This post is a response to this earlier one, in which Withers propounds the virtues of The Kenyon Review in the 1940s.
The “middle” has a bad rap. Consider, for instance: middle children, middle age, the mid-life crisis, and worst of all, the Middle (or “Dark”) Ages. Think mediocrity, think middling; think how on official forms they only ever ask for your middle initial. In the hubbub of the beginning and the rumpus of the end, in the frisson of the flirtation and the devastation of the climax or the crash, we tend to forget what falls between. My grandmother doesn’t even read it.
Just so with The Kenyon Review during the 1950s. Flanked on either side by the fabulous forties and the swinging sixties, at first glance the fifties may seem to be lacking in luster. It is interesting to note, for instance, that although Federico Garc??a Lorca published in the late thirties (1.2 Spring 1939) and again in the sixties (29.5 Fall 1967), he does not appear in a single issue of the 1950s. F. Scott Fitzgerald published his last piece in The Kenyon Review in 1948 (10.4 Autumn 1948), while Sylvia Plath her first in 1960 (22.4 Autumn 1960). The decade seems to be characterized by near misses, adjacency to fame, and a few troubling Contributor’s Notes that powerfully illustrate the nation’s need of the coming revolutions (see Civil Rights Movement, Second-wave Feminism).
But a closer examination yields a glimpse of the decade’s wealth. Like a sandwich, the 1950s may mark a different kind of middle, rather constituting the meat, cheese, and tomato of the century than its unremarkable intermission. We’re talking major writers, weighty works: Robert Penn Warren, William Carlos Williams, Josephine Miles, Marianne Moore, and Randall Jarrell pick up where they left off in the forties; John Crowe Ransom and Robert Lowell make the most of a legendary friendship; and such giants as Theodore Roethke, Flannery O’Connor, James Wright, T.S. Eliot, Roberta Teale Swartz, Elizabeth Hardwick, and John Ashbery take the stage. In these sweet salad days, W.S. Merwin still sometimes went by “William.”
So I’m saying there were a few big stars in the KR sky in the days of the 1950s. And more than that, there were dozens upon dozens of lesser-known lights in constellation with them–writers just as brilliant as those few most famous, who in the “middle age” of the fifties shine out more distinctly than they might in the sun-spotted epochs that flank it. Readers of The Kenyon Review in the 1950s have the opportunity to discover the great and yet unknown. We can read those writers who were young then and may still be new to us now, the poets who are the poets’ favorite poets–but whose works rarely reach the mainstreams of high school and college reading lists.
The beauty of this middle decade runs deep. It is the beauty of a decade writing down its ghosts–writing and wrangling with them. Rolling around and wrestling with what’s happened, what’s to come. So it is that in the second issue of 1951, Helen Forman was chastising Ophelia‘s, “green inane careening counterpoise” even as William Belvin was contemplating the debts of war: “Someone said we’d killed a hundred each; / And since our knowledge of events was vague, / We used the digits in our dim additions: / Sometimes I deck zeroes out in lashes / To make crude, comic eyes that will not cry.”
These works are rich, gorgeous, opulent–and yet so seldom seen.
As to the fifties, to the middle age, to the so-called “dark” age of KR history, I can only say with Flannery O’Connor (in 1953), “I’d give a fortune to live where I could see me a sun do that every evening.”
The best of KR might very well be here.