Literary magazines

The enormous upheavals of the late 1960s–the war in Vietnam, the urban riots, the assassinations–sent the American punditocracy into a sustained and intense period of self-examination.  Writers and critics were sent out “on the road” (where Truth presumably was to be found) to survey the American scene, to take Americans’ emotional temperature.

Supernation at Peace and War

One of the most thoroughgoing of these editorial examinations was published in the venerable magazine The Atlantic in March 1968–journalist Dan Wakefield’s “Supernation at Peace and War.”  In fact, The Atlantic (as it was then calling itself on the cover, having dropped the century-old “Monthly”) devoted this ENTIRE issue to Wakefield’s peripatetic essay, which was then published in book form.  Wakefield was 35 at the time, and had already published several perceptive essays on the American scene, and would within a few years become a best-selling novelist (Going All the Way and Starting Over).  What an extraordinary assignment this young writer got in 1967!   “No one man can cover everything, but travel and capture as much as you can of America, its people, its moods, its troubles and disillusionments, its still bright and valid dreams, its many ways of life (and not a little death); portray what you can of the entire great, ingenious, rich and poverty-stinking, beautiful and beer-can glittery, generous and selfish, mixed-up and marching straight on to what? (a bigger and better destiny or the primeval asphalt swamp?), powerful yet impotent, clear-the-slums and kill-the-goddamn-grizzlies, pick-your-1968-Choice and take-your-chances kind of country this is.”

The two wars of the 1960s

Published early in the year–and thus missing events like Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election, the assassinations of King and RFK, and the violence at both national party nominating conventions–”Supernation” is perhaps more an artifact of 1967 than 1968.  And significantly the essay is dominated by issues of race and racial conflict on the one hand, and by the war in Vietnam on the other.  Wakefield writes perceptively: “The only declared war being fought by the United States is the War on Poverty.  The President declared it in 1964, and it continues to be waged.  Unlike the war in Vietnam, the War on Poverty does not cost very much to fight.  Even so, it is not a popular war, and in fact is even less popular politically than the war in Vietnam, which must make it THE most unpopular war in the nation’s history. . . . Like the war in Vietnam, the War on Poverty seems to have no end in sight, but in both cases the President keeps predicting victory.”

War games

There are many brilliant descriptions and stories in this long essay, but one of my favorites comes near the end.  Wakefield visits a “cordon and search mission” staged at a fake Vietnamese village staged at Fort Belvoir VA, outside Washington–thatch-roofed huts, idle peasants (soldiers and WACs in costume), fake artillery fire, clouds of smoke, and clearing out the “Vee-Cee” from fake tunnels.  All of this took place in front of an audience, in bleachers, of “several hundred young men in the khaki garb of the U.S. Army.”  At the end, after the “village” was “pacified,” Wakefield writes: “It seemed awfully simple, not only to me but to many of the men in the bleachers behind me.  Beneath the groans, there were loudly whispered comments like ‘ka-rist,’ and ’shee-it,’ and after one cynical snort, one soldier said, ‘Yeah, and then they lived happily ever after.’”

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High Art– and high-class erotica

Wander through cyberspace looking for “Avant-Garde,” and you’re likely to encounter more about it as the name of the typeface invented for this magazine than for the magazine itself.  Neither the typeface nor the magazine lasted very long:  Avant-Garde (the hyphen was not in the logo, but was in the fine print) began publication in January 1968 and ended just 15 issues later, in July 1971.  So to call 1968 the “high-water mark” of Avant-Garde would be kind of obvious.  It’s also described as a “hardbound” periodical, which is not quite true–more like a thick version of a paperback book cover.  But that was enough to set it apart from, say, LIFE or Time or Art News, and to mark it as High Art, something to save and display on a coffee table, next to the water-pipe, perhaps.  There is real art, in abundance:  one of Avant-Garde’s most famous issues included a vast survey of Picasso’s erotic drawings.  The September 1968 issue (pictured here) features work by American artist George Tooker, including his 1965-66 “Landscape with Figures” on the cover–as haunting an image of modern alienation as ever produced.  And thrust onto the cover of a later 1968 issue is an astounding pair of breasts by Pop-Art star Tom Wesselman.

Knowing it when you see it?

The man behind “Avant-Garde” the Typeface was famed graphic designer Herb Lubalin.  The man behind Avant-Garde editorially was Ralph Ginzburg, a great Sixties character who had by this time served eight months in federal prison on a conviction (1963) of distributing obscene literature through the mails in a case that had gone all the way to the Supreme Court.  (The original indictment had been brought by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.)  The conviction involved previous publications (such as his EROS magazine), but that doesn’t mean that Ginzburg, in Avant-Garde, gave up on material that many people probably considered at least soft-core (did we even have that term in 1968?) porn.  There’s a color-photo story in this issue on New York’s “Playhouse of the Ridiculous,” a very downtown avant-garde theatrical troupe, who engaged in wild “happenings”-like performances and onstage sex simulations.  Another color spread spotlights a ”Voodoo ritual dance,” executed by a voluptuous Caribbean dancer, nude save for well-placed props (live chicken, a human skull).   There’s a story by a female writer about a spectacularly endowed “Haitian Negro” male performer in a sex exhibition she saw in Cuba in the 1950s.  And there’s a calendar for 1969 that consists of 12 different cleverly set up photo shoots, each of them with bare-breasted women on prominent display.

A hawk’s story of why he wants to kill

But the most arresting story has nothing to do with sex. It’s “The Battle Hymn of Jeffrey Weinper,” a non-fiction article by “a young hawk who tells why he quit college to slaughter in Vietnam.”   Jeffrey enlisted in the Airborne in July 1967, and writes:  ”Curiosity was a major reason for my enlistment . . . I am not enthused over the Vietnam War, but it is the place where I can go and kill people and they me. . . . The persistence of human violence . . . leads me to doubt the condemnation of war more than the phenomenon itself. . . . It may be that at some time, man will lose all his aggressiveness, rip off all his clothes, and spend his day dragging pot and sticking his finger in his navel.  The day of Hippie Heaven and Universal Love may come, but when they do, man will no longer be man but something else.”

A black box on the same page announced that “as this issue was going to press,” Avant-Garde learned that Pfc. Jeffrey Weinper had been killed near Hue in South Vietnam.

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Evergreen:  Intellectual celebrities and leftist politics in the 1960s

Evergreen Review (rebranded in the 1960s as simply Evergreen) was founded in 1957, and for 16 years was one of America’s leading literary magazines, heavily laced with helpings of leftist politics.  Its roster of literary contributors was so iconic that surnames suffice: Nabokov, Sartre, Beckett, Camus, Burroughs, Mailer, Borges, Neruda, Sontag, Duras, Pinter, Stoppard.  In this issue there are pieces by Jack Kerouac (an excerpt from his novel Vanity of Duluoz, which appeared later that year, his last published work), Muriel Rukeyser, and Berton Roueche.  This issue also reproduces speeches and letters by Fidel Castro and by Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, captured and killed just a few months earlier.  This issue of Evergreen — especially with the stunning portrait by illustrator Paul Davis on the cover– represented the beginning of the secular canonization of Che.  In fact, this was the first time that this iconic image (based on a 1960 photograph) was published in the United States. So enraged were anti-Castro Cuban emigrés by this issue that Evergreen offices (in Greenwich Village, of course) were firebombed.

But on the inside . . .

Evergreen seems, in retrospect, to be an almost uncannily precise evocation of that pervasive phenomenon of the 1960s, trenchantly described two years later by Tom Wolfe:  ”radical chic.”  This is not a cheap, flaming radical rag or “zine”; note the newstand price of one dollar (Life that same year was 30 cents an issue; the New Yorker that month was still 35 cents, but would jump to 50 cents in September).  There are ads inside: mostly records (Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Janis Ian); book clubs and publishers, including some offering “homosexual theme fiction;” and that great 2-page ad for “art posters,” the source for the Picasso “Don Quixote” prints that hung on untold thousands of walls of of college dorm rooms.  A color ad for Grand Marnier takes up the back cover.  There is some naughty stuff, too: a 7-page comic piece by satirist Michael O’Donoghue (later known for his work at National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live) with lots of color pix of a nude “go-go” girl after-hours at a discotheque.  Very soft-core porn, but also very idiotic– and more than a little bizarre, popping up just a few pages after a 2-page reproduction of the famous UPI photograph of Che’s dead body, eyes open, surrounded by his killers.

Evergreen ceased publication in 1973–more or less the same time the Sixties ended.

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