Robert Boyers, Salmagundi and Bennington review

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FEATURE REVIEW

Robert Boyers, Salmagundi and Bennington Review George Held When Robert Boyers arrives at his office in Palamountain Hall on the Skidmore College campus, he sits down at his desk in one of two roles - professor of English and editor o f little magazines. While most editors of literary journals earn their living as professors, few, if any, others are responsible for editing two such significant and disparate publications as Salmagundi and Bennington Review. The founder of Salmagundi, an eminent journal of culture criticism, Boyers was named four years ago to revive Bennington Review, a magazine of the arts that had been defunct for nearly eight years. With two substantial editing jobs on his hands, Boyers faces the task of keeping both magazines up to his h i g h standards, editorially distinct, and financially afloat. Besides teaching literature and editing little magazines, Boyers has edited several books based on special issues o f Salmagundi, contributed over 100 essays to a variety of journals, including Partisan Review, Tri-Quarterly, and the (London) Times Literary Supplement, and written three small volumes on R.P. Blackmur, F.R. Leavis, and Lionel Trilling. These critics, along with Matthew Arnold, are clearly Boyers' intellectual forebears and exemplars, and his studies of them allow him a platform for remaking the case for a sort o f criticism, now out of fashion, that blends close reading of and a poetic responsiveness to the text itself with an explicit concern for the ethical value of literature. Thus o f Blackmur, Boyers writes that he never mistook ideas in literature "for the poems and novels he wished to celebrate and analyze" (R.P. Blackmur: Poet-Critic, 1980). And in Salmagundi Boyers' kindred sensibility can be seen in the literary essays and the poetry - he's the poetry editor - he chooses to publish. At present he is at work on Politics and the Novel (under contract to Oxford University Press), a study of the political novel since 1945 that he envisions as a sequel to Irving Howe's Polities and the Novel (1957). If Robert Boyers were a businessman, he'd be the president o f his own company. As an editor, he represents the sort o f luck, pluck, and virtue that brought success to Horatio Alger's heroes, and like them he's risen from comparative rags to comparative riches. Born in 1942 into a working-class family in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, Boyers was sternly tutored in left-wing politics by his parents, who addressed him in English but spoke Yiddish to each other, especially when they wanted to keep their boy in the dark about anything. In 1956 the Boyers family moved to semisuburban Bay Terrace, in Queens. Robert qualified for Stuyvesant High School, in Lower Manhattan, traditionally one o f the best college preparatory public schools in New York. Even before high school Boyers had become an avid reader (Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoevsky) with a special concern for politics engendered b y his parents. At Queens College he majored in English and encountered his first important

mentor, Norman Silverstein, who would become an early and frequent contributor to Salmagundi. While an undergraduate, Boyers sought an outlet for his interest in politics but was repelled b y the campus leftist club's Stalinist line, so he founded The Liberal Club, for like-minded social democrats. From Queens for college it was back to Manhattan for graduate school, as Boyers earned a Master's degree in English at New York University, where he especially enjoyed the tutelage of the poet and critic M.L. Rosenthal. While at N.Y.U. Boyers sent essays to Dissent, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, and Partisan Review; when these magazines accepted and published his work, he decided to forego a doctorate and concentrate on writing for publication. Also during his N.Y.U~ years, Boyers came under the influence of Henry Pachter, a professor o f political science at The New School for Social Research and an emigre European intellectual of the sort Boyers closely identifies with to this day. In a memorial essay

Robert Boyers, editor, and Peggy Boyers, managing editor of Salmagundiand Bennington Review.

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(Salmagundi 52-53, Spring-Summer 1981) Boyers identified Pachter as "the man who encouraged me to start SALMAGUNDI," for it was during 1964, when he was a member o f Pachter's informal seminar held weekly in The New School cafeteria, that Boyers got the idea for beginning his own little magazine. "I'd become dissatisfied with Partisan Review," Boyers recalls, "because it had too little political content. I wanted a journal that was more confrontationist." So during 1965 and 1966 Boyers and his boyhood friend Michael London each put up $10,000 to found and sustain Salmagundi: A Quarterly of the Humanities and Social Sciences. Its first issue was dated Fall 1965 and sold for a dollar. Though "salmagundi" means "mixed salad" or "potpourri," the magazine is less variegated than its title might imply, for during its seventeen years o f publication, Salmagundi has reflected Robert Boyers' interests in criticism and politics and his taste in fiction and poetry. From the beginning its contents have derived mainly from writers solicited by Boyers himself. These writers include Rudolph Arnheim, John Bayley, Leslie Fiedler, Erich Heller, Stanley Kauffmann, Christopher Lasch, Susan Sontag, George Steiner, and many others who collectively give Salmagundi an unsurpassed amount of intellectual clout among today's literary quarterlies. Whenever Boyers wants a serious disquisition on an important topic, he taps the appropriate writer, who nine times out of ten will deriver the goods, and without pay. F o r example, Boyers urged Henry Pachter to write a series o f twelve essays on cultural historians, five of which he completed before his death in 1980, and Boyers has asked John Bayley for 10,000 words on the Third World novel for a projected special issue on the South African writer Nadine Gordimer. Thus it is no exaggeration when Boyers says that Salmagundi simply could not exist without him as editor. Other magazines can change editors and still receive enough manuscripts to continue along their course, but Boyers makes Salmagundi what it is, probably the most solid, critically challenging literary review of our time. ( F o r a review of Salmagundi, see SR 6:3, 29-30.) Although Salmagundi began winning prizes as early as 1969, when three o f its essays received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, it was the fifteenth anniversary issue o f Fall 1980--Winter 1981 that, according to Boyers, "moved the magazine to a new plane." Addressing "Art and Intellect in America," this number epitomized the growth and substance o f the magazine. At 352 pages, it dwarfed the inaugural volume of 95 pages, and its contributors, most o f whom had participated in a conference at Skidmore in April 1980 to celebrate Salmagundi's fifteenth anniversary, included many o f those on whom it had made its name. The issue features George Steiner's controversial derogation of the state of American culture, "The Archives of Eden," and responses by four panelists at the conference, who take Steiner to task for his elitism and Eurocentrism. The issue also incorporates conference papers and panel responses considering American painting, fiction, history, film, social science, and dance, with a brief rejoinder to his critics by Steiner. If all this were not enough for one number of any literary journal, Boyers adds an opening selection o f 34 poems b y a dozen poets, including his personal favorites Ben Belitt and John Peck as well as the better-known Robert Penn Warren, Howard Nemerov, Louise Gluck, W.D. Snodgrass, and David Wagoner. Moreover, the anniversary issue contains two fictions b y Jorge Luis Borges, the ninth Salmagundi installment of Rudolf Arnheim's aphoristic "Journal Entries," and seven substantial book reviews. As usual for Salmagundi the book reviews are essaylength (up to 18 pages long) and deal with major topics, such as Derrida, Edmund Wilson, Frank Kermode's textual criticism,

and a feminist revaluation of the 19th century literary tra= dition. Not to be missed among these reviews is "French Freud," Peter Sedgwick's satire on Lacanian psychoanalysis, which is almost worthy o f Swift. Sedgwick slides so subtly into parody that one blinks in disbelief before catching his drift and then relishing his "modest proposal." All together, then, the fifteenth anniversary edition of Salmagundi represents the state of the art in little magazines. After its appearance Boyers was offered novella-length fiction b y two foremost authors, William H. Gass and Cynthia Ozick, that appeared in the Winter 1982 issue. There Gass's "The Tunnel" received responses b y Alvin Rosenfeld and Ihab Hassan, initiating a practice that Boyers will continue, as in a forthcoming issue containing a long excerpt from a new novel b y the Hungarian author George Konrad and a response by Stanley Kauffmann. The Konrad material was offered to Boyers b y the publisher, as was a companion excerpt from Jorge Semprun's forthcoming novel. Both of these European authors are political novelists of the kind Boyers admires, and he relishes the fact that their work came to him unsolicited, the fruit o f seventeen years of tending his editorial garden. Thus Robert Boyers today views Salmagundi with satisfaction as having reached its prime, a maturity that he hopes to sustain as long as possible. His next major project for the quarterly is a special issue on homosexuality, due in November 1982. Co-edited by George Steiner, this number will address "all sides of the subject, and its contributors will include Michel Foucault, Robert Alter, Martin Duberman, John Boswell, Calvin Bedient, Herbert Blau, Martin Green, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Catherine Stimpson, Paul Robinson, and others. This special issue will probably be the most discussed in Salmagundi's history and will assuredly be its longest over 400 pages - and most widely circulated, topping the 8,000 copies that the special issue on dance (Winter 1978) has sold. In addition, the Fall 1982 material on homosexuality is under contract to Farrar, Straus for publication as a book. If Salmagundi is now firmly in its prime, Bennington Re view is still growing up. Its first incarnation lasted from 1969°1971, under the editorship of Laurance Hyman, son of the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, long a faculty member at B e n nington College. Shortly after becoming the president of Bennington in 1976, Joseph S. Murphy determined to revive the review as a source of publicity for the college and consulted Robert Boyers at nearly Skidmore college about the running o f a little magazine. Eventually Boyers himself undertook the editorship of the new BR, a paid position, unlike his post at the helm of Salmagundi, with President Murphy assuring a subsidy that Boyers admits is "considerable." When Salmagundi arrived at Skidmore in 1969 its annual subsidy from the college was $3,000; today it's $8,000. By contrast, Kenyon Review, for example, operates on a subsidy of $120,000 per year, Georgia Review on one o f $I 10,000. While Salmagundi costs $8,000 per issue to print, with a paid circulation of 5,400 BR costs $t 1,000, with a circulao tion of 2,300, 500 of which are copies sent gratis to various friends of Bennington College. At present, Salmagundi, without a paid staff or paid contributors, stays within its budget for four issues per year, whereas BR, with all the usual exo penses of a publication, runs a deficit for three. In explanation o f why BR has failed to increase its circulation beyond 2,300, Boyers believes that initially too few free copies of the journal were given away to make prospective subscribers aware of its existence. Moreover, the magazine has never used subscription promotions or favorable rates for long-term subscriptions, nor has it ever advertised. Though it has elicited favorable responses from artists and writers, it has not yet found a wider public. The review has thus had to rely on President Murphy's commitment to its value as a

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public relations vehicle for Bennington College and his consequent willingness to subsidize it. In an effort to attract new readers, Boyers plans the first o f several special issues - on film - for December 1982. The special issue has repeatedly worked to stimulate sales o f Salmagundi, so perhaps it can help BR too. One test of a little magazine is the test o f time: whether any individual number merits keeping in one's library over the long haul or easily invites being thrown out with yesterday's Times or last month's Atlantic. In this regard, Bennington Review is problematic. On the one hand, its pictorial sections, most notably the color plates o f Helen Frankenthaler's gorgeous paintings in its initial number, make some issues of BR worthy o f that loosely used epithet "collector's items." On the other hand, its poems, short stories, and columns, sometimes in the same issue as a luminous portfolio of an artist's work, are ofteni ephemera. The reason that BR is such a mixed blessing may lie in its attempt to do too many disparate things in one format. First published in April 1978 as "a forum and a testing ground for contemporary art and thought," BR has covered as many as nine arts in one issue. In Number One, for example, painting, theater, architecture, film, dance, photography, crafts, poetry, and fiction are represented by example or critique. Painting is represented by the Frankenthaler reproductions already mentioned, and painting remains one o f the most satisfactory categories regularly appearing in the magazine. But after the superficial, factually unreliable survey of postWorld War Two American architecture in Number One, that art has been treated just once more through BR's twelve issues to date. A dance column appeared in j u s f t h e first two issues, and dance has even been dropped from the list of arts on the cover, beginning with Number Five, though an essay on Balanchine appeared in Number Eight. A column on film has been a staple from the start, but Leslie Epstein's witty, informed writing on the movies has been missed since he dropped out after Number Four. Although music was not included in Number One, and has never been assigned a column, essays on music began to appear in Number Two and have shown up intermittently thereafter. Unfortunately, however, two essays on popular music by W.T. Lhamon, "Poplore and Bob Dylan" (No. 2) and "Dadapunk" (No. 7), represent the nadir of criticism so far in BR, to say the least. The best criticism regularly appearing in BR can be found in its columns on painting, by Ronald Paulson, photography, by Charles Molesworth, and crafts, by Barry Targun. Paulson reports on significant exhibitions, placing the painters in a historical context and deftly evaluating their work esthetically. His columns are invariably complemented by reproductions, often in color, of the material under discussion. Like the plates presenting the work of Frankenthaler and o t h e r contemporary artists in the magazine, the quality o f reproduction of the illustrations for Paulson's columns is excellent, the equivalent o f that found in expensive art books. F o r lucid, urbane commentary on notable shows (Johns, Hopper, the German Expressionists) and noteworthy books on art and artists (Pollock, Rothko, Meyer Schapiro), Paulson proves dependable in every issue. F o r coverage of the notable shows of photographers and noteworthy books on photography, Charles Molesworth is equally dependable. His column appeared with slightly less frequency than Paulson's and has disappeared after Number Nine. Molesworth began with a penetrating review of Susan Sontag's On Photography (No. 1) and then surpassed even her excellent criticism in his "A Child with a Lever: Nadar's Portraits" (No. 5), a subtle essay in art, history, and culture. While crafts tack the popular recognition commanded b y most other arts, Barry Targun writes of them with such

knowledge and affection that he raises them to the level of deserving serious consideration as art. Whether discussing ceramics, weaving, or jewelry, Targun is consistently interesting, asking the hard questions about form and function which every art must answer. His ongoing examination of the nature o f crafts may have been the most engaging column regularly appearing in BR, yet it too has dropped out since Number Eight. The most striking aspect of the magazine, however, is its format: 8½ by 11 inches, with a perfect binding and a durable cover of coated paper that usually bears a color reproduction o f the work of the artist featured in that number. (The worthy exceptions are Nadar's photo portrait of Bandelaire for the issue containing Molesworth on Nadar, Michael Dolen's pen and ink drawing o f John Ashbery, interviewed in Number Eight, and a clip from Kurosawa's Kagemusha, reviewed in Number Ten.) These are strong, attractive covers, for which their prize-. winning designer, executive editor Alex Brown, must be praised; they make BR stand out on the newsstand, especially among its smaller format competitors. So did its price, $4.00 per copy, but that is more reasonable today than it was in April 1978. No doubt in order to hold the line on price, and maintain production qualities equal to those of Art News, BR has reduced its size from an average of 107 pages for its first three issues to 77 for its last three, and the number of those expensive color plates has been drastically reduced in some later issues. BR probably reached its low point in editorial quality in Number Ten (April 1981), at 72 pages its shortest issue. Absent is the work of any contemporary painter or sculptor, only two small color illustrations accompany Ronaid Paulson's art column, and gone is the glossy stock on which such repro° ductions used to be printed. This de-emphasis on the plastic arts is accompanied b y a decided shift in the direction of the literary arts. Over half the pages of this number exclusive of its colo umns are consumed b y three essays in literary criticism, two o f them on American poetry. All three of these articles would be more at home in Salmagundi, and all three are hard going for various reasons: Herbert Blau on language and ritual in contemporary theater is egocentric and predictable in his biases, William Wasserstrom on the centrality o f William Carlos Williams to American poetry labors too long in a longwinded style, and Harold Bloom on masturbation as the hid~ den spring of a basic trope in Whitman is, well, Harold Bloom These writers are neither so enlightening nor so interesting as Annie Dillard, the subject of an interview, is on her writing and on the nature o f literature. Interspersed among these literary goings-on are a short story and six poems that are, I'm afraid, largely inconsequential. BR has rebounded, however, in its last two issues. Number Eleven resumes the art feature, with a handsome portfolio o f the sculptor Richard Hirsch's work, and Number Twelve includes three glossy color reproductions of paintings by Arshile Gorky to illustrate Ronald Paulson's column on the Gorky exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1981. But the columns remain limited to art and film, and the criticism continues to be of a nature more suitable to Salmagundi than BR. This is especially true of Jim Sleeper's "Timerman and the Case for a New Pofitics," a socialist attack on Commentary, the neo-conservative Jewish quarterly, for its abuse of the Argentine Jewish publisher Jacobo Timerman. Sleeper's political polemic seems especially out of place juxtaposed to Paulo son's urbane reflections on Gorky. In the same number (12) appear essays by Erich Heller and Mark Krupnick and poems by John Hollander and David Wagoner, all contributors to Salmagundi, and of the three critical essays in Number Eleven,

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two are by Salmagundi contributors Rudolf Arnheim and Sanford Pinsker and the third is an excerpt from Russell Fraser's book on R.P. Blackmur, one o f Boyers' literary heroes. The tenor of BR, then, has lately become strikingly consonant with that of Salmagundi, with the result that BR appears to be facing an identity crisis. F o r three years it conducted a bold experiment in publishing b y presenting in an expensive format a cross-section of the arts, but it never achieved a uniformly high quality in its coverage o f all of them, though a few of its articles have been chosen to appear in annual collections of the best work from little magazines. F o r the past year, however, in the face o f both rising production costs and the failure o f circulation to increase, its editor has pared its length and fallen back on his expertise as a literary intellectual, filling its pages with literature and criticism. But hundreds o f little magazines devoted to these subjects already exist, none o f them better than Boyers' own Salmagundi. Since Boyers' original vision of BR was for it to have the contemporary arts field to itself, and since the magazine made a good start in that direction, let's hope that in future issues the visual and the performing arts that have recently been neglected - crafts, photography, and architecture, music and dance - return in force.

REFERENCE

In t h e words of the RSBR Committee of t h e A L A . . .

" R e f e r e n c e S o u r c e s covers a wide range o f subfect matter. its special strength lies in the fact that it directs readers" to m a n y reviews. R e f e r e n c e S o u r c e s is an intpressive achievement and is r e c o m m e n d e d f o r large public and acadernic libraries... --Booklist, April 15, 1981 '"

Reference Book Review Index, 1970-1972. Reference Book Review Index, 1973-1975. Subject Guide to Reference Books, 1970-1975. $42.50 each. Reference Sources. 1977. 1978. 1979. 1980. $65.00 each. Set of all seven volumes: $310.00 Postage extra. RS-1981 in prod.

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Ideally, according to Boyers, each of his magazines would have a paid circulation of 10,000. While Salmagundi is over halfway there, BR faces a new Bennington College administration in July, 1982, after Joseph Murphy's resignation takes effect. Whether the new president will want to continue to provide BR with its ample subsidy and renew Boyers' contract, which runs through January, 1983, remains to be seen. Meanwhile, BR is such a handsome, worthy product that libraries would do well to own a full run of its twelve numbers thus far and take out a subscription to insure having the upcoming ones, since Robert Boyers has recommitted himself to making his magazine of contemporary art and thought as distinguished in its own way as his "quarterly of the humanities and social sciences" already is.

Bennington Review. 1978--. Tri-quarterly. Individual, $12.00/ yr., $24.00/2 yrs., $34.00/3 yrs.; institution, $16.00, $32.00, $48.00. Bennington College, Bennington, VT 05201. Ed.: Robert Boyers. ISSN 0522--8999.

Salmagundi. 1965- . Q. Individual, $9.00/yr., $15.00/2 yrs.; institution, $16.00 and $25.00; single issue, $4.00. Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866. Ed.: Robert Boyers. Indexed: Ind.Am.Per. Verse. ISSN 0036-3529.

SOURCES R e f e r e n c e S o u r c e s is b y far t h e m o s t c o m prehensive guide to r e f e r e n c e b o o k s available to r e f e r e n c e and a c q u i s i t i o n s librarians. R e f e r e n c e S o u r c e s and its p r e d e c e s s o r volumes, R e f e r e n c e B o o k R e v i e w I n d e x , have dir e c t e d users t o 3 8 , 0 0 0 review c i t a t i o n s o f m o r e t h a n 2 0 , 0 0 0 r e f e r e n c e b o o k s since 1970. A n d , coverage e x p a n d s w i t h t h e p u b l i c a t i o n o f each new R S annual. R e f e r e n c e S o u r c e s ind e x e s m o r e titles, p r o v i d e s m o r e i n f o r m a t i o n , is s u p p o r t e d b y m o r e d e t a i l e d i n d e x e s , a n d monitors more reviewing media than any other reference book selection tool. T h e 1980 R S f e a t u r e s d o u b l e d c o v e r a g e a n d a new s u b j e c t f o r m a t ! R S 1 9 8 0 i n d e x e s 6 0 0 library and n o n - l i b r a r y r e l a t e d j o u r n a l s a n d arranges entries b y L i b r a r y o f C o n g r e s s s u b j e c t headings. O r d e r t h e series t o d a y ! No r e f e r e n c e d e p a r t m e n t is c o m p l e t e w i t h o u t it. Pierian Press

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