Editors Compiled by Saul Bellow and Keith BotsfordHardcover: ISBN: 1-902881-35-4 Pages: 1120 8¾"x6¾" US$ 39.95 Paperback: ISBN: 1-902881-36-2 Pages: 1120 8½"x6½" US$ 29.95 Saul Bellow from Hidden Within Technology's Empire, A Republic of Letters When I was a boy ‘‘discovering literature,’’ I used to think how wonderful it would be if every other person on the street were familiar with Proust and Joyce or T. E. Lawrence or Pasternak and Kafka. Later I learned how refractory to high culture the democratic masses were. Lincoln as a young frontiersman read Plutarch, Shakespeare and the Bible. But then he was Lincoln. Later when I was travelling in the Midwest by car, bus and train, I regularly visited small-town libraries and found that readers in Keokuk, Iowa, or Benton Harbor, Michigan, were checking out Proust and Joyce and even Svevo and Andrei Biely. D. H. Lawrence was also a favorite. And sometimes I remembered that God was willing to spare Sodom for the sake of 10 of the righteous. Not that Keokuk was anything like wicked Sodom, or that Proust’s Charlus would have been tempted to settle in Benton Harbor, Michigan. I seem to have had a persistent democratic desire to find evidence of high culture in the most unlikely places. For many decades now I have been a fiction writer, and from the first I was aware that mine was a questionable occupation. In the 1930’s an elderly neighbor in Chicago told me that he wrote fiction for the pulps. ‘‘The people on the block wonder why I don’t go to a job, and I’m seen puttering around, trimming the bushes or painting a fence instead of working in a factory. But I’m a writer. I sell to Argosy and Doc Savage,’’ he said with a certain gloom. ‘‘They wouldn’t call that a trade.’’ Probably he noticed that I was a bookish boy, likely to sympathize with him, and perhaps he was trying to warn me to avoid being unlike others. But it was too late for that... John Cheever told me long ago that it was his readers who kept him going, people from every part of the country who had written to him. When he was at work, he was aware of these readers and correspondents in the woods beyond the lawn. ‘‘If I couldn’t picture them, I’d be sunk,’’ he said. And the novelist Wright Morris, urging me to get an electric typewriter, said that he seldom turned his machine off. ‘‘When I’m not writing, I listen to the electricity,’’ he said. ‘‘It keeps me company. We have conversations.’’ One of the more attractive oddities of the United States is that our minorities are so numerous, so huge. A minority of millions is not at all unusual. But there are in fact millions of literate Americans in a state of separation from others of their kind. They are, if you like, the readers of Cheever, a crowd of them too large to be hidden in the woods. Departments of literature across the country have not succeeded in alienating them from books, works old and new. My friend Keith Botsford and I felt strongly that if the woods were filled with readers gone astray, among those readers there were probably writers as well. To learn in detail of their existence you have only to publish a magazine like The Republic of Letters. Given encouragement, unknown writers, formerly without hope, materialize. One early reader wrote that our paper, ‘‘with its contents so fresh, person-to-person,’’ was ‘‘real, non-synthetic, undistracting.’’ Noting that there were no ads, she asked, ‘‘Is it possible, can it last?’’ and called it ‘‘an antidote to the shrinking of the human being in every one of us.’’ And toward the end of her letter our correspondent added, ‘‘It behooves the elder generation to come up with reminders of who we used to be and need to be.’’ This is what Keith Botsford and I had hoped that our ‘‘tabloid for literates’’ would be. And for two years it has been just that. We are a pair of utopian codgers who feel we have a duty to literature. I hope we are not like those humane do-gooders who, when the horse was vanishing, still donated troughs in City Hall Square for thirsty nags. We have no way of guessing how many independent, self-initiated connoisseurs and lovers of literature have survived in remote corners of the country. The little evidence we have suggests that they are glad to find us, they are grateful. They want more than they are getting. Ingenious technology has failed to give them what they so badly need. Keith Botsford from On The Facts This aspect of friendship—the common endeavor—has had an unusually long life. Nearly a half-century. The magazines we have published together have been intermittent: a burst in the sixties and seventies, with The Noble Savage and ANON; another from 1989 to the present with Bostonia, which I edited and to which Saul was a Contributing Editor, and News from the Republic of Letters, or TroL as we call it. Obviously we had a common need, or a shared dissatisfaction, and I at least must have magazines in my blood, since my first appeared in 1944. Why we’ve had magazines together is explored in the several introductory texts that follow. My view is that, given the disparate nature of our backgrounds, their appearance smacks of the miraculous. We think magazines are ephemera. Ours have had varying histories: The Noble Savage was published by Meridien books, with Aaron Asher and a clutch of sometimes helpful and often sceptical contributing editors. The occasion of its founding was the presence together, at Bard College in 1953, of its first three editors Saul, myself and Jack Ludwig. Bard was a small college with a strong commitment to the arts (among others, Mary McCarthy and Paul de Man had taught there, as had Irma Brandeis, the Dora of Montale’s poems); we met there, the trio busted up there, and we’d all gone our separate professional ways when the magazine came out. Its organizing meeting was at the old Algonquin in New York, where most of the writers we had convoked to launch the project—Arthur Miller, Ralph Ellison, Sid Perelman, Herbert Gold et al—thought we were mad even to dream of such a thing. The Noble Savage lasted five solid bi-annual issues before disintegrating in a publishing debacle when the times they started a’changing… News From the Republic of Letters came into being from our continued dissatisfaction with other magazines, from the absence of things we wanted to read and the way serious readers were being exiled to the wastelands of Mammon and the Academy. We decided to put our money where our mouth was and the steady growth of the magazine, which has no real likes, continues to astonish us. There are Readers and there are Writers out there and it seems a long time since they had anywhere to go. TroL is the first opportunity we’ve had to create ideal conditions for a magazine. As it depends on no one it is entirely free, and as it comes out irregularly—when the rabbi’s cup of water is filled and not before—it need publish only the best. From the beginning we have stuck to the principle that as editors we should also write in our magazines. If this were simply a matter of self-gratification that would be one thing; as we regularly read and (we hope) help each other it is another matter. When we write in our magazines it is to expose ourselves to the scrutiny of our readers: this is what we do, and that is what others do. Good writing should jostle other good writing, and what we think of as good writing should be visible… It happens that our tastes coincide, though not altogether our natures. It is of the nature of friendship to forgive defects in the other. Our only rule—for those occasions when we disagree, so rare that I can count them on the fingers of one hand—is that each has one absolute right of inclusion and one of exclusion. We’ve edited in Chicago, Texas, Boston, Puerto Rico, along the Hudson, or wherever we were. We don’t meet, editorially, all that often; nor do we need to. Nor do we have staffs to clutter up the place, nor offices, nor advertisers, lawyers, distributors (thieves to a man), nor specialists in grant applications, tax-men, expense accounts or little cenacles. We don’t think some people belong in the Republic and others don’t; we read words and judge by the way those words are put together. We look for voices, for people who have something to say and a way to say it that is entirely their own. Table of ContentsEDITORS ARIAS ARCHIVES INVESTIGATIONS LIVES POEMS TEXTS
Edward Hoagland: Cowboys, Noble Savage 1 |
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