History:

The following essay, written by former faculty advisor Warren Eyster, appears in the 1992 Fall-Winter Issue of The New Delta Review and describes the years leading up to the historic departmental schism which led to the ten year discontinuation of the Delta. A more comprehensive history is currently being written by this years editor-in-chief, Matthew Herron.

Delta Blues: Requiem for an Undergraduate Magazine and Birth of New Delta Review
by Warren Eyster

When Duke Maronic went straight from Steelton High School to the Philadelphia Eagles to play guard (offensive and defensive), opening holes for Steve Van Buren—that was when I first heard of Louisiana State University. But I never knew Bob Petit and Alvin Dark had attended LSU until I looked at a map of Baton Rouge. The quirky behavior of radio waves had bounced a couple of Tulane Green Wave football games into central Pennsylvania. That, and a few late night dance bands which would fade in and out, providing brief contact with a New Orleans hotel, was all I knew of Louisiana. Correction: I may have seen a newsreel about some Long fellow and heard him sounding off against F.D.R. at a political convention, but I may have his voice confused with Mayor LaGuardia, who liked to read the funny papers over the radio on Sunday mornings for those of us too poor to buy a Sunday paper or too illiterate to read Flash Gordon. My only real contact with Louisiana was a brief stay at the Algiers Naval Base, where I promptly requested a transfer after discovering what two nights in the French Quarter could do to Seaman 1/c pay. I also discovered that it could take a day and a half by train to get from New Orleans to Orange, Texas, where I saw girls walking barefoot outside the railroad station and thought I’d found God’s Little Acre. I promptly boarded a Fletcher class tin can, the U.S.S. Oyson, and fled via Galveston for the relative safety of Guadalcanal.

In 1970 I was hired by LSU as coordinator of the new creative writing program that had been founded by David Madden two years earlier. Shortly after I arrived, Dr. Thomas A. Kirby, who I believe had been primarily responsible for obtaining administrative approval twenty years earlier for the magazine Delta, asked me to act as its advisor. Since I fervently believed in the need aspiring student writers have for opportunities to publish, I immediately consented. As an undergraduate student at Gettysburg College, I had edited Mercury and remembered how exciting that experience had been, even though editorial duties had included searching for advertisers, bargaining with printers, acting as both publicist and salesman, and defending the magazine from an administration that did not approve of caricatures of college professors or staff personnel and especially did not appreciate Cartoons that made fun of the burned fish the cafeteria of a Lutheran college served on Fridays. I had also served as advisor for Gyra at Longwood College, where concern had been expressed that Longwood ladies were becoming too liberated or too liberal. I left before I decided which.

I remembered, too, as managing editor of the publishing company McDowell-Oblensky the pride and pleasure of serving as editor to writers Andrew Lytle, Peter Taylor, William Carlos Williams, Frederick Manfred, William F. Buckley, Robert Phelps, and others. I also had published new writers like Carlos Fuentes, J.P. Donleavy, Helga Sandburg, Ferejdoun Esfandiary, Anthony C. West, and the ill- fated Sally Thompson. It had been with considerable personal satisfaction that I had edited Agee on Film and had participated in piecing together James Agee’s posthumous A Death in the Family.

I wanted very much for young writers at LSU to get a taste of the heady wine that new, unpublished manuscripts—living literature — can offer those who have been stifled by pedagogical scholarship. The years I had spent in Mexico convinced me that it was far better for the poet to be considered dangerous and subversive than to be considered an eccentric but harmless contributor to the spare-time reading of a “free” society, as seemed to be the case in the dear old U.S. of A. Thus, although Yeats would always sing with purer notes for my ear and far more profound stirrings of my heart, I was happy to see that Ginsberg’s howling, combined with Kent State, had finally awakened the belated hippies on the Baton Rouge campus. Alas, what a brief candle had been lit.

I make it sound too much as if Delta was born in 1970. Actually the first issue was published in the winter of 1947 under the editorship of Charles East, who was the guiding spirit of LSU Press when I arrived on campus. David McDowell, my friend and editor since Random House days, had told me that Charles East and Louis Simpson, editor of the Southern Review, were two good reasons to be at LSU, and I regret that Charles East left shortly afterwards, and that my contact with Louis has been limited largely to brief hallway conversations. They can probably tell more about the early years of Delta than I can. The first issue declared itself as “tangible evidence of the need for a medium of expression for student literary output.” The first literary advisor was George Marion O’Donnell, poet and critic, whose writings had already appeared in Kenyon Review, the Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, the Nation, and the New Yorker. One sidelight of interest:
in that first issue of Delta, Truman Capote was forecast as the most promising young American writer. Other Voices, Other Rooms was published almost simultaneously.

John Hazard Wildman was literary advisor from 1950 to 1970. During those years the contributors included Robert Penn Warren (whom I had first met in a balky Random House elevator and had mistaken for a janitor), soon-to-be movie critic Rex Reed, and local television celebrity Gus Weill. I leave that list to be filled in by others who were on campus or followed the fortunes of Delta during those years.

When I became advisor, I wanted very much to put the magazine into the hands of undergraduate students and to maintain its status as primarily of, by, and for undergraduates. I hoped it would provide an editorial training ground for the staff, allowing them to recognize how much patience and open-mindedness and independence of judgment reading manuscripts requires and hopefully later to know the satisfaction of having been responsible for the publication of an unknown writer who later became nationally or internationally respected. I personally found it rewarding to have published interesting fiction by writers who perhaps never wrote another story or novel.

I confess I was tempted to promote my own ideas that would, I believed, result in a literary magazine students could take pride in. But I felt I had already had my opportunities and that Delta should truly be an undergraduate magazine, reflecting entirely the editorial choices and decisions of the staff. Except when possible legal difficulties might occur, I would offer my advice only when it was requested by the editorial staff. They would choose their own poetry and fiction editors, set their own deadlines and individual responsibilities, and hammer Out their own disagreements. Only when they became hopelessly deadlocked would I advise accepting or rejecting any manuscript.

During the fifteen years that followed, the magazine changed its name to Manchac, then eventually to New Delta Review. One of the unavoidable difficulties confronting an undergraduate magazine is the rapid turnover of staff. No sooner did one editorial policy show promise than it was replaced. One staff wanted to change the magazine size, despite requests from the library, which found difficulties in making a bound collection. Name and format changes presented similar difficulties. Faced with a large number of submissions the staff believed should be published, they began an ill-fated attempt to make the magazine a quarterly or at least a semi-annual publication. I wholeheartedly supported this effort. It seemed to me then, and now, shameful that a major university should offer little or no support for the publication of a student literary magazine. The problems of financing two or four issues on a budget that barely covered the expenses of an annual publication were compounded by other circumstances. University regulations required that all monies acquired through sales of the magazine be turned into the General Fund. A few years later, sales tax also had to be set aside. Monies from sales or advertising could not be added to the next year’s budget, nor used to increase the number of issues published during that fiscal year. Since the number of copies students and I were able to sell by setting up card tables, benches, and chairs (which I had to bring in from off-campus) seldom exceeded six hundred copies (one year we sold over 700 copies and considered it a major victory on a campus of 25,000 students), the printing had to be limited, which in turn resulted in making the cost per page too high to seek advertisers. Since all revenues had to be turned into the General Fund, without any corresponding increase in the budget, the staff had no incentive but personal pride in trying to sell ads, raise funds, or even devote time to selling the magazine on campus.

We attempted in numerous ways to reduce the cost of publishing, including doing our own proofreading, copyediting, and page layouts, practices I favored since I believed the editorial staff should learn as much as possible about typefaces and sizes, design, and photography. Unfortunately, although I had some experience, if not expertise, with selecting the quality and weight of paper, bindings, and jackets, it was still a case of the blind leading the blind. The principal difficulty for me was each year having a new staff
to instruct and frequently very tight time schedules in which to do the layouts, often working without light tables or any equipment except scissors and rulers. One staff decided to combine doing page layouts with a wine and cheese session, a hilarious occasion that I recall fondly, but which resulted in my having to work all night to re-do the layout.
Nevertheless, I was proud of the core groups within those editorial staffs. They put in a lot of hours reading, editing, sometimes working closely with contributors on revisions. Since the magazine was small potatoes to the printers and manuscript selection was often not completed until early spring, publication frequently occurred at the same time students were beginning to be concerned about exams. But the staff usually made a strong selling effort. For five or six years the magazine was offered for sale in several local bookstores. In fact, off-campus cooperation was much greater than that of the Student Union and the administration. Petty officials were constantly harassing students, forcing them to cease and desist displaying signs and selling magazines near the library. The Student Union would not permit the magazine to be displayed or sold inside or even outside the building, although they graciously ignore4 our presence beneath the oak tree across the street, and the LSU Bookstore was willing to sell the magazine if it received 40% of the sale price, which was already below our printing cost. Once I was reduced to borrowing a pair of chairs from a U.S.M.C. recruitment display that had taken over the lobby, which nearly caused World War
Ill. These idealistic young writers spent long, hot, wet hours discovering just how illiterate or at least unliterary the student body of LSU is, and they received not one penny in compensation, and not one hour of credit for any course. Rarely did more than a dozen professors purchase the magazine (offered at fifty cents until inflation raised it to the astoundingly high price of one dollar). Believe it or not, one half dozen English professors might be counted among the dirty dozen.

There were a few bright spots in this bleak and hostile environment. Except for one printer, who refused to set type for one of the stories because his secretary found it obscene, the magazine never to my knowledge faced major criticism for its content, and this at a time when local libraries were under attack for having such dangerous subversive works as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye on their bookshelves, and the state legislature was showing its infinite wisdom by passing worthless obscenity laws. I concluded that the campus was a relatively safe haven, if not an absolute sanctuary, for young writers. They might not be appreciated, but they were sure to continue unread.

My greatest personal satisfaction during that decade and a half was that undergraduate students, most of whom had no previous literary experience, showed taste and perceptiveness in their selections of stories, plays, poems, drawings, and photographs. There was remarkably restrained and selective publishing of their own creative efforts, remarkably little scratching of each other’s backs, that disease so prevalent in trade book publishing and afflicting so many literary magazines and university presses. Almost every staff, while not closed to outside contributors (indeed, several stories by Angola convicts were published), emphasized manuscripts written by undergraduates. I will always take personal pleasure from knowing that student editors, without coercion, chose to publish the works of then unknown and unpublished students who are currently establishing reputations in the literary world, including John Ed Bradley, varsity football center during the Charlie Mack era (Tupelo Nights), Vietnam vet James Colbert, who wrote with vivid insight into the effects of that war on American servicemen but couldn’t find publishers until he turned to detective fiction a decade later (Profit and Sheen and No Special Hurry), and Charlotte Holmes, former managing editor of Antaeus, poet, short story writer, and teacher. Two student contributors later became press secretaries to the governors of Colorado (Larry Henry) and Louisiana (Jeff Coward). Jeff is currently executive editor of the Greater Baton Rouge Business Report. During that decade a number of student contributors, including Raymond Cothern, Marcy Frantom, and Margo Davis Kasprowicz, had their writings included in such national publications as Intro.

Others on campus had direct and indirect influence on the magazine. David Madden had aroused interest in theater with off-campus productions of student plays, and he organized Pleasure Dome, which sponsored both formal and informal readings in which contributors to the magazine participated. One marathon session of twenty poets was held in the Colonnade. Kit Hathaway interested a group of students in producing a series of letterpress chapbooks of poetry on an old hand-operated printing press—a labor of love that required almost as much devotion as that of the monks who kept religious scholarship alive during the dark centuries before the printing press. Advisors Stanley Plumly and Raymond Beard were responsible for arousing the enthusiasm of the student staff at Delta in 1970.

But the two largest lists of students I will retain in my fondest memories contain those talented young writers who are still struggling to attain recognition and those who have turned to occupations that offer bread and butter and maybe sometimes even greener pastures. They have scattered from coast to coast, working in film libraries in Los Angeles and installing stained glass windows in Nova Scotia. They have become lawyers, journalists, and investigative reporters. One became a Finnish poet. Several of the most talented simply disappeared.
I believe that my writing classes and my efforts to interest students in competing with other universities, especially in the Southern Literary Festival, the Louisiana College Writers Society, and the Associated Writing Program-sponsored Intro, where a few won awards even though competing against graduate students, resulted in these same students contributing to Delta and Manchac. I had seen all the Harvard-Yale graduates who had overrun the Madison Avenue publishing scene, and I sensed that Louisiana was fertile ground for young writers who saw life clear and straight and true, and who still loved the land and the water, if only they could shake themselves free of the good old boys who had performed lobotomies upon themselves without using a scalpel or a drill sometime between Lanterns on the Levee and All the King’s Men.

But it is my personal suspicion that the various administrations at LSU have never realized what is valuable in science and the arts on this campus, nor what the function of education should be. That is just another way of saying that they are trying to imitate every other university that they regard as successful. In any event, Delta-turned Manchac was finding it increasingly difficult to stay within the budget. The English Department no longer welcomed any financial drain, however small. The last two issues dug a small hole and then a larger hole in my own pocket. When the MFA program was approved, it seemed to me inevitable that the undergraduate magazine would get swallowed up in the graduate program and that the undergraduates would gradually get squeezed out, both as staff and contributors. I had favored a separate publication for graduate students. So it was time to step aside as advisor, and Delta, alias Manchac, became New Delta Review. The rest is somebody else’s story. I shall be leaving LSU in December before I enter the fifth act of an Elizabethan play and have to be carried off-stage. I have seen a few faces peering into my office, measuring its size and relative inconvenience, and the look on those faces and the clock inside me whisper forcefully, “HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.”