GILBERT SORRENTINO
241
recall, neon in Greek is the neuter form of
neos,
"new things."
Barone:
Did you ever look upon yourself as a regional magazine?
Sorrentino:
I suppose so, but of course a lot of other people came into
it. When it first came out, I don't know what I thought of it. We were
hopeful, you know, hopeful and naive as to what the magazine could
do or who would come into it. Then I was immediately astonished
because as that first little fifteen-page issue came out it was obvious
that there were dozens of writers who had no place to go. I thought
that I had no place to go, but that other writers were there somehow.
There were few magazines then, unlike now. The little magazines
that existed were mostly rotten; the literary equivalent of a candle in
a wine bottle.
Barone:
What do you think was the matter with the regular magazines?
Why were they so unwilling to open up?
Sorrentino:
Because, I think, they didn't see the need for literature to
freshen itself. I mean, the last word had been said by Eliot and Frost
and Lowell, etc. That's where they wanted to stay. They thought of
literature as something that had been formalized. It was already dead,
and you couldn't do anything new. Whatever you had
to
say, there
was this "form" that already existed, into which you put "it."
If
you
made your own form for what you had
to
say, they didn't recognize it
as being literature. That's why if you read the short stories and the
sections from novels that appeared in those magazines, quarterlies,
in the forties and fifties, they're all alike. They were as predictable as
the stories that appear in
The New Yorker.
The quarterlies had the
same kind of story, plus that terrifying criticism. My God, the
technique of anything was never discussed. How a guy did it was
never talked about.
It
was, "what does he mean by so-and-so?" and
then
they
would tell you.
Barone:
Where was
Neon
selling and who published it?
Sorrentino:
It was sold in the Eighth Street. It was sold in the Gotham.
I'm sure they still have copies in the cellar. It was just "us" who
published the magazine, students at Brooklyn College. Most of us
were veterans. We all wanted to write and all had begun to write and
had no place to publish. We felt extremely rebellious against the
entire literary establishment and bored
to
death by college.
It
was
very odd coming back
to
college after having been in the army,
because you felt like an old man. I had married and had a child.
When I went back to college, there I was, in classes with people who
quite literally had nothing
to
do with my life. They were talking
about dances and fraternities. I had begun
to
write and then met men
