TRTR Very Misc....50s, Partisan Review crowd

[Mark Kohut]

"We met some of the PARTISAN REVIEW crowd, the POETRY MAGAZINE crowd, and the HUDSON REVIEW crowd.."
and lots of other poets and writers....in the Williams' place in desolate downtown Manhattan"......"to us they seemed a most sophisticated bunch."
 
His wife Gene Derwood was also a poet...she wore long capes and big berets. "her voice was raspy and filled with gloom. .....
seemed to be some dreaded foreboding message behind even her most pleasant words."....
 
"The talk centered around outre literary matters---style, poetics, symbolism, as well as such 'of the moment' subjects as
psychoanalysis, alcoholism and high anxiety"....
 
"The intellectual atmosphere struck me as being airless and impenetrable"....They served one food, mashed potatoes. Lukewarm. "More mashed 
potatoes, anyone?" "To me, all that literary talk, all those profundities sounded ponderous and leaden and self-important."
 
BINGO, recognize this? 
 

From: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>; pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Wednesday, September 7, 2011 5:10 PM
Subject: Re: TRTR Very Misc....50s, Partisan Review crowd


On 9/7/2011 3:14 PM, Mark Kohut wrote: 
So, I pick up this nicely-made, solidly-done book which is John Gruen's
>memoirs...i recognize his name from NYTimes pieces...it is subtiltled
>a critic's memoirs and in it I learn when he was a bookseller at the old Brentano's
>in NYC early in 50s of The Recognitions, in one of his earliest jobs after college, he recognized one Oscar Williams
>browsing, famous anthologist and poet, known mostly then for his A Little Treasury
>of American Poetry which our author had had at Iowa Writer's School very recently,
>becasue a picture of Oscar's round face was on the book and, introduced himself and soon he and
>his wife entered the highly prestigious, tightly-knit, competitive and back-biting world of the so-called
>"little magazines".....
>                           TO BE CONTINUEDProvides an excuse to pull A Little Treasury down from the shelf. It's the revised edition of 1952, which is probably the one Brentano's had in stock.  (an English major once lived here)

Oscar was competitive enough to include a pretty good sample of his own poems in the section for major poets.

Several dozen of the greater names (including Oscar) have photos at the end of the book.  Mostly they are quarter page size except for Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot, who rate a full page.

P
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