MP: During The Hudson Review's past fifty years, beginning with the New Criticism, there have been a number of literary trends. Can you say whether the magazine has embraced any of them?
FM: In general, I have always been allergic to schools and movements since I tend to judge pieces of writing on the basis of their individual merits as I understand them. The fact that an author identified himself, or herself, with a particular school never cut much ice with me. This would have been true even of the New Critics, meaning I genuinely liked some but not others. When I published articles in the New Criticism, I did so because I learned something about whichever author or critical point of view was being discussed. The same has been true right along. I am not very ideological, and maybe this is a weakness, but frankly, we have not embraced any literary trends though it may be true that some of the works we published could be put in one box or another. But we have published essays that illustrate a variety of literary approaches and trends.
For a cliché example, take the Beat writers. I thought they were pretty lousy writers, and there was not much there that interested me. Though they were considered the latest, I would not have wanted to publish them.
MP: But didn't you publish Allen Ginsberg once?
FM: Yes, one of his better works, "Contest of Bards." We may have been wrong, but that was our belief. We certainly could not be praised or blamed for embracing the Beat poets, but we did publish Allen Ginsberg once.
The movement we have become more closely associated with than any other, at least since the New Criticism, is the one described as New Formalism or New Narrative. Although we have published many writers who identify with this movement, this came about not because we wanted to sponsor this or that movement, but because we happened to feel that these writers were doing very important work deserving of publication. One could simply say that these writers in a sense discovered us as much as we discovered them. But we would not publish a writer just because he or she claims to be part of that movement, and there are some we have rejected.
MP: Has the magazine's range of interests changed since you first formulated your goals?
FM: Yes, I believe the range has simply gotten broader. We are more interested now in memoirs, in historical studies, in biographical studies, and in articles about travel, for example. Even articles about science. These are all expansions over our original range of interests that tended to be focused more exclusively on the literary.
MP: Is there anything in particular that has encouraged these changes over the years?
FM: Mostly experience. In my case, and it was certainly true of Joseph Bennett2 in the fifties, as we lived more and read more, we expanded beyond the bookish interests we had as university students. And I have continued to expand so that I am interested in more now than I was twenty-five years ago; and twenty-five years ago, I was interested in more than I was fifty years ago.
MP: Who reads The Hudson Review, and do you think your readership has changed over the past fifty years?
FM: In general, the readership has not changed, though obviously the readers themselves have changed. But I would say that our readers can basically be divided into two categories. First, we have readers directly connected with universities, mainly faculty members but also some graduate students and possibly a few undergraduates. These are readers whose primary interest is linked to the academic. Then we have general readers who simply like to read and are content with a magazine that gives them words on pages without many visual aids. They are interested in what is going on in the visual arts and what the newest books are about and in keeping up with new fiction, new poetry and the world of ideas. General readers may not be interested in every single piece of a given issue, but they would be attracted to at least 75 percent of it. Although we have scatterings of subscribers in rural or small-town areas, our basic readership is mainly urban and somewhat sophisticated, professional men and women, doctors, attorneys, people interested in culture and the arts. To sum it up: there is the cultivated reader and then the very cultivated, in most cases, academic reader whose interests might be a little more specialized.
MP: As a follow-up, what was the magazine's relationship with academe in the early years and how has it changed over the last fifty years?
FM: Since Bennett and I were Princeton graduates, it was inevitable that we began with our association there. We were in touch with writers who were either on the faculty or lived in the Princeton area. But we were always mistrustful of becoming too closely linked to Princeton or any other academic entity. We resisted as long as was necessary the tendency to be labeled an outgrowth or affiliate of the university. Although we formed our ideas about publishing at Princeton, with a great deal of help from Allen Tate, we were independent and involved with writers from all over the country or, for that matter, from all over the English-speaking world. We never wanted to be considered an academic journal, and people have not referred to us as one for a number of years. We feel that we have maintained a certain direction established by our own views. When I say our, I mean mine and Joe's to begin with, and, for the last thirty years, Paula's3 and mine. Our advisory editors also sympathize with these views. We all agree to retain a focus and emphasis on originality in writing and on scholarship and criticism that has its own tradition. Where universities are true to it, good for them, but more often they are the ones to stray.
About fifteen years ago, as a guest at a luncheon at Yale, I was amused to meet a young member of the English department who was considered very bright. He paid me an intended compliment by saying he was coming back to The Hudson Review after many years during which he thought the magazine was irrelevant. And we thought we were publishing interesting work all along. I should have turned his statement around and said, "During the years you and your colleagues were doing deconstruction and the like, you were the ones who were irrelevant. Maybe you are coming back to the avenue of common sense." On the one hand, I think the academy does valuable work by providing critics and scholars with a home and a livelihood, a context for creative writers and original minds. On the other, the prevailing tenor of intellectual life in any given English or modern language department, or in the humanities, may be off on some fashionable hobbyhorse that would impose a dogmatism on their following. I suppose there are independent minds in the academy, just as there are everywhere, but they are scattered around. We have always resisted the prevailing doctrines in force.
MP: This certainly ties in with your shift in interest from the early years to much broader-based interests.
FM: Even in the early years, the New Criticism we were publishing was not popular in the academy at that time.
MP: In every issue, you publish a piece of short fiction and several poems. Over the years the poetry has seemed better and stronger than the fiction. Do you agree?
FM: In responding to this very good question, there are two aspects to bear in mind. In our social and economic context, there is a sharp difference between fiction and poetry. Fiction can become commercially viable, and writers of fiction can make money publishing books that sell in great quantities. Poets, on the other hand, probably do not have that hope. It is not impossible for a good poet to sell a book of poems in bestseller quantities, but it would be a remarkable exception. Writers of fiction, though not the majority, can do it. Therefore, two results follow. First, since The Hudson Reviews existence, commercial publishers and large-circulation magazines have been looking for storywriters. They are not looking for poets. Consequently, were we to publish a story noticed by an editor at Doubleday or Random House or a fiction editor at, say, Playboy or Esquire, or any commercial magazine that could pay $1,000, $2,000 or $5,000, it was common for us to receive letters from them to be forwarded to our authors. If his or her next story was any good, the author had the option to go where the money is. So they do not stay with us.
Secondly, agents pick them up. And where an agent comes into play, authors lose their loyalty to the original publication. If Mr. X sends poems to The Hudson Review, and they are accepted and read by a number of people, he will be pleased and submit more over the course of a year. In this way, we would continue this writer's poems for a decade or longer, and Mr. X may become famous.
