THE LITTLE MAGAZINE, by Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, Carolyn Ulrich.
The Princeton University Press.

This book is quietly based on a distinction between the Little Magazine and the "little little magazines", those too short-lived, too informally gotten up, too abounding in unknown names to be considered in a History. But this innocent distinction is scientifically disastrous, for it isolates the subject of study from its natural continuum, which *in itself* is the primary struggle of artists to get a public, even a token public, in order to complete the objectification, self-immortalizing, etc. of the art-act. This social force is institution-making; being primary, it is largely free of the literary institutions and could, I think, be demonstrated as a rather simple social pattern. (But the causes of itself, sociopsychological and even religious -- for we are dealing with a very fundamental matter -- are immensely complicated.)

The attitude of these authors towards the subject-matter and toward the advance-guard is benevolent but hopelessly mistaken. They regard the activity they are describing as marginal activity: either as a lunatic fringe or as the leaven in the lump; mostly, for they are benevolent, as the leaven in the lump. But the "advance-guard" is not marginal in these ways: it has no role vis-à-vis the literary institutions; if one wants to explore the relationship between advance-guard and institutional-literature he must take the advance-guard as the simpler datum and his problem will be to show, not how the lump is animated by the advance-guard (we nowhere see this animation), but how it is a secondary elaboration of the advance-guard, with precautions taken, stings drawn, etc. The authors seem to assume that the lump is bread, or potential bread; but the advance-guard is the bread. The name "advance-guard" is unfortunate. The truth in the name is that

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certain propositions, methods, and programs are first exploited by
the advance-guard and then become common; these things -- e.g.
psychoanalysis or historical materialism -- are not invented by the
advance guard but are affinite to it because all primary natures
interact. But the name is false because the "advance guard" does not
lead, it is not appointed to lead, and except in nervous fancies it
does not want to lead.

As a kind of praise and justification of the Little Magazine
the authors point out that the great majority of the now well-known
important writers (they are everywhere more than generous in their
appraisal!) were "discovered" by the Little Magazines. But this is
all upside down. It imagines that there is a vast cultural forum
to which new speakers are introduced by special agents. Where is this
forum? It is the inventors themselves that determine, generation by
generation, the language and tone of the forum. To the extent that
this is not the case, and unfortunately it is the case less and less,
there is no living language and no urgent tone. And then, what is
this word "discovered"? Do the authors imagine that if, say, *View*
did not exist, the artists would not at once create *View*, neither
worse nor better than it is, as one of their organs? The authors are
making the same mistake as the political theorists who assume that
it is the state-structure that creates social cooperation, whereas
at best it does not fatally hinder it.

The confusion of the authors, their distance from real causes,
is amusingly exhibited in their classification of Little Magazines as
"Poetry, Leftist, Regional, Experimental, Critical, and Eclectic... in
many cases the divisions obviously overlap." The intellectual apparatus
of the book consists of this remarkable classification, the foregoing

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theory of "discovering the important writers", and the negative (but at least true) definition that the little magazines are non-commercial.

The last is somewhat worked up into a few clumsy discussions of alienation. This is very little to go on, and it is not enough; it is a bad book, very dull, but _not_ malicious. (One does not begrudge the book its "selling reviews in the Big Magazines.)

Everywhere, however, even in the material as presented, the real causes manage to show themselves: bands of friends, the creative bullying of expansive personalities, the affinity of creative people for ideas of freedom, the strong but fitful force of art to appoint itself and display itself.

Paul Goodman

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