Below, Kenneth Patchen offers aspiring editor/publisher Jasper Wood advice on how to run a literary journal.
October 2, 1944, NYC
Dear Jasper Wood:
What a wonderful letter!
How is this for your magazine’s name: OTSOTA (ON THE SIDE OF THE ANGELS)…?
Otsota has an archaic sound which I like: it’s arresting, good to look at, short, and I think it covers what you stand for.
Maybe run it OTSOTA: On The Side Of The Angels.
Don’t think twice about [Edmund] Wilson. He’s afraid of his shadow and since he makes it I don’t blame him: a thousand years old in the wrong direction, and bad manners (promiscuously like that) have no place anywhere. An old old woman, Wilson; a lot like the late pres. by that name.
For the others, well, let it go: they are Commercials, I think.
Reprint some Herman Melville instead. Or Blake.
The answer to how I make a living is that mostly I don’t: my books never bring much in but chicken feed: I have arthritis of the spine and spend a big share of the time in bed; usually my wife has to be on hand to wait on me, so jobs are pretty well out for her too. On this score, know of any monied Cleveland people who might buy a ms. book? For instance, that of Cloth of the Tempest…100 dollars down, and as much more as they want to pay later. (I could sure use the 100.) I write the books in publishers’ dummies…all in long hand, corrections, notes, etc.
I’ll make a pleasant sum on the reissue of MOONLIGHT: but that’s far off in January before it comes to payment.
What is your deadline on material for the first issue? I hope to get some more poems to you…and the prose piece.
Have you given much thought to format? What I like to see in a magazine is lots of punch in use of a good black type (Bedoni, say) on book-stock paper. transition was nice. No wood—or linoleum—or other nonsense cuts. Lots about contributors. Bold running-heads above poems and stories and articles. The whole thing neat and shipshape. Only three or four names of contributors on cover.
Do you plan ads? Query Gotham Book Mart, New Directions, all book stores in Cleveland, all such stores in Ohio and the Middle West, and maybe try to get ‘exchange’ ads with other Little Mags. Writing around if nothing else will make you known to people. And also try now to make arrangements to get your magazine handled by all the bksts that handle mags. Write to those listed in the 2nd issue of Circle, say; and Brentano’s in the various cities. I think with a lot of work and pushing you can get it around.
After you get material set for the first issue, print up an ad card…have a party in Cleveland (maybe now), admission price of a subscription. I wish I could tell you that I’d come to Cleveland to read in behalf of the magazine; but I can never tell whether I’ll be able to get around or not. Do you think you could get any sort of crowd to hear me read poems? At 50¢ a head, perhaps. (I’d likely be broke (in November, say) and need trainfare back and forth out of it.) I have a steel harness and might swing it. Kill another bird by stopping to see my father and mother in Warren on the way.
If I can’t come (or if you think it might not pan out anyway) I can let you have some ms. pages to auction off at your party…or a water color.
How old are you? Your wife?
We love jazz. Have a lot of good records which we can’t play in our present place because the electric current is wrong for the machine.
Do you know Celine? Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan…wonderfully strong and bitter books. They are out of print: if you haven’t them, we’ll send on our copies, provided you guard them with your lives.
Like to know how you set up the symposium.
Sending you a copy of The Dark Kingdom. And couple photos which Publix might put up or whatever.
All our good wishes to both of you.
Sincerely yours,
Kenneth Patchen
By the way, I got a letter the other day from something The Ohioana Library (Columbus) telling me that Cloth of the Tempest has been chosed by their committee of judges (John Crowe Ransom, Ridgeley Torrance, Jean Starr Untermeyer) as the best book of poems published by an Ohion in ’43, and I’m to receive a medal—made of clay, no less.
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FURTHER READING
For Henry Miller’s incisive essay on Patchen (“That is another quality of Patchen’s which inspires dread on first meeting—his awesome silence. It seems to spring from his flesh, as though he had silenced the flesh. It is uncanny. Here is a man with the gift of tongues and he speaks not.”), click here.