Ted Solotaroff, brilliant literary middleman

Theodore Solotaroff died last Friday, and while his name was only vaguely familiar to me -- a member of the New York literary world, yes, but what were his accomplishments, exactly? -- James Wolcott's soaring evocation of The New American Review, the magazine Solotaroff founded in 1967 and which lasted a decade, make his literary contributions abidingly clear:

In the first issue alone, Wolcott writes, there appeared:

Stanley Kauffmann's memoir of his brief, contested tenure as chief drama critic of The New York Times; a story by Grace Paley; an excerpt from a novel in progress by Mordecai Richler; an excerpt from a novel in progress by Philip Roth, the n-in-p being Portnoy's Complaint ("Sometime during my ninth year one of my testicles apparently decided it had enough of life down in the scrotum and began to make its way north" -- now there's an attention-snagging opening sentence); William Gass's novella "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country;" a story by Ron Sukenick; an essay by George Dennison on Jean Genet; an essay review by Richard Gilman of the controversial "Macbird!"; an essay by Conor Cruise O'Brien on Edmund Burke and Karl Marx; a student's account of an appearance by Norman Mailer at a graduate school ("He had come to talk to us of style and everyone was full of it, up to the ears in all kinds of manners, modes, and means; the room blossomed smiles, bourbon, questions..."); and poems by Anne Sexton, Robert Graves, John Ashbery, Richard Eberhart, and Anna Akhmatova.

Not bad for a first go.

Moreover, The New American Review (it later droped the "New") "never lost altitude, never peaked out, continuing to make literary news back when literary news didn't seem like an oxymoron …" -- until it finally expired in 1977. (As they say, read the whole thing; brief excerpts clip Wolcott's own New Journalism wings.)

The review, to Wolcott, has been unfairly overshadowed by the likes of the Partisan Review and Commentary in New York's collective cultural memory, or what remains of it, but its spirit lives on in Granta and the most recent incarnations of the Virginia Quarterly Review and the Paris Review. But unless Wolcott overstates the wallop of the arrival of a each new Solotaroff-edited literary mashup , those publications seem culturally subterranean by comparison.

(Nor was Solotaroff a born-to-the-manner type like William F. Buckey or George Plimpton. According to the obit the Globe ran, his father, who owned a struggling plate-glass factory during the Depression, "tormented" his mother and beat Ted, often threatening "to break [his] spirit once and for all." This did not leave his own temperament unaffected.)

I can't locate an anthology (email me or leave a comment if there is one and I've missed it), but individual issues are plentiful and cheap in the second-hand market. I just sent off for a copy of Vol. 1.