Editors: The Best from Five Decades
by Saul Bellow and Keith Botsford
1120 pages
ISBN: 1902881362
Toby Press, 2000 ($39.95/$29.29)

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Robert Edric, The Spectator (London)

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 essay-writers, 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 shoveled 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.

Tom D'Evelyn, Bostonia, Summer 2001

As Bellow says in one of his introductions, "The horror of some necessary enterprises is that they are recommended by idiocy even more strongly than by wisdom." The diction is hoary with nineteenth-century rebelliousness: "horror," "idiocy"—the language of Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky. There's a certain highmindedness, then, about all this; the editors may be "fools," but they are fools for the literary imagination.

The table of contents is divided into not—self-explanatory sections. The section titles are: "Arias" (shorts: five of Bellow's ten contributions are here, along with a gnarly obit by Botsford, pieces by Stephen Spender, Mark Harris, and James Wood, Martin Amis on road rage, and the everfresh Julia Copeland on being a girl in an orchestra, among others); "Archives" (Samuel Butler, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph de Maistre, Victor Hugo); "Investigations" (essays by Harold Rosenberg on the said hegemony of the middle-brow, George P. Elliott on criticism—a brave, now-dated piece, and, exceptionally, a memorable and useful essay by Raymond Tallis on dementia, which cites new research while questioning the boundaries of science); "Lives" (three more Bellow, two by the redoubtable Josephine Herbst, one each by G. V Desani, Seymour Krim, and others); a brief sheaf of traditional-sounding "Poems" (Michael Hulse's elegant elegy along with old sinners like Howard Nemerov and Anthony Hecht, not to mention Pushkin). Finally, there's the biggest section, accounting for over half the book, titled simply "Texts" (mostly fiction, some of it in translation, including Botsford's translations of the distinguished Louis Guilloux).

That should give you some idea of the scope and ambition of the contents. The organization brings out a salient tone or theme. In keeping with the editorial stance, these pieces, fiction and nonfiction, derive from the individual writer's hand-to-hand struggle with reality—hence Arias, Lives, Texts. Herbst's "A Year in Disgrace" captures a prevailing, if nostalgic, image of the writer: "During the day we worked at our typewriters, John in the main room, I in the kitchen, where I could keep an eye on the cooking. Dark fell early and the light from the Aladdin lamp cast a mellow glow the color of a ripe pear." Later she says of that period: "The little magazines, so different from the academic organs they were to become, tempted, teased, provoked, and ridiculed."

Presumably these pieces once "tempted, teased, provoked, and ridiculed."

Not all of them look back. The essay by Tallis on dementia is quite current; Murray Bail's fabulous short story "The Seduction of My Sister" is only a few years old. In general, however, there is a backward glance here, beginning with the awkwardly grandiloquent epigraph: "Each of us has his private necrology. This anthology is for all those who have left us but left their traces in these pages."

Editors is fittingly part of an experiment in publishing. The Toby Press does not distribute to bookstores (perhaps this appeals to the editors' self-marginalization). One must order this book from a catalogue or from Tobypress.com. Some of the old standards for which the editors may be expected to remain vigilant seem to droop in the dust, namely those connected with planning and proofing. Stephen Spender's name is misspelt at one point; more grievously, there's an index of authors with no page numbers (whose stupid idea was that?); and most irritating for this reader, who loved the first one, the second of Copeland's two stories listed in that index was left out, presumably through negligence. (A little detective work and one discovers the piece in the April 2000 issue of The Republic of Letters.)

Finally: would a mainline publisher take on this volume? Probably not. Are we glad the Toby Press found a way to publish it? Absolutely. It is never too late to be reminded that the solitary writer, left to his own devices, may construct an object of contemplation that transcends the moment of its conception. Such high-mindedness is timeless. It is also no guarantee of coming anywhere near the mark. At least an effort at honesty has been made in writing each piece; here, tone is everything. Is there a contradiction in preserving material from "ephemeral" (Botsford's word) magazines? Perhaps the spirit of resistance—resistance to clichŽ, to literary posturing, to the powers that be, to time itself—lives on in these pages. To paraphrase an editorial comment on the Lawrence story, the balance of good and not-so-good here is lost in the overall verity of its character. In short, Editors: The Best of Five Decades is a pillow book for the perpetually dissatisfied.

Kevin R. Kosar, Bully Magazine

Students and lovers of the modern novel are surely familiar with Saul Bellow. Bellow's won much praise for his works—the National Book Award, The Nobel, the Pulitzer, and numerous others. Bully Magazine's more devoted readers will recall that not long back we wrote glowingly of Bellow's Ravelstein.

Keith Botsford is less well known, though among serious writers, no less esteemed. His production's been prodigious—novels, articles for the Sunday Times and La Stampa, translations of heady Italian texts, and, the recent novel, Out of Nowhere.

On one level, Botsford and Bellow are an obvious fit as co-editors. Both are cosmopolitans, worldly sorts whose passports are a rainbow of foreign ink. Chicago, New York, Paris, and other centers of high culture hold clutches of Bellow and Botsford friends and colleagues. Both clearly have high standards and won't hesitate to wield the strap—see, for example, Botsford's recent entry in Pierre Bayle's Notebook, (News from the Republic of Letters [TRoL], no. 9, 2000), where he takes a good swipe at the Me Generation as manifested in singer k.d. lang. And Bellow—well, nobody's likely ever accused him of being a low-brow.

However, as novelists, they would seem to be two very different creatures. Bellow's novels often explicitly center on big philosophical subjects—friendship (Ravelstein), Democracy and America (The Adventures of Augie March) and his characters tend to embody certain ideas—think of the dualism between Moses Herzog (Romanticism) and his wife (Reason). And in terms of style, some find Bellow's writing dry. A young writer I know scoffed at my mention of Bellow over a coffee. "He's boring—JESUS." Bellow's fiction tends to be a mix of the narrative and the critical; recall one of his characters describing women who "eat green salad and drink human blood." (Herzog)

[ . . . ]

Somehow, these two very different novelists have done a lot of editing together. In the 1060s they ran The Noble Savage, in the 1990s they started News from the Republic of Letters, and Anon and Bostonia too. Their 1200 page volume, Editors, purports to carry "the best from five decades." Within one finds brief pieces by each along with familiar names like Stephen Spender, G.V. Desani, Arthur Miller, and excerpts from immortals like Victor Hugo. It's a treasure trove of good writing, and anyone with an interest in Bellow, Botsford, or the magazines they edited will find it a must-have.

How do these different writers work so well together? Simple, says Botsford in the introduction to Editors. Both, obviously, have "catholic tastes." Each has the right to include one piece and strike one from each issue they edit. But more importantly, each has a good eye. "Manuscripts arrive in the mail ... and are read by one of us or our deputies, who have always been discerning. Some pieces go right in: they are obviously good." Obviously!