There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—
There is more I don’t know. I don’t know that W. H. Auden lives just down there, and might at any moment be seen striding toward home under his tall rumpled hunch; I don’t know that Marianne Moore is only up the block, her doffed tricorn resting on her bedroom dresser. It’s Greenwich Village—I know that—no more than twenty years after Edna St. Vincent Millay has sent the music of her name (her best, perhaps her only, poem) into these bohemian streets: bohemia, the honey pot of poets.
On that first day in the tea-leafed cup of the town I am ignorant, ignorant! But the three riddle-omens are soon to erupt, and all of them together will illumine Washington Square.
Begin with the benches in the Park. Here, side by side with students and their loose-leafs, lean or lie the shadows of the pretzel man, his creased ghosts or doubles: all those pitiables, half-women and half-men, neither awake nor asleep, the discountable, the repudiated, the unseen. No more notice is taken of any of them than of a scudding fragment of newspaper in the path. Even then, even so long ago, the benches of Washington Square are pimpled with this hell-tossed crew, these Mad Margarets and Cokey Joes, these volcanic coughers, shakers, groaners, tremblers, droolers, blasphemers, these public urinators with vomitous breath and rusted teeth-stumps, dead-eyed and self-abandoned, dragging their makeshift junkyard shoes, their buttonless layers of raggedy ratfur. The pretzel man with his toilet paper rolls conjures and spews them all—he is a loftier brother to these citizens of the lower pox, he is guardian of the garden of the jettisoned. They rattle along all the seams of Washington Square. They are the pickled City, the true and universal City-below-Cities, the wolfish vinegar-Babylon that dogs the spittled skirts of bohemia. The toilet paper rolls are the temple-columns of this sacred grove.
Next, the whirling doors of Chock Full o’ Nuts. Here is the marketplace of Washington Square, its bazaar, its roiling gossip parlor, its matchmaker’s office and arena—the outermost wing, so to speak, evolved from the Commons. On a day like today, when the Commons is closed, the Chock Full is thronged with extra power, a cello making up for a missing viola. Until now, the fire of my vitals has been for the imperious tragedians of the Aeneid; I have lived in the narrow throat of poetry. Another year or so of this oblivion, until at last I am hammer-struck with the shock of Europe’s skull, the bled planet of death camp and war. Eleanor Roosevelt has not yet written her famous column announcing the discovery of Anne Frank’s diary. The term “cold war” is new. The Commons, like the college itself, is overcrowded, veterans in their pragmatic thirties mingling with the reluctant dreamy young. And the Commons is convulsed with politics: a march to the docks is organized, no one knows by whom, to protest the arrival of Walter Gieseking, the German musician who flourished among Nazis. The Communists—two or three readily recognizable cantankerous zealots—stomp through with their daily leaflets and sneers. There is even a Monarchist, a small poker-faced rectangle of a man with secretive tireless eyes who, when approached for his views, always demands, in perfect Bronx tones, the restoration of his king. The engaged girls—how many of them there seem to be!—flash their rings and tangle their ankles in their long New Look skirts. There is no feminism and no feminists; I am, I think, the only one. The Commons is a tide: it washes up the cold war, it washes up the engaged girls’ rings, it washes up the several philosophers and the numerous poets. The philosophers are all Existentialists; the poets are all influenced by “The Waste Land.” When the Commons overflows, the engaged girls cross the street to show their rings at the Chock Full.
Call it density, call it intensity, call it continuity: call it, finally, society. The Commons belongs to the satirists. Here, one afternoon, is Alfred Chester, holding up a hair, a single strand, before a crowd. (He will one day write stories and novels. He will die young.) “What is that hair?” I innocently ask, having come late on the scene. “A pubic hair,” he replies, and I feel as Virginia Woolf did when she declared human nature to have “changed in or about December 1910”—soon after her sister Vanessa explained away a spot on her dress as “semen.”
In or about February 1946 human nature does not change; it keeps on. On my bedroom wall I tack—cut out from Life magazine—the wildest Picasso I can find: a face that is also a belly. Mr. George E. Mutch, a lyrical young English teacher twenty-seven years old, writes on the blackboard: “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d,” and “Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,” and “A green thought in a green shade”; he tells us to burn, like Pater, with a hard, gemlike flame. Another English teacher—his name is Emerson—compares Walt Whitman to a plumber; next year he will shoot himself in a wood. The initial letters of Washington Square College are a device to recall three of the Seven Deadly Sins: Wantonness, Sloth, Covetousness. In Commons they argue the efficacy of the orgone box. Eda Lou Walton, sprightly as a bird, knows all the Village bards, and is a Village bard herself. Sidney Hook is an intellectual rumble in the logical middle distance. Homer Watt, chairman of the English Department, is the very soul who, in a far-off time of bewitchment, hired Thomas Wolfe.
And so, in February 1946, I make my first purchase of a “real” book— which is to say, not for the classroom. It is displayed in the window of the secondhand bookstore between the Astor Place subway station and the union hall, and for weeks I have been coveting it: Of Time and the River. I am transfigured; I am pierced through with rapture; skipping gym, I sit among morning mists on a windy bench a foot from the stench of Mad Margaret, sinking into that cascading syrup: “Man’s youth is a wonderful thing: It is so full of anguish and of magic and he never comes to know it as it is, until it is gone from him forever. . . . And what is the essence of that strange and bitter miracle of life which we feel so poignantly, so unutterably, with such a bitter pain and joy, when we are young?” Thomas Wolfe, lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again! In Washington Square I am appareled in the “numb exultant secrecies of fog, fog-numb air filled with solemn joy of nameless and impending prophecy, an ancient yellow light, the old smoke-ochre of the morning. . . .”
The smoke-ochre of the morning. Ah, you who have flung Thomas Wolfe, along with your strange and magical youth, onto the ash heap of juvenilia and excess, myself among you, isn’t this a lovely phrase still? It rises out of the old pavements of Washington Square as delicately colored as an eggshell.
The veterans in their pragmatic thirties are nailed to Need; they have families and futures to attend to. When Mr. George E. Mutch exhorts them to burn with a hard, gemlike flame, and writes across the blackboard the line that reveals his own name,
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,
one of the veterans heckles, “What about getting a Buick, what about spending a buck?” Chester, at sixteen, is a whole year younger than I; he has transparent eyes and a rosebud mouth, and is in love with a poet named Diana. He has already found his way to the Village bars, and keeps in his wallet Truman Capote’s secret telephone number. We tie our scarves tight against the cold and walk up and down Fourth Avenue, winding in and out of the rows of secondhand bookshops crammed one against the other. The proprietors sit reading their wares and never look up. The books in all their thousands smell sleepily of cellar. Our envy of them is speckled with longing; our longing is sick with envy. We are the sorrowful literary young.
Every day, month after month, I hang around the newsstand near the candy store, drilling through the enigmatic pages of Partisan Review. I still haven’t bought a copy; I still can’t understand a word. I don’t know what “cold war” means. Who is Trotsky? I haven’t read Ulysses; my adolescent phantoms are rowing in the ablative absolute with plus Aeneas. I’m in my mind’s cradle, veiled by the exultant secrecies of fog.
Washington Square will wake me. In a lecture room in the
Main Building, Dylan Thomas will cry his webwork syllables. Afterward he’ll warm himself at the White Horse Tavern. Across the corridor I will see Sidney Hook plain. I will read the Bhagavad Gita and Catullus and Lessing, and, in Hebrew, a novel eerily called Whither? It will be years and years before I am smart enough, worldly enough, to read Alfred Kazin and Mary McCarthy.
In the spring, all of worldly Washington Square will wake up to the luster of little green leaves.
Published as “The First Day of School: Washington Square 1946,” Harper’s, September 1985
The Function of the Small Press
What, nowadays, is a small press? Partly it is really a press: one thinks of the burgeoning, all over America, of those artists who are active artisans, who care for beautiful paper (and sometimes fabricate their own) and beautiful type (and sometimes set it themselves, the old-fashioned way), and with their own hands turn out pleasing sewn folios that, while they are certainly books, are at the same time art objects of high dedication. In the crush of a lightning technology that slams out computerized volumes stuck together with a baleful glue, it is good now and then to be reminded of a book as something worthy of body-love. The nostrils also read.
A small press means something else as well: a publisher who is a woman or a man (or a living handful of men and women), not a “corporate entity.” Big companies are compelled to attend to “markets”; the bigger the house, the deeper the compulsion. Small-press publishers, unless they operate out of the pocket of some maverick philanthropist indifferent to the pinch of economics, are not averse to a bit of profit either; but more than on making money, they concentrate on making room: for eccentricity, for risk, for the idee fixe, for poetry, for the odd essay and the odder fiction; for the future. They are on the watch for originality—even though originality, like any watched pot, often ends by blowing off steam identical to all other steam. It is a vigilance, a readiness, for which nothing can be predicted: one day (the saying goes) a tedium, the next a Te Deum. Still, when the big publishers are looking for a miracle, they are usually thinking of dollars. For the small presses a miracle is more often a literary dream: Willa Cather rising out of an unlikely Red Cloud; the obscure Bernard Malamud, teacher and father in Oregon, patiently constructing his magic barrel of stories— sprinkling out shavings of a kind never shaped in the world before; Donald Barthelme, editor of a forgotten organ called locations, closeted in a dusky cubicle at the top of a staircase in New York, imagining new locutions for a new art. Unexpectedness is what the small presses are open to. They are like the little shoemakers who come unseen at night to stitch the leather no one else can master. No wonder they have Rumpelstiltskin goldspinner names—Unmuzzled Ox, and Mho and Mho Works, and Unspeakable Visions of the Individual, and Cosmic Information Agency, and Shankpainter, and Mr. Cogito Press, and Antaeus and Persea and Shan-tih and Orim and Pequod and Sun and Moon—names that announce their intent to turn the invisible visible. (They can also be called by straightforward names like The Quarterly, Southwest Review, Fiction.) Some of these little-shoemaker presses are in fact conventionally ambitious publishing houses working on a shoestring. But many are little magazines.
Little magazines. These may not be the real right words any more; they have a faintly anachronistic resonance, and have been sensibly replaced by the more capacious term small press, which in its democratic egalitarianism omits nothing on the American scene, whatever its aim, mood, tone, “school,” literary or political coloration. But with the words “little magazine” we are in another place; we are in the history of our literary culture. It is not simply that without Poetry, without the fabled Dial, those antique particularist precursors of our current abundance, we would not have had a vehicle for the first glimmers of modernism in American poetry and criticism. The little magazines began as an elitist movement favoring high art, in contradistinction to the big popular magazines; in this sense they were programmatic, didactic. They were intended as sanctuaries away from what was once thought of, dismissively and uncomplicatedly, as “midcult” (an out-of-date notion in a time when even kitsch is a resource, when graduate students in philosophy solemnly deconstruct the language of McDonald’s hamburger advertisements and serious literary critics look to reruns of The Honeymooners for cultural signifies). It was not so much what they were, or what they were meant to be—they were meant to be an aristocracy of letters, and sometimes they were. But their best case lay in what they weren’t. They weren’t Life or Look or the Saturday Evening Post or Esquire, or even Harper’s or the Atlantic. They were, by and large (I am reflecting now on the little magazines of the forties and fifties), coterie journals: all, however, with the same ideal—the loftiest peaks of what was known and thought. In a 1946 essay, “The Function of the Little Magazine,” Lionel Trilling undertook to defend the little magazines against “populist critics” who “denounce the coterie and the writer who does not write for ‘the many’”:
The matter is not so simple as these earnest minds would have it. From the democratic point of view, we must say that in a true democracy nothing should be done for the people. The writer who defines his audience by its limitations is indulging in the unforgivable arrogance. The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections. . . . He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon and his subject. And the democracy that does not know that the daemon and the subject must be served is not, in any ideal sense of the word, a democracy at all.
“The word coterie should not frighten us too much,” Trilling warned. “Neither should it charm us too much; writing for a small group does not insure integrity any more than writing for the many; the coterie can corrupt as surely, and sometimes as quickly, as the big advertising appropriation.”
If anything has changed in the life of the little magazines in the last four decades, it is their proliferation; and also the meaning of their proliferation. The little magazine as a form no longer stands for a single idea: the retreat to art and high culture. If Trilling’s justification for the coterie journal—that “the daemon and the subject must be served”—is still even minimally viable, if little magazines are still founded to promote and pursue an “agenda” (and surely they are), then what has happened is the multiplication of coteries, hence of purposes and agendas. Not every daemon will be congenial.
It may be that the little magazines no longer define themselves as uniformly as they once did because they cannot. Once they were the heralds and couriers of modernism—in advance of modernism’s inclusion in the literary curricula of the universities. Their agenda, prevalent and single-minded, was modernism, and with it the now-archaic passions of the New Criticism, inspiring ranks and ranks of tertiary imitators—every poet a sub-Pound, every writer of fiction a neo-Kafka, every critic a pseudo-Eliot. Not that, forty or fifty years later, we have left the parrots behind, but the question is: parrot whom, parrot what? With the famous exhaustion of modernism, who knows where we are now? Aspiring to the cadences of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Gertrude Stein or Samuel Beckett is one thing; aspiring to the sound of Ann Beattie or Anne Tyler is another, and may represent us more honestly. We live on a nameless planet. To give it a name—postmodernism—is only to confirm these thickets in the wilderness of no-man’s-land, which turns out to be everyone’s turf.
And so the little magazines increase their numbers. Where there were twenty little magazines with a single modernist idea, there are now a hundred, with a hundred different daemons. If you believe in the power of the Zeitgeist, then they may be more alike than they realize, these different daemons; but they assume singularity. This puts me in mind of my five zealously individualistic uncles. Each uncle demanded to be regarded as absolutely unlike the others; yet they all demanded this, and in just the same style. And so they march by, our Rumpelstiltskins, some devoted to intellectual puzzlements of a recogn
izably professorial kind, others to startling Pan into kicking up his goat feet: Salmagundi, Raritan, Grand Street, Granta, Parnassus; Holy Cow!, Home Planet News, Crawl Out Your Window, Toothpaste Press. The range in reviews is from Anaesthesia to Yale, with Lowlands, Mulch, Nada, and Ploughshares in between. And just here it may be salubrious to look at still another passage in Trilling’s small-press report:
To the general lowering of the status of literature and of the interest in it [and Trilling is writing before television], the innumerable “little magazines” have been a natural and heroic response. Since the beginning of the century, meeting difficulties of which only their editors can truly conceive, they have kept our culture from being cautious and settled, or merely sociological, or merely pious. They are snickered at and snubbed, sometimes deservedly, and no one would venture to say in a precise way just what effect they have—except that they keep the new talents warm until the commercial publisher with his customary air of noble resolution is ready to take his chance, except that they make the official representatives of literature a little uneasy, except that they keep a countercurrent moving which perhaps no one will be fully aware of until it ceases to move.
Some years later, Trilling, having invented the term “adversary culture,” would show how the established institutions of society have digested their opposition. Bohemia and all its works are vanished out of America; or, more exactly, bohemia has migrated to the middle class, and is alive and well in condo and suburb. The countercurrent has become the main current. So the little magazines have not only lost their elitism—beginning, one supposes, with the turning from Eliot and the long-range impact of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. They have also lost (though some of them may resist admitting to it) their bohemianism, the glamour of outsiderness and marginality. Citizens of a free country with a free press, we are luckily without a samizdat; anybody can publish anything, including righteous rage of a political sort, which rather limits the spectrum of anti-establishment emotion. All this—the swallowing up of the counterculture—Trilling more or less predicted.
Metaphor and Memory Page 13