Files Reveal Struggles of the New Leader

NEW YORK -- George Orwell, Arthur Miller and Bertrand Russell have been among its contributors. Influential texts have included Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's then-secret denunciation of Stalin and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Letter From a Birmingham Jail."

The New Leader, founded in 1924, is a chronically underfunded magazine that through will and vision became an important forum for liberal anti-communism and cultural debate during the Cold War and remains in business despite announcing it would fold a year ago.

To have such longevity is a feat for any publication, but The New Leader's endurance approaches the supernatural. Some of the world's leading thinkers and politicians have contributed essays and reviews for little or no money. A magazine with a peak circulation of around 30,000 has been read by presidents, poets and Nobel laureates. Reaction to its planned demise was strong enough to persuade the editors to revive The New Leader as an online publication.

You need more than readers to keep such a magazine alive; you need the most determined of editors. The New Leader archives, recently donated to Columbia University, reveal a small magazine's private battle for content as it wages a public war of ideas. While files are devoted to Orwell, the Kennedys and other famous names, some of the strongest voices belong to those at The New Leader, especially Samuel M. Levitas, a Soviet emigre who headed the magazine for more than 20 years and made an art form out of not accepting "no" for an answer.

"He was something of a character actor," says Myron Kolatch, who took over The New Leader after Levitas' death, in 1961, and now presides over the magazine's files and publication from his office on the Columbia campus. "I used to tell him that if he had become an actor and gone to the stage, he could have prevented the whole Communist movement from ever happening."

Reading through the archives, you can almost imagine Levitas on bended knee, pleading for material from the greats and the near-greats, in sickness or in health. In the late 1940s, when George Orwell was ill with tuberculosis, Levitas repeatedly pushed for reviews and other commentary even as the author emphasized _ "I honestly cannot write anything" _ that he was too sick to work.

"I know you are busy, and are plagued by poor health, but please do try and find time to send us some copy," Levitas writes, adding that he hoped "when your fingers itch to write on any subject, you will think of us and give us the preference over other publications."

"That was part of his schtick," Kolatch says of Levitas. "It made people feel terribly important to the magazine, and he used that very effectively. He was a very masterful performer and he worked with literally no money against magazines that were pretty well financed."

Saying no was a letdown; saying no, then writing for a competitor, was a betrayal. Noting a piece Orwell had contributed on Mahatma Gandhi for Partisan Review, Levitas confides, "To be frank, we are extremely jealous that it didn't appear in The New Leader." In the late 1950s, when an allegedly promised article from Henry Kissinger ended up elsewhere, the New Leader editor seemed on the verge of tears.

"You can imagine my astonishment, surprise and jealousy when I saw your piece in the Reporter," he writes. "The only way to recoup your sins is to do an article for us."

Advised Kissinger, then a rising star at Harvard University: "You must not press me quite so hard."

The range of excuses is impressive: political commitments (John F. Kennedy); too busy writing novels (Thomas Mann); a broken ankle (anthropologist Margaret Mead); temporal confusion (philosopher Isaiah Berlin, asked for predictions about the Soviet Union, replied: "When I think about the future my mind is totally clouded and I have nothing to say").

T.S. Eliot begged off a request to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Tolstoy's death with an embarrassing confession: He wasn't familiar with his work. The poet was more open to adding his name to a petition urging the release of political prisoners in Eastern Europe, but cautioned that in the eyes of the Communists he was "degenerate, pornographic, anti-Semitic pro-fascist ..."

Eliot, an American who spent much of his life in England, even suggested that writing for The New Leader might be against the law. "The export of British capital is restricted and may only be done under license," he writes in 1964. "Therefore, I am afraid I can send you nothing except my sincerest sympathy."

The New Leader has landed many important works, including essays by Orwell, Kissinger, Albert Camus and Bertrand Russell, numerous dispatches from such Eastern bloc dissidents as Joseph Brodsky and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and recent contributions from historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and sociologist Daniel Bell. The magazine was noticed in the highest places, with New Leader files including letters of praise from former Presidents Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt and from former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Also captured was part of a famous exchange between critic Irving Howe and "Invisible Man" novelist Ralph Ellison. In 1963, Howe, writing in Dissent, chastised Ellison for lacking the "clenched militancy" of fellow black author Richard Wright. Prodded by Kolatch, Ellison answered with "The World and the Jug," in which he accused the white Howe of regarding blacks as one-dimensional beings useful only for social protest.

"My goal was not to escape or hold back," Ellison wrote about his fiction, "but to work through; to transcend, as the blues transcend the painful conditions with which they deal."

As Kolatch recalls, Howe had asked Ellison to publish his response in Dissent, where he presumably would have earned more money. But Ellison, "who kind of shared my own feelings about Howe, told him that, `You know, it was Kolatch's idea.' So Ralph told him to go fly."

After Ellison's essay came out, The New Leader editor wrote him a letter of thanks, and noted that "in the case of those who earn their bread by their pen we do at least attempt to offer a token of appreciation."

Ellison's reward was a check for $50.