"The first function of a literary magazine is to introduce the work of
new or little-known writers of talent.” There is an appealing modesty about
this brisk declaration, even a kind of impersonality in subordinating
editorial ego to the larger good; it seems likely to provoke a murmur of
agreement, not least from new or little-known writers. But this is not, of
course, the only way in which the function of such publications may be
conceived. The editor of one of the many new literary periodicals
established in the 1920s announced a no less definite sense of purpose in
quite other terms: “I shall make its aim the maintenance of critical
standards and the concentration of intelligent critical opinion”. The goals
expressed in these two quotations are not necessarily in conflict: editors
might, it is true, maintain “critical standards” in a practical way by
identifying new literary talent. But the tendency is for the pursuit of
these two purposes to result in periodicals of rather different types. One,
often thought of as the classic “little magazine”, largely carries new
poetry and fiction, mostly by as yet unrecognized writers, often
exemplifying a style of writing that is self-consciously, even determinedly,
insurgent and unfashionable. The other, committed to upholding the critical
or reviewing function, is largely filled with essays and book reviews,
taking in the literature of both the past and the present, as well as taking
in more than literature; it aspires to shape intelligent opinion and to
combat the slackness and puffery of mainstream literary journalism.
Much of the history of literary periodicals can be written around the
contrasts and tensions between these two types and their various hybrid
manifestations. As it happens, both the above statements are by the same
person – T. S. Eliot. There is nothing fortuitous about this common source;
Eliot was not only a dominant, perhaps the dominant, figure in English
literary life for roughly the half century after the end of the First World
War, but he was himself the editor of a literary journal and one who
frequently mused on the character and purpose of such publications. The
first quotation comes from 1954, when, very much the literary elder
statesman, he was wishing well to the new London Magazine, and hence could
afford to affect the impersonal view. The second comes from 1922 when he was
about to launch the Criterion, and it faithfully catches that note of
haughty self-importance characteristic of Eliot in his pomp (perhaps few
editors of journals committed to maintaining “critical standards” can be
altogether free of it).
The importance of such publications in the literary or intellectual history of
a period is tantalizingly hard to gauge, especially in the case of journals
that were short-lived and erratically distributed. To the enthusiast for a
particular coterie of minor poets, the yellowing pages of the few issues
that appeared before debt and infighting took their toll may have the aura
of holy relics. But to the literary historian, focusing on who read what and
who influenced whom, the scale of attention given to such a publication will
be largely determined by whether any of its contributors subsequently
enjoyed a significant reputation. The social historian, in search of pattern
and representativeness, may well conclude that such a source has the
documentary value of school magazines or the annual reports of local
horticultural societies, and allot space accordingly.
A brave attempt at addressing these difficulties and bringing some kind of
order to the bewildering array of literary journals in the early decades of
the twentieth century has been made by the Modernist Magazines Project,
based at De Montfort University (this is not to be confused with the
Modernist Journals Project at Brown University in the United States, which
is helping to revolutionize this kind of study by making available fully
searchable digitized versions). It appears that the British project will, in
the first instance, issue in three volumes of essays to be known as The
Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, of which
Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 is the first (to be followed by volumes on the
United States and on Europe). Any choice of defining dates for such a
survey, as well as any definition of “Modernist”, are bound to be
contentious: the present volume errs on the generous side on both counts.
The Pre-Raphaelite journal the Germ (1850) figures as a “precursor”, before
we launch into detailed discussion of journals relating to the
“art-for-art’s-sake” and Arts and Crafts movements, and then to the Celtic
revival and the Georgians. We are a quarter of the way through the volume
before we encounter the kind of journal more usually thought to be
associated with the beginnings of literary Modernism, such as Ford Madox
Ford’s English Review (1908–10), Dora Marsden’s The Freewoman (1911–12), and
Wyndham Lewis’s Blast (1914–15). The logic behind 1955 as the closing date
also seems hard to fathom, but is perhaps an acknowledgement of the fact
that the Hugh MacDiarmid-inspired journal Voice of Scotland, having appeared
irregularly between 1938 and 1949, suddenly came to life again in that year.
The definition and scope of “Modernism” as a literary-historical label have
long been a matter of debate, but there has been a marked tendency in recent
scholarship to try to expand its range, employing it as a quasi-historical
label for a whole period rather than for a cultural style or movement.
Indeed, there is a risk that it is coming to embrace more or less everything
post-Victorian. Thus, the present volume claims to operate with “a more
generous definition” of the term which “defines modernism primarily as an
engagement with the intellectual problems of modernity . . . in which the
formal properties of literature are only one means to that end”. Or again,
we are told that what qualifies a group of Cambridge-based politico-literary
magazines of the 1930s for inclusion is their “active contemplation of
alternative modernities”. In such declarations (of which there are several
in this collection), “modernity” hovers between being a purely chronological
term and being a way of picking out certain developments which, taken
together, allegedly characterize the defining novelty of the period.
Whatever the merits of this usage, readers should be alerted to the fact
that this volume discusses a lot of writing that would not normally be
thought of as having any closer relation to Modernism than that of mere
contemporaneity, as well as some that does not have even that.
In addition, all the tensions and uncertainties about the genre of the
“literary magazine” suggested by the quotations from Eliot resurface here in
the form of intractable definitional issues facing the scholarly study of
such publications. We may all have our own ideas of what constitutes a
literary magazine, but I suspect many readers will find it odd to include,
for example, a general political and cultural weekly such as the New Age,
edited by A. R. Orage (1907–22), under such a label (at least in its British
usage), and odd in a different way to include Eliot’s own stately quarterly,
the Criterion (1922–39). This raises inevitable questions about implicit
criteria for inclusion and exclusion. There is an essay on the smart monthly
Life and Letters (1928–35) but not one on, say, the Bookman (1891–1935),
with which it was to merge in later years. The New Age is included, but not
the New English Weekly (1932–49), which was also initially edited by Orage
and which had the distinction of first publishing three of Eliot’s Four
Quartets, a not insignificant role in the dissemination of literary
Modernism. By contrast, we have an essay on Sir John Squire’s London Mercury,
which, though it did publish one or two writers subsequently classified as
“Modernists”, chiefly cultivated a rather more hearty, middlebrow version of
Englishness and was regarded as “the enemy” by the likes of Eliot and John
Middleton Murry. The free-thinking, broadly feminist weekly Time and Tide is
included, though not any of the more established weeklies with which its
founder, Lady Rhondda, explicitly aligned the new journal – the Nation, the
Spectator, the New Statesman and the Saturday Review, periodicals with “the
highest office” in journalism of attempting “not merely to talk but to
think”. (Only the first decade of the journal is discussed in Jane Dowson’s
essay, reasonably enough, though it went on to have a long life in various
incarnations, ending up, improbably, as Time and Tide and Business World in
the late 1960s. It had a brief reincarnation under its original title in the
1980s.) So, working with a generous if rather implicit remit, this volume
consists of almost forty essays, treating in detail some eighty periodicals,
the majority of them literary journals of either the “creative” or the
“critical” kind, most of them publishing, discussing, or responding to
“Modernism” in literature and the arts, during the century between the 1850s
and the 1950s, but heavily concentrated in the period from about 1910 to the
1940s. The high quality of several of the essays together with the
informativeness of the accounts of numerous relatively obscure publications
make this an extremely useful publication, for all its ragged edges. (It has
also been handsomely produced, in pleasingly readable layout, with footnotes
at the bottom of the page; it contains more than a hundred illustrations,
mostly reproductions of periodical covers.) The best essays, such as Michael
Whitworth’s outstanding contribution on the two journals edited by Murry,
the Athenaeum (1919–21) and the Adelphi (1923–48), draw on new archival
research and combine sensitive content-criticism with attention to the
journals’ material properties. There are also authoritative accounts by
those who have dealt at greater length with a particular journal elsewhere,
such as Laura Marcus on Close Up or Jason Harding on the Criterion, while
excellent essays of a different kind rescue short-lived journals from
various kinds of obscurity, such as Rod Mengham’s on a trio of Surrealist
magazines in the late 1930s and early 40s or Cairns Craig’s on a clutch of
ephemeral outlets for new Scottish writing over several decades.
Much of the pleasure to be had comes from the accounts of journals that have
been largely neglected by literary historians. These include the Acorn
(1905–06), an Arts and Crafts periodical in which the contributors’ names
were not printed but signed by hand; New Numbers (1914), which had no editor
or editorial matter and was “published” from Lascelles Abercrombie’s
“cottage in rural Gloucestershire, with his wife, Catherine, doing much of
the work”; the Decachord (1924–31), which promoted a belated “Georgianism”
in poetry though “it retained a focus on the West Country”; Ireland Today
(1936–8) whose anonymous editor was “a former bomb maker and Director of
Chemicals with the IRA”; and Arson: An ardent review (1942), whose editor
declared, ardently enough, “N.B. It will be noticed that no poetry is
printed in these pages for the simple reason we do not believe there is a
single line approaching the nature of poetry being penned in English”.
One of the most fascinating themes to emerge is the repetitiveness of the
terms in which the target readerships were imagined. There are constant
invocations of a “serious reading public”, not defined by profession or
level of education, whose needs are not being met by the shallow or
coterie-led discussion of literature available in existing publications. The
Welsh Review (1939–40) was representative in aiming to address “men and
women of mind”, hinting that Wales’s more democratic educational traditions
meant that, as in Scotland, such individuals were not to be identified with
any one class or set of occupations. And the necessary rhetorical complement
of this idealized public was the demonization of the dominant literary
culture. The Athenaeum, for example, defined itself the “enemy of every form
of intellectual cant and humbug, however eminent and established”; while
Geoffrey Grigson, never one for understatement, positioned New Verse
(1933–9) in opposition to “the poisonous and steaming Gran Chaco of
vulgarity, sciolism and literary racketeering”. (Grigson’s wielding of the
critical scythe receives winningly sympathetic treatment here from Stan
Smith. Grigson’s penchant for exaggeration does, of course, make him very
quotable: it’s hard to resist his unfair description of Scrutiny as in
danger of becoming “the perfect body-builder for prigs”.) Needless to say,
these self-serving self-positionings are not to be taken at face value.
Several of the essays buttress their more quizzical treatment of these
aspirations by referring to Mark Morrisson’s The Public Face of Modernism
(2001), in which he argued that some of the early Modernist journals were
not in fact, as is often assumed, deliberately cultivating a withdrawal into
a minority sphere of avant-garde culture, but shared, rather, “an optimism
about re- directing the public function of the press”.
In addition to the perhaps necessary self-dramatization involved in posing as
the lonely beacon of artistic integrity in a commercial world, a kind of
energizing pathos could be generated by the recurrent trope of being the
last of a kind. Sean Latham rightly remarks that “from the beginning,
Horizon [1940–50] had established itself rhetorically as the last ‘little
magazine’”, but, as with so many claims to being the last of a kind, the
pleasures of elegy were here being allowed to displace the demands of
accuracy. Almost every such journal is the last of the “little magazines” –
until the next one comes along. R. A. Scott-James, the last editor of the
London Mercury, declared in 1939 in the kind of obituary editorial common in
journals announcing their closure, that there was no longer any hope of
resisting “the democratization of culture and the mass- production of books,
papers, films etc which stimulate or drug the popular mind”. As it happened,
Horizon was launched later that year. When the venerable Edinburgh Review
closed in 1929, the Bermondsey Book, a quarterly aimed at encouraging
writing by “working people”, drew the familiar declinist moral: “The passion
of the modern reader for the topical, which is too frequently the ephemeral,
is notorious, but we are surprised to learn that among the cultured classes
there are not sufficient people with a sense of tradition strong enough to
support a journal as famous as the Edinburgh Review”. Alas, the following
year saw the realization that among the “working people” there were not
sufficient readers to support a journal as obscure as the Bermondsey Book.
One way of making some, necessarily speculative, inferences about readership
is from the kinds of advertising a journal carried (when “commercial” enough
to do so), and several essays attend to the semiotics of those pages usually
ignored by content-greedy literary and intellectual historians. For example,
Jane Goldman concludes that the advertisements in Life and Letters under
Desmond MacCarthy’s editorship (1928–34) suggest “the caricature of a
comfortably off pipe-smoking, male, metropolitan reader, middle class,
middlebrow, but with some highbrow literary aspirations as a serious reader,
a book collector and literary connoisseur, and possibly a fledgling writer”.
The fact that the advertisements seem to be aimed at male readers may say
more about control of purchasing power than appeal of content; other kinds
of evidence suggest that many of these magazines had substantial female
readerships.
Given that the nature of the various assumed readerships was as pivotal
rhetorically as it was crucial economically, it is a pity that no systematic
effort has been made to provide circulation figures. Some of the essays do
attempt this; most do not (there is no entry for “circulation” in the
index). We know that for the critical reviews, numbers were in the low
thousands, while for the little magazines of new writing we are sometimes
talking the low hundreds. Among the better-known examples, the range
extended from the Criterion, which peaked at between 800 and 1,000 copies in
the mid-1920s (at 3/6d it was expensive, even for a quarterly), to Horizon,
which, profiting from the paucity of competitors as well as the wartime
hunger for reading matter, reached 8,000 to 10,000 copies per month in the
early 1940s.
Perhaps it is inevitable that a large collection of essays on such a sprawling
topic should seem, in the end, to add up to less than the sum of its parts.
Repetition exacerbates this impression: for example, Cyril Connolly’s
celebrated contrast between “eclectic” and “dynamic” editors is quoted in at
least five different contributions. Attempts by the editors, in the general
introduction and the introductions to each section, to impose a kind of
coherence do not really help. The repeated deployment of Raymond Williams’s
schematic binary of “emergent” and “residual” conjures up a faux-sociology,
and their insistence on celebrating the “dissident” or “oppositional”
character of these periodicals sits better with some examples than with
others. Looking to identify an organizing developmental theme, they
emphasize that the volume runs from the Germ of the Pre-Raphaelites to the
discussion in the final chapter of F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny, no longer a
magazine of art and creative writing, but of criticism, which closed in
1953. This movement over a century from an artistic to a critical formation
is symptomatic of the emergence, consolidation, and institutionalisation of
predominantly literary modernism.
Well, yes, a story can be told of the growing acceptance of “literary
modernism”, though it cannot be told in terms of “critical” journals
replacing “creative” ones (and it seems curious to date the “movement” from
the 1850s). But more curious still is the fact that the chapter on Scrutiny
is not actually the final chapter in the book. It is the antepenultimate
chapter, the final one being a discussion of Tambimuttu’s Poetry London
(1939–51) and Indian Writing (1940–42), the former of which published new
poetry by the younger poets of the so-called Apocalyptic school. Not only is
it surprising to find the editors mis-reporting the structure of their own
book, but the slip seems symptomatic of their urge towards the schematic,
even when that is resisted by the riches surveyed in the constituent essays.
Far from representing the “institutionalization” of Modernism, the last
chapter signals a fresh wave of creative energy on the part of poets who
were mining other seams, exploring other idioms, and in this respect it
serves as a properly open-ended ending, pointing to the continued vitality
of the genre. The literary journal is dead. Long live the literary journal.
Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, editors
THE OXFORD CRITICAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY OF MODERNIST MAGAZINES
Volume One: Britain and Ireland 1880–1955
955pp. Oxford University Press. £95 (US $180).
978 0 19 921115 9
Stefan Collini’s Common Reading: Critics, historians, publics has just
been published in paperback. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain appeared
in 2006.
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