Light Up in London

Reader's Digest was the first U.S. magazine to be printed in Britain after the wartime blackout. Last week the second one popped up in London bookstores. Unlike the Digest (circ. 11 million), the second U.S. entry--Partisan Review--is a highbrow magazine almost as unfamiliar to most Americans as it is to Britons. But it quickly sold out.

To such English intellectuals as Critic George Orwell and Editor Cyril Connolly, the bi-monthly Partisan Review is the voice of the U.S. intellectual Left. If so, it is a small (circ. 6,500) and often confused voice. Once Communist, it shifted to quasi-Trotskyite, is now vaguely Marxian (but anti-Stalinist), and more literary than partisan. In its 13 years it has published such U.S. writers as John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, and Gertrude Stein.

Because he admires the Partisan Review so much, Editor Connolly, who publishes London's highbrow Horizon, had 1,000 photo-offset copies of Review printed, and sold them at cost (35. 6d.). Said one Bloomsbury bookseller: "American intellectuals have so much vitality that it just forces itself out from inside them, while ours just seem to be writing off the top of their minds. Why, when people have discovered Partisan Review on the shelf, their eyes have lit up with pleasure, and as you know people's eyes don't light up any more, what with the dawn of the ice age."

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