Notable

THE LITTLE MAGAZINE IN AMERICA: A MODERN DOCUMENTARY HISTORY

Edited by Elliott Anderson and Mary Kinzie; Pushcart Press; 770 pages; $25

The 84 literary periodicals recalled in this lively chronicle range from Partisan Review, left-wing and loudly ideological at its birth in 1934, to Paris Review, a sleek '50s expatriate now based in New York. An entry on John Crowe Ransom reports that the poet started the Kenyon Review because he thought Partisan Review too flashy. Robert Creeley, founder of the Black Mountain Review, says that "to be published in the Kenyan Review was too much like being 'tapped' for a fraternity." United only in their dislike of New York publishing and each other, the little magazines were starting points for Hemingway, Faulkner, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller--and just about every other significant American writer of the past half-century.

Sadly, as the editors of the 1940s, '50s and '60s point out, the literary gadflies have lost much of their sting. The underground has become fashionable: everybody has joined the avant-garde and Allen Ginsberg has joined academe. Lacking the diehard convictions of their elders, most of the 1,500 little magazines now being published print anything and wind up sounding the same. "The multiplication of poets sort of leaves my mind blank," says Poet Karl Shapiro, former editor of Poetry. In many ways this collection of essays is a retrospective; editors like Robie Macauley, formerly of the Kenyan Review, fear that the little magazine is "rather like a Conestoga wagon in the day of the automobile."

LITTLE LIVES

John Rowland Spyker

Grosset & Dunlap; 211 pages; $10

Like its literary antecedents, Spoon River Anthology and Winesburg, Ohio, John Howland Spyker's Little Lives consists of sketches: hard, brilliant line drawings of small-town Americans. With a roving eye for bawdy detail, Spyker (pseudonym for Poet and Novelist Richard Elman) compresses each life into a tidy epiphany; an individual is captured with an anecdote or gesture, an eccentricity or epitaph. Judge Fury collected wives and knives; "P.C.B." Terry, who once took a swig of that carcinogenic chemical, spent the rest of his life growing tomatoes that no one else dares to eat. Hypolite Hargrove made a small fortune concocting cocaine-spiked fruit drinks savored by Mark Twain and Jenny Lind.

Each biograph is enlivened by a macabre whimsy: a man is steamed alive "like a lobster" when his car wash malfunctions; children are fed meals of worms; decent folk fall victim to robbery, infidelity and bad genes. Spyker reports it all, creating a community from the disparate characters as well as a portrait of the narrator, an "outlander... struck more by bits of detail than the total sepia haze of the picture: by odd names or locutions, specific items and photographs that have survived, the price paid for caring."

STAR WITNESS by Richard Kluger Doubleday; 471 pages; $10.95

In his novel, Members of the Tribe, and in Simple Justice, documenting the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school segregation, the legal system has been an inspiring force for Richard Kluger. His latest novel, Star Witness, traces the life and crimes of Feminist Lawyer Tabor Hill. A woman with a hair-trigger wit, she could give lessons in politics to Machiavelli. An affair with a judge, a partnership in an exclusive firm, legal aid to the poor--she does it all, and she does it well. So does Kluger, who knows the layout of the corridors of small-city power down to the decibel level of the lunches.

Tabor's pivotal case arises when the politicians and legal establishment attempt to do her in: Gabriel Zampa, an eccentric sculptor builds three Watts-like towers jutting out of the tan wasteland, "Cause eve'yt'ing aroun' was gettin' ugly." The city orders them demolished, but Tabor argues that they are works of art. Craftily, the city hires Ellen Trask, a woman whose credentials are even more formidable than Tabor's, and with the ceremony of gunfighters, the two legal amazons go at it. Tabor wins, but neither she nor the towers are safe from predators. In the end she is pregnant and jobless, but Kluger makes sure that she is not quipless. Pondering an abortion, the expectant mother muses, "The Law is my shepherd, I shall not flaunt." sb

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.