Books
THE RESISTANCE
.
w
OULD MISS :MARGARET ANDERSON
ever have dreamed, during
those high bohemian days when she was living in a tent beside Lake
Michigan and editing
The Liitle Review,
that there would some day
be a scholarly textbook
1
on the little magazines? Well, if we don't have
as much fun any more, at least we have the satisfaction of being more
closely watched by the scholarly chaperones: the very existence of
this book shows that the avant-garde has become institutionalized to
the extent that the little magazine is now accepted as a more or
less permanent sideshow in our culture. Unfortunately, the academic
quality of this text illustrates another and equally serious direction
toward which the institutionalizing has been moving.
It
is a useful
book, to be sure, but the usefulness resides chiefly in Miss Carolyn
Ulrich's bibliography (with Mr. Hoffman's appended notes), which
is long and looks thorough.
As
for the text of Messrs. Hoffman and
Allen, the worst that can be said, and said very briefly, is that it has
missed the principal opportunity of its theme-nothing less than to
do the "sociology" of the American writer over a period in which his
situation has been very rapidly evolving and which leaves his very
existence now more problematical than ever. Two necessary gifts for
this task would have been a sharp journalistic eye for background and
a sharp sense of historical change, both of which the authors lack, to
such an extent that the reader would hardly gather from their text
what enormous shifts have occurred from the situation of the twenties
to that of the forties. And these deficiencies have not been helped by
a too complete surrender to certain critical habits now in vogue in
some of our literary reviews. The authors are just too nice and polite
to everyone all round; and this history (like most others) could have
been done successfully only from a very much more critical and
partisan point of view. Evidently the avant-garde ha,s become institu–
tionalized to the extent that it has now evolved a set of hierarchical
1.
THE LITTLE MAGAZINE,
A
HISTORY AND A BIBLIOGRAPHY.
By
Frederick ].
Hoffman, Charles Allen, Carolyn F. Ulrich . Princeton University Press.
$3.75.
