Like a Camel

By Paul Gray

THE PUSHCART PRIZE, VI: BEST OF THE SMALL PRESSES Edited by Bill Henderson Pushcart Press; 539 pages; $19.95

If small presses constitute the off-Broadway of U.S. publishing, then this annual anthology, now in its sixth year, is becoming the equivalent of the Obie Awards. The development is almost all to the good. Those who contribute to little magazines know in advance that their readers will be few and their pay, if any, laughable. They must make a virtue of necessity and find gratification in their work itself; being singled out for recognition by The Pushcart Prize is a happy bonus.

On the other hand, the announcement that the "best of the small presses" has been gathered in one volume poses some problems. Pushcart Editor and Publisher Bill Henderson writes that the 52 winners were chosen from more than 4,000 submissions by 2,000 presses, ranging from Abaxas (Madison, Wis.) to Zuezda (Berkeley, Calif.). Since no one person could comfortably read, much less intelligently compare, this avalanche of material, Henderson called on "the assistance of 147 staff and special contributing editors for this edition." Any anthology designed by so large a committee is bound to look more like a camel than a horse, and this one does. It is filled with ups and downs, the low points perhaps owing more to compromises than aesthetic judgment. The truly weak pieces prompt a disquieting question: If this is the best, then what must the worst be like?

Once its beauty-pageant pretensions are ignored, though, The Pushcart Prize, VI can be seen for what it is: a fascinating peek at the vast and largely hidden world of noncommercial publishing. This is where talented young or unknown writers are likely to make their first impressions. Perhaps the most interesting debut over the past year belongs to Gayle Baney Whittier, who teaches French literature at the State University of New York, Binghamton. Her short story Lost Time Accident, which opens the collection, sensitively records a girl's growing awareness of the life her father leads, exposed at his factory job to chemicals and danger, and of her first intimations of the meaning of love. Medical Student David Hellerstein's A Death in the Glitter Palace is affecting in a more harrowing way; it describes the ordeal of a Vietnamese immigrant woman whose initial cancer may have been turned into something more deadly by advanced medical care.

Though the fiction ranges from very good to arch or trivial, the level of poetry is consistently high. That is not surprising, since very few popular magazines include any poems at all. The best contemporary poets must depend largely on smaller presses, and a number of them are represented here: Derek Walcott, Joseph Brodsky, Carolyn Forche, Charles Simic, Louise Glueck, Galway Kinnell and Robert Creeley.

The essays are less impressive. One, titled Experiment and Traditional Forms in Contemporary Literature, starts off early with a solecism ("Contemporary literary works such as Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, Ray DiPalma . . .") and then goes rapidly downhill. George Steiner, Leslie Fiedler and Theodore Roszak, all of whom have commercial-publishing credentials, turn in rather shaky performances before the smaller houses of the little magazines.

Uneven as it is, this anthology shows that despite the electronic revolution and the long-expected death of literacy, a lot of people are still putting words down on paper. The news is heartening, and then some. A few of these stubborn writers are doing it very well indeed. --Paul Gray

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