge Marxist in semi-slick dress. Its first monthly issue (15,000 copies) was adorned with a Picasso cover.

¶ Instead, which looked like a folded-up air raid instruction poster, was an unhappy combination of surrealism and existentialism. Publisher John Myers wanted a monthly magazine which would be “hard, virile, masculine, and which would raise difficult questions that had never been asked before.”

¶ Neurotica was a quarterly put out by nonneurotic St. Louis Antique Dealer Jay Irving Landesman, 29. Said he: “Most of my friends are writers and artists and all of them are neurotic as hell. We decided there was a need for a magazine to explore the problems of the neurotic personality.” Among the contributions were poems by Kenneth (Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer) Patchen and Conductor Leonard Bernstein (who called his poem Life Is Juicy). The lead article (by Londoner Rudolph Friedmann) began: “Getting married is the best way of taking regular exercise. In order to encourage his libido the wife lets the husband chase her around the bed. …”

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