The Atlantic

The prospect of a 100th birthday for anyone is formidable. Such a celebration for a literary magazine is equally imposing and deserving of the same bewildered respect popularly bestowed for longevity. The occasion, though solemn, can be festive. It should betoken new life.

Although not mired in its former glory, the 100th Anniversary Issue of The Atlantic definitely has an antique aspect. Though the ancients appearing in its pages retain most of their power, they are undeniably growing old. A litle fresh blood for its own sake would have added a tone to the issue which would not have marred the solemnity of the occasion.

Starting with review by the editor of Atlantic's impressive past, in which the mystical names of James Russell Lowell, Bliss Perry, Ellery Sedgwick, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and William Dean Howells figure as editors, the issue goes on to new material by past contributors. Frost, Marquand, Hemingway, Thurber, Berenson, Morison, Isak Dinesen, President Conant, Jung, Slichter, Niebuhr, Osbert and Edith Sitwell, Auden, Wilder, McGinley, R. P. Lister, and the late Max Beerbohm march with deserved pomp and circumstance through the table of contents.

Only one unknown, Brian Moore, is in the list.

All acquit themselves with as much if not more distinction than usual. Nearly all meet the basic requirements of Atlantic policy: "to concentrate the efforts of the best writers upon literature and politics, under the light of the highest morals."

The Victorian touch--"highest morals"--still holds onto the magazine, but there are evidences that its grip is less strong than it once was:

"Someone says the Lord

Says our reaching toward

Is its own reward.

One would like to know

Where he says it though."

Robert Frost intones flippantly in his latest attempt to still the clatter of the Machine Age and to put man in his proper place. Summer Slichter, not in the realm of morality, but certainly in the musty halls of tradition, takes a well-aimed iconoclastic swing at Keynesian economics. If his argument is not convincing to the conditioned minds of the New Deal, it represents a refreshing conservatism, too seldom well expounded.

Not all the authors, however, are so novel, and in reality Slichter and Frost are reworking old themes, and doing their jobs well. Osbert Sitwell keeps up his barrage of family anecdotes; Bernard Berenson analyzes another family topic--Bernard Berenson; Beerbohm revives the Victorians; and Marquand traces his genealogy and that of New England. All is as it was--fluent, powerful in spots, and not disturbing.

Other authors in the issue are disturbed, but again not disturbing. Reinhold Niebuhr shows the concern of religion for the failure of our enlightenment to solve the eternal problems, but aside from a line on "our gadgetfilled paradise suspended in a hell of international insecurity" his concern is academic. Samuel Eliot Morison does prove that things have changed; "young William (Hickling Prescott) had gone through Harvard College gaily and easily, but lost an eye as a result of a brawl in college commons." Morison, however, devotes a very interesting article to the unknown historian and his claims for recognition in the same fruitless way that Edwin W. Teale some pages before bids us preserve the bald eagle. Both articles, no matter how well done, seem excursions unrelated to The Atlantic's opening statement of high principle.

One indication that year of publication is 1957, not 1857, is a varying concern seen througout the magazine with man's ability to annihilate himself. Phyllis McGinley puts the sugar-coating of humor on the situation:

"Though doubtless now our shrewd machines

Can blow the world to smithereens

More tidily and so on,

Let's give our ancestors their due.

Their ways were coarse, their weapons few

But ah! how wondrously they slew

With what they had to go on."

While Edith Sitwell renders what is probably the most forceful piece of poetry in her tragic memorial to all war orphans:

"The snow is the blood of these poor Dead...they have no other--

These children, old in dog's scale of years too old

For the hopeless breast--ghosts for whom there is none to care--

Grown fleshless as the skeleton

Of Adam, they have known

More aeons of the cold than he endured

In the first grave of the world..."

Of the other authors represented in the issue it is enough to say that Hemingway remains great, if gruesome, and Thurber gentle, though blind.

The total effect of the journal in which these masters appear is one of awesomeness. They may be old, but they are not dead. The Atlantic's 100th Anniversary Issue is in a way a compilation of the representative thought and writing of the most fluent men and women of our time.

If the thoughts are not new and the writing familiar, it does not speak ill of the occasion or the agency which produced them. A magazine which can summon these people to a command performance can perhaps find the talent to keep up its tradition, and, hopefully, add to it.