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A fellow alum’s passing sparked vivid memories of launching the Cornell Review, a cutting-edge journal of ideas, in the late 1970s

“Chime In” comprises brief first-person essays by Cornellians. Do you have a topic in mind? Email us at cornellians@cornell.edu.

Editor's note: The publication recalled in this essay is unrelated to the current campus newspaper of the same name.

By Wayne Biddle ’70

“Is a pen a metaphorical penis?” When I saw this sentence, I knew we had something good. Sandra Mortola Gilbert ’57 was set to publish a book called The Madwoman in the Attic and had graciously given us an excerpt.

As associate editor and designer of the Cornell Review, it was one of my myriad tasks to “paste up” by hand the long paper columns of text we received from the typesetter in Syracuse for every page of each issue.

The year was 1979: no desktop publishing software, no landmark work of feminist literary criticism (yet).

Wayne Biddle

The Review had started two years earlier as a journal published by the College of Arts & Sciences that would bring cutting-edge scholarship and fine arts from the University campus to the Cornell community beyond Ithaca.

Baxter Hathaway, recently retired from the English department as founder of the creative writing program and Epoch magazine, was editor. An advisory board included faculty stars like Carl Sagan, Jim McConkey, Archie Ammons, Harry Levin, and Tom Eisner.

A cover of the Cornell Review literary magazine

After my two-year stint as a (non-degreed) MFA student under Baxter’s mentorship, he asked me to help him produce this new periodical.

So there we were, ensconced on the rickety second floor of Baxter’s old clapboard building at 108 North Plain Street, where chapbooks in his Ithaca House poetry series were pounded out on an ancient letterpress machine in the basement.

Baxter’s Rolodex was a cornucopia of 20th-century literary luminaries.

“Hello, Tom?” I would hear him rasp on the phone as he lined up cigarette filters across his desk like spent handgun cartridges.

This Tom would happen to be Thomas Pynchon ’59, whom big-time editors in Manhattan would have given their eye teeth to reach so easily.

Tom never sent us anything, but plenty of others did, including Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Don DeLillo, Robert Bly, May Swenson, Josephine Jacobsen, Joy Williams, and on and on from literary constellations alone.

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Baxter’s Rolodex was a cornucopia of 20th-century literary luminaries.

Three of Sandra Gilbert’s poems appeared in the fall 1977 issue, when my contributor’s note said that she was “working on a two-volume study of 19th and 20th century literature by women.”

In retrospect, this was rather like saying circa 1928 that Virginia Woolf was working on a speech about women’s access to education. But never mind, the fact was that 70-something Baxter and 20-something me had no problem with “Is a pen a metaphorical penis?”

Au contraire, we knew it was dynamite.

Those were marvelous, turbulent times and Cornell was usually out in front with progressive ideas.

The Review lasted just seven issues over three years, though we enjoyed generous patronage from a score of Cornell friends, especially writer and art critic B.H. “Bob” Friedman ’48.

Baxter Hathaway
rare and manuscript collections
Prof. Baxter Hathaway, who passed away in 1984.

Baxter’s health was shaky, as was financing from the college. Ambition pulled me toward the Big Apple.

In his Editor’s Notes column for the final issue, Baxter called attention to an estimate in the June 1979 Harper’s that the total number of people who could be counted on to support serious intellectual projects in America was no more than 1,100.

The cover of "The Madwoman in the Attic"

“There are more of you than the general statistics say we had any right to expect,” he wrote, addressing our readership, “and we have all held together to make a little bit of history.”

When Sandra Gilbert died in November 2024, her obit in the New York Times reprised the now-famous first sentence and lauded Madwoman as a “groundbreaking work of literary criticism that became a feminist classic” like Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics and Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own.

To my knowledge, our excerpt in the Cornell Review was the only such circulation outside the book’s first Yale University Press edition.

Baxter died in 1984 and now I’m older than he was then. Progressive ideas are more endangered than ever, but big things sometimes appear first in small windows and then propagate exponentially, with only enough time.

An electrical engineering major on the Hill, Wayne Biddle ’70 has been a contributing editor at Harper’s and a reporter at the New York Times, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize for writing about the “Star Wars” anti-missile system. He retired from the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2019 after 20 years in the writing seminars department.

(All images provided, unless otherwise indicated.)

Published January 9, 2025

Comments

  1. Robert Schultz, Class of 1981
    14 Jan, 2025

    As an MFA student, I benefited from Baxter’s tutelage as my academic advisor in those years when Wayne was a classmate. And I remember helping to set type with Baxter for one of the poetry collections he published under his Ithaca House imprimatur. Also, I recall reading manuscripts for the Cornell literary journal Epoch that Baxter had founded. His well-timed remarks, often laconic but impactful, made the our editorial meetings into virtual seminars for the aspiring writers around the table.

    Reply
  2. Jan Garden Castro
    14 Jan, 2025

    I was a freshman and sophomore at Cornell in ‘63-‘64 during the start of the Vietnam Nam War protest years and was in Archie Ammon’s first class at Cornell, participated in the poets’ kidnapping of Allan Kaprow from his happening in a Cornell car dump site, helped Forest Read edit something during his Pound-Joyce years, had two poems in the Trojan Horse, and studied American Parties and Politics with a friend of Bobby Kennedy. Every class at Cornell was foundational and formative. I’m a co-founder of River Styx Magazine, based in St. Louis, which turns 50 this year and have lived in Brooklyn for the past twenty years. My bestseller on Georgia O’Keeffe took ten years to research. Love meeting Cornellians! Jan Garden Castro

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