This year's issue of The Idol came out just in time for the beginning of fall classes. The color cover of Union's literary and arts magazine is an abstract design-“actually a photograph of a group painting, the original of which is about four feet by four feet,” says Editor-in-Chief Peter Sage '04.
The painting was the result of this year's Jackson Pollack party, which involved staff from The Idol. This annual event is now a tradition, explains Sage: “We get together and watch the film 'Pollock,' then we put down plastic sheets and a huge canvas, and throw paint around.”
In keeping with its shoestring tradition, The Idol has no office. “It operates either out of my room or a room in the campus center,” says Sage. “It's a group project-we put it together in one night, starting at 5 p.m. and, with the help of donuts and coffee, going maybe to 3 a.m. We choose the submissions we want to include, do the layout. It's a lot of work. But it's a blast-fun putting it together, and you get to see students' creativity and what some people are doing. A lot of people at Union are talented, but you don't get to see their talent in the course of an ordinary day.”
The production schedule was a little late this year, since Sage had spent the fall term in the rainforest in Australia. A biology major with minors in visual art and chemistry, Sage joined The Idol staff as a sophomore, after seeing a flyer at Club Day. He's always been interested in the intersections of science and the arts, and last spring signed up for The Illustrated Organism course (see separate article in this issue) as one way he could “get a dose of science and art together.” He's also taken drawing, sculpture, and art history, and does photography.
The Idol first appeared in 1910, promising to be “a quarterly of scintillating sarcasm strongly soliciting the
ceasing of swiftly circulating student sobriety.” This humor magazine lasted one issue.
In 1928, it emerged again, and its first two years saw some of the best student literary works ever produced at Union. The lead article in the first issue was titled “Henry David Thoreau: Propagandist of High Thinking,” and ten substantial book reviews ranged from a look at two books on football to an examination of Conversations with Anatole France.
Brooks Atkinson, famous drama critic for The New York Times and onetime professor of English at Dartmouth, commented, “Whether The Idol had reviewed my book or not, I shall still have thought it a remarkable publication from any college. The Thoreau piece goes right back to the old English quarterlies in its completeness and its independent grasp of the subject.”
The author of the Thoreau piece, and The Idol's first editor-in-chief, was William Gilsleichter '28, later to become a technical writer for the Bendix Aviation Corp. and eventually a playwright. Gilsleichter noted in the first issue that the
Concordiensis and the Garnet for years had recorded the activities and expressed the opinions of students. The Idol, he said, was created solely to provide a means of expression for creative and appreciative writing by students. “We hope to avoid the curse of imitative cleverness, the veneer of sophistication, the laboured and strained effort at aping styles and moods, that often is apparent in many undergraduate publications.”
Those first Idols were oversized, gray, and very serious. A later editor had to defend the magazine against charges of being ponderous: “We are not averse to publishing articles of a light nature if we can obtain them, but we shall always prefer genuine ponderosity to strained levity.”
“Genuine ponderosity” must have been difficult to produce, however. One student took aim and unleashed this in a competing publication:
By the doors of old Concordy
Sits the idle Idol boardy
With the folded thumbs a-twiddling,
With their eversharps fididdling
And as ever, in a daze
Known as literary haze.
Nothing serious, I fancy,
Just a bit of lead in Pantsy.
In the early 1930s, The Idol expired, but rose again like a phoenix in 1937, with a fresh list of editorial planks:
- “The Idol will print anything worth reading which seems to make sense and obey the laws of grammar.
- “It has no patience with institutions or people whose behavior and intellects stammer.
- “It does not pretend to be right, or articulate, or oracular.
- “It will make no more than a reasonable attempt to be spectacular.”
In 1939, editorship passed to Alfred (“Pat”) Knopf, Jr. '42, son of the distinguished publisher and himself a future publisher of note. Knopf streamlined the layout; used his connections to obtain subscriptions from the likes of Willa Cather, H.L. Mencken, and Bennett Cerf; and tried to produce a journal that would not embarrass him in their eyes. Contemporaries discovered in it the influence of both The New Yorker and Time. Student contributions virtually disappeared, and belletrist writing was largely replaced by faculty analysis and other features.
Knopf did not ignore the local scene entirely; he commissioned student polls, editorialized against the growing power of the president of Union, and published a photograph of the usually dignified President Dixon Ryan Fox at a dinner, with his mouth full. For these and other sins (presenting “personal opinions” and being “inaccessible” to campus contributions), he became the target of several attacks in the
Concordiensis; one denounced him as 'Mein Knopf.'”
Because of World War II, The Idol suspended publication between spring 1943 and the end of 1946.
The following fall, the journal came back to life, offering students $1,500 in prizes for their writing. Postwar editors included future book publisher Clarkson Nott Potter '50, who revived book reviews and faculty articles, introduced profiles of young faculty members, and published the first photographic essay. Future
Washington Post editor Howard Simons '51 also published several faculty articles and was the first to reproduce photographs for their own sake, rather than as illustrations. Walter Tower '53, later proprietor of Nimrod Press, increased The Idol's attention to the campus, publishing several student polls and analytical articles about the College.
There is no one Idol, with an appearance and content transcending the frequent turnover in editors and contributors. Each
Idol is a distinctive reflection of the small group that produces it. One result, of course, is a notable lack of consistency in style. The Idol of 1928 would not have published the following, from a 1954 issue:
Reporters; “I've got the perfect news story.”
Editor: “Man bites dog?”
Reporter: “No, bull throws professor.”
By the 1950s, The Idol was a magazine about the campus, with profiles of students and faculty members, short stories, sports reports, articles about various departments, a series on the St. Andrews Exchange program, and something called “The Last Page”-an attempt at a humor column.
From the 1960s onward, depending on the editor, changes of direction occurred almost every year. But there was a noticeable trend toward including more and more graphic art (especially photography) and reducing nonliterary content and faculty contributions. “Honesty” and “relevance” were important words, and there was anger, too. Photographers showed poor blacks, empty faces, rundown apartment buildings, desolate highways. Stories touched on murder, suicide, sex, poverty, Vietnam. In 1966, the magazine contained this editorial credo:
“The winds of change. A new size, a new format. An experiment.
“The real change is between the covers. Fiction and poetry that avoid pretension. Photographs that speak for this generation….
“This issue is not esoteric, is not pseudo-intellectual. Its emphasis is on solid material; with no pose and without pretense.
“This issue is honest.”
A poem from that era, titled “My Love Is Like a Motorcycle, or
Ode to a Gas-House Girl”:
POUNDING DOWN THE HIGHWAY DOING NEARLY NINETY.
lurching and accelerating
fluttering, now bellowing, now echoing.
Braking the inertia out from within.
You can wave and jump and fly and scream
and laugh and cry and be happy and hit a
truck head-on.
The Idol mellowed in the 1970s. It had, at times, a certain zaniness, a sort of off-the-wall approach, unlike the hard edge of the 1960s, but by no means a return to the softness of the 1950s. Here's a sample, the start of a long piece in 1973 entitled “Segment From an Unfinished Novel” by John Devlin '73:
“As I drove in the main gateway of the college, I was once more overcome and revolted by the impressive Belcher Memorial in the center of the campus. This structure, which was the nucleus of the campus, was a circular-cylindrical building, jet-black, smooth and shiny, without windows. It curved to a point at its top. Because of the copper color of the dome, the black color of the main cylinder, and its over-all shape, it suggested an enormous bullet or artillery shell. As I was to learn later, this was by no means an accident. Elijah Heath Belcher, the founder and the first president of the college (from 1878 to 1902), was before he entered the academic business a ballistics scientist and entrepreneur.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, The Idol appeared less frequently and less regularly-in the sixteen years between spring 1974 and spring 1990, only about twenty-five issues appeared. One 1985 issue appeared as four pages in the
Concordiensis. Changes of format were very frequent; in some years, no two issues had the same dimensions.
In winter 1989, The Idol, under editor Jose Andrade, also produced an additional publication, called
End., noting, “In the previous decade, we saw the Me Decade of the 1970s turn into a SuperMe decade, lived under Republican rule, watched MTV, and witnessed the Community Empire begin to crumble….”
In her note in the 2002 edition, Kristen Andrews '02 commented, “Much like the art between its covers, the bounds of The Idol consistently look to be stretched, expanded, and redefined.”
The Idol continues to experiment and no doubt, to puzzle. Its eccentric inconsistency has grown out of a tradition of being allowed to simply be itself.
editors and contributors to The Idol:
Codman Hislop '31, Research Professor of American Civilization at the College and author of
Eliphalet Nott.
Harry Rositzke '31, retired CIA agent whose books included The KGB: The Eyes of Russia.
Alfred Knopf, Jr., '42, who went on to serve as chairman of Athaeneum Publishers in New York City.
E. Arthur Kean '50, screenwriter and film director in Los Angeles.
Daniel Smuthe '50, professor of English at Bradley University and a poet.
Howard Simons '51, managing editor of The Washington Post.
Walter Tower, Jr. '53, owner of Nimrod Press in Boston.
Rodham Tulloss '66, research leader at Western Electric
(later Bell Labs) and published poet.
Kate White '72, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine
and mystery writer.
Steven Glazer '85, professional treasure hunt maker and
editor of Valley Quest: 89 Treasure Hunts in the Upper Valley
and The Heart of Learning Spirituality in Education.
Kerrie M. (Ticknor) Droban '87, attorney and award-winning mystery writer (The Watchman's Circle won the Daphne Du Maurier Award and the Claras Award for Mystery
Writing Excellence).
Joy Runyon '88, project manager at The New York Botanical
Garden Press.
Dina M. (Schweitzer) Leitch '90 went from Union to study
feminist psychology, work in a family law office, and become certified in California as a marriage and family therapist.
Rebecca Smackey '92, director of communications and
publications for the Philadelphia Orchestra.
Glenn Konopaske '95, a biology and classics double major,
went on to get a medical degree, and is now a psychiatrist
in Connecticut.
Julianna Spallholz '98, a fiction writer and poet who
completed an MFA in creative writing at Goddard College and who now works in Union College Special Collections.
Duncan Campbell Crary '00, co-founder of Salvage Magazine,
a literary and art publication launched last year in New York's Capital Region.