Faith Binckes
In April 1911, a 21-year-old John Middleton Murry wrote to a friend, sharing his interpretation of ‘modernism’ and outlining his plans for an artistic and literary magazine that could be used to promote it:
Modernism means, when I use it, Bergsonism in Philosophy […] Bergsonism stands for Post-Impressionism in its essential meaning – and not in the sense of the Grafton Exhibition. [The magazine] is to be kept absolutely cosmopolitan […] We will have no Shavianism or False Aestheticism … But still we want more younger men from England – young men in London; who have not gone thro’ the unenthusiastic aesthetic atmosphere of Oxford: How to get them is the problem?
We are arranging to have the paper distributed in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, New York, and Munich and all over the world by subscription. (Murry to Philip Landon, qtd. in Lea, 1959, 24)
Murry’s youthful naiveté was apparent here, not least in his vision of the ‘paper’ effortlessly winging its way to a global network of subscribers. Nevertheless, we can still recognize ‘modernism’ through the distinguishing elements on Murry’s projected contents list. ‘Modernism’ should be the preserve of the ‘young’. It should also be ‘absolutely cosmopolitan’. As Murry knew from his recent visits to Paris, ‘Bergsonism in Philosophy’ united a range of diverse contemporary movements in art and literature on or around 1910.1 But Murry was equally clear that the modernism his magazine would present would be distinctive from this field, as well as participating in it. Most obviously, Murry’s version of Post-Impressionism was offered as an alternative to the version on show at Roger Fry’s exhibition of the previous year.2 Moreover, his confidence in the fact that his publication would represent this artistic movement in its ‘essential meaning’ demonstrated that he did not consider Fry’s version of Post-Impressionism to have either priority, or authority, over his own. When the magazine, eventually called Rhythm, first appeared in the summer of 1911, it held true to these tenets.
This early outline of Rhythm is just one example of the long-acknowledged role periodical publications played in the emergence and development of modernism. These magazines came in a huge variety of forms, reflecting and embodying the complexity and richness of the modernist field. They also represented the forces of competition and collaboration that shaped that field from the ground up. So, on one hand, Murry’s assertion that ‘modernism’ indicated a certain set of things ‘when I use it’ registered a distinctive editorial perspective, taking ownership of the definition. On another, his statement acknowledged that other definitions were equally possible. As composite texts that thrived on shared traditions but also on their difference from one another, magazines generated a modernism that could not exist either as a single or as a static category. As his list also makes plain, the composite format of magazines encouraged associations and juxtapositions, often between different areas of related aesthetic production. For this reason, certain publications were particularly effective – and have become particularly well known – as vehicles for groups whose members worked across the arts. This was the case for Lacerba for the Futurists, BLAST for the Vorticists, DADA for the Dadaists or for any number of later Surrealist publications. But the story of modernist magazines is also populated with periodicals that operated far less exclusionary editorial policies. A good example would be The New Age, the first periodical to be reproduced on the landmark digital resource The Modernist Journals Project. This magazine was revived by Holbrook Jackson and A. R. Orage, the latter taking full editorial control in 1908. The New Age resembled a newspaper more than an illustrated magazine like Rhythm or BLAST. It contained coverage of politics and current events, but it also hosted writing on modern art and literature by the likes of Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme and Murry himself, thriving on clashes of ideas and opinions. In a 1964 article on the twentieth-century periodical scene, Cyril Connolly divided magazines into two camps to reflect these supposedly opposing editorial strategies. ‘Little magazines are of two kinds, dynamic and eclectic’, he stated: ‘Some flourish on what they put in, others by whom they keep out’ (1964, 95–6). In fact, appealing as this neat distinction might be, the lines between the ‘dynamic’ and the ‘eclectic’ were very frequently blurred. By virtue of their format and their periodicity, all magazines are in a certain sense ‘eclectic’, and the dynamism of even group-orientated little magazines was generally reflected in their combustibility as much as it was in their coherence. On the latter score, modernist magazines have an extremely colourful history – part fact, part folklore – that includes more than its fair share of verbal and physical dust-ups. But, equally important, magazines could be the site of unlikely yet productive alliances. Adam McKible’s account of The Liberator, a New York magazine with a strong Marxist ethos, provides a particularly good example. In one number for 1922, editor Mike Gold described Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven loudly reciting Dadaist poetry to fellow poet and co-editor Claude McKay, best known as an author of the Harlem Renaissance. McKible enquires ‘What was Freytag-Loringhoven – a prominent contributor to the avant-garde Little Review and sometimes an outspoken racist and anti-Semite – doing in the office of The Liberator with a black Jamaican and a Jew from Manhattan’s Lower East Side?’ (McKible, 2007, 198). Although this artistic triangulation was brief, as the Gold–McKay partnership lasted less than a year, McKible’s article serves as a reminder that the myriad components of artistic production – social, textual, sexual, financial, aesthetic – collide within the material confines of a magazine and within the spaces inhabited by its makers.
The shifting configurations of this primary modernist scene have been echoed by ongoing revisions to modernism in the critical canon. A closer look at the fortunes of Rhythm, and of those whose work appeared regularly in it, is a good case in point. The magazine played an important role in the early careers of Murry, Katherine Mansfield and (to a lesser extent) D. H. Lawrence. It also published artwork, including images by Picasso, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, André Dunoyer de Segonzac and the Russian modernist Natalia Gontcharova. The prime mover behind the artistic content, and one of its major contributors, was Scottish modernist J. D. Fergusson. Murry had become friends with Fergusson while in Paris, and the older man acted as Art Editor until December 1912. Rhythm also included regular illustrations from women artists from Fergusson’s expatriate circle: Americans Anne Estelle Rice and Marguerite Thompson, and the British artist and poet Jessica Dismorr. Some of these names have been written into histories of modernism throughout the twentieth century – Picasso being the most obvious. But most others have enjoyed a more uncertain position. Now viewed as a major female modernist, in spite of early recognition Mansfield was ‘nearly erased […] from the history of the movement’ and it is still unclear where (and how) Murry himself should be placed (Kaplan, 1991, 1). Despite the pioneering work of its female members, the artists, who exhibited as ‘the Rhythmists’ or ‘the Rhythm Group’, are generally sidelined in histories of the period. However, as one of the leaders of the ‘Scottish Colourists’ – a term coined in the 1940s – Fergusson has always been recognized as a key figure in Scottish art history.3
The increasing availability of modernist magazines in digital editions has been part of this ongoing, if uneven, process of rediscovery and reappraisal.4 This has both assisted, and been assisted by, the emphasis on temporal and geographical expansion that has characterized the ‘New Modernist Studies’ (Mao and Walkowitz, 2008, 737). As we have seen, even in 1911 Murry was insistent that his magazine should be ‘absolutely cosmopolitan’ and imagined that it might find readers ‘all over the world’. In the twenty-first century, interest has grown both in the terms under which a global modernism might be theorized – as ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘international’ or ‘transnational’ – and in the specifics of its forms.5 This has also prompted a consideration of the role of magazines in an integral but apparently opposing drive, as ‘scholars have been drawn to analysing the historical avant-garde’s contrapuntal focus on localism – the specificities of place, time, nationality, region, and milieu – that emerged as a component of (rather than as a trend opposed to) the transnationalism generally taken to characterise literary modernism’ (White, 2013, 1). These co-existing alternatives look paradoxical when articulated in critical prose. But within a magazine, multiple ‘periodical codes’ always operate simultaneously, bringing multiple contexts to bear on any content.6 Plainly, these contexts explode further when we consider magazines as a ‘world form’, whose study is confined more by logistics – disciplinary and institutional – than by their own significance or contribution to modernism. As Eric Bulson observes, the lines of inheritance that link, for example, the distinctive ‘little magazine’ culture of mid-twentieth-century Africa to the European modernist magazines of the 1920s are only one element in an infinitely larger cross-pollination of style and of print form (2012, 267–8). In formal terms, then, magazines collapse the apparent distance between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’, as they do the divides between literary periods. As such, periodical texts can be said to represent not only an expansion but a parallel concentration of the modernist field.
A further aspect of this ‘expansion’ has been the increasing attention paid to the presence of modernism in periodicals Connolly would have placed on the outer perimeter of ‘eclecticism’. This includes fashion magazines such as Vogue, which demonstrated a general interest in modernist art and literature, and which in its British edition led to contributions by writers such as Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen.7 More challenging still to earlier notions of the ‘modernist magazine’ are so-called ‘middlebrow’ publications such as Good Housekeeping or Charm: A Magazine of New Jersey Home Interests (Wood, 2010, 12–24). The latter, published by Bamberger’s Department Store in the mid-1920s, was the venue for one of Mina Loy’s only critical essays on contemporary poetry, and Djuna Barnes also appeared in print there under a pseudonym.8 Later, public-service-orientated reviews like BBC magazine The Listener, which published criticism by the likes of Herbert Read and Wyndham Lewis, provoke additional questions about the temporal boundaries of modernism, as well as its institutionalization in the second half of the twentieth century.9 And yet, even magazines that seem to issue from what has been designated as the ‘centre’ – temporally, generically and geographically – can present definitional questions. One example is the British magazine Coterie. It was first published in May 1919, ran until the number for Winter 1920/21, and was relaunched as New Coterie in 1925.10 Andrew Thacker has noted that although Coterie published numerous writers and artists closely associated with distinct pre-war ‘schools’ – not only Vorticists but Imagists and Georgians – the magazine contained no mention of any of these groups. Thacker connects this to the time in which Coterie was published and to a post-war context in which the artistic landscape had irrevocably changed (2009, 478). Certainly Lewis’s attempts to revive Vorticism after the war – attempts that were still visible in his magazine The Tyro, which shared contributors with Coterie – were never sustained. It is therefore possible to see Coterie as representative of a sea change in modernist literary history, affected not only by the passing of time and modernism’s ongoing investment in the ‘new’ but by a move away from a pre-war group-orientated avant-garde. However, Coterie’s interest in the miscellaneous can also be seen as something of a magazine tradition, which had informed modernist magazines from the outset. As early as 1896, The Savoy, labelled by Connolly as a ‘dynamic’ magazine, disavowed a group identity in favour of a pragmatic emphasis on quality.11 Rather than choosing between these two interpretations, it is more accurate to say that Coterie participated in both.
This reworking of tradition, via the links magazines maintained with their periodical heritage, can be understood as part of a drive that was central to modernism’s formal preoccupations across the board. In the light of this, Murry’s promise that Rhythm would avoid ‘False Aestheticism’ is less anachronistic than it initially appears. In Rhythm Murry had attacked Wilde outright, accusing him of distorting the legacy of later nineteenth-century French authors, principally Baudelaire (Murry, 1913, xxvii). But elsewhere in the magazine, while sticking to the language of reinvigoration common to much early twentieth-century discourse, he gave credit to the influence of a movement that he clearly did not consider ‘false’.12 There were many reasons to point out how much modernism owed to aestheticism and to figures such as Arthur Symons and Holbrook Jackson, who bridged the gap between the two generations. We could think of T. S. Eliot carefully annotating his copy of Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, underlining its striking descriptions of the poetry of Jules Laforgue.13 Periodicals could express this engagement more directly still. In the November 1917 number of the British modernist magazine The Egoist, Symons’s work was printed alongside that of Eliot, Lewis and Pound.14 But for editors of early twentieth-century little magazines, the most obvious debt was the example set by The Yellow Book (1894–97) and The Savoy (1896). These texts – the latter jointly edited by Symons – were far from being the only high-profile magazines of the 1890s, but their combination of a series of visual, textual and promotional elements set the tone for a range of similar modernist publications. Aubrey Beardsley was closely associated with both, initially co-editing The Yellow Book before becoming Symons’s co-editor on The Savoy, and his graphics remain their most immediately identifiable signature. These designs compacted influences from William Morris and Japanese woodcuts with a sinuous and striking monochrome borrowed from contemporary poster design and influenced by eighteenth-century caricature. The originality that sprang from this hybridity was visible more generally in the magazines. The Yellow Book was happy to cross generational borders. It secured high-profile contributions from the likes of Henry James and Lord Frederick Leighton, but it also promoted the work of young and challenging writers. Prominent among these were female authors such as Vernon Lee, Charlotte Mew and Ada Leverson.15 National boundaries and their associated publishing conventions were traversed too. Henry James appeared largely due to the efforts of American editor Henry Harland, although James later sought to distance himself from the innovations of more popular magazine culture that Harland also used in The Yellow Book. If anything, The Savoy went further. It published Beardsley’s erotic, macabre lyric ‘The Ballad of a Barber’ and the tale of a marriage wrecked by a wife’s alcoholism, ‘A Mere Man’. It included writing about, and some writing by, Zola, Verlaine and Mallarmé. Alongside a series of pieces by Yeats, The Savoy published Havelock Ellis’s essays on Nietzsche and morality in literature, and an essay by Edward Carpenter on ‘The Simplification of Life’. Both magazines harnessed the controversy stirred up by Decadence to underline their significance to the movement, publishing not only the positive but also the negative reviews that they received. Despite taking advantage of popular modern print outlets – the prospectuses for The Yellow Book announced that it would be available not only from bookshops and libraries but also from ‘railway bookstalls’ – they also conveyed an impression of exclusivity, claiming an advanced cultural perspective that rejected the majority view ([Anon.], 1894 ii). The latter position was underscored when both were forced to close as a result of some form of moral controversy.16
The English-speaking magazines of the early twentieth century were anxious about their status – particularly when compared to the vibrant Continental scene. Publications such as the Mercure de France, or Munich’s graphic and literary magazine Jugend, seemed to possess a combination of aesthetic modernity and popularity that eluded comparable English-language ventures. In this atmosphere, the notoriety and physical presence of The Yellow Book made it particularly attractive to editors. Murry was certainly not alone in his ambition to make Rhythm ‘the Yellow Book for the modern movement’ (1935, 275). Ford Madox Ford claimed a similar ambition for his far more sober-seeming The English Review, which he initiated in December 1908 and continued to edit until February 1910.17 In this magazine, which was more obviously influenced by the Mercure de France, Ford juxtaposed figures such as James and Joseph Conrad (who also acted as an assistant editor) with Wyndham Lewis and D. H. Lawrence, whose first publications appeared in the magazine (Morrisson, 2001, 32–9). Wyndham Lewis’s BLAST, which appeared just twice in 1914 and 1915, was, like The Yellow Book, published by John Lane and Co. and carried an advert for its predecessor in the back of its first number. Lewis returned Ford’s favour by publishing the first instalment of ‘The Saddest Story’ (better known as The Good Soldier, the title of its completed novel form) in the first of its two numbers. In her autobiography, Margaret Anderson named The Yellow Book as both inspiration and warning when she was planning The Little Review. Concerned friends had reminded her of its collapse, she recalled, while she had reminded them of its status as a ‘precious possession’ on the library shelves of book-lovers (Anderson, 1930, 44). The Little Review, which Anderson went on to edit with Jane Heap, would, in its turn, become a precious possession, not least for its publication of twenty-three instalments of James Joyce’s Ulysses, prior to its suppression.
To mention The Yellow Book, The Savoy and Ulysses in close succession inevitably draws attention back to the confrontation between modernist magazines as vehicles for challenging or transgressive content and those who policed the boundaries of public decency. For these publications, as for their predecessors, the censorship of a text or image could sometimes work in a magazine’s favour, allowing it to advertise its radical stance. Murry publicly noted his printers’ refusal to include certain pieces in Rhythm, for instance.18 The first number of BLAST did include Pound’s risqué satirical poem ‘Fratres Minores’, but with several (badly) redacted lines (Pound, 1914, 48). As ‘Fratres Minores’ was a criticism of poets whose verse was too caught up with sex, these visible but partial deletions allowed BLAST both to mark its difference from, and to participate in, a popular mode of modernist taboo breaking. In other cases, the desire to challenge existing norms would cause history to repeat itself. The Freewoman suffered an identical fate to The Savoy when W. H. Smith’s withdrew it from sale, not because of any supposed obscenity, but because it found the editor Dora Marsden’s language unsuitably violent (see Glendinning, 1987, 39). Unsurprisingly, then, as both Joyce and the Little Review were already on the radar of the authorities, the excisions Pound made in the ‘Calypso’ instalment of Ulysses – which detailed Leopold Bloom’s bowel movements – prior to its appearance in The Little Review reflected his aesthetic and his pragmatic concerns. ‘In the thing as it stands you will lose effectiveness’, Pound wrote: ‘The excrements will prevent people from noticing the quality of things contrasted’ (letter to Joyce, [29 March] 1918; qtd. in Pound and Joyce, 1968, 131).
These engagements with legal and editorial authority, as with numerous other material concerns, point to some of the ways in which magazines participate in the wider publishing field. This holds true for magazines owned by a publisher, as well as for those affiliated with a specific printer or being published entirely independently. Modernist magazines were intimately connected with the revolutions in book and typographical design of the early twentieth century – the header for The New Age was designed by Eric Gill, for instance – although this element has not played as significant a role in recent periodical scholarship as we might expect. Sometimes magazines were backed by publishers with progressive reputations, as was the case for BLAST and John Lane. More rarely, magazines became progressive publishers in their own turn. The Egoist Press, which emerged from The Egoist magazine, was funded by its editor Harriet Shaw Weaver and published books by Joyce, Lewis, Dora Marsden, Robert McAlmon and Marianne Moore. The company that magazines kept is an important element when trying to understand how modernist periodicals were located within what are commonly known as ‘communications circuits’ – that is, the complex processes of production and transmission that are fundamental to reception and interpretation.19 This could involve connections forged between magazines that shared a publisher or direct relationships that form the basis of what Lucy Delap has called ‘periodical communities’, whose shared interests sometimes defy expectation (2000, 233–76). It was common for magazines to carry announcements for books and for other periodicals, even when they resisted more obviously commercial forms of advertisement, and many modernist magazines published regular reviews of other recent magazine publications. Clearly, such reviews contribute to reception history, but they also present a way in which the identity of the magazine that published them was shaped, for instance through the promotion of a ‘periodical community’. But it was also true that these reviews could draw attention to the difference between the magazine in which they were published and those under review. Pound’s lengthy series ‘Studies in Contemporary Mentality’, which ran in The New Age between August 1917 and January 1918, is an extended example of the latter.20 Pound’s acute and highly irreverent readings of a range of popular magazines dissected, paraphrased and occasionally imitated their content and its arrangement. The hilarious analysis in September 1917 of The Strand, and of its patriotic Sherlock Holmes story ‘His Last Bow: Sherlock Holmes Outwits a German Spy’, also contained serious points regarding Pound’s own aesthetic commitments and, perhaps, the values circulating at a time of war: ‘Whenever art gets beyond itself, and laps up too great a public, it at once degenerates into religion. Sherlock is on the way to religion, a modern worship of efficiency, acumen, inhumanity’ (Scholes and Wulfman, 2010, 245). The end of his next contribution, on the illustrated weekly The Sphere, shared some similarities with Joyce’s satirical use of newspaper discourse and layout in the ‘Aeolus’ chapter of Ulysses, but opened with more general ‘Reflections on Letter-Press’. This critique of the more popular magazine field allowed not only Pound, writing tongue-in-cheek as a ‘simple-hearted anthropologist’, but also The New Age to position themselves by implication (248).
This awareness of periodical texts – and sometimes ‘periodical communities’ – as participants in a wider publishing culture provides an invaluable sense of modernism’s embeddedness in the financial and material conditions of its production. But it is equally important to note that those periodicals were distinctive within that culture. This is not just a matter of the distinctiveness individual publications carved out for themselves – the sort that Murry claimed for Rhythm or that Pound generated for The New Age in the examples given above. The versions of modernist texts that appear in magazines are typically distinctive, first of all because they have a different context from those published in, or as, books. For instance, there are several reasons why reading Jean Rhys’s first publication ‘Vienne’, as the story initially appeared in Ford Madox Ford’s Paris-based the transatlantic review in 1924, is a different experience to reading it in her Jonathan Cape collection The Left Bank and Other Stories (1927). The magazine’s table of contents for that number shows Rhys in the company of familiar expatriate American modernists, many of whom had clear ‘localist’ modernist affiliations. ‘Vienne’ was preceded by Hemingway’s ‘Cross-Country Snow’ and was followed by Robert McAlmon’s ‘The Village’ and an instalment of Gertrude Stein’s ‘The Making of Americans’. The number featured other young and less well-known authors who shared an interest in the MidWest. Elma Taylor’s story ‘Calico’ focused on a woman who, having dreamt of moving into town for years, finds herself lost and dislocated once there. The magazine also included Amabel Williams-Ellis’s ‘London Night’ and a portion of Ford’s ‘Joseph Conrad: A Portrait’. The 1927 collection shared some elements of this context. Ford remained a significant presence in both publications, and the thematic organization of the collection emphasized Paris as a location. Nonetheless, following Christopher GoGwilt, one could argue that the absence of Ford’s recollections of Conrad removed a significant intertext for Rhys’s writing, one that drew attention to the colonial experiences of modernity beyond the obvious Franco-transatlantic modernism promoted by the magazine (GoGwilt, 2011, 82–4). One could also explore a line of similarity in the shared themes of unsettled geographical and gendered identity that surface in Rhys’s fractured account of a post-war former imperial capital, and the various meditations on gender, narrative and place that run through the stories of Hemingway, Taylor, Stein and Williams-Ellis listed above. This first appearance of ‘Vienne’ illustrates another of the notable aspects of magazine publication – that of actual textual variance. Rhys revised and expanded ‘Vienne’ prior to its book publication in 1927 (and would do so again prior to publication in the 1968 collection Tigers Are Better Looking). The narrative was significantly smoothed out. The sharp discontinuity GoGwilt notes between the French ‘Vienne’ and the English ‘Vienna’ – a discontinuity that hints at the marks left on Caribbean speech by these two languages, as much as it does the suppression of German – was played down by the removal of the French from the opening sentence of the story.21
Modernist magazines, and the texts published in them, must therefore be understood as sharing a number of convergences that operate on multiple levels. The richness of this textual and referential layering, and its often surprising combinations of forces, underlines the capacity of the form to ‘make new’ even the established contours of its own canon. As many of the examples given above show, magazines can be said to conform to an accepted, even a conservative, high modernist canon that includes Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Lewis and Ford. The publications in which these authors appeared – The Savoy, The Little Review, BLAST, The Egoist, The English Review, the transatlantic review – were listed in early institutionalizing accounts of modernist magazines by the likes of Hugh Kenner and Malcolm Bradbury. This canon opens a little with the inclusion of Rhythm and Coterie, and opens still further with the addition of a North American political publication like The Liberator. But if the study of magazines has changed the way we think about modernism more generally, rather than simply adding more publications to its repertoire, what, we might ask, are the most important areas of revision?
There are a range of answers to this question, but one of the most salient ones is the revisioning of the role politics played in modernism, both in the specific and in the general senses of the term. The notion that modernism generally separated the aesthetic from the political – and when it didn’t tended to affiliate itself with sometimes extreme right-wing ideologies – has been thoroughly revised by the study of periodicals and magazines over the last two decades. Although it thrived on controversy and was famous for hosting debates between figures of different political orientations, The New Age was launched as an explicitly Socialist publication. Emma Goldman was a significant presence in the early issues of The Little Review, and she was also the subject of Anderson’s provocative appreciation, titled ‘The Challenge of Emma Goldman’ (1914, 5–9).22 The social upheavals of the first decades of the twentieth century and the dominating horror of the First World War all made themselves clearly felt on the pages of modernist magazines. Murry, Mansfield and Lawrence’s short-lived The Signature (1916) was one example of an explicitly anti-war magazine staffed by well-known modernists. BLAST’s War Number reflected at length on the relationship between actual war and the aesthetic front it had attempted to open up, presenting a far more ambivalent, but equally powerful statement. Lewis’s opening editorial and series of articles on the war, and Helen Saunders’s poem ‘A Vision of Mud’ bracketed Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s ‘Vortex Gaudier-Brzeska: Written from the Trenches’.23 The first page provided a quick summary of Gaudier-Brzeska’s combat history, moving swiftly on to his manifesto-style meditation upon mass conflict. When the reader turned the page, they were faced with a continuation of the manifesto, but also with a black-rimmed notice of Gaudier-Brzeska’s time and place of death. Allan Antliff’s study of anarchist publications with explicitly modernist aesthetic agendas – such as Revolt (1916) – demonstrates the attraction magazines held for those who were politically as well as artistically avant-garde. But in a wider sense, periodicals offer powerful testimony of publishing as an unavoidably political act and demonstrate modernism’s commitment to remaking as a social as well as an aesthetic project. A figure such as Dora Marsden, who between 1911 and 1919 jointly edited The Freewoman, then The New Freewoman and then their successor The Egoist, illustrates the appeal of the periodical format for an individual uncomfortable with the majority of the templates available to her, including those of the Suffrage movement with which she initially aligned herself. In its exposition – but also exploration – of the multifaceted and transnational ‘feminist’ movement, The Freewoman ‘serves as an example of cross-national exchange within avant-garde movements and, specifically, within early twentieth-century feminism’ (Delap, 2007, 79). But within this, Marsden’s contributions to magazines exemplified the liberating potential of the periodical format, in terms of content, genre and mode of address. Her editorials were an example, as much as an examination, of what it meant to be a ‘free woman’, as they themselves ranged freely in style as well as in content. The November 1917 number of The Egoist, which we have touched upon with reference to Symons, contains a good example in Marsden’s article, ‘Lingual Psychology XII: A Detailed Moment of Consciousness’. In this extraordinary text, Marsden undertook a phenomenological self-analysis prompted by the face of a girl that appeared unbidden in her mind after an evening’s work. The article pursued a recognizably modernist ‘train of thought’ as it uncoiled in Marsden’s consciousness, allowing her to elaborate on questions of memory, temporality and ‘imaginary images’, but also to experiment with a variety of intersecting narrative techniques (Marsden, 1917, 147). The text was a psychological case study, divided up into discrete analytical paragraphs. But it was also filled with cross-cutting dialogue, juxtaposition and free indirect speech. The text was unavoidably engaged with gender and with unspoken currents of intellectual and bodily feeling. Marsden recalled first that the girl was a former pupil, then remembered aspects of her physicality and demeanour, bringing to the surface an incident when the girl’s shy blushes provoked pleasurable recognition in two older women.24 When, at the outset of the series, William Carlos Williams sent in a letter to The Egoist, protesting against Marsden’s ‘attempted destruction of masculine psychology’, her response was crisp and unapologetic: ‘Mr Williams’s “criticism” will be more helpful when he makes it clearer what the distinction is which he draws between male and female psychology. Is it anything beyond the fact that one is written by a man, the other by a woman? If not, most of us will feel that we have not been helped very far.’25
Williams’s negative interpretation of Marsden was wide of the mark. And yet, this encounter illustrated another vital component of modernism’s engagement with gender politics and the tensions implicit in it – that is, the growing prominence and authority of women as editors of, as well as contributors to, magazines.26 Marsden – and her more retiring initial co-editor Mary Gawthorpe – can be listed here not only with Mansfield, Weaver, Anderson and Heap, but with Harriet Monroe, Marianne Moore and Alice Corbin Henderson.27 The latter three all participated in the running of Poetry (Chicago) at different times. Moore became Managing Editor of The Dial in 1925, following Alyse Gregory. Bryher financially supported and co-edited the cinematic review Close Up (1927–33) with Kenneth Macpherson, assisted by H.D. Other women – Beatrice Hastings of The New Age, to name one – vigorously defended their centrality to periodical publications that did not always recognize their financial or editorial contributions officially. Jayne Marek lists a series of women involved in editing the magazines of the Harlem Renaissance. These included Jessie Redmon Fauset, who worked as literary editor for The Crisis, and Gwendolyn Bennett and Zora Neale Hurston who were part of the ‘editorial collective’ behind Fire!! (Marek, 2007, 105). Marek’s caution in using ‘modernism’ or ‘Harlem Renaissance’ as descriptive terms is important when analysing the role of magazines in a racially inflected modernist field, and yet, as we have noted throughout, any ‘movement’ read through the lens of periodical culture is always already refracted and made plural. Recent works on magazines such as The Crisis (1910–34), Fire!! (1926) and Opportunity (1923–42; 1949) have not only discussed their acknowledged significance as vehicles for distinctive African American literary modernisms but have also addressed the more unexplored significance of their visual and formal composition. For Rachel Farebrother, the ‘collage aesthetic’ visible in many modernist forms takes on a different historical resonance in African American print culture, concerned with making visible discontinuities, ruptures and erasures (2009, 11–12). While this supports GoGwilt’s reading of Rhys’s use of linguistic rupture in the transatlantic review (and asserts the significance of its later erasure), Farebrother also points out the ways in which the periodical form could be used recuperatively, to patch together a community of otherwise scattered and silenced voices.28 Elsewhere, the incendiary single issue of Fire!! (November 1926) rejected discourses of racial uplift, presenting itself as a crucible for a radical new modernist aesthetic that broke sexual as well as formal rules. A good example would be Langston Hughes’s poem ‘Elevator Boy’ contrasted with the more sonorous quality of an earlier Crisis poem like ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ (June 1921). In ‘Elevator Boy’, the speech is not sonorous but slangy, the rhythm of the poem and its narrow confines on the page indicating not only a modern, jazzy, African American idiom but the routines of repetitious and alienated labour (White, 2013, 167).29 In ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, by contrast, the speaker alludes to a pan-African history that runs through black experience in the Euphrates, the Congo and the Mississippi: ‘My soul has grown deep like the rivers’. Aaron Douglas’s cover image of Fire!! referred directly to African roots, yet that heritage was configured very differently than in earlier magazines. Other legacies were also apparent. Bruce Nugent – an artist-writer who worked frequently in linear monochrome, not unlike Beardsley – returned to the Decadent signatures of The Savoy and The Yellow Book in his story ‘Smoke, Lilies and Jade’.30 Nugent’s text self-consciously positions its narrator, Alex, as a young bohemian dandy. Almost entirely punctuated with ellipses, the text winds its way smokily through Alex’s memories and daydreams, and themes such as interracial and bisexual desire, incorporating the first names of the young writers involved with the magazine just as it incorporated the totemic names of Wilde, Freud, Schnitzler and Gurdjieff. The story was a bravura act, not of ‘passing’ but of ‘crossing’.31 Its hybrid style and form recalibrated the legacy of those famous fin-de-siècle periodical texts, articulating the political impulses noted above with playful seriousness.
For all these reasons, then, it is increasingly difficult to reassess modernism without addressing the periodical texts in which it was made and constantly remade. Following Marek, it is even tempting to consider a move away from the descriptive phrase ‘modernist magazines’, with its always-problematic shorthand for a mercurial period and an even more mercurial form. A simple reversal produces ‘magazine modernism’. This emphasizes ‘modernism’ as a set of practices unavoidably shaped by a medium with its own qualities and conventions – one that will continue to inform modernist studies in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Notes
1 Henri Bergson (1859–1941), the French philosopher whose writings and lectures were enormously influential on early modernist conceptualizations of time and consciousness.
2 This was the first of two exhibitions organized by Roger Fry and held at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1912, respectively. The first of these has been viewed as a watershed moment for modern art in Britain. However, as Murry’s statement suggests, alternative perspectives on ‘Post-Impressionism’ were in circulation in Britain at this point.
3 John Duncan Fergusson (1874–1961), who lived and worked in Paris for many years, explored an idiom with stylistic connections to both Fauvism and Cubism. One of the other Colourists, Fergusson’s friend S. J. Peploe, was also a regular contributor to Rhythm.
4 The best known of these are the Modernist Journals Project (MJP) based at Brown University and the University of Tulsa, the Modernist Magazines Project (MMP) based at De Montfort University and the University of Sussex, and The Blue Mountain Project, which operates at Princeton University. Numerous other resources – for instance, Periodicals Archive Online – provide access to periodicals with identifiably modernist content, but do not focus specifically upon it.
5 See, in particular, the work of Susan Stanford Friedman (2006 and 2010).
6 ‘Periodical codes’, a phrase derived from Jerome McGann’s ‘bibliographical codes’, describe the multiple elements from which a magazine is composed. See Thacker and Brooker (2009, 5–9).
7 For an early perspective, see Jane Garrity’s ‘Selling Culture to the “Civilized”: Bloomsbury, British Vogue, and the Marketing of National Identity’ (1999); see also Jessica Burstein’s more recent study Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art (2012, 123–50).
8 See Roger Conover’s note on Loy’s article, ‘Modern Poetry’. Loy published in Charm in April 1925, and her work was reprinted in Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedecker (1997, 217). See also O’Connor and Cummings (1984).
9 See, for example, the digital archive of Lewis’s art criticism in The Listener, which provides a good overview of the magazine in the Wyndham Lewis Late Writing Project: http://www.unirioja.es/listenerartcriticism/index.htm
10 See Thacker (2009) and Tollers (1986).
11 ‘We are not Realists, or Romanticists, or Decadents. For us, all art is good which is good art’ (Symons, qtd. in Beckson, 1987, 127).
12 ‘Aestheticism’, he stated, ‘has had its day and done its work’ (Murry, 1911, 36).
13 See Soldo (1983).
14 Symons’s ‘Notes Taken in Constantinople and Sofia’ was printed immediately after the final installment of Lewis’s first novel Tarr and immediately before an essay on Elizabethan classicism by Pound. Eliot’s ‘Reflections on Contemporary Poetry’ appeared in the same number.
15 See Ledger (2007) and also Krueger (2014).
16 The downfall of The Yellow Book was caused by the mistaken association between the magazine and Oscar Wilde during the period of his trial. In the case of The Savoy a seemingly innocuous instance of male nudity in one of William Blake’s engravings, reprinted to accompany an essay by W. B. Yeats, caused W. H. Smith’s to withdraw it from sale.
17 In 1921, Ford retrospectively described his aim of making The English Review an ‘aube-de-siecle’ Yellow Book; quoted in Peppis (2000, 23).
18 ‘… we regret that the state of public opinion in England should be such that it is impossible to obtain any degree of free expression for a serious work of art’ (Murry, 1912, 34).
19 Robert Darnton’s model, first used in his ‘What Is the History of Books?’ in 1982 and revisited in 2007, has become central to modern book history.
20 Pound’s series has been described by Robert Scholes as a sort of originary example of periodical scholarship. See Scholes and Wulfman (2010).
21 This sort of versioning is far from unusual, of course. When it was republished in his collection Personae, Pound chose to restore ‘Fratres Minores’ to its unexpurgated form, while Joyce reinstated the passage Pound had deleted from ‘Calypso’ in the first edition of Ulysses.
22 Emma Goldman (1869–1940) was an American radical and feminist, one of the most influential anarchist activists and theorists of her era.
23 BLAST (1915), Lewis’s ‘Editorial’ (5–6), ‘War Notes’ (9–16) and ‘Artists and the War’ (23), Saunders’s ‘A Vision of Mud’ (73) and Gaudier Brzeska’s ‘Vortex (Written from the Trenches)’ (33–4) were the most conspicuous engagements with the conflict.
24 ‘There is a slight shiver of contact as eye meets eye, followed by an interchange of glances which, without saying, mean: “How shy!” “Isn’t it delicious!”’ (Marsden, 1917, 150).
25 Editor [Marsden], ‘Correspondence: The Great Sex Spiral’, The Egoist, April 1917, 46.
26 Female editors did, of course, exist prior to the twentieth century. For a Victorian example, see Palmer (2011).
27 The key critical text here remains Jayne Marek’s Women Editing Modernism: ‘Little’ Magazines and Literary History (1995).
28 Her discussion of editor W. E. B. DuBois’s correspondence column, ‘The Outer Pocket’, which identified a global readership of men and women of colour and let them speak in their own words, points to the significance of this aspect of periodical format (Farebrother, 2009, 192–3).
29 The cover image was provided by Aaron Douglas.
30 Caroline Goeser’s work on visuality and race in the period deals extensively with the strategies of African American artists, including Nugent. See, for example, Goeser (2006).
31 See Goeser (2007, 166) and White (2013, 164–7).
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