Editors See Magazines In Two Distinct Lights

Conflicting viewpoints and a general attitude which fell a bit short of the oftmentioned "qualified optimism" provided the main attraction at the past three days' Conference on "The Little Magazine in America."

A large number of editors of and contributors to the Little Magazine spent the beginning of this week discussing the many facets of the existence of these magazines and in doing so appeared to break down into two distinct categories; bleak pessimism and apologetic optimism.

Philip Rahv, editor of the Partisan Review and keynote speaker, termed the Little Magazine "an oasis of gratuity in a desert of utility" and pointed out that since 1912 these magazines have discovered 80 percent of all new novelists, poets, and critics.

He conceded, however, that ours is an age of consolidation rather than of great innovation and claimed that this fact could not be blamed on the Little Magazine. "Our task today," he said, "is to keep the literary criteria going, to resist vulgarization on the one hand and academicization on the other."

Lowell Optimistic

Optimism in this same vein came in a rather light-hearted tone from Robert Lowell who, while commenting on Partisan Review, said, "Anyone must be impressed by a magazine which was against Stalin in 1936 and against Time in 1956." Rahv had previously attacked Time's article on the "reconciliation of American intellectuals."

Henry Rago, editor of Poetry, continued the early trend of the conference when he asserted that, "whether popular or not, whether solvent or not, the Little Magazine is free."

However, there were soon others to contradict these points of view. William Barrett, formerly of Partisan Review, questioned the idea of freedom somewhat when he claimed that "the poets belong to the Little Magazine; they have no place else to go."

"Snotty Young Man"

Barrett mourned the passing of the "snotty young man who could be counted on to throw bricks when needed" into what he termed the "academic."

Donald Hall cited the disappearence of "exciting" Magazines and blamed the conservative group which now, according to Hall, dominates this area. All the excitement, he continued, is from the old poets like Marianne Moore and e.e. cummings.

Hugh Kenner, a Contributing Editor of Poetry, said on the final evening of the conference, "the Little Magazine is largely an academic phenomenon,...and our civilization is in a very perilous situation when its writers are driven into the universities."

He saw the working of the magazines as "a great cooperative endeavor" in which the non-academic reader is merely an "eavesdropper" in the literary communications between isolated academics in universities scattered all over the country