Diana Trilling
AN INTERVIEW WITH VIRGil THOMSON
Diana Trilling:
I am doing an oral history of the advanced literary–
intellectual culture of New York City between 1925 and 1975,· and
what I want to talk about with you, Virgil, is the relation of music to
that world. I define advanced literary-intellectual in a rather arbi–
trary way. I have in mind a small group of periodicals that were, it
seems to me, definitive of the way that advanced intellectual opinion
was created and disseminated in the period I'm dealing with:
Partisan Review, Commentary, The New Republic, The Nation ,
The New Masses
in the late twenties and thirties,
The New Leader,
The Reporter
while it was in existence. Then later there is
The New
York Review of Books,
of course. That's where we'll perhaps find
that the musical aspect of New York artistic life was most recognized
by literary people. Do you think of other magazines I've left out?
Virgil Thomson:
Well, of course I lived in Europe for a great many of
those years, and one read
Horizon
in the days when it was subsidized
by Peter Watson and edited by Cyril Connolly, which was a quite
bright literary and even political magazine.
Trilling:
How much American stuff did it have?
Thomson:
I don't think it had much . But the literary and political
advanced movements weren 't limited to America. Eliot had his own
paper called the
Criterion ,
and of course there were half a dozen or
more very good French magazines at that time. Living in France, I
read them .
Trilling:
Did you know that
Partisan Review
published some of Eliot's
Four Quartets?
He sent at least one of the
Four Quartets
to
Partisan
Review
but that may have been after the
Criterion
stopped publish–
ing in 1939. "The Dry Salvages " was 1941 and "Little Gidding" was
1942.
Thomson: The Dial
had published
The Waste Land
back in the
twenties. They gave it a prize, I believe, or some sort of award.
·The series, when completed, will be on deposit in the Oral History Department of the
Columbia University Libraries.
