WILLIAM CLAIRE: I'm delighted to be here but Miss Steloff is a very tough act to follow. I hope everybody has been to The Gotham. I've been a book nut all of my life and have been in every used book store in the United States and some abroad, and consider The Gotham Book Mart certainly the best in the country - and for literary magazine people, it's everything.
Frances: I've seen you there.
WILLIAM: "Voyages" for six years has always sold out at The Gotham Book Mart, which is not true in any other store so it's wonderful to share the morning with you.
Anaïs was of great value to my magazine as an advisory editor from the beginning. She was not at all like another famous man whom I wrote to of my dreams for starting a magazine and his being an advisory editor. I said there had never been anything like this in Washington where I live. He wrote back and said he'd be delighted to be an advisory editor if I took his advice. I wrote back and said sure, "What's your advice?"
He said, "Don't start a literary magazine." But he did become an advisory editor and a very good one. But the importance of Anaïs was that through her I was put in touch with several writers whom I published: Marguerite Young - on whom I hope to do a special issue some day, because she is one of the most compelling writers of our time; - Daisy Aldan, E.M. Esker on the West Coast, poet Natalie Robbins from New York, Wayne McEvilly in Mexico, and several others who have given a certain flavor to the magazine.
(To Anaïs) I'm deeply grateful to you for that. You kept me in touch with writers all over the world. Some I haven't published. I never had the feeling that if you sent me a piece there was any compulsion to publish it and so some were sent back. But unlike any other advisory editor you have contributed to the flavor of the magazine, for which I am deeply grateful.
Now about the possible importance of literary magazines in our society in early days I published in much the same way Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, described in connection with some drawings that he published in magazines:
In a world cluttered and programmed with an infinity of practical signs and consequential digits referring to business, law, government, and war, one who makes such non-descript marks as these is conscious of a special vocation to be inconsequent, to be outside the sequence, and to remain firmly alien to the program. In effect these writings are decidedly hopeful in their own way insofar as they stand outside all processes of production, marketing, consumption and destruction, which does not mean however that they cannot be bought. Nevertheless it is clear that these are not legal marks nor are they illegal marks since as far as law is concerned they are perfectly inconsequent. And to be perfectly inconsequent in terms of the supposed consequential matters is to me the essence of a literary magazine. This presumes that the more advanced a technological society becomes, the more important individual endeavors are, in a practical sense. Not only for the purpose of one's sanity but also because it is the only way civilization, if it deserves to advance at all, might proceed.
At another level, Primus St. John, a black poet friend of mine from the inner-city, once wrote me, 'WHEN THE WORLD GETS YOU DOWN, FOOL IT WITH A POEM.' The same point of view applies to all your endeavors from pottery to painting.
Unfortunately, little magazines have to deal with outside influences like distributors, post offices, whose increasing rates threaten to drive many of them out of business, and others who would like to exploit the magazine for one purpose or another. Even in a private endeavor with a total sense of independence, you have to deal with those who would want in some way to subvert it or to have you sell out. And there is nothing that disturbs the Establishment more than something they cannot understand and there's no conceivable way for them to understand a little magazine.
In reaction to this, however, some editors tend to become overly political. They become anarchists and act as if they are always marching against the Czar. And it's very difficult to march against the Czar with a mimeograph machine. You just can't win. So if I ever have another magazine and publish a manifesto I will probably have a blank page. I think it's good to rant and rave against the established forces, but I'm increasingly inclined to think that it would be just better to fill the world with poems, with stories, with photographs and make that kind of presence without preaching and I dare say often without politics. Although a magazine needs to resist even the pressures to resist, the best ones seem to move beyond the reflections of an individual's tastes and whatever limitations that might entail.
In the five or six years since I've had the good ship "Voyages" going, we've had many interesting trips. But I come here this weekend hoping to find from all of you possible new areas in which I may move, new areas that I would like to explore. Just as Wallace Stevens had a poem about "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", so I have developed 10 commandments for a literary magazine: These are not the 'shalt nots" of childhood repression, but 10 commandments for this gathering this weekend. Here they are:
