Beach Reading
It wasn’t the beach reading I’d planned on or brought along (that was a bag of mystery novels and a book on the financial crisis), but when I found it at Herridge Books on an afternoon browse in Wellfleet, I had to add it to the list.
Published in October, 1959, the first issue of Volume I – the inaugural 200 pages of a then-new “Quarterly of Literature, the Arts, and Public Affairs – boasts poems by Frost (a sketch of whom graces the cover), Williams, cummings, and Kumin (then one of a handful of “New Poets of New England”), drawings by Leonard Baskin, John Ciardi’s translation of a canto of Dante’s Purgatorio, and half a dozen articles. It was these last that drew me in later, back in the rented house in the Wellfleet woods. Alvan Ryan forges an implicit link between this new Quarterly and a progenitor, the Massachusetts Quarterly Review run by Emerson in the 1840s, Allan Brick examines lunacy in works of Joyce, Beckett, and Nabokov, Leo Marx offers a glimpse of what will become a founding classic of what has not yet come to be called American Studies. These all fit comfortably under the first two terms of the magazine’s masthead, offering analyses of literary texts whose value readers could take for granted. But the issue also includes Edward L. Katzenbach Jr.’s decidedly un-literary essay on U.S. military policy at the turn of the decade:
Perhaps the first step towards a moderately realistic understanding of the problems of defense policy is a basic appreciation of the fact that military policy is determined much as are other policies – tax, commercial, or farm. Large numbers of people make it, many of whom would be astonished – and horrified – if they knew they were. [. . .] policy is a compromise amongst conflicting interests arguing from unprovable assumptions (108).
Katzenbach’s essay is a brief for arms control, an argument that to wait until as late as (gasp) 1970 for serious negotiations with the Soviets will be to wait far too long. “How,” he asks, “does one control the men who control the weapons of modern war?” He concludes by speculating that, given the speed with which weapons technologies were out-pacing strategic or diplomatic thinking, his essay might already be, upon publication, obsolete.
Le plus ce change . . . . The table of contents of any issue of The Massachusetts Review or a similar magazine is, in part, an implicit bet on what will be of interest not only to readers at the moment but also to readers fifty years hence. Of the ten ads published in the back of the book, seven are for businesses now defunct (including, alas, two book stores). The ratio of “lasting” to “ephemeral” contents in a given issue of the magazine is, we hope, a little better. The obvious odds seem to favor the aesthetic’s claims for timeless and universal value, the implicit claim made overleaf from Katzenbach’s conclusion, in Leon Barron’s poem, “The Foolish Cat That Died on Hallowe-en,” with its own concluding image of nature abiding over intimations of mortality. But the smart money might just double down on what’s compelling in the moment. The nukes that worried Katzenbach, after all, are still with us, though there are no Soviets with whom to negotiate about them, just as the conditions that made possible this spring’s uprisings in the Middle East, this summer’s riots in England, and this fall’s scheduled round in the President’s pummeling by intransigent anti-tax Republicans will be with us fifty years from now. Vita brevis? Ars brevis too.
