Western Brain Child

The editors' aim was to sweep the modern world "with the same searching gaze which the Spectator turned on manners of 1 8th Century England." Pacific Spectator had a lot of territory to cover, and no Addison & Steele to help cover it. Since the days of Bret Harte's Overland Monthly, the Western U.S. has had no highbrow magazine of any weight. To help fill the vacuum, 23 colleges had joined as sponsors -- "the largest Western college league ever organized," cracked one reviewer, "to support anything but athletics." Last week Pacific Spectator began its second year. It had not yet grown to the stature of a Yale, Kenyon or Sewanee Review, but it was at least gaining weight. The fifth quarterly issue went to 8,000 buyers, a gain of 3,000 from the first. To win them (at $3.50 a year), Spectator had turned an appraising gaze on Western writers, from Saroyan to Steinbeck. It had given two score pent-up regional intellectuals an outlet, and had ranged beyond the Pacific horizon to China (Lawrence Sears) and London (C. S. Forester).

Brain child of an American Council of Learned Societies group, Spectator started life with a three-year subsidy ($5,000 a year) from the council, besides gifts from the colleges and other angels. Because of development costs, it had a year-end deficit of $6,000, which Stanford will make up.

The brain child is managed by a brain trust headed by John Wendell Dodds, dean of Stanford's School of Humanities and younger brother of Princeton President Harold Willis Dodds. Other members: Stanford's Wallace Stegner, California's George R. Stewart, U.C.L.A.'s

Dixon Wecter, and Louis B. Wright of the Huntington Library. The only paid staffer is Managing Editor Edith Ronald Mirrielees, 69, a retired English professor who does her editing perched on a cushioned Governor Winthrop chair in the cozy study of her Palo Alto home.

Pacific Spectator tries hard not to be parochial or schoolmarmish, tries to strike a balance between the critical and the creative, and "as a mark of respectability" pays its contributors $30 an article. Its "Spectator's Appraisal," one of two regular departments, assays such solid stuff as Toynbee's A Study of History and Northrop's The Meeting of East and West. "Tradition and the Skeptic," the other, usually takes the skeptic's side.

Spectator, says Adviser Stegner, "hasn't a single ax to grind.. . . There ought to be a good Western magazine that you don't have to be ashamed to support." At the first year's end, Spectator's founding fathers were unashamed.

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