Big dividends from little magazines
Robert Edric
EDITORS: THE BEST FROM FIVE DECADES by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford www.tobypress.com, £45 and £35, pp. 1,120 ISBN 1902881362 (Tel: 020 7637 8143; also available from the website and from John Sandoe Books, Tel: 020 7589 9473) Just as there can no be denying that Bellow's name will feature significantly in the promotion, reviews and sales of this book (a small sigh of relief and thanks, perhaps, from the estimable Toby Press for the alphabetical courtesy which allows him to precede his co-editor Keith Botsford, and thus afford quicker access to all its potential mouse-clicking purchasers), so, too, there can be no denying that it represents a true, solid and honest labour of love. Fifty years of stringent, vigilant editorship have gone into Editors, and it shows on every page (except perhaps for the ones containing the sub-Thurberesque elephant cartoons), and very little of what is included here seems any less vital and vigorous today than it must have appeared upon first publication ten, 30 or 50 years ago.
A series of introductory essays and asides explains this long germination, and both editors contribute a generous number of pieces (no lights under bushels here). Briefly put, from the Fifties onwards, Bellow and Botsford founded and then edited a number of influential magazines — News from the Republic of Letters, The Noble Savage, The Bostonian and ANON chief among them. Few of these gained any sustained following beyond the literary and academic domains within which they were nurtured, but all of them attracted important work from, mostly, America's finest essaywriters, journalists, poets and novelists. It is from this wide-ranging and all-inclusive body of work that the present (literally) weighty selection is chosen.
Nothing is dated here, in any sense of the word, and the whole collection is leavened and made even more intriguing by the way in which the old and the new are placed together with no indication of their chronology.
The majority of pieces are reprinted for the first time, and reading them and noting down all those previously unheard-of and unread names — Herbert Blau, Raymond Tallis. Mark Harris, Louis Gilloux, Bette Howland — only serves to emphasise what contrived, market-led and pandering things most other modern anthologies are. Another book of cats, anyone? One more book purporting to be the best of this year's writing on golf or cricket? Editors aims itself squarely and unashamedly at lovers of good writing, at the reader prepared to take chances, to be surprised.
Bellow and Botsford remark on their 'duty to literature', and if it is a duty, then it is one discharged with grace and with risk, and more importantly — and all too rare a thing these days — one discharged with awe and wonder. These might sound like grand claims for a book of reprints, but I can think of nothing comparable published here today which indulges itself in these risks, and where work of this diversity, calibre and resonance would find a home — further proof, if it were needed, that 'little' magazines remain both the seedbeds and mulch of a country's true and future literary well-being.
I make no apologies for not yet having finished the book; it is something to be savoured at random and not shovelled down wholesale. In fact my recommendation would be six bookmarks to allow a little gentle wandering.
Were it not for baggage-weight restrictions, I would recommend this collection for holiday reading the world over. There
must surely be some appetite out there beneath the palms and beside the pools for something other than the one-trick, diminishing returns of the Clancys and Archers of this world, and the blousy, overwrought Binchys? Speaking as someone who piles up his books for summer reading, I doubt if I will encounter a more constantly surprising or satisfying read this year.
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