'Scorpion' Survives--From Issue to Issue

Around the middle of last year, 500 copies of as amateurish-looking T5-page literary magazine with the vegusly menacing name of scorpion appeared in the Square. It sold for a dollar a copy, which was 20 coast more than it cost to print, and Robert Justice '66, its creator, lost 300 dollars. Whatever readership the first issue acquired had deserted both Cambridge and scorpion by the time the second came out is June.

Scorpion is now 400 dollars in debt, and the figure is bound to go up when the magazine's now editor brings out his first issue is October. It could conceivably be the last. Guy Franklin Delano Roosevelt Kuttner '67 doesn't care about the money, although the loans are in his name, but he does enjoy caring about his magazine. "Look, I'm a Boy Editor," he'll say, gleefully posing with a telephone receiver. "I'm throwing paper clips at a dinosaur."

The dinosaur is the Harvard Advocate, a tradition-bound and, according to Kuttner, slick monolith that has long cornered the undergraduate writing market while publishing relatively little undergraduate material. The advocate's unsatisfactory state is Scorpion's raison d'etre. But Kuttner, with his staff of six (he gave himself veto power over everything the rest of the staff does, but promised never to use it, "Or else what's the sense of having a staff?") is not out to get the Advocate, only to improve it. "The Advocate needs a pep pill -- that's us. The time is ripe. If Scorpion comes across, the Advocate can no longer rely on its name."

He had little to do with the magazine's first year, disapproved of much of its material, but liked the idea well enough to take over, although it will mean directing Scorpion from Chicago where he will be spending a year off. The first issues had too much social commentary ("you can get that any place") and literary criticism ("it's like hair creme -- greasy and it smells bad") for Kuttner's taste. His will be exclusively prose fiction and poetry.

Scorpion might be a hand-to-mouth operation, but there will be nothing haphazard about it; Kuttner has carefully fashioned his own taste into a consistent philosophy for the magazine. "The styles of tomorrow will supposedly come from today," he explains, with rare lack of hyperbole, searching for words which on paper look like a prepared speech. "I don't want to go into the 'To's with our generation having created no type of synthetic heritage for ourselves.

"Trying to say something that has never been said before rarely comes out well -- and it doesn't matter. I'd much rather print bad innovational material than good polished work in which nothing' going on."

Kuttner gets violent at the thought of filling his magazine with either slick -- even New Yokerish -- Action or traditional poetry. "It's ludicrous to think of an undergraduate sitting down in 1966 to write a classical lyric." His own writing, both poetry and prose, is "thinkable, but not readable -- there is a majesty and grandeur in something that's in its crude, formative, germinal stages, where the reader can fill in the gaps." And then, characteristically, interrupting his own lecture to shriek. "Poetry is wonderful -- it's nonsense -- I love it!"

The Boy Editor now has some 35 pages of copy good enough for the next Scorpion. He will wait until he has at least twice that before putting the magazine together. "It's such a pain to put out, it might as well be big enough to be worth it." All the material is solicited, "hard wrung," from people either he or his board knows. A few things have come in unsolicited but, Kuttner says scornfully, "You pass a Cliffie on the street. She scowis. You scowl. Well, that's the kind of writing you get from these girls."

The issue will also contain a screen play, ("not just a crappy dialogue, but a script from a real flic -- you need something totally visible in a literary magazine") and some "marginalia" -- notes on one of the poems, probably one of Kuttner's own, by an "English major's English major."

The privilege of putting all this between covers is one for which Kuttner might have to pay, to the tune of several hundred dollars, but that threat makes the task of dinosaur-fighting just that much more appealing. "I don't give a dawn whether they buy it or not, as long as they read it. If they're not interested, I don't want them to touch it." He enjoys talking like a boy-with-mission and, if the magazine survives beyond its next issue, he's probably found as good a mission as any. "But look," he says as he prepares to spend a year in Chicago "reading manuscripts of something," "I've already had enough jobs to tell my grandchildren about. I don't really need another one."