Small Journals Starting to Hit the Big Time

Amid the mass culture of 1987--in which MTV is king, and most books are slickly aimed at the bottom line--there’s an incongruent bit of news:

America’s literary magazines are flourishing.

That’s the word from many of the poets, writers and literary editors who will gather in New York next Friday to celebrate the persistance--many say resurgence--of the 1,000 or so journals of fiction and poetry that still nourish the nation’s literary life to an degree that would surprise many readers who have never picked up any of the 1,000 small magazines now publishing.

The Nov. 6 event at Manhattan’s Westside Young Mens Hebrew Assn., long an unassuming haven for the written word, marks the 20th anniversary of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines (CCLM), whose members range from smaller, more raffish reviews to models of prestigious longevity like The Paris Review.

A Time of Opportunity

“This is a time when one would expect a gloomy picture for the small, entrepreneurial literary magazine,” said Alice Quinn, fiction editor of The New Yorker magazine and chairwoman of CCLM. “There is competition from television, big, glossy magazines, fancy paperback books, a rumored decline in literacy and “The Closing of the American Mind” is on the best-seller list.

“But,” Quinn continued, “many of the magazines are doing very well. I think of it as a time of opportunity and consolidation.”

Indeed, Quinn and many of them say CCLM--a trade organization enlivened over the years by eloquent battles among many of America’s leading literary figures--is celebrating its first two decades at a time when editors of these journals are forming ties to commercial publishing houses, using bold graphics to broaden their appeal and managing them more effectively than 20 years

ago.

“We were once part of a literary underground,” said Harry Smith, editor of a tiny New York magazine called Pulpsmith. “Now we’ve gone above ground. We’re becoming respectable.”

Laboratories for the national literature, these are the journals that published Ernest Hemingway and Ezra Pound at the start of this century and, say fans, are nurturing writers who will fathom its end.

And, since commercial magazines--even those that care about literary readers--devote scant space to fiction and poetry, that specialized readership is increasingly turning to the 1,000 or so journals, quarterlies and biannuals whose circulations rarely overshoot 10,000. And, their editors say, they are reaching for a larger audience.

Although some are published by universities, most proclaim their publishers’ singular individuality with names like The Spirit That Moves Us, Salt Lick and Yet Another Small Magazine.

Collectively, they also serve as a record of the passionate enthusiasms and values of a somewhat hidden, intellectual society within the nation’s general culture.

When the Berkeley-based Threepenny Review recently published author Elizabeth Hardwick’s analytical essay about Gertrude Stein, composer Virgil Thompson wrote her: “Stein piece was a beaut!”

“It’s the most important thing that I do,” declared writer George Plimpton about The Paris Review he founded in 1953 with financial backing from Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan. The Khan is out of the picture now, but Plimpton is more involved than ever.

“I spend more time on it than on my more public activities,” said Plimpton, who now runs The Review. “We published Samuel Becket’s first translation into English. I believe we published Phillip Roth’s first short story.”

In 1986, the mailman brought an unsolicited manuscript titled “Where the Sea Used to Be” to the Review’s office in Plimpton’s Manhattan town house. Plimpton published 29-year-old Rick Bass’ short story, and now three separate publishers are bringing out books of Bass’ short stories and nonfiction. CCLM will soon announce that the piece has won a 1987 General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers, a prestigious prize administered by the council.

“It was staggering to me they said they’d publish my story,” said Bass, who is also a petroleum geologist. “I’d been banging my head against a wall trying to get fiction published.”

Bass’ New York agent, Timothy Schaffner, who reads several of the literary reviews, believes Bass is benefiting from a “search for new literary talent that is a sub-trend in publishing right now.”

Although such trends come and go, media watchers point to the fact that three commercial publishing houses have begun publishing and/or distributing such magazines since 1980--and a fifth is said to be close to working out a national distribution deal. Similar deals have occurred before, but no one can seem to recall quite so many corporate sponsors eager to finance the traditionally anti-establishment magazines.

W.W. Norton distributes a New York review called Antaeus; Random House publishes The Quarterly; David Godine publishes Conjunctions, and Penguin Books publishes Granta, a British quarterly edited by Los Angeles native Bill Buford.

Granta’s managers expect its U.S. circulation to reach an unusual 75,000 by the end of this, the fifth year they’re distributing it here. “Other than the New Yorker, there just aren’t many places that publish long works of fiction and nonfiction anymore,” said Jonathan Levi, Granta’s U.S. editor. “We’re convinced that there’s a market out there,”

“I have the power of Random House behind me,” declared Gordon Lish, who has dual positions: A Random House editor, he also edits The Quarterly, which Random House sells through bookstores. Lish, who started the review a year ago, envisions its 15,000-copy circulation eventually reaching 50,000. And he freely states that part of its mission is scouting talent for Random House imprints.

“I desperately want The Quarterly to be seen as the place you can go to find the highest density of prose and poetry that seizes your heart and takes your mind and twists it,” said Lish, whose degree of passion seemed out of place in the quiet mid-Manhattan offices of a corporate publishing house--until one remembers that Lish himself is a commercially published writer who sends stories to the small magazines.

David Godine, president of the general trade, Boston-based publishing house that bears his name, saved a 7-year-old review called Conjunctions when it was about to run out of money in 1983.

“We didn’t do it for the money because it doesn’t make any,” said Godine, whose company distributes about 3,000 copies to about 300 literarily inclined bookstores nationwide. “Brad has very fine, experimental taste and that’s why we do it,” he added, referring to Conjunctions editor Bradford Morrow, 36.

Although much has been written about Grand Street, an especially well-heeled New York magazine started in 1981, The Quarterly and Granta are the two journals browsers are most likely to see on their bookstore shelves. Their stylish covers alone--colorful abstractions for former and intriguing photos in the latter--make them more accessible than many older literary magazines.

Still, they’re not going as far as some contemporary counterparts.

“This is a visual generation and literary magazines are showing the influence of the more broadly commercial cultural magazines like Interview and L.A. Style, said Craig Scheak, president of Cornucopia, a Seattle-based magazine distributor that ships out 70 different literary magazines to about 300 bookstores in the West.

In Portland, Ore., Joel Weinstein published Mississippi Mud in a relatively plain, book-like form for 14 years. He rarely sold more than 300 copies. This year, he recast it in lively, oversized pages, and uses lively graphics. “The sales increase has been dramatic,” he said. “I’m on the second issue with the new look and I’ve sold 600-700 copies. I think that I could go up to 10,000 if I pushed it.”

The average life span of the literary magazine in America has gone from 3 1/2 years in 1967 to about seven now, said Len Fulton, who publishes “The International Directory of Little Magazines & Small Presses.” Fulton added that the number of the magazines has steadily increased to 1,000 over the past 20 years, from about 200.

“They’re getting better at surviving,” he said. “They’re doing things they didn’t do before to make sure they last.”

More of them advertise. A number of magazine editors said they’re finding innovative ways to feature advertising. Weinstein created a comic strip in which a family of reincarnated astral travelers go shopping at his advertisers’ stores. A reincarnated whale drops by a local bookstore.

“Advertising is a way in which a community shows that it supports you and I’ve found that I love selling ads,” said Howard Junker, 49, founder of a sensually produced, San Francisco-based review with the tongue-twisting name of Zyzzyva.

Fellow editors give Zyzzyva high marks for its uptown elegance, but some purists qualify their praise for it and a number of the other contemporary magazines.

“The whole idea of literary magazines is that they’re absolutely opposed to the corporate idea and corporate methods,” said George Hitchcock, 73, who founded “Kayak” in San Francisco in 1964. He published it for 20 years, he said, like someone paddling a one-man canoe.

Several editors of Hitchcock’s generation point out that from its first flowerings at the start of the 20th Century the literary magazine has undergone perpetual change. New editors arrive and redefine their time.

That’s what the The Little Review did when it helped generate the aesthetic revolution of the ‘20s, serializing James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The Partisan Review, begun in the ‘30s, combined aesthetic modernism with progressive politics. The Kenyon Review carried the new Southern poets and critics of the ‘50s. In the ‘60s came the democratization called the little magazine movement.

Starting in 1967, CCLM helped sustain this movement by distributing newly available grants from the National Endowment of the Arts to editors who joined a Jeffersonian flowering of independent periodicals for true believers of every kind. The decade’s pluralist politics erupted in microcosm. Said said Michael Anania, a Chicago poet long associated with CCLM: “That this organization is still around is a miracle.”

But survive it does, organizing seminars, promotion campaigns and literary prizes. Anania said CCLM also projects a faint sense of collectivity across an archipelago of basements, attics and kitchens, to the faithful.

“You see, the literary magazine goes to the heart of the way American literature works,

the way it really works beneath the surface,” he said. “Every one of these editors thinks the present is really just a stupid mistake and that history will pluck his magazine from the morass and say, ‘This guy was right. He published the ones who mattered, even if nobody noticed.”