Lumps for the Little Ones

The editors of The Carleton Miscellany had what they thought was a splendid idea. Why not ask the editors of other "little magazines" what they thought they were really accomplishing? Perhaps the answers would contain some thing "interesting" or "revealing" or "important." In high hopes, the Carleton College intellectuals circulated a questioning letter among their fellows-- the men who put out those literary-intellectual reviews that cater to a few thousand readers. The answers were certainly revealing.

"I am afraid," wrote Robert Ely, editor-publisher of The Sixties, "this symposium will be another occasion for self-congratulation by little-magazine editors. So I will say a few rude words. American little magazines are for the most part utterly pointless. Almost all are mediocre. A near example is our host, The Carleton Miscellany. It has had a pointless quality about it ever since it was set up."

That was rude enough, but Bly was not the only one with some bile to cough up. A surprising number of the 22 participating editors and former editors thought there was much awry with the proliferating little literary enterprises. Said one of the symposium contributors, William Mathes: "There must be some worth mentioning. I just haven't been able to think of any." One of the problems seemed to be an inevitable conformity. Said Jack Garlington of Western Humanities Review: "The fact that most of us belong to the same class --we're eggheads, whether we admit it or not--contributes to a certain homogeneity in itself."

Mississippi of Mediocrity. Moreover, that homogeniety is reinforced by a tendency to feed on one another. As Mathes put it: "The editor of magazine X publishes frequently in magazine Y, which just happens to be the magazine edited by the poet who appears regularly in magazine Z." The result, as Paul Carter of The Colorado Quarterly sees it, is that "there develops a breed of poet and short-story writer found only in these magazines. I believe that The Colorado Quarterly could disappear without much notice being taken, just as it appears without much."

The main excuse for the magazines, said Garlington, is that writers need a place to publish. For a typical issue, Garlington reported, he has 900 submitted essays, short stories and poems to choose from. In addition, "the Mississippi of mediocrity," as The Sixties' Bly put it, "has deepened lately because the colleges have found literary magazines useful for their prestige," and cheap at the price--as little as $10,000 a year. "The cost is comparatively low in view of athletic budgets," noted Colorado's Carter wryly.

Perhaps it is not all so terrible after all, he continued. "If one is willing to accept the finger-in-the-dike argument in support of any spot of literacy, there is some small justification for every magazine." While waiting for that spot, "we editors shall simply have to endure, talking to ourselves and our faithful little bands of subscribers."

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