Little Magazines: An Imaginary Interview with Jarvis Thurston

LITTLE MAGAZINES: An Imaginary Interview with Jarvis Thurston / Jarvis Thurston Q: Since you and your poet wife, Mona Van Duyn, have been editing a literary magazine for over thirty years—a magazine that is subscribed to by most of the great university and public libraries of the world, including the British Museum, the BibUothèque, and the New York Public—I thought it might be appropriate, nostalgias being fashionable these days, to ask you about the Then and Now of highbrow publications like yours. (Note: the self-puffery here is characteristic of little magazines.) JT: I am surprised you were able to find me in my broom-closet here in Duncker Hall. I'll be glad to answer your questions, but I must confess that my memory is not as good as it once was; I sometimes have the feeUng that my brain has been dissolving, immersed as it has been for so long in a sea ofjunk short stories and still looking for another WH. Gass "Icicles" or Stanley Elkin "Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers." Q: Do you find the function of the "kttle magazine" changed since you and your wife founded Perspective in 1947? JT: The non-commercial little magazines are still publishing the bulk of quality short fiction and poetry in the U.S. They StUl encourage new writers and still provide a half-way house to eventual acceptance by a trade publisher or a university press. Practically every famous writer of the twentieth century was discovered in a little magazine: Eliot, Faulkner, Bellow, Malamud, J.F. Powers, Welty, K.A. Porter, etc. And it is still true of the newer reputations. I am thinking of the stories of Leonard Michaels, Joy Williams, Raymond Carver, Brock Brower, and Andrew Fetler. Q: How do you account for the fact that the little magazine is particularly an American phenomenon? JT: To answer that satisfactorily would require little less than a cultural history of the U.S., written against a background of British and West European culture, but let me make a few glib generalizations. In Britain, for instance, stories, poems, and articles that demand a rather sophisticated reader are published in magazines that have circulations of 20,000 or more, hardly "little" by American standards—magazines Uke Encounters, Horizon, and Scrutiny. The reason that this is possible in 232 · The Missouri Review Britain is that there exists a sizeable middlebrow audience. On the other hand, the split between lowbrow and highbrow culture has always characterized the U.S. Our lack of middlebrow culture is a reflection of America's long preoccupation with settling and exploiting a continent, but more directly it's a factor of our educational system, which does not teach liberal arts to future specialists. I haven't, for instance, encountered any American-educated biochemist who can quote from memory long passages of Eliot and Pound, as did Nobel Laureate Carl Cori. In America, there are very few middlebrow publications that might permit a serious writer to meet a larger audience without compromising standards too seriously, but those publications that are still around have declined since the thirties. Still left are Harper's and Atlantic Monthly, both of which are struggling to pay the new inflated printing costs and mailing rates. Esquire, I see, which has published a few good stories in its time, has been wheezing into total slicknéss recently. So it is that we have Partisan Review, with a circulation of 8000 (now the largest of the quality publications, but looking more like PMLA as time passes), and Hudson Review, with 2800; most of the other literary magazines have less than 1000. Half of Partisan's circulation may be attributed to the fact that, from the beginning, it has been both political and literary. Q: Has there been a decline in the number of little magazines, or in the quality of the material published since you began? JT: Decline! Hardly. The last time I picked up a copy of Dustbooks's annual directory of little magazines, I noticed that there were over 1000. I find this disheartening; even the existence of a directory upsets me—this institutionalizing of what ought to be undomesticated...