The Intellectual Quarterly in a Non-Intellectual Society

The title of my paper¹ was suggested to me; I should not otherwise have had the temerity to choose it. For I am in no way specially qualified to be the spokesman for most of the numerous magazines that, in any literal and laudatory sense, deserve to be called intellectual publications—the larger part of which I have not even opened and could not understand if I did try to read them. Intellectual periodicals in this sense of the adjective are PMLA, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the American Review of Economics and Ecology. All of these, I am sure, require a high level of intellectual attainment on the part of both their writers and their readers, and their worthwhileness is not open to question.

But I am expected to talk about the problems of certain journals called intellectual in another and often somewhat uncomplimentary sense. They are best defined by enumeration: in this country they include, along with others, the Partisan, Sewanee, Hudson and Kenyon Reviews—one of which, incidentally, is not a quarterly but a bimonthly; and their problems are shared by a number of other magazines, some of them published monthly or weekly, ranging from Poetry through the New Republic to Commonweal and Commentary. All of these can be called critical reviews, though most of them also publish creative writing, and what they have in common can be roughly described as a more or less central concern, in certain of their departments, with current literature and with what are called general ideas; with varying emphasis on philosophical, theological, aesthetic or political ideas so far as these can be treated in a way that is not, at least in editorial intention, professionally specialized. Such is their scope, but to distinguish them as a group from a number of other magazines is their—we cannot shrink from the damning word—their so-called “highbrow” character. They neither try very hard to make money nor succeed at it; all of them, so far as I can learn, survive only with the aid of modest subsidies from colleges, foundations or private angels. Their subscribers range from a few thousands in the case of the quarterlies to a few tens of thousands in the case of some of the weeklies; though as the critical reviews are always the most dog-eared on univcrsity library magazine racks, and librarians say they are the most often stolen, we must assume that their readers outnumber by several times their subscribers. Their well-wishers say that these reviews are distinguished by an integrity the commercial magazines do not have, and that they refuse to make the compromises forced upon the middle-brow periodicals by economic circumstances. Their ill-wishers say that they are cliquish, esoteric, wilfully obscure, pretentious, snobbish, faddish, anemic, jargonic, and even subterraneously subversive—in short, all that is connoted in the political arena by the term “egghead.”