Little Magazines (Pamphlets on American Writers)

PAMPHLETS ON AMERICAN WRITERS . NUMBER 32

Little Magazines

BY REED WHITTEMORE

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS • MINNEAPOLIS

Copyright 1963 by the University of Minnesota ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Printed in the United States of America at the Hart Press, Long Prairie, Minnesota

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-64004

Distributed to high schools in the United States by McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. New York Chicago Corte Madera, Calif. Dallas

PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN, INDIA, AND PAKISTAN BY THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, LONDON, BOMBAY, AND KARACHI, AND IN CANADA BY THOMAS ALLEN, LTD., TORONTO

LITTLE MAGAZINES

College, has been editor of two little magazines, Furioso and the Carleton Miscellany. His latest book, The Fascination of the A bomination, is a collection of verse, essays, and short stories.

Little Magazines

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.T TAKES very little to start a little magazine. As a minimum a secondhand typewriter, some paper, and access to a mimeograph machine will do. The new editor can write the thing himself and send it out to his friends. But one can spend money at it. In the history of little magazines there have been a number of lavish ventures done up in nineteen colors by foundations and rich widows. Littleness is not determined by the money expended, though money inevitably has had some bearing on it, particularly in the last decade. When pressed, recently, a prominent little magazine editor estimated that the potential audience for "serious magazines" (he meant little magazines) in the United States was probably about 12,000. He is the only one who knows how he arrived at that remarkably precise figure, but certainly no little magazine has exceeded the figure so far without having its dignity questioned. Still, littleness is not finally determined by readership either. What, then? Nobody seems sure, but some of the apologists for little magazines venture in at this point with that word "serious": a little magazine is a serious magazine or a serious magazine is a little magazine. Such a definition may be nonsense but it is as near to definition as most readers of little magazines get. Nor will this pamphlet get further. To avoid complete irresponsibility the pamphlet will, however, tackle the word "serious" lightly, in stages, and it may profitably begin by considering the opposite of seriousness; that is, by considering what little magazine editors of all shades have consistently 5

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regarded as wnserious magazine activity, namely big magazine activity, or the thinking which precedes big magazine activity, such thinking as that behind the following quotation (from Theodore Peterson's Magazines in the Twentieth Century): "This book . . . seeks to trace the popular magazine from its origins in the late nineteenth century through 1955 by drawing on a variety of sources — on the magazines themselves; on corporate records of magazine publishing houses; on records of the magazine industry; on reminiscences and observations of publishers, editors, writers, and business office personnel; and on the small body of research done by social scientists. "In general, I have limited my subject to commercial magazines edited for the lay public. . . . "My aim has been to explore the major tendencies in the magazine industry . . . "The low-priced popular magazine of national circulation was born in the late nineteenth century as America made the transition from an agrarian to an industrial economy. It emerged as changes in the distribution of consumer goods brought about a growing volume of advertising. By joining the magazine with the system of marketing, national advertising affected many aspects of the magazine industry. As the volume of advertising increased, magazines grew in numbers and in circulation. . . . "The magazine audience was widened by a rise in population and by such fruits of democracy and industrialization as an increase in leisure time, an increase in the general level of education, and a redistribution of income. . . . " Little magazine editors — that is, serious little magazine editors — can be exceedingly snobbish in the presence of remarks like these. The remarks are intelligible and apparently sensible, and they even deal with at least one matter that some, though not all, little magazine editors could regard as serious, that is, the "lay public." But for all that they remain unserious from the little magazine editor's point of view because they focus on what he can only 6

Little Magazines regard as side issues. Magazining is not, for him, an industry. As he sits in his bedroom- or attic-office surrounded by cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts, images of "corporate records" and "magazine publishing houses" and "business office personnel" amuse him, of an "increase in leisure time" depress him; and if the "lay public" happens to interest him it interests him in the same way that an object off in the distance like Utopia might interest him, an object to which not much attention should be paid if everyday matters are to be tended to. What those everyday matters are and have been for little magazine editors is the subject of this pamphlet. I have chosen to deal with just a handful of magazines in detail, adding at the end of the discussion brief descriptions of a few others whose activities could not readily be assimilated into my main essay. For a detailed account of dozens and dozens of such publications (perhaps a thousand could be uncovered by a tireless scholar) I recommend a volume by Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine, though it is now a bit dated. For any serious understanding of them nothing but the magazines themselves will do. Let me begin with a familiar case. In the first issue of Poetry (Chicago), founded by Harriet Monroe in 1912, appeared a statement of principles: Poetry needed help, so Poetry was going to help it ("poetry alone, of all the fine arts, has been left to shift for herself"); and at the same time the world needed poetry ("an immediate and desperate need"), so there was presumably an audience for poetry. Poetry would try to tap it. Miss Monroe had with her another crusader, Ezra Pound, perhaps more fervent than herself, certainly more polemical. He had in the magazine's first issue a poem in praise of Whistler, which concluded: 7

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You and Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts Show us there's chance at least of winning through. Miss Monroe went all around Chicago gathering money. She was a good promoter and soon had a fine list of patrons (whose names she printed regularly in the magazine) and subscribers, none of whom she was disposed to let go: "What do you owe, you who read this article, to Shelley? to Coleridge, Milton, Shakespeare? to Moliere, Dante, Sappho, Homer? to all the great poets whose immortal singing has incalculably enriched life . . . ?" As might be expected, the above eloquence (printed at the end of Volume IV) was followed by a plea for more patronage and renewed subscriptions (in the background Pound was saying, "Keep on remindin' 'em that we ain't bolsheviks, but only the terrifyin' voice of civilization, kulchuh, refinement, aesthetic perception"). Miss Monroe's industry was rewarded; fifty years later Poetry was still afloat, and it was still being advertised in the Monroe vein by statements, like the following, from well-known poets: "Without Poetry the poem like the wild pigeon would have remained among us no more than an official memory" (William Carlos Williams). For the saving of poetry Miss Monroe adopted very early an editorial principle which has remained with Poetry ever since: "the editors hope to keep free of entangling alliances with any single class or school." Crusading, however, even for Art, is difficult to engage in without the formation of "entangling alliances." The idea, for example, that one can simply represent poetry alone — and do so by cultivating genius and eschewing dolts — is a curiously unsocial and unhistorical view of the nature of poetry, or of art and literature as a whole. In basing her publishing venture upon such an idea Miss Monroe, as well as the editors of Poetry who succeeded her and of other magazines which copied her, in effect backed a way of art with no commitments except to eternity, a weak reed. Of such a program it seemed unreasonable to expect 8

Little Magazines much; and editors and writers of clearer persuasions accordingly advised Poetry of this for many years, editors and writers as diverse as Dwight Macdonald and Archibald MacLeish. Yet the weak reed, after a dark period in the thirties and forties, is again in the ascendant. The possibility of an art which can exist independently of the surrounding climate, even an art which can create its own climate and then impose it on the "outside," is now as seriously entertained as it was in the twenties. There remains nonetheless no doctrine, nothing formulatable in the Monroe position except the platitudinous proposition that literature has important values that should be preserved. What it comes down to is opposition to the historical and social climate its adherents find themselves in, and a resultant determination to do something unhistorical about it. This point is best made by looking at the career of Pound himself, whose unhistorical activities in history are notorious, yet who is the only editor indispensable to this chronicle. Born in Idaho, educated at Hamilton College and the University of Pennsylvania, he took a teaching job in Indiana in 1907, lost the job right away, gave up on the United States as a place for the literate, and left it precipitately to live in England, France, and Italy. As the "foreign correspondent" for Poetry he was in part responsible for the early eminence of that magazine, but as an editor of several other magazines as well, as a friend and enemy of editors, and as a spectacular poet and literary critic in his own right, he rapidly transcended Poetry. His early cultural complaints were various and extreme but almost uniformly against the going norm, whatever the norm was. He was against the bourgeoisie and Victorians and iambic and abstractions and Swinburne. Later he came to concentrate upon modern capitalistic finance, finding usury to be the root of all cultural wrongs including the decline of literature. He identified him9

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self with Italian fascism in time to become the most celebrated American traitor of World War II. Captured at the end of the war, sent home for trial, found to be mentally unfit to stand trial, confined to a mental hospital for twelve years, and finally released at the behest of half the American literary community to return to Italy, he is probably the most antidemocratic, anti-melting-pot artist in the canon of little magazines, yet also perhaps the prototype. Interestingly, some of the qualities of his thinking which led psychiatrists to declare him mentally unsound are also the qualities which have made him so representative of little magazine editors. From the beginning, for example, he displayed an uncommon interest in saving civilization (after World War II he was less expansive than usual when, in denying that he had been a traitor, he kept saying that he had merely been trying to save the Constitution). Throughout his letters to Harriet Monroe and others he tended to identify poetry with civilization, and to see himself accordingly as a major preserver of civilization as he walked about London and Paris picking up poems by Yeats, Eliot, Frost, and others to send to Harriet. The following statement is characteristic: "My problem is to keep alive a certain group of advancing poets, to set the arts in their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization. The arts must be supported in preference to the church and scholarship. Artists first, then, if necessary, professors and parsons." His picture of modern civilization was, essentially, of a few bright artistic spirits, all of whom he knew, caught in a whirlwind. The bright spirits could save civilization if first they could be saved from it; so Pound worked diligently to save them by trying to find money for them and by getting them published. His picture of the publishing world was, similarly, of a small, select community of enlightened editors, almost never connected with commercial 10

Little Magazines publishing, who were not concerned with large audiences (he hated "that infamous remark [on the back of Poetry] about poets needing an audience") but with the promulgation and preservation of excellence for a few: "If the 243 Americans who ever heard of civilization wd quit crabbing each other and organize, it would be a start." "Honestly, besides yourself [Harriet Monroe] and Mrs. Henderson, whom do you know who takes the Art of poetry seriously? . . . Who in America believes in perfection and that nothing short of it is worth while? Who would rather quit once and for all than go on turning out shams?" "There is no democracy in the arts." "My only contention is that genius ought to exist, and that all publications should not exclude it." "I want a place where I and T. S. Eliot can appear once a month (or once an 'issue') and where Joyce can appear when he likes, and where Wyndham Lewis can appear if he comes back from the war." "It is the function of the public to prevent the artist's expression by hook or crook." The few for whom the little magazines were to be published and on whom Pound placed such great reliance were not, he kept discovering, apt to be found on college campuses. He didn't really believe in the civilizing possibilities of institutions of any kind (in this respect conforming to a most familiar tenet of American romanticism), and the academic institutions with which he had any acquaintance seemed to him the most disappointing institutions of all, disappointing perhaps because they looked so civilized: "All the U. of P. or your god damn college or any other god damn American college does or will do for a man of letters is to ask him to go away without breaking the silence." In short he discovered that if there were to be institutions they had to be small institu11

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tions, preferably run by Pound, and they had to be institutions dedicated to protecting, helping, educating, promoting the great talents of the period rather than the almighty many. Pound was very consistent on this point; whether talking about a foundation or a college or a little magazine he was constantly angered at the expenditure of time, money, and energy on mediocrity. Poor Harriet was always printing too much; the foundations were always giving their money away to dryasdust scholars; and the colleges had sold themselves completely on trying to educate mediocre minds. The intensity of his commitment to saving civilization by saving the unusual man — and the blindness he accordingly displayed toward the limitations of such a program — may be best observed in his formation, together with Richard Aldington, of "Bel Esprit," an institution dedicated to saving civilization by saving T. S. Eliot. The institution was created to raise money for Eliot, who was working in a bank, had suffered a nervous breakdown, had written The Waste Land while convalescing, and needed to be "released" for other such endeavors. Pound went about among his friends asking each of them to contribute ten pounds a year to Eliot for as long as Eliot needed it, at the same time circulating an "outline" of the general aims of "Bel Esprit" full of statements like this: "There is no organized or coordinated civilization left, only individual scattered survivors. . . . Must restart civilization." The "Bel Esprit" was a freak, a marvel, yet it was intimately related in spirit to the little magazines of Pound's time, and to his conception of what little magazines should do and be. They too were to be instances of cooperation among a select few; they too were formed to promote, as he said, "an individual here and there" and thereby "restart civilization"; and in the process they too were obligated to fight tooth and nail against all compromises with mediocrity. Pound resigned from his position with Poetry at least twice because Harriet Monroe kept printing what he thought was 12

Little Magazines bad, and he got in several squabbles with Amy Lowell over her publishing schemes which tended, he believed, to water down good work with bad and so sell out to "uncritical democracy." Thus he slowly discovered that even those tiny institutions, the little magazines, over which he had some control, inclined to betray him and his cause. That he was personally unassimilatable by "uncritical democracy" seems clear: after his release from St. Elizabeth's hospital a few years ago he left the United States, probably for the last time, with the observation that everybody in this lost country was crazy. But his works? And his influence? All his ravings against Harriet have left us with a magazine, Poetry, which has in effect made a virtue of compromise, has turned longevity and persistence and representativeness in the publishing of verse into cultural capital. The point is not to complain about Poetry, though a complaint may be in order, but to say that its continuing march under the Pound banner conceals a real shift in the order of the march and therefore perhaps a real shift in the ideology provoking it. For Pound the "good thing" was to be found on the mountain and brought down, but in the history of Poetry the good things have mostly been found in the valley, on the principle: Print everybody and you'll find somebody. Poetry is probably the most significant magazine to be mentioned in this pamphlet. Except for its long life (the average life of a little magazine is probably not more than two or three years) it has been in principle and practice the model for hundreds of others. Many of them have of course printed fiction as well as poetry, but poetry has been the wild pigeon, to use Dr. Williams' figure, they have felt particularly responsible for. And has Poetry, or its many progeny, preserved the wild pigeon? There are many sensible skeptics who would say no. Or if they 13

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acknowledged poetry's preservation they would ask embarrassingly what it has been preserved as, a question that needs to be asked. Poetry first began to be in trouble about the middle of the nineteenth century, at which time, characteristically, its values began to be asserted with unusual vehemence. I am thinking not only of Matthew Arnold's notorious proposition about the immense future awaiting poetry but also of the amazingly pontifical reputations achieved by certain poets, notably Tennyson and Browning. These reputations, and the reputation of poetry itself, were not built upon "a few lines down from the hills unsullied" (Pound's phrase, in the poem "Homage to Sextus Propertius"). Instead poetry — and literature as a whole to the extent that it partook of the insights of poetry — was seen to be capable of presenting mankind with a complete image of itself or what it ought to be, was seen to be the right and true discipline to save mankind from the lesser images of the narrower disciplines. Thus a poet, it was conceived, could descend to be a journalist or a historian or a minister or a scientist, but he could be happily all these and much more when he ascended back to poetry. Now if we look at the early issues of Poetry we will see something of the same grandiose spirit at work, a spirit the more remarkable because the early issues were relatively thin, containing maybe fifteen poems by such persons as Yeats, John Reed, Fletcher, Tagore, H. D., Pound, Sandburg, Robinson, Bodenheim, and Eliot, a couple of reviews, and a pronouncement or two by Monroe and Pound on the state of literature. But despite the civilization-saving flavor there was also present a newly constricted view of what it was about a poem that one should be interested in. A gap is visible even in the early issues between the underlying civilization-saving theory and the rather narrow, issue-by-issue preoccupation with printing verse that is rhetorically clean, descriptively sharp, thematically unplatitudinous, and generally "adequate." 14

Little Magazines In explanation of this gap it should be remembered that Poetry, captained here by Pound, was in its infancy the home of the Imagists and a whole stable of anti-Victorians who, when they thought of Victorians, thought first of flabby rhetoric and second of semireligious mutterings in verse about Truth and God. As a result Poetry had a craft view of the poetry world which, while a reasonable reaction against the immediate past and also against the current practice in less enlightened quarters, was also a workaday view of the Word. It may be argued that civilization-saving should and does begin with the Word, but it also may be argued that the Word constitutes a rather specialized study and that specialization is exactly what the grand old Victorian or pre-Raphaelite masters made capital out of not practicing. Furthermore, if we look at the later issues of Poetry we see that this specialization has, if not increased, at least become more apparent by the continual practice of it, by the insistence over the years that Poetry is a magazine of verse only, and of verse mostly of a certain kind: short, miscellaneous, personal perceptions, recollections, meditations. Asked what is at the core or center of Poetry's historical being, one can perhaps best answer that Poetry is, finally, a trade journal. The trade is a worthy one, and so is the journal, but the two work together to maintain the boundaries of the trade and the standards within those boundaries, rather than to fuss directly with the culture Pound and Monroe conceived the trade to serve. To serve. Service. Poetry's or literature's service to culture. With these puritanical notions we are confronted immediately with the central ideological issue of the little magazine world. Little magazines are incomprehensible without reference to their real or imaginary responsibilities, to whom and for what. For it has been the rare little magazine which has not been begun by a soul with large plans for shouldering responsibility, yet the rare little magazine 15

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which has not been criticized for failing to shoulder it. And in all the resultant arguments the issue has normally been What is the "it"? In the case of Poetry the "it" began as something nebulous involving the whole of civilization, but rapidly became more narrowly defined, for practical reasons, as a responsibility for printing and encouraging poets who demonstrated either a real sense of poetry as an art or at least of poetry as a trade of some magnitude and difficulty. Indeed it has been partly because the editors of Poetry have been, for fifty years, so scrupulous in their efforts to fulfill their imagined obligations to poets and poetry that they have been criticized for evading responsibilities elsewhere, responsibilities they would probably deny have been theirs. What other responsibilities? And to whom? I can best answer these questions indirectly by comparing Poetry's policies with those of two other magazine groups, one represented here exclusively by the Partisan Review (though it was a large group in the thirties) and the other by a quartet of southern (or near southern) magazines with pretty much a common ideological center: the Fugitive, the Southern Review, the Kenyan Review, and the Sewanee Review. The Partisan Review began in the thirties as a Communist organ, and was for that not distinguishable from a great many other publications of the depression era. Then it broke with the party and, while being attacked by those it had "betrayed," began to take great pains to distinguish between a literature corrupted by entangling alliances and a free literature of political or social engagement: "As our readers know, the tradition of aestheticism has given way to a literature which, for its origin and final justification, looks beyond itself and deep into the historic process. . . . Any magazine, we believe, that aspires to a place in the vanguard of literature today, will be revolutionary in tendency; but we are 16

Little Magazines also convinced that any such magazine will be unequivocally independent. PARTISAN REVIEW is aware of its responsibility to the revolutionary movement in general, but we disclaim obligation to any of its organized political expressions. Indeed we think that the cause of revolutionary literature is best served by a policy of no commitments to any political party" (1937). This insistence upon freedom on the one hand and commitment on the other — a normally polite paradox made tough and practical by political urgencies — reveals the primary literary fact of the thirties: the existence of a movement, an organized social movement to which one could be committed, a movement with explicit practical plans for subverting the culture that the literary people had all along been trying to subvert on their own. There had been plenty of revolutionaries in the twenties with clearer social heads than Pound's; there had even been many magazines, like the Seven Arts and Secession, which had professed immediate social responsibilities. But the difficulties of conducting social and spiritual revolutions had been pleasantly distant until the thirties. For the little magazine editor the interesting problem suddenly arose as to whether he wished to continue to be an anarchist now that he didn't have to be, now that he could participate in organized rebellion. The PR editors in effect decided that they still wished to be anarchist, but with qualifications. Their retreat from the party coincided with the general retreat by intellectuals in the late thirties from their enthusiastic commitments of the early thirties, a retreat of great historical significance which I do not wish to belittle but simply take for granted while pointing out what is generally ignored, that the retreat was a retreat, not a rout, and that it took place in several stages. Furthermore none of the stages, even the last, moved the PR editors as far back of the social-historical front as the editors of Poetry had always been. PR continued to 17

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adhere to the principle of literary engagement, and to abhor disengagement, even as it became progressively disengaged. For PR the first stage of post-Communist engagement involved an attempt to demonstrate that one could be "revolutionary in tendency" without being Stalinist; in other words, that one could see and report truthfully the decay of the bourgeois culture without adopting the Stalinist program as the necessary alternative. In the late thirties any number of arguments took place in the pages of PR on how to be committed to a political system without losing one's intellectual integrity. Andre" Gide writing on the U.S.S.R. proclaimed that "there is no party which can keep my loyalty — which can prevent me from preferring truth to the Party itself"; James Agee wrote a parody of the political utopianism of southern Agrarianism; Dwight Macdonald complained about various kinds of political neutrality and ignorance (the New Yorker's "inhibitions stretch from sex to the class struggle"; Robinson Jeffers' "failure to develop poetically is parallel to his political development — or rather, lack of it"); Arthur Mizener, optimistic about new defectors from the party line, discovered that "serious literature is able, for the first time since it discarded the rationale of Western Capitalism, to deal with the moral dilemmas familiar to the common reader"; and any number of other writers worked equally hard at being simultaneously nonaesthetic and non-Stalinist. The second stage, perhaps not readily distinguishable from the first except in terms of objects being attacked, occurred as a reaction to the literary proponents of what came to be known as the "American Front," notably Archibald MacLeish and Van Wyck Brooks. At the outset of World War II MacLeish and Brooks attacked American intellectuals en masse for not being engaged, and literary intellectuals in particular for adopting a narrow aestheticism which, they said, backed fascism by default. The PR replied by dismissing the accusation with contempt, mostly because the 18

Little Magazines verbiage carrying it ended "in hollow strain, inflated rhetoric, and the empty heat of evangelism" (Morton Zabel). But the general accusation, divorced from the empty heat, caused consternation nonetheless, and various fine discussions of the nature of fascism followed (notably essays by James Burnham later to appear in his book The Managerial Revolution) as well as a few admissions that the proponents of non-Stalinist revolutionary engagement were in desperate trouble: they were "confronted by a frustrating historical situation — the breakdown of the political, social and cultural values of the bourgeois order, and the simultaneous impotence of any progressive revolutionary force to sweep clear the debris" (Dwight Macdonald). Clearly the optimism of the first stage had vanished, but this did not mean that PR was ready for aestheticism. Clement Greenberg, for example, reviewing in 1941 a group of new little magazines, firmly maintained the first-stage line by asserting that the new magazines promoted an "abstract notion of quality" and that their chief difficulty was, "after money, ideas." It was apparent that though the PR people had lost the particular historical grounds for the kind of literature they believed in they were nonetheless not persuaded that a literature with no such grounds could be of interest or value. The award of the Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound in 1949 for The Pisan Cantos was the occasion for the unveiling of the third PR stage, perhaps the most interesting stage for this chronicle since, with Pound on the scene, the battle between aestheticism and engagement was suddenly focused on one person. Here was Pound, an incurably unhistorical literary man who had backed an "abstract notion of quality" vehemently for forty years, here he was engaged to the hilt nationally, as a traitor by his own doing, but engaged on a side, fascism, that none of his literary chums had chosen (though some of them were accused of having done so). The judges for the award, none from PR, were Conrad Aiken, 19

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W. H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Katherine Garrison Chapin, T. S. Eliot, Paul Green, Robert Lowell, Katherine Anne Porter, Karl Shapiro, Allen Tate, Willard Thorp, Robert Penn Warren, and Leoni Adams. They tried to make their position clear, in a statement issued in announcing the award, which concluded: "To permit other considerations than that of poetic achievement to sway the decision would destroy the significance of the award and would in principle deny the validity of that objective perception of value on which civilized society must rest." The complications of the ensuing arguments, the most extensive of which took place in PR, were sufficient to build a course in literary history or criticism on. For the purposes here it is enough to remark that the old PR dilemma of 1937 emerged again, still tending to separate the PR men from the Poetry men, though there were exceptions. Defecting from the PR side was Dwight Macdonald, who abandoned his engagement principles but not for literary reasons: he praised the judges for asserting American intellectual freedom from entangling political alliances and found, in this particular demonstration of freedom, "the brightest political act in a dark period." Defecting from the Poetry side was Karl Shapiro, who would soon become the editor of Poetry and who had been the only vocally dissenting judge on the Bollingen Award Committee. He said: "I voted against Pound in the belief that the poet's political and moral philosophy ultimately vitiates his poetry and lowers its standard as literary work." Otherwise the comments reflected with reasonable consistency the aestheticism of the Poetry camp and the engagement theory of the PR camp, but the watering down of the latter had been indeed extensive. Gone was the Marxist kind of historical engagement which had been the keystone of the earlier position, and in its place was an admittedly indeterminate, humanistic appeal to history, society, environment: ". . . the context in which this question is raised has to be extended to include the his20

Little Magazines torical circumstances that now condition literary judgement in the United States. What the present controversy demonstrates is that the category of the aesthetic is not the primary one for human life, and that the attitude which holds aesthetic considerations to be primary is far from primary itself, but produced by very many historical, social, and moral conditions. It would be hard to define just what the reigning climate of opinion has become in literary America since the collapse of the 'thirties; but perhaps it is high time we sought to establish a new climate, beginning with a re-examination of some of these 'non-aesthetic' bases of literary judgement." So wrote a PR editor, William Barrett. To tell us that we ought to establish a climate, and to allege that until we do so we haven't even got one, was to make a hash of the old Marxist affirmations. The historical context, while vital to and anterior to "aesthetic considerations," was missing and needed to be created — by aesthetes perhaps? Mr. Barrett would probably have said no, and with conviction, pointing to Pound as an example of the aesthetic mind at work on social, historical matters. And yet, with his aesthetic opponents already acknowledging Pound's ideological and social aberrations, and themselves appealing to history, Barrett's argument was toothless in comparison with PR arguments of the past. During the Bollingen controversy the judges' phrase "objective perception of value" was thoroughly tended to. Mr. Barrett chose to be ironic, noting that the objectivity being expressed enabled the judges to dismiss material in Pound's poems which was "hideous, ugly and vicious" and concentrate upon "rhythm and diction," upon the "effective use of a living colloquial language," in short upon "the poet's technical accomplishments." In the hands of lesser critics the Barrett position came out as a simple polemic against art for art's sake, against the "coterie" poetry of the whole 21

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twentieth century. The judges in turn were hard put to muster a defense. They did have principles they regarded as fairly objective, principles having to do with more than "technical accomplishments"; but the principles were not readily applicable to many of the poems for which the award had ostensibly been given. As the dissenter Karl Shapiro noted, "reasons of personal loyalty" entered into the decision. The poet whom Pound had intended to save civilization with or through, T. S. Eliot, was one of the judges. And the other judges, whether they had known Pound personally or not, were deeply aware of Pound's contributions to the little magazine world and the general literary culture, whatever the merits of The Pisan Cantos. Who could be objective about Pound? Not the judges. They were saved more by their dignity in the face of the opposition's frequently wild intemperance than by their logic. What they stood for was battered about until it was hardly recognizable. A firmer historian than I might even say that with the Bollingen Award the era of clear literary conviction really ended, to be replaced by a kind of "Art Is Good for You" decade. I disagree because it seems to me, first, that there had never been a period of clear literary conviction and, second, that even after the award the old arguments continued underneath, with PR remaining a magazine of general social as well as literary discussion. But certainly it is true that the old combatants were exhausted and that the hot war turned tepid. The tepidity is best sensed by comparison. We must go back twenty or thirty years again and look at the careers of certain southern editors and writers whose convictions played a part in the Bollingen Award. These men discovered during the Bollingen battle that they were thought of as simple-minded aesthetes, and that all the distinctions they had sought to establish between themselves and simple lovers of Truth and Beauty had gone down the drain. 22

Little Magazines Yet in their heyday they had even thought of themselves as men of engagement. Their magazine careers began small, in such short-lived ventures as the Double-Dealer (New Orleans), the Reviewer (Richmond), and the one to be looked at here, the Fugitive (Nashville), magazines so difficult to get nowadays that they linger on mostly in the mythology surrounding the main figures who wrote for them. In his Southern Writers in the Modern World, Donald Davidson describes the Fugitive as largely a manifestation of the activities of a very talented Saturday-evening poetry-smashing group, where discussion "was likely to be ruthless in its exposure of any technical weakness as to rhyme, meter, imagery, metaphor and was often minute in its analysis of details." Allen Tate makes a related observation about the southern literary renaissance as a whole, which involved, he says, a switch "from the rhetorical mode to the dialectical mode." In other words a question period began on Saturday nights in Nashville and ended up in the Southern Review, the Kenyan Review, a refurbished Sewanee Review, a new southern literature, and the New Criticism. If we can believe Donald Davidson the Saturday nights in Nashville were weighty nights indeed. Those in attendance were, among others, Sidney Hirsch, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Merrill Moore, Robert Penn Warren, and Davidson. Their discussion moved rapidly from the particular to the general, from specific problems of rhetoric and prosody to the worth or possibility of poetry in an age without myth. The evenings were also mostly nonpolitical, or so they would have seemed to a PR man. Says Davidson: "WTe did not need to ask whether the Muse were thankless, so long as we found excitement, week by week, year by year, in strictly meditating, as indeed we did, the art of poetry. We meditated almost nothing else besides." But the group's meditations were interrupted by the Dayton evolution trial of 1925, which got the 23

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Civil War going again, sent John Crowe Ransom out briefly to defend fundamentalism in religion, and produced eventually (1930) a volume of essays entitled /'// Take My Stand, which may be set against the early PR statements of principle. Indeed it antedates PR's advocacy of a literature of engagement by a few years and would seem therefore, except for one slight difficulty, to make the southerners ancestors of PR. The difficulty is that the southerners perversely took a stern line against the revolutionary historical processes of industrialism around them, and made a point of not being "progressive" but "reactionary," not "in the vanguard" but "in the great tradition." No magazine was produced to document this curious historical episode. It could therefore well be omitted here except that it marked its fomenters, politically, thereafter as wanting a return to "huge Georgian plantation houses with well-filled slave quarters" (as the Macon Telegraph put it). That most of the poetry of two of the most prominent fomenters, Ransom and Tate, may be taken as evidence disproving any plantation commitments made no difference; from then on they were regarded by many apostles of engagement as political incompetents. Indeed the political reputation they achieved then may reasonably be said to have influenced the direction their literary activities took in the critical thirties. At just the time the PR editors were fighting the party the southerners appeared to be retiring gracefully into "the tradition of aestheticism," a retirement which seemed to be signalized by the appearance, under the generous auspices of Huey Long via Louisiana State University, of the Southern Review. I say "appeared to be" and "seemed to be" because a distinction needs to be made again between engagement and political activism. Like the PR editors the southerners had had their fling as activists and had retreated in some disarray. They were now coming back as poets and literary critics, to turn out magazines of 24

Little Magazines poetry and literary criticism; but they were coming back with a program which could well be described as a political program removed from politics, a political program, that is, for language or the Word. For their efforts they were, like the PR critics, to be jumped on as irresponsible by activists — notably in the early forties, by the American Fronters already mentioned — but their reply (unlike the PR insistence on freedom and integrity) was that they saw no reason to consider themselves as responsible or irresponsible for matters over which they hadn't the slightest control. The political problem, then, as they saw it, was first to find an area over which they might exert a measure of control, and then try to be responsible for and about it. The area they chose was language; their responsibility, as Allen Tate put it, was to preserve the vitality of language. They chose to accept their responsibilities, first, by drawing attention to the depth and complexity of the problems connected with simply turning out a sentence or quatrain and, second, by moving out to studies of whole poems, plays, essays, and novels in order to demonstrate the intimate relationship between language and thought itself. For the magazines with which these "Fugitives" were connected such activity meant that the publication of literary criticism frequently took precedence over the publication of literature proper. Here, for example, is a description, from Hoffman's book, of the influential Southern Review. ". . . the majority of essays are critical in nature; and many of these are devoted to an analysis of individual poets as well as to the general problem of modern poetics. The Southern Review has favored the kind of close structural and textural analysis of poetry which has come to be regarded as one of the distinctive contributions of modern literature to the history of criticism. . . . [It] has fulfilled well the purpose of the critical quarterly which Allen Tate summarized in ... 1936:'The ideal task of the critical quarterly is not to give the public what it wants, or what it thinks it wants, but what — 25

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through the medium of its most intelligent members — it ought to have.' " Now if it be asked on what grounds Mr. Tate imagined that an issue of the Southern Review devoted, for example, to an examination and analysis of the poetry of W. B. Yeats could be said to be what the public, liking it or not, ought to have, the best answer seems to be that the "Fugitives" thought the public needed to be educated, educated in a certain way, educated by "its most intelligent members" in the processes of language by examination of the masters of language. To talk about one of the southern magazines in these terms is to talk about them all, and they set the pattern for the critical quarterlies we now have in abundance on our campuses, quarterlies dedicated very largely to an examination of the Word (detailed analyses of poems and poets — or their fictional counterparts). Such dedication did constitute, I think, a political activity; but because the relationship between language and culture is superficially more remote than the relationship between, say, the class struggle and culture, the proponents and practitioners of what we now call the New Criticism were thought of by their opponents as aesthetes and put in the ivory tower with the promoters of Poetry. Yet the long-run effect of the southern magazines, together with the famous Brooks and Warren textbook, Understanding Poetry, has been quite different from the effect of Poetry and similar publications. Many qualifications should of course be made: I don't mean to say that there have been no New Critics among the promoters of Poetry; or that Poetry has been unconcerned with the "minute analysis of details" so characteristic, if Davidson is to be believed, of Nashville Saturday nights; or, finally, that the alleged effects may be measured with any precision. But I must still insist on the difference in effects, adding that the difference is finally political. In the first place the effect of Poetry has been restricted 26

Little Magazines pretty much to poetry, to its general welfare and the welfare of its practitioners, while the effect of the southern movement has been upon readers at least as much as upon creators; and in the second place the civilization-saving motif in Poetry has failed to foster, even in fifty years, anything much more than the faith in things of excellence which marked Pound's earliest pronouncements and now Poetry'?, editor's latest pronouncement ("representing the good thing wherever it is to be found" — Henry Rago in Poetry's fiftieth anniversary issue), while the language-saving motif of the southerners has transformed the teaching of literature in this country and encouraged as well a pedagogical attentiveness to language in non-literary places. These accomplishments are political; they will be measured differently by opponents than by apologists, but neither can deny the presence of the New Criticism in our schools. Poetry on the other hand, though it is in the school libraries, is not in the classrooms as an intellectual force; it is not in the classrooms even though it printed "Prufrock," "Chicago," and many other poems which frequently appear (and New Critically) in the classrooms. Back to the Bollingen controversy. There, in the judges' pronouncement in favor of the objective perception of values, we see briefly what the southern movement aspired to, and see also how that aspiration, political in a grand sense, could also become, unfortunately but perhaps necessarily, political in a common sense: Pound was the grand old man of modern poetry despite his fascism and his madness, and he needed help. Why anyone should imagine that such motives as sympathy and respect and friendship would not enter into the deliberations even of men who aspired to objectivity is not clear, and yet in a way the judges had asked for such imaginings by plumping so long for objectivity. I suppose it could be said, then, that the judges were not free of their own entangling alliances — either to Pound or to objectivity — when they made 27

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their decision; but the larger point is that they had much earlier made an alliance, a grand political alliance, which has frequently been denied them. You can't be entangled without first being engaged. With these three basic patterns — of Poetry, Partisan Review, and the southern group — in mind, let us return to the two primary words of this account: seriousness and responsibility. The two are frequently interchangeable — to be serious is to be responsible, and vice versa — but in their interchangeability they fail to strengthen each other. It is clear that for all the magazines discussed seriousness and responsibility have not been felt to adhere to commercial or popular magazine activities, since money and circulation are, in the latter, what one has to be serious and responsible about. Otherwise the meaning of the two words is fuzzy; they have become, heavily weighted and belligerently undefined, the purr words of the little magazine word book. For Poetry seriousness and responsibility have been connected with encouraging and representing the unhistorical Good as it has appeared in a form which has always had peculiar affinities for the Good: verse. But since the human connection with any such abstract ideal has been, as always, tenuous, Poetry's, ways of achieving seriousness have been difficult to describe precisely or practice consistently. A methodology has not emerged for realizing the magazine's aims other than for the editors to sit in their office in Chicago reading most of the poems written in the country. Judgment on poems has accordingly been made by reference to a good many standards (all of its editors have professed to catholicity), of which two may be singled out as dominant: that a poem be well made and that it seem to have some permanent value. For PR in its heyday seriousness emerged quite differently. While its editors had no objections to a poem's being well made, or 28

Little Magazines to the poet's pretensions to permanence, they insisted that to be serious a poet had to be in time too or he wouldn't in fact achieve permanence. For the southern group seriousness was responsibility to "the vitality of language," a responsibility which took precedence over other responsibilities for social and temporal reasons and which involved placing emphasis upon verbal accuracy and completeness as the best way of facing up to history and being, therefore, serious. Now surely it is obvious that these three visions of seriousness are in many respects interchangeable. One can expect some of the same writers to appear under all three auspices, expect poems of engagement to appear in Poetry, poems of verbal vitality to appear in PR, poems of permanent value to appear in the Kenyan Review, and so on. But because the overlapping is great the differences should not simply be dismissed. The cleavage between the historically minded (the southerners and PR) and the unhistorically minded (Poetry] is fundamental even though the practices of individuals like the difficult Mr. Pound tend to obscure it; and its importance is the greater now with the decline of the fortunes of both the Marxists and the New Critics. PR goes on but, as William Barrett suggested, the loss of its Marxist orientation has meant that it is now hard put to find itself a historical position to affirm. The Kenyan Review and the Sewanee Review and a number of their lesser successors also go on, as do the related machines of New Criticism in our nation's classrooms; but their historical validity — that is, their continuing, everyday role in the kind of educational movement their progenitors envisaged — has been weakened by practitioners with nothing of the founders' historical sense, practitioners who couldn't for the life of them draw any faint connection between the weaknesses of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" and the Decline of the West but who nonetheless dutifully go on explaining why, objectively, "Trees" is a bad poem. Meanwhile the strength of the 29

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unhistorically minded, still represented by Poetry but also by a good many other new magazines and forces, has been proportionately enhanced, as may be seen in many places. Sex and the Life Force were rediscovered, for example, in the late fifties: permanent human values no doubt, but also unhistorical values by virtue of their permanence. Also reaffirmed were various kinds of historical disengagement which once went by such names as surrealism and dadaism but now pose as liberating expressions of the id. And finally, at a more dignified level of Kulch, come the intellectual successors to Poetry and the old Pound-Monroe position ("a few lines down from the hills unsullied"), successors who incorporated some of the planks of the proponents of engagement while at the same time demonstrating an abhorrence of engagement. Two examples of this last phenomenon are the Hudson Review, started in 1948, and Arts in Society, started in 1958. Their principles? "The Review is committed to no politics or philosophy but will not hesitate to consider these subjects where they affect the general cultural situation." — advertisement for the Hudson Review, 1948 "In serving as a national forum for lively discussion, learned interpretation and illustration of the place of the arts in our times, ARTS IN SOCIETY seeks to advance creativity and education in the arts, especially in the field of adult education. "In general, ARTS IN SOCIETY covers four major areas: education in the arts, aesthetics and philosophy, social analysis, and the presentation of significant works in artistic media which may be served by the printing process. We hope that by integrating the research of the scholar, the experience of the administrator, the insights of the social science expert, and the aspiration of the artist — in practical terms of broad organizational efforts — to promote and create a climate for the arts in America; to produce a truly American culture which is worthy of that name." — from a brochure for Arts in Society 30

Little Magazines The felicities proposed here are of course delightful. One may only ask if they are real — or, to put them in the terms of this account, serious and responsible. They are democratic. The Hudson Review wants to represent all (presumably intelligent) opinions; Arts in Society wants to cover the arts like a blanket and integrate them under it. Both of them are also of course in favor of art and the Good and creativity and scholarship and education. They are not both equally critical, that is, critical in the sense proposed by the New Critics. The Hudson Review has a fifteenyear history of attentiveness to language and detail; its editors would certainly not approve of such elaborate and fuzzy syntheses as those to be found in the Arts in Society brochure. Between them they may be said to represent the most intellectual form of the new unengaged seriousness, a form manifested in a whole new generation of academic periodicals appearing across the country, and also in the program for the arts recently devised in Washington under the direction of August Heckscher. They make strange bedfellows (with each other, and also with the Sex and Life Force advocates) — this is why the very phrase "little magazine" has come to be, and properly, suspect; and why a recent effort to form a sort of business-fraternal organization of little magazines called the Association of Literary Magazines of America has been regarded, even by certain of its sponsors, with some hilarity. And yet they do seem to share a point of common faith, the old Monroe-Pound position. Now how is it that the really very aristocratic position taken by Pound, as represented by his "Bel Esprit," has been transformed into a democratic position? And why is it that the transformation has occurred even though very few intellectuals could be imagined to be consciously promoting an indiscriminately democratic literature? 31

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Perhaps the answer is to be found in the absorptive properties of the democratic culture itself. Let me invoke without confidence the old image of America as a melting pot. Or invoke De Tocqueville's image of social leveling. Here is the critical "cultural wrong" against which Pound and his successors fought. Here is what the little magazine movement has been, generally, about; it has been a manifestation of opposition to the cultural results of the American and French revolutions, that is, opposition to some of the realities of the resultant age of the common man, opposition to a historical condition. Yet this opposition has persistently failed, except perhaps in the thirties, to come to grips with the historical condition, that is, with the local and temporal issues which journalists and other men of affairs have dealt with. It has instead been driven back on "permanence." Now one doesn't need to complain about "permanence" — who wants to? — to complain about the impotence of our writers and editors to deal with temporal values. Nor is it enough, I think, to say with Mr. Tate that the poet's "best weapon in history seems to have been Shelley's fleet of toy boats, each bearing a cargo of tracts, which he committed to the waters of Hyde Park." For the facts remain, first, that the literary rebels of our century as represented in the little magazine movement (and as represented by Mr. Tate himself) have sallied forth against the local, temporal wrongs with the expectation that they would achieve at least local, temporal victories; have thought to establish some substantive as well as ideal models or patterns for twentiethcentury American Man to look at — not just a few Grecian Urns, but a historic role for language and literature — and thereby perform what they believed literature in the past performed, a serious historic function. And the fact also remains that they have been deceived in these expectations. But, it may be argued, if Pound himself has survived, and the few others who might be admitted by the serious men of literature 32

Little Magazines into the society of "Bel Esprit," perhaps the historical function has been performed after all. The argument is a poor one. While it is easy, for example, to agree with Karl Shapiro that Pound, together with Eliot, has profoundly influenced all of modern poetry (Shapiro, it should be noted, thinks the influence has been deadly), a different way of looking at it is that modern poetry as represented by its least, not its best, practitioners has taken over Pound and Eliot, knocked the edges off them (their political, social, and artistic intemperance, the rebellious character of their major works) and given them back to us as snippings — a few rhetorical devices, an odd notion or two about form — snippings which any "uncritical democrat," perhaps in a creative writing course in an institution Pound would have despised, can practice and then go on to win the usual prizes for Kulch. Kulch. Perhaps in that Poundian word we may best see the extent of democracy's absorption of Pound and, by extension, of even his worthiest successors. Pound spelled "culture" the way he did because he had a real contempt for most of the culture around him. And yet he or his snippings have now become, to a degree, a part of that Kulch, and the Kulch goes on, and the Kulch will absorb more Pounds. Perhaps we have reached the end of civilization-saving in literature and therefore, incidentally, of the age of little magazines, an age some future historian may say began with the founding of Poetry in 1912 and ended with the Bollingen Award in 1949. Certainly a great many pronouncements to this effect, with attendant recommendations, have been made within the little magazines themselves in the last decade, of which the following is a not very weighty (serious) example, but noteworthy because it came so early: "As we see it, the little literary magazine is dead. The 'little mags that died to make verse free' have been replaced by subsidized 33

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vehicles for clique poetry, critical back-scratching, and professorial piddle, served up with a transparent overlay of regional or radical futilitarianism. Having embraced the preciosity and academicism that the little magazine was raised up to fight, the current types find themselves wholly without purpose and practically without audience" (Neurotica, Autumn 1949). Or perhaps the magazines will not die but accept a diminished (less serious) role for literature and act accordingly. With literature regarded as a sideline, a diversion, a form of relaxation from other presumably more central disciplines, the defenders of literature in the magazines will be replaced, as some have already been, by persons not interested in literature: managers, professional culturists, publicists, synthesists, builders of monuments and circulation. This displacement will aggravate our already complicated literary politics, in which sometimes a celebrated poet can't be sure whether he owes the celebration to himself or to his powerful friends. Another possibility is that the magazines will extend but render unrecognizable a role they have always prided themselves on playing, one described in the statement of principles put forth in 1961 by the Association of Literary Magazines of America: "It is a wellknown historical fact that American Literature since 1910 would not have survived in its present variety and vigor without these magazines. Almost without exception, all the distinguished modern writers in America started their careers in them — writers such as Faulkner, Frost, Sandburg, Eliot, Hemingway, Saroyan, Tennessee Williams and Robert Lowell, as well as scores of younger writers now emerging into prominence. Nor are the magazines concerned only with, dedicated only to, the great talents. A nation's body of literature does not depend wholly on the great, and since the magazines have served as a seedbed for each generation 34

Little Magazines of creative writers they have also helped to preserve the very impulse to literary creation." This statement is extravagant, but essentially true, historically. All one needs to do with the statement, however, to make it prophetic of a dismal literary future is to imagine what it would mean if the phrase "distinguished modern writers" were removed. Then the little magazines of the future could be thought to serve as a seedbed for the commonplace. Then every community could be imagined as having its own little magazine for which everybody in the community would write, with the produce being filed away in some central place, presumably Washington, of synthesis. But is there a future more serious than any of these possibilities for the magazines? The historical pattern outlined above is not encouraging. If the magazines can no longer be "in the vanguard of literature" or be the preservers of cultural wild pigeons, the former excitements of editing and publishing them will simply not be sufficient to attract the great talents. All, then, that Ezra Pound said about our institutions' failure to do anything for the unusual man will come to apply to the little magazines themselves. Yet the prospects of a culture with no such subversive publishing activity in it are so dismal that perhaps there is still the possibility that a few new serious magazines will appear with vigorous, talented editors and writers behind them. At least one might suppose that efforts to prevent the passing of the whole "medium" will continue to be made by talented civilization-savers who, looking at the past of these magazines, regard their preservation as itself an act of engagement. Under the right auspices, for example, a literary magazine of science or international diplomacy or even journalism might become a serious force in other fields than literature, and therefore serve the double function of reasserting the breadth of literary concerns while blasting away at the target chosen. What does not seem possible, however, is that new magazines in 35

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the old Poetry mode can be of much use. It is of course important for Poetry to remain healthy, but the future of the "medium" as a whole, if there is to be a future, would seem to lie in reinforcing the activities of Poetry and its allies with the activities of editors committed to some sort of engagement, even though any such activities will unquestionably appear to be, at this moment in history, incurably Utopian. A FEW OTHER M A G A Z I N E S The selection here is capricious, but little magazines are themselves capricious, perhaps to confound the writers of pamphlets. I merely wish to represent briefly other intellectual and literary provinces of the little magazine world than those described in the main essay, though I hope it will be evident that these magazines also may be thought of in relation to the forces or impulses which have governed the publishing of Poetry, the Partisan Review, and the magazines of the "Fugitive" group. The Texas Review, later the Southwest Review, introduced the subject of regionalism in its first issue (June 1915). Its editor, Stark Young, wrote as follows: "Reeking of the soil is a fine term, no doubt, especially when used by literary experts who never knew the soil. In the sense that the classic myth and classic art and classic poetry are open and clear and inevitable, full of beauty and the tears of things . . . the phrase is a good one. . . . Only, those things seem but the soil flowering into human life. They do not reek. Your reeking is a modern affair, conscious, heavy with journalistic sweat. It is apt to be an exploitation, a marketing." Young was editor of the magazine for only two issues, which included a group of thoroughly unlocalized poems and essays, and a note of welcome from England by Edmund Gosse. Young's successor, Robert Adger Law, shared Young's sentiments; he undertook to "express thoughts of cultural interest to other Texans without . . . reeking of the soil"; and when he gave up the editorship nine years later he seemed if anything to be slightly embarrassed to dis36

Little Magazines cover that all the issues he had edited had had a few Texans in them, and that one issue had been entirely devoted to Texans. His successor, Jay Hubbell, who took over when the magazine moved from the University of Texas to Southern Methodist in 1924, felt quite differently: "The Southwest Review, then, will be national in its outlook, and its pages will be open to all who write well; but it will especially encourage those who write on Western themes, for it is a magazine for the Southwest." Hubbell was interested in folklore and the frontier and Texan history. Drawing upon his predecessors' literary capital, and adding to it his own, he produced a magazine containing curiously conflicting matter. In the April 1925 issue, for example, appeared John Crowe Ransom's "regional" poem "Antique Harvesters," but nearly next door to it were several "regional" ballads about the Alamo and Kit Carson. Here is a sample: 'Twas at the Cimarron Crossing On the trail to Santy Fee, Kit Carson met up with a caravan That was a sight to see. Two kinds of literature, one patrician and one popular or democratic, were thus meeting here under the name of regionalism. The Southwest Review continued in this eccentric vein for years; one finds side by side in its pages New Critics (to be) and writers of cowboy stories, essays of a conventionally academic cast and essays on cities of the Southwest. The regionalism in which Hubbell was interested might be called a regionalism of engagement, that is, the kind of which Stark Young disapproved. Though austerely, Hubbell was in the business of promoting the culture of the Southwest; his position is perhaps analogous to that of the leftist activists of the thirties against whom the PR editors rebelled, and it seems clearly distinguishable from the position of regionalists like Young — or later Ransom and Tate — who mostly disdained region-promotion thoughts and would probably have preferred the following definition of regionalism by a younger regionalist of the Northwest, William Stafford: "They call it regional, this relevance — the deepest place we have." The South Atlantic Quarterly, started twelve years before the 37

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Texas Review, confronted the same problems: "While necessarily the articles in The Quarterly will be written for the most part by Southern men, the editors hope that no note of provincialism will be heard. They will do all in their power to make the national spirit dominant." The magazine did, however, focus persistently on southern culture, publishing all sorts of matter about the Civil War and so on right up into the forties when, as in the case of the Southwest Review, the local or provincial cast of the publication became less evident. The Virginia Quarterly Review, started much later (1925), aspired from the beginning to follow the Stark Young path. It was always less regional than any of its southern peers, and indeed has perhaps been closer in spirit to some northern magazines, notably the Yale Review. The Yale Review began in the late nineteenth century as a nonliterary academic magazine devoted to economic, political, and social matters. It was not visibly regional at all (and in fact still is not), though in ignoring its provincial New England heritage it perhaps displayed New England regionalism inadvertently, pointing up a significant difference in modern times between New England and other regions of the country. Henry Adams, as Allen Tate and others have suggested, may be taken as the New England prototype here, an intellectual bred up to national and international concerns who thought "reeking of the soil" a sign of simple ignorance, and who preferred to deal with ideas rather than places. He ought to have liked the Yale Review, which was from the beginning an aggressively national and international quarterly. When, under the auspices of Wilbur Cross (beginning in 1912), it entered the domain of literature proper, this characteristic of it did not change. One of its curious features as a result has been its persistently miscellaneous character: for example, though it has been constantly concerned with contemporary politics it has not had a politics; and though it has printed many fine poems and stories, and much good literary criticism, it has never deigned to back any particular literary movement. Thus, though it has in one sense been engaged with the world, in another sense it has been rather like Poetry in its obsession for avoiding entangling alliances. 38

Little Magazines The publisher of Midland from its beginning in 1915 to its end in 1933 was John T. Frederick, who had a clearly regional mission: "We have found . . . that the Middle West possesses a regional consciousness. We have met with a response not bounded by rivers nor limited by state lines. The Middle West exists as a unit in the life of the world. It is waiting for self-expression." What did not attach to Frederick's regionalism was an interest like Hubbell's in publishing works with regional themes or subjects. He was dedicated to helping the Middle West enter "upon the toils and joys of the way of civilization," and in his regular news notes he dutifully recorded all signs of civilization around him, such as the appearance of new periodicals; yet the work printed in Midland was seldom regional in manner or matter. One might wish, for example, for a bit of soil-reeking in these lines: Thou silver-lipped, thou lyrist of All Time, Poet who knowest no change, prophet unawed Of Eld's illimitable lure, bright sign of God, Thou holdest the World close prisoner in a chime! — Mahlon Leonard Fisher A slight regional crisis occurred in 1922 when Frederick had to move from Iowa to Pittsburgh, but he made it clear that he was still a midwestern regionalist, for he was now "at almost the eastern extremity of the Great Valley, and at a point which was one of the first outposts in the occupation of the middle west by the white race." In the twenties and early thirties the stones he printed did tend to have certain regional properties, such as a solid respect for local dialect; and even the poetry began to localize and brighten: He walks his field, unseeing, and he thinks The corn-shocks draw their skirts to let him pass. The winter tracings which cold midnight left Spell out his secret on each window glass. — Jay Sigmund But as a whole Frederick's regionalism was mostly a working out of a theory which has guided the destinies of many, many little magazines, regional or nonregional: that the little magazine is a kind of literary service to its contributors, helping them to get a start in

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the world, providing them with a sympathetic, unbusinesslike reader-editor who doesn't care much about audiences, doesn't expect to be rewarded, but thinks that one could do worse with one's spare money and time than to get in print some promising talent, preferably but not necessarily from the neighborhood. The dimensions of Frederick's enterprise — it was mostly a private show — and the informal, amateur spirit in which it was conducted make it an extremely pure example of the little magazine act. By the name itself Story may be imagined to be analogous to Poetry in its functions; but since it began in the early thirties it printed in due course a good bit of left-wing, activist prose (I remember particularly lots of stories — though there probably weren't so many — about riding boxcars and being chased by railroad guards). Hoffman's description in The Little Magazine of Story's beginnings seems a good one: "It was inevitable that the story magazines, committed to no social program, should absorb a number of leftwing writers. Story, the most successful of the lot, was begun in Vienna in 1931 by Whit Burnett and Martha Foley. In the course of its very active career it printed 'short narratives of significance by no matter whom and coming from no matter where.' The magazine's principal value is that it served as a proving ground for young writers who were experimenting with form. The American version of the Chekovian tale was given a good deal of attention. A simple reflection of the life or mind of a character, given no ethical or psychological clarification, this form marks the development of new experimentation in narrative writing." Mr. Burnett, who started the magazine up again in the late fifties after a lapse, takes justifiable pride in the number of now well-known writers who appeared early in Story. In the sheer breadth and distinction of its contributors' roster it is probably only comparable to Poetry itself. I have never seen a copy of the Little Review and so must depend on secondary sources and on The Little Review Anthology, published in 1953. On the jacket of the latter appears the statement "No American Magazine Ever Made as Much Literary History as the Little Review from 1914 to 1929." Whether this statement is 40

Little Magazines true or not the magazine was sufficiently diverse to be hard to characterize briefly. Margaret Anderson was its editor and followed her whims with a fine fury espousing, according to Hoffman, feminism, anarchism, imagism, symbolism, and dadaism in turn. Ezra Pound liked her aggressive spontaneity and took on the job of foreign editor for the magazine in 1917 as an antidote to his frustrations with Harriet Monroe. In its pages he took occasion to blast both Poetry and regionalism: ". . . Poetry has shown an unflagging courtesy to a lot of old fools and fogies whom I should have told to go to hell tout pleinement and bonnement. It has refrained from attacking a number of public nuisances . . . I cannot believe that the mere height of the Rocky Mountains will produce lofty poetry; we have had little from Chimborazo, the Alps or the Andes. . . . It may be pleasing to know that a cook is president of the local poetry society in Perigord . . . The fact remains that no good poetry has come out of Perigord since the Albigensian crusade . . . The magazine printed a number of now celebrated works. It serialized Joyce's Ulysses (and was banned for doing so; the work was only cleared later, when it appeared in book form). It printed such poems as Eliot's "Hippopotamus" and Yeats' "Wild Swans at Coole." It was a repository for a good deal of incidental literary and artistic comment: Ford Madox Ford on W. H. Hudson, Pound on Brancusi, John Cowper Powys on Henry James, and so on. Throughout its history the Little Review was as much a magazine of comment as creation, the comment taking its tone from Pound and Miss Anderson, and later her assistant Jane Heep. The Little Review Anthology is therefore a useful and interesting document, testifying to the kind of engagement Pound would have practiced with Poetry if he had had his way. Furioso (1939-53) was begun by two Yale sophomores. I was one of them and have described our activities in an essay, "A Brief History of a Little Magazine, and Other Matters." Here let me simply provide a few clues to the disastrous economics of most little magazining. Our first issue cost us less than $200, but by the early fifties the costs had risen to more than $4000 a year, for four issues (the printing of each issue, of ninety to a hundred pages, ran slightly less than $1000, payment to contributors about $500; our an41

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nual returns normally paid for about one of the four issues). We never had more than four hundred subscribers, including about a hundred libraries, though we were generally able to sell, at a good loss, five or six hundred on newsstands and in bookstores. We had, I estimate, two or three contributors — that is, persons submitting manuscripts — for every reader. We paid $10 a page for verse printed in the magazine, $8 a page for fiction. Though we sometimes felt we were publishing for ourselves alone, we had a good time, mostly. When we stopped publication we began to be told what a good and important publication Furioso had been. The Tiger's Eye (1947-49), edited by Ruth and John Stephan, was an elaborate and eccentric publication envied by its competitors for the money poured into it. It was about half art and half literature, with frequent efforts to synthesize the two — poems about painting, etc. — on the theory that the creative act is the creative act is the creative act. Its editorial pronouncements tended to be splendid but obscure: "The selection of material should be based on these questions. Is it alive? Is it valid as art? How brave is its originality? How does it enter the imagination?" "Who can look at our nation of a hundred and forty million people and assume he and a few associates are the only aesthetes in it. It is time to admit the foolishness of such a fatuous assumption and get on with the development of art and literature." "The Tiger's Eye has presented art with the viewpoint that it is an aesthetic creation, apart from political or commercial considerations, that arises and is formed by the imaginative disposition of the artist, whether painter or poet." Its reproductions of paintings, frequently in color, were incredibly numerous and uniformly excellent. It also printed a good deal of good verse. Critically it favored general statements about aesthetics and modest polemics against academic literary criticism. In format it was bright and odd — the cover a colorful abstraction with an eye in it, each page a separate layout "creation," and the table of contents in the middle of the magazine (only there could one find out who wrote or did what). It was as determinedly un42

Little Magazines engaged, politically and socially, as a magazine of general cultural pretensions could well be; and yet, perhaps because it was a private venture of the Stephans, it had character to it, a quality difficult to achieve in a magazine aspiring to eclecticism. Big Table burst out of Chicago in the late fifties as an exile from the University of Chicago, a ferocious thing banned by the Chicago Post Office. Its most celebrated offering was William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, which provoked the same kind of passionate controversy about obscenity — what is it? what should be done about it? — as had Joyce's Ulysses in the Little Review and a number of Henry Miller's novels in book form. The predictable result was that Big Table's circulation shot up obscenely to 10,000. But as its editor, Paul Carroll, was unable to find backers, it subsided after a short, spectacular run of printing Beats like Corso, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg. In its financial instability, and in its belligerent opposition to the literary, academic, and moral conventions by which it was (for its purposes, so happily) surrounded, it is perhaps the best example of a whole group of magazines which ushered in the sixties. In New York the book publisher of Henry Miller, the Grove Press, sponsored the Evergreen Review, which was even more successful than Big Table in scaring up an audience (but it had an advantage; it was distributed as a paperback book). In California William Ryan began a magazine called Contact, which was polemically pacifist and attracted many socially alienated, antiacademic writers, but at the same time aspired to bourgeois success by going businesslike, searching for advertisers, getting into profitable sidelines (for one, the publication of a Beat cookbook), and generally trying to look uneasily popular. Perhaps for the purposes of this history these magazines are chiefly notable not for their dalliance with obscenity and/or popularity, and not for their insistence upon the peculiar literary merits of beards or dope or poverty, but for their antiacademic pronouncements and practices. Most of the editors and contributors to these magazines seemed to feel, as Pound had felt in his time, that the campuses were the real scenes of the villainy of their time, and they spent many words deploring the fact, if it was a fact, that the little magazine movement had 43

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been taken over by institutions and institutionalists. As a result they felt that the little magazine movement was, in effect, dead; and so they cast about for ways of re-engaging the artist with society by taking him off campus. Obviously their success can't be reported on yet. The first Dial (1840-44) was edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson; it came, of course, out of Boston. The second Dial, started in 1880 in Chicago by Francis F. Browne, clumped along for nearly forty years as a monthly or semimonthly "Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion and Information"; it contained no poetry or fiction and concentrated on book reviews and miscellaneous articles covering everything from "Recent Railway Literature" to "Walter Pater in Perspective." The third Dial (continuing the volume sequence of the second, but from New York) was a belligerent political and social weekly with such editors as John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and Lewis Mumford. It lasted for only a year and a half, and was then taken over by J. S. Watson and Scofield Thayer, with later help from Stewart Mitchell, Gilbert Seldes, Alyse Gregory, Kenneth Burke, and, particularly, Marianne Moore. This fourth Dial moved brilliantly within the realm of little magazines for ten years; it is probably the best American literary magazine of the century. Very satisfying anthologies of modern poetry, fiction, art, or criticism could be compiled exclusively from its pages. Its regular contributors included most of the brightest artistic figures of the age: Pound, Sandburg, Hart Crane, Cummings, Yeats, Williams, Joyce, Eliot, Picasso, Matisse, Wyndham Lewis, Conrad, Bridges, Ford Madox Ford, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, Sherwood Anderson, and dozens of others. Perhaps the very magnitude of its publishing contribution should disqualify it as a little magazine, yet it was surely a little magazine in spirit, as a bit of prose from the magazine's "Comment" pages should demonstrate: ". . . a year ago THE DIAL took for her health a somersault. More or less coming up on her more or less renovated feet, clad in reassuringly genteel tights, she smiled stiffly at the world. But acrobats are, like anything else, a business. And the particular kind of acrobatics for which the edi44

Little Magazines tors of THE DIAL have a taste did not fill the hat. Unwilling to follow The Atlantic Monthly and confine themselves to skipping rope . . . these editors, by way of further stiffening their smile, instituted the department of Modern Forms. . . . In the course of an amusing year there have come our way some really lovely letters . . ." This in 1921. In 1924: "Most of those living American writers whose art pleases us as significant are not taken up by The Yale Review. And many of those writers most often met with [in the Yale Review] . . . appear to us either meretricious . . . or merely, and perfectly honourably, dead . . . " A short note ending the magazine's publication in 1929 makes, also, a fitting conclusion here: "We are also grateful to our readers, always bearing in mind that although a magazine can get along somehow without readers it cannot exist without contributors — who were, however indignantly, THE DIAL."

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Selected Bibliography Forty Prominent Little Magazines Started before 1950 Scwanee Review. 1892-date. Present editor: Andrew Lytle. Yale Review. 1892-date. Present editor: John Palmer. Poetry. 1912-date. Present editor: Henry Rago. Egoist. 1914-19. Editors: Dora Marsden and Harriet Shaw Weaver. Little Review. 1914-29. Editor: Margaret Anderson. Blast. 1914-15. Editor: Wyndham Lewis. Midland. 1915-33. Editor: John T. Frederick. Texas Review, later Southwest Review. 1915-date. Editors: Stark Young, Jay Hubbell, Allan Maxwell, and others. Pagan. 1916-22. Editor: Joseph Kling. Seven Arts. 1916-17. Editor: James Oppenheim. Liberator. 1918-24. Editors: Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, and others. Owl. 1919-23. Editor: Robert Graves. S 4 N. 1919-25. Editor: Norman Fitts. Contact. 1920-23. Editors: William Carlos Williams and Robert McAlmon. (A later Contact, begun in 1959, is edited by Robert Ryan.) Dial. 1920-29. Editors: Scofield Thayer, J. S. Watson, Marianne Moore, and others. (A short-lived fifth Dial was attempted in 1960 by James H. Silberman.) Voices. 1921-date. Editor: Harold Vinal. Broom. 1921-24. Editors: Harold Loeb, Slater Brown, Malcolm Cowley, and others. Double-Dealer. 1921-26. Editors: Julius Friend, John McClure, and others. Secession. 1922-24. Editors: Gorham Munson, Matthew Josephson, and Kenneth Burke. Criterion. 1922-39. Editor: T. S. Eliot. Fugitive. 1922-25. Editors: Walter Clyde Curry, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and others. Transatlantic Review. 1924-25. Editor: Ford Madox Ford. (In the sixties another Transatlantic Review has been started, edited by J. F. McCrindle.) Exile. 1927-28. Editor: Ezra Pound. Hound and Horn. 1927-34. Editors: Lincoln Kirstein, Allen Tate, Yvor Winters, and others. Prairie Schooner. 1927-date. Editors: Lowry Wimberly, Karl Shapiro, and others.

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Selected Bibliography transition. 1927-38. Editors: Eugene Jolas and Elliot Paul. Harkness Hoot. 1930-34. Editors: William Harlan Hale and Selden Rodman. Fantasy. 1931-43. Editor: Stanley Mayer. Smoke. 1931-37. Editors: Winfield Townley Scott, David Cornel Dejong, and others. Story. 1931-date. Editors: Martha Foley and Whit and Hallie Burnett. Partisan Review. 1934-date. Editors: Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Dwight Macdonald, and others. Southern Review. 1935-42. Editors: Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and others. American Prefaces. 1935-43. Editors: Wilbur Schramm, Paul Engle, and others. New Directions in Prose and Poetry. 1936-date (now published as a paperback). Editor: James Laughlin. Rocky Mountain Review, later Western Review, 1937-59. Editor: Ray B. West. Kenyan Review. 1939-date. Editors: John Crowe Ransom, Robie Macauley, and others. Furioso. 1939-53. Editors: James Angleton, Reed Whittemore, and others. Politics. 1944-50. Editor: Dwight Macdonald. Tiger's Eye. 1947-49. Editors: Ruth and John Stephan. Hudson Review. 1948-date. Editor: Frederick Morgan and others.

Suggested Readings Back files of the magazines listed. (The New York Public Library and the University of Wisconsin Library have two of the largest collections of little magazines, but a good many other university libraries and a few public libraries are also well stocked.) Anderson, Margaret, ed. The Little Review Anthology. New York: Hermitage Press, 1953. Davidson, Donald. Southern Writers in the Modern World. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1958. Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1946. O'Connor, William Van, and Edward Stone, eds. A Casebook on Ezra Pound. New York: Crowell, 1959. Paige, D. D., ed. The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950. Peterson, Theodore. Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956. Whittemore, Reed. "A Brief History of a Little Magazine, and Other Matters," in The Boy from Iowa. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

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