It seemed to take me forever and a day to finish the summer NYRB that came with the facsimile issue of the first ever edition. But I'm very glad to have been taken back to the summer of 1963 in all its literary glory, on the Yankee side of the water, that is.
I'm guessing there were some special circumstances behind the choices of reviews and stuff for that first edition because there's just so many big names involved. We get poems from Lowell, Berryman and Robert Penn Warren and a piece by Lowell on Robert Frost; there are reviews of Ivan Denisovich, The Naked Lunch, Raise High The Roofbeams, Carpenter and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? plus Auden on David Jones's Anathemata and Berryman on Auden's The Dyer's Hand; and there are bits from Mailer, Vidal, Kazin, Styron and Sontag. No way was that just an ordinary month.
It's surprising just how much some things now seem dated, usually what I would guess to have been what the editors would have considered the most 'current' material. Three or four reviews have issues of race firmly in view, particularly the cover piece on Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, and these seem to come from a different world - one, in some ways, best forgotten.
But it's equally striking how much written then would not sound at all out of place in the current NYRB. What was that definition of literature by Pound? - News that stays news, or something to that effect. Sometimes the old anti-Semite got things right.
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