Big Little Magazines: Post-War Inflation in the Avant-Garde

There was a time when Audience meant a twenty-four page poetry magazine peddled on newsstands and street-corners from Cahaly's to Massachusetts Avenue. In those days it was written by and for the Cambridge community.

Progress, they say, has its virtues. And in two years Audience has expanded to six times the old size, revamped its format, and added fiction, feature articles, and artwork. Not even the night people can deny that the magazine is more attractive, what with a color cover and offices in New York and Los Angeles. But that small gleam in the yellow eye we used to call hope--for undergraduate literature outside the Advocate's erudite stasis--is conspicuously missing in the summer volume of the new Audience. The editors choose to become another little magazine, to be judged on that dubious basis.

There are approximately 126 little magazines in America today--small circulation, less advertising, and long editorial introductions. North Beach and Greenwich Village provide the bulk, with the ballast variously composed of universities, small Southern towns, and writers' colonies in Arizona and New Mexico. Most of the little magazines are part of a post-war inflation for the avant garde. In the general confusion which gave culture the Beat, Silent, Sad, Brown, and Breathless Generations, art and intellectual vomit (the boundary has been transgressed) have prospered if not much improved.

Little magazine poetry subscribes by and large to the maxim that poets, like porpoises, run in schools. American poets (with very few exceptions) stopped thinking after T. S. Eliot, divided into two camps, and started publishing little magazines. The first flails away at the English language, American technology, form, the gentle passions, and the fairer sex; its grenadiers are men like Allen Ginsberg--neurotic Walt Whitmans with heroin and hypodermic needles and an intense sense of persecution. The second consists of old men with furrowed brows, writing for university quarterlies and occasionally publishing in the Atlantic; substituting form for substance, proceeding with hunched back and hickory cane down the convoluted paths of experiment, translating Latin quartets, and employing the scholar's mild irony on pared and perfect verses.

The poetry of the two camps thus vacillates between the precision of text book exercises and the protest on lavatory walls. In taking great pains to be original, both brands of poetry have degenerated into glittering, fatuous babble.

Little magazine post-war prose suffers the same division, except it's a gap between old and new. The old: the grand-children of Twain and illegitimate sons of Hemingway who have come to confuse the simple sentence with literature and the monosyllable with wisdom--the crude words and rugged realism of men's magazines and college sophomores. This species of literature is dying along with the subconscious-childhood reverie. The new: Jack Kerouac's bastardization of the picar-esque tradition, the hipster vocabulary, the mystic meaningless words attached to a generation, where motion is meaning and stasis is death. (I do not speak here of the book clubs, circulating libraries, paperbounds, and imported brown-covered erotica; Henry Miller and Herman Wouk bestride this cultural colossus, alternately sagacious and sadistic with their American public.)

How does Audience measure up in the big leagues of the commercial literati? If a magazine is judged on need, reason, or originality, it strikes out without swinging; there is nothing new in Audience. If a magazine is judged by the community which produces it, Cambridge can wash its pale hands and return to ruminations over dark beer and pornography; of the twenty-seven signed articles in the current issue, only two came out of the Brattle Street axis.

The best of Audience in the past has been its poetry, and this edition features a few professionals, among others William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, and Arthur Rimbaud. (Rimbaud's Rages de Cesars is published in apposition to Lowell's "Napoleon III, a translation and colloquialization of the former.) Williams offers a limp and muted tribute to Sibelius.

Firman Houghton (according to the credits, he "writes poetry and plays") contributes a series of five fair poems, devolving from fractured form and bird imagery to a chair-ridden poor cousin of Gerontion, grieving over his memories. The best of the five is a childhood recollection called "Rocker." (Four poems and two stories in Audience come from the childhood kettle of perceptive innocence.)

A critic once wrote that nothing was more tedious than mediocre poetry, and tedium sits like a lead bat on this reader's shoulder. Aside from two good poems from Daniel Langton and a garbled experiment in sound by C. C. Abt, the rest of Audience poetry ranges a dusty spectrum from the merely interesting to the very bad. Four poetesses help anchor down the ends.

And prose fails to redeem things. There is only one decent piece of fiction--"Mademoiselle Champignon", By Frederick Wakeman, a Harvard junior. Wakeman is sandwiched between two long short stories, the first a pallid Hemingway without irony, called "The Leedhes." It begins with twenty-one simple sentences, stumbles along under a clock of belabored symbolism, and never quite gets on its feet again. C. C. Abt returns in the other effort to tell a long tale inadequately.

There are two side-swipes at the lost art of satire, and both flop for the same reasons. Felicia Lamport's "By Henry James Cozened" begins with a light touch, lapses into gray elaboration, and drags on to repetitive dreariness. Maura Cavanaugh (a Radcliffe History major) embarks on a twenty page slash of Samuel Beckett in a vindictive farce called "Waiting for God." Both satires lack any self-substance beyond the parody. Both blunder on after the comic veneer has worn thin enough to recognize their paucity. And both conveniently ignore or unhappily miss a good deal of their victims' subtleties.

The rest of the issue consists of J. A. Rose's turgid prose on electronic music and a three-part centerpiece portfolio of excellent line-drawings.

Unless we judge a magazine on make-up or typicality, Summer's dish of pot-pourri fails to justify its seventy-five cents. Audience is heavy and directionless. And dull.