Sometime earlier this year the New Leader magazine, after 82 years in business, ceased publication. Not all that many people could have known of the magazine during its existence. The tag line in a full-page ad that it once ran in the New York Times Book Review seeking new subscribers, as I remember it, was "Habitual coupon clippers please don't clip this one." The ad went on to say that not everyone read the magazine and cited a statistically infinitesimal number of people who did--only the intellectually best people, to be sure. John F. Kennedy read it, Hubert Humphrey read it, T.S. Eliot read it, and I forget the other rather rarefied names who did. In its house ads, the magazine used to carry a blurb from Eliot that went (again, I'm quoting from memory): "Of all the journals that cross my desk, the one I should most sorely miss is the New Leader."
I worked as a sub-editor for the New Leader for nearly two years, 1962-63. If that ad were to have been re-run later, it could not have said that Joseph Epstein reads it, because for more than 40 years I scarcely glimpsed it. Now that the magazine is gone, I suppose the best I can say is that I shall miss not missing it. But my brief adventures there, I have always known, were of considerable significance, to me if not at all to the rest of the world.
The first article I published was in
the New Leader. The year was 1959, I was in the Army, an enlisted man typing up physicals in a recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas. Two years before, Little Rock had been at the center of the world's attention, when President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to insure the safety of the black children who, by court order, integrated Little Rock's Central High School. I wrote a piece on race relations in the city two years later from the standpoint of an outsider. I have just reread it, and it strikes me as in the category I think of as sensitive-pretentious, and rather cheaply moralistic, with ornate vocabulary thrown in at no extra charge: "Gallimaufry," "blague," and "panjandrum" were among the words I used.
I had learned of the New Leader only a few months before I sent off my article. I discovered it in a tobacco store on Main Street in Little Rock that sold out-of-town newspapers and foreign magazines, including the London Spectator. I had discovered the little magazines and intellectual journals a few years before, while a student at the University of Chicago. Encounter, Commentary, Partisan Review, Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, these magazines opened up a new world to me, and an entirely new cast of writers--among them Dwight Macdonald, Sidney Hook, Irving Kristol, Robert Warshow, Midge Decter, Isaiah Berlin, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe, and a great many others. I must have been the only soldier who went off on bivouac with copies of Partisan Review and Dissent in his backpack in the icy November of 1958 at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.
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