Psychic Tomorrow

In the fall of 1941, a shrewd Irishwoman named Mrs. Eileen J. Garrett surrounded herself with eager young literary men and started a magazine in Manhattan. She gave showy cocktail parties in her penthouse to introduce herself to the trade. The trade learned that Mrs. Garrett was a "celebrated international medium," who claimed powers of clairvoyance, telepathy and prevision.* The people she picked to run her magazine obviously lacked prevision. Last week Eileen Garrett's Tomorrow had its third editor in 60 days.

By paying well, Mrs. Garrett had got some good names (Henry Steele Commager, Jessamyn West, Frederic Prokosch, V. S. Pritchett, Sean O'Faolain) to write for Tomorrow. She kept her psychic secrets pretty well out of it. People who wanted to know what her aim was got a steady, blue-green stare and a soft answer: "I have no bone to bury, and no ax to grind. But I have a policy: I believe in the humanities, and in common decency."

In Tomorrow's five years, that unexceptionable policy had not been able to make ends meet. The 35-c- monthly (circ. 25,000) had gone into the red on every issue, was still eating up about $15,000 a month. What kept it going, besides Eileen Garrett's own money and implacable will, was a silent partner, Representative Frances Bolton (R.) of Ohio.

Spiral v. Corkscrew. Keeping editors from one Tomorrow to the next had been a continuing problem. There was, for example, the matter of the ascending spiral which curls across each month's cover. It was one of Mrs. Garrett's pet ideas. She also uses it to adorn the books of the Creative Age Press, a profitable publishing firm she owns. On this month's Tomorrow cover the spiral--which to her signifies the universal urge of beanstalks, nebulae and people to strive onward & upward--was all but invisible. John Richmond, the editor who diminished it, is now gone; next month the spiral (called the "corkscrew" by some irreverent ex-staffers, the "bedspring" by others) will be back as bright as ever.

Some of Tomorrow's numerous alumni complain that an editor must be psychic himself to work for a psychic boss. Serenely stroking her nine gold bracelets, thrice-married Eileen Garrett says sweetly: "I've never had anything but a neurotic editor until this very moment. You know," she adds with a glitter, "the number of phonies you meet in this town."

*She had two "controls": "Uvani," a 19th Century Arab, and "Abdul Latif," a Persian physician who lived at the time of the Crusades.

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