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PARTISAN REVIEW
figures who are always and automatically to be spoken well of-and
quite uncritically well at times.
But what a triumph it is! and how irresistible the temptation to
wave before the complacent eyes of Publishers Row the list of writers
who have come up through the little magazines! Eliot, Joyce, Pound,
Hemingw·ay, Faulkner, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Sherwood
Anderson, William Carlos Williams, and a good many others. Unfor–
tunately, Messrs. Hoffman and Allen choose to wave it apologetically
rather than defiantly- as if the little magazines had no other function
but to serve as talent scouts for the big houses, as way stations on the
road to Publishers Row. In their first chapter, for example, there is
the unfortunate extended metaphor of Hemingway's snowballing
reputation, starting from the small pellet of snow launched by the
little magazines until presently Hemingway has rolled into the of–
fices of Charles Scribners' Sons. The trouble with this metaphor is
that the usefulness of the little magazine seems to have ceased after
it has given the first little snowball its push. Here the authors have
unconsciously submitted to the schizophrenic split
in
our culture be–
tween commercial and noncommercial writing: the significant and
troubling question, which they do not raise, would be whetlier
Hemingway himself, after his early days in Paris, after he had snow–
balled into the Scribners' office, ever bothered to read a little magazine
again, much less write for one. Significantly, when the authors do
come to speak of the continuous function of a literary review within
our society, they use such adjectives as "dignified" and "sober."
As
if it were a question of "dignity" and not an uninterrupted warfare!
Here the sociology and history of their subject shine through
the very choice of words-even if the authors themselves have not
had a very keen eye for it. Why did they fail to concentrate on
this
tendency which they embody so fully? Probably they could not be
conscious of it just because they embody it so fully.
One of the best recent treatments of the whole sociology
2
of
American writing is by R. P. Blackmur on "The Economy of the
American Writer," and it is pethaps to be regretted that Blackmur
himself did not write the present book on the spadework of its authors.
But the sociology that Blackmur sketches is itself very incomplete, and
the main terms of his analysis-the notion of America as a frontier
country, without a settled class traditionally devoted to culture, and
2. Here, and throughout, I am using the term "sociology" in
the completely
descriptive
sense of Max Weber.
