transatlantic immobility

Le rhythme de l’ocean berce les transatlantiques.

▸ Arthur Cravan in 1912, the same year the Titanic sank

a preamble

“There is no earthly reason why Poetry shouldn’t ‘reach England.’ ‘England’ is as dead as mutton.”¹ That’s Ezra Pound in 1912 writing to Harriet Monroe, editor of the recently launched little magazine Poetry. On this first point, Pound was right. There should not have been any reason, earthly or otherwise, why Poetry, a little magazine based in Chicago, couldn’t reach England with relative ease at that moment in time. Transatlantic cables were already in place to enable quick communication (accompanied by antennas on boats and land for wireless transmissions), transatlantic shipping companies and ocean liners were in the business of carrying bags of mail, and there was sufficient individual movement in both directions to make sure that the logistics of production and distribution could be taken care of.² And yet that’s not what happened. In the history of little magazines, the Atlantic Ocean proved to be more inhospitable than Pound, Monroe, or anyone else could have imagined. Modern transport and communications technologies may have continued to shrink the distance between England, the United States, and France, but this didn’t result in the formation of any substantial transatlantic magazine community, one where large numbers of readers, editors, and critics were united by the same titles arriving at the same time. In fact, the reverse very often proved to be true. In the decades that followed Pound’s pronouncement, little magazines continued to pop up like so many mushrooms overnight, but the Atlantic was a formidable foe, and it ended up shaping the literary field on both continents precisely by keeping magazines out of the hands of a transatlantic reading public. Though we still identify the Atlantic Ocean at the beginning of the twentieth century with the romantic thrill of adventure, movement, migration, and literary cross-fertilization, it also had the power to hinder and/or stop the flow of the people, boats, books, and magazines that tried to cross it. With the little magazine, the causes were many, involving everything from postal import regulations during World War I to the general unreliability of international mail delivery to the carelessness of booksellers slow to pay up (if they did at all) to the dearth of overseas subscribers (many of them too lazy to renew). But if we still want to go on arguing that modernism was a transatlantic phenomenon, then we will also have to be willing to acknowledge it was in spite of the fact that communication through the little magazine was seriously restricted, connectivity hard to come by, and mobility more of a critical myth than a triumphant historical reality.

I

The concept of a “transatlantic axis for modernism” is as old as modernism itself.³ It is an “axis,” in fact, identified with the expats, émigrés, and exiles, who crossed and recrossed the Atlantic Ocean in both directions, and it is linked up again and again with the transnational circulation of literary texts even if there is still very little critical work done on the subject. Strangely, though, it was not books that were bringing these texts to audiences on both sides: it was little magazines, and though they could be cosmopolitan in what (and whom) they published, they were never particularly mobile. For the Little Review and the Egoist, World War I was largely to blame. Not only was it costly to send individual issues back and forth across the pond, there were also import regulations on bulk mail coming into England and an import tariff on the other side. After signing on as the foreign correspondent for the Little Review in 1917, Ezra Pound, then living in London, repeatedly had to remind its editor, Margaret Anderson, not to send him more than six copies at a time. “Malhereusement [sic] there can be no importation in bulk into England until after the war, but I’ll send a couple of dozen names of the people who really matter and they can have single copies. If the thing is good enough we can dispose of bound vols. post bellum.”⁴ A couple of dozen names for single copies and the hope of selling bound volumes of back issues at the war’s end: that might be one way to find readers, but it doesn’t really seem “good enough” to build an axis for anything.⁵

And after the war ended, the situation didn’t improve very much, and the regulations on bulk mail weren’t to blame. It was the general unreliability of the transatlantic mail system.⁶ As late as 1922, Scofield Thayer, the cofounder of the Dial (with James Sibley Watson) who was then living in Vienna, was up in arms because his individual copies were repeatedly arriving late from New York City (if they arrived at all). In his correspondence with the Dial’s New York office, he agonizes over the delays, rages against those who might be responsible, and tries to come up with reasons why the Dial, a funny name in this context, just wasn’t showing up on time. In one particularly cranky dispatch, he provided Gilbert Seldes, his assistant, with a breakdown of the facts: “The May number of the Dial, reached me upon the morning of May 20th, a full week later than I usually received the Dial. Mr. Riccius and others have informed me that they receive their Dials very irregularly. Would you be so good as to let me know upon what date approximately these Dials were dispatched to me and whether you yourself have any knowledge of why they took apparently four weeks to come to Vienna.”⁷ Though Seldes was keen to dissociate himself from the “vagaries of the international postal union,” he didn’t have an answer, but he was forced to keep looking for one as the distribution delays continued.⁸ A few months later, and with no improvements in sight, Thayer requested a detailed report regarding the dreadful state of Dial distribution outside the United States: “I find it was impossible for London subscribers to The Dial to get their copies at different times during the autumn and that therefore it was generally said in London that The Dial had gone out of business, was indeed bankrupt. Friends from Paris have also written me that they have been quite unable to get their Dials.”⁹ After all his ranting and raving, Thayer discovered one possible explanation for the delays, but they only applied to the route between New York and Vienna. It turns out the U.S. Senate had passed a law requiring that American ships, which were limited in number and known to be much slower, transport all German and Austrian mail to and from the United States. For the rest of Thayer’s stay in Europe, then, he rerouted his letters and his Dials through London in the hope that they would travel on the Mauretania or the Aquitania, two of the more celebrated express ocean liners at the time (figure 2.1).¹⁰

2.1 Scofield Thayer envelope. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Equally problematic was the distribution arrangement that little magazines like the Dial made with overseas bookstores and subscribers. After Thayer asked his other assistant, Samuel Craig, for a breakdown of “foreign sales,” Thayer, I’m sure, was as surprised as anyone to discover that the situation was pretty bleak. “We have a great deal of difficulty in dealing with the English bookstores,” Craig informed him. “In almost every case they allow their accounts to run for months before paying. Cecil Palmer, who gets more than fifty per cent of the copies sent to England, has never paid us a cent, and now owes more than 43 pounds. Frank Henderson, another bookdealer, owes us 24 pounds. We have written these dealers numerous letters and they get our monthly statements, but none of these has so far been effective. A friend who will be in London this spring has agreed to see what he can do to collect these sums for us.”¹¹ The few British subscribers they managed to locate weren’t much better about remittance or renewals, and Craig was convinced that any future success building a reliable transatlantic readership would have to involve having “someone on the ground” in London.¹² No one, as I’ll explain later, was ever put there.¹³ Attached to Craig’s letter was a report for the Dial’s British circulation in 1923 (figure 2.2). All in all, sixty-six copies went to five different bookdealers (of which thirty-one sold on average per month), and fifty-seven went to subscribers. That’s less than one hundred copies per month for a little magazine whose circulation hovered around twelve thousand that year (including domestic mail circulation and newsstand sales).¹⁴ On the basis of this evidence, and bearing in mind the Dial would have been in the best possible position to ensure transatlantic distribution because of its budget, I think it’s safe to conclude that if there was indeed a “transatlantic axis for modernism” between England, America, and France, in particular, it was not because there was ever a reliable system in place for the transatlantic distribution of little magazines.¹⁵

2.2 List of bookdealers for the Dial. Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

This leads me to the larger point I want to make in this chapter: though critics have been quick to associate the little magazine at the beginning of the twentieth century with the benefits of modernization (including transport, communication, and printing technologies), mobility was not one of them. Sure, a small percentage of individual issues for some magazines moved through bookstores and subscriptions, but with the Little Review, the Dial, the Egoist, and the Criterion, there was never any robust infrastructure in place that would enable the easy transatlantic circulation of any one of them. This is a necessary corrective to make because critics have been conflating the transatlantic internationalism of so many modernist writers—whose works were published in different countries and languages—with what was really a more restricted, nationally defined geography of the little magazines where they published. And this point has larger implications for the way we continue to theorize the formation of a transatlantic literary field during these decades, in large part because it emphasizes the very real limits of circulation within this medium. If writers were moving, in other words, the magazines were not.

In his analysis of a globally conceived literary transnationalism in directions east and west, north and south, Jahan Ramazani points out that the “transatlantic” was one route out of many, including those that existed between the first and third worlds, ex-colonizer and ex-colonized.¹⁶ So much of Ramazani’s argument rests on this productive migration of literary texts, and the emphasis, in the end, is always on the identification of a modernist cross-cultural poetics that depends on strategies of collage, adaptation, and subversion. Texts, in Ramazani’s argument, move between so many different cultures, but there is no explicit attention to the medium they were moving in: books, pamphlets, anthologies, magazines, newspapers, what? I understand, of course, that Ramazani is less interested in the material aspect of transnationalism and transatlanticism, but this search to uncover the synergy of a transnational poetics is still very much bound up with the material processes that would allow for any poem to travel in the first place.

So I want to distinguish here just what I’m after in this chapter. Influence, migration, and cross-fertilization are terms used to define the interaction between writers from different cultures who come into contact with one another. Such interaction tends to be read either formally, through the critical and creative appropriation of a particular work, or historically, through a focus on the sources out of which that work emerges. I’m interested instead in a more concrete approach that tries to identify the friction of transnationalism through the transatlantic ambitions of the little magazine in the hopes of explaining how such fertilizations, if they ever happened, were not facilitated in the way we have been led to believe. Modernism’s magazines, where so many writers published, were subject to the laws, timetables, and business practices of transnational movement, some of them stopped dead in their tracks, but this provided, in the end, different strategies for interaction between magazines, which, in turn, influenced how certain works could and could not travel from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Consider, for instance, two of the most monumental examples, involving Ulysses and The Waste Land. Both of these works appeared in two magazines at once precisely because transatlantic circulation was impossible. A few dozen subscriptions might have made the journey, but there was no way for either of them to appear in both places at once in any significant number. And that’s precisely what I mean when it comes to the materiality of transatlantic literary distribution. Texts were not magically flowing from one destination to another: they were getting stopped, tangled up, mutilated, and sunk along the way, some of them trapped in the very magazines that promised safe transport.

Transatlantic, then, is a misleading term since the prefix itself promises movement “across” the world’s second-largest ocean, when what I’m really interested in is the immobility, slowness, and deceleration that too often came whenever the journey was made. But even if all of the magazines I discuss in this chapter are, finally, transatlantic failures (at least as far as mobility is concerned), it’s not because they clung to the shore for dear life. In fact, as I’ll explain, every one of them tried to find a successful passage in both directions, east to west, west to east. After all, it had worked well enough for Charles Dickens and Henry James when they serialized their novels in British and American magazines and newspapers. In this case, however, there’s one major difference to consider: the medium. Not only did little magazines never have the budgets; they also didn’t have the circulation numbers to justify such an expense. Transatlantic immobility, then, was a common fate for the little magazine, one that inspired editors on both sides to come up with creative solutions: for the Little Review and the Egoist, this involved the simultaneous publication of a single novel in two different magazines; for the Dial and the Criterion, a similar approach was taken, only to be followed by botched plans for a magazine cooperative based in London; and for the transatlantic review, it involved the crushed fantasies of a united (and simultaneous) three-country readership. And maybe that, in the end, is one of the little magazine’s more memorable triumphs in the first half of the twentieth century: making us forget that the Atlantic was always an ocean separating literary cultures and audiences on two continents and not a bridge successfully joining them.

II

Before signing on as the transatlantic liaison for the Little Review (in 1917) and the Dial (in 1919), Ezra Pound had dreams of editing his own little magazine. Funded, in part, by John Quinn, the Transatlantic Vortex Monthly, as he planned to call it, was going to reconnect Paris, London, and New York at the war’s end.¹⁷ Indeed, Pound’s plans were ambitious from the start, motivated by the desire to create the conditions for a transatlantic conversation that would change the course of modern literature. It was a vortex he wanted above all, a swirling maelstrom of creative and critical energies that would eventually get American and British literature up to speed with the modern advances taking place on the Continent. As part of his protracted pitch to Quinn, which lasted between 1915 and 1917, he worked through all of the production details, including everything from format and size (octavo) to word count (three hundred words per page) and type (pica). The Transatlantic Vortex Monthly, which was modeled very closely after the Mercure de France, would be 112 pages (forty of them reserved for chroniques detailing current literary and cultural events), be printed on thick paper without advertisements, and sell for twenty-five cents a copy, with twenty-two hundred subscribers paying three dollars a year.¹⁸ By this time, Pound already had experience working in an editorial capacity with American and British magazines (Poetry, New Age), but it’s clear from his correspondence with Quinn that he still didn’t understand exactly how transatlantic communication would work, focusing his attention more on what the Transatlantic Vortex would look like and where it would be printed (London or New York) and less on questions of circulation, how it would actually move between these three cities.¹⁹

In 1917, and quite out of the blue, Pound finally got his chance to try it all out after getting hired on as the “foreign correspondent” for Margaret Anderson’s the Little Review. “Two years of the L.R.,” he told Quinn, “will be enough to show what a small magazine ought to be.”²⁰ And, as it turned out, he was right. In less than two years, not only did Pound manage to corral writers now regarded as modernist heroes, but, and more to the point, he learned how to make the “small magazine” function transatlantically. As the foreign correspondent, he mediated between the editors back in New York City and the writers and readers based in England and across Europe, collecting subscriptions, channeling the money through a bank account in Pennsylvania, and vetting/editing the British and European contributions, which he sent back to Margaret Anderson.

One of Pound’s earliest and most significant contributions as foreign editor was “A Study of French Modern Poets” (February 1918), a special issue devoted entirely to Jules Laforgue, Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud, Remy de Gourmont, Charles Vildrac, Jules Romains, and others.²¹ For this particular issue, transatlantic communication was the primary goal, and Pound was determined that his readers would not miss the point. Throughout these pages, he assumes the role of the cheeky editor, commentator, and critic, but as he explains in the preface, this was not something he planned on doing. Instead, he had imagined publishing this issue without any commentary so that readers coming across these texts in the original French would be forced to make their way without any critical guidance (many of them, it is safe to say, with a dictionary in hand). But there was an interesting legal hitch that Pound hadn’t anticipated when he first began putting everything together. Upon asking Alfred Vallette for permission, via the critic Henry Davray (in charge of the “Lettres Anglaises” section for the Mercure), to reprint poems that had originally appeared in the Mercure, he was informed that French copyright law wasn’t so clear on the subject. Vallette explained that if the Little Review was publishing a study of a literary movement, it had the right to cite the poets from that movement. The law, however, wasn’t explicit about the length of these citations, and further, if Pound wanted to publish them without commentary, then he would have to contact the authors themselves for permission, which would prove lengthy and complicated since they were scattered across Europe. Davray, who was fully in support of Pound’s project, recommended another solution: entrelarder (intersperse) the full poems with lines of explication. In doing so, Pound would be able to avoid the problem of overquoting, and at the same time, he could present these texts as a unified study of a literary movement, which, in effect, would secure him the right to reprint these poems in the first place.

Seen this way, the structure of Pound’s “Study,” with its mixture of commentary and lengthy quotation, was determined, at first, by the pressures of French copyright law. And throughout the entire issue, the necessity to comment on these poems very often ends up exaggerating the presence of an American mediator anticipating the negative reactions of his audience. Laforgue’s “Locutions des pierrots,” for instance, receives the following gloss: “I am well aware that this sort of thing will drive most of our bull-moose readers to the perilous borders of apoplexy.” Corbière inspires the recollection of an American acquaintance in Paris, who complained that “all French poetry smelt of talcum powder.” And a single poem by Stuart Merrill occasions a gentle note of caution: “There is no need to take this sort of tongue-twisting too seriously, though it undoubtedly was so taken in Paris during the late eighties and early nineties.”²² There are many other places where the criticism is more serious, but the overall tone is still bound up with the personality of an editor/commentator leading his band of curiosity seekers through the landscape of modern French poetry after Baudelaire.

Pound had another trick up his sleeve as well. Even before the unexpected legal need for commentary had arisen, he had decided to make this particular number of the little magazine “a simple anthology.”²³ T. S. Flint first had the idea when he published a series of “French chronicles” in Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama, and it proved a lucrative venture because it maintained the value of the bound volumes after the fact. For this very reason, Pound wanted Anderson to raise the price on this special issue from twenty-five to fifty or seventy-five cents, arguing that it was superior and significantly cheaper than Amy Lowell’s anthology, which had come in at a whopping 488 pages for $2.50.²⁴ This wasn’t the first time Pound had the idea to disguise a little magazine as an anthology (and it wouldn’t be his last), but in this instance, I suspect that there was a specific motivation behind it: transatlantic tariffs.²⁵ During these years, American tariffs on books and magazines were one of Pound’s obsessions, and he was convinced, as he explained during one of his many tirades in the Little Review, that they were “an [sic] hindrance to international communication, serious at any time, and doubly serious now when we are trying to understand France and England more intimately.”²⁶

Pound, it turns out, might have been overreacting. Robert Spoo explains that after the passing of the Underwood Tariff Act of 1913, import tariffs in America applied only to “foreign books and periodicals” written in English and not to those in other languages, which were given “free list” status.²⁷ It’s unclear just how thoroughly Pound understood the intricacies of U.S. tariff laws, but if he had, in fact, printed an anthology in France, a 15 percent tariff would not have been added if and when imported into the United States, assuming that it was treated as a foreign-language publication. Copyright, however, was a different issue. The manufacturing clause of the 1909 act ensured copyright protection to books and periodicals “typeset, printed, and bound on American soil,” and a French anthology printed in France could also get copyright protection if it had the appropriate copyright notice.²⁸ The trick, however, would involve determining the language of the anthology. To avoid potential problems with French copyright and to ensure American copyright for foreign authors, Pound relied on the entralarder trick suggested by Davray, but in doing so, he ended up making it a French-English hybrid. For that reason, this anthology could have been treated as an English-language publication, which, if coming in from abroad, would have then required that the printer follow the ad interim provision of the manufacturing clause for U.S. copyright requiring a copy get sent to the Copyright Office within sixty days, followed by a reprinting and binding in the United States. It’s doubtful Pound would have known all of this, but the larger point I want to make involves the way that the little magazine was getting adapted to avoid tariffs and copyright snafus.²⁹ In 1917, then, this domestically printed American little magazine, with its second-class domestic mailing privileges, was able to do what no other anthology from abroad could. And for twenty-five cents a copy, readers, it turned out, were getting quite a deal.³⁰

An announcement on the back inside cover of the same February 1918 special issue also indicates that the Little Review had even bigger plans in store for the future: “I have just received the first three installments of James Joyce’s new novel, which is to run serially in The Little Review, beginning with the next number. It is called ‘Ulysses.’…This announcement means that we are about to publish a prose masterpiece.” Pound and Anderson had just managed to pass off a little magazine as an anthology, but now it was clear that they wanted to try something similar with a novel, one getting written in Europe while a war was raging and sent back to the United States for publication and distribution. Running Ulysses serially for an unknown number of installments, under cover as it were, they were already anticipating more of a marathon than a jog, but I want to emphasize here that with this arrangement, Pound would have been aware of the irony that Joyce’s novel was, in fact, coming into America from abroad. Serialization in the little magazine provided a backdoor into America, a way for a foreign novel written in English to reach an audience without paying the necessary tariffs at the border or requiring ad interim protection years before it would even see the light of day as a self-contained book.

At the time, of course, no one could have predicted that Ulysses would end up attracting so much attention from British and American censors, eventually leading to the abrupt cessation in the Little Review after two years, when it was still incomplete. But in a compelling twist, it was, in fact, the serialization of Ulysses and its circulation through the U.S. mail that actually opened it up to legal trouble. Because Joyce refused to censor any of the more explicit chapters (with scenes of defecation and masturbation), Ulysses was a liability, and what Pound conferred to Quinn after reading the “Circe” episode was right all along: “All the human humiliations must fall upon le cher Leopold. That being so J.J. is artistically right for the whole book. but he has no case for serial publication.”³¹ What Pound meant, in fact, was what Quinn had already told him a month earlier when preparing his defense of Ulysses in front of the New York State Court of Special Sessions: “There are things in ‘Ulysses’ published in number after number of ‘the Little Review’ that never should have appeared in a magazine asking privileges of the mails. In a book, yes. In a magazine, emphatically no.”³² Indeed, if seriality in a little magazine was one way around import tariffs, it also opened Ulysses up to censorship laws banning the circulation of lewd material through the U.S. “mails” and led to the prosecution of Ulysses under the New York State Obscenity penal code and not U.S. postal sanctions.³³

Even with all of the legal woes, the serialization of Ulysses was Pound’s crowning achievement as a foreign correspondent. The contract was formalized between Joyce and the Little Review via Pound in February 1917, serialization began in March 1918, and by November of that same year, seven episodes were published in full. Almost half of the serialized Ulysses, then, appeared during wartime, and the triangulated arrangement between Joyce, Pound, and Anderson stayed intact even after the war was over. In practical terms, the exigencies of the war meant that transatlantic distribution was severely restricted (six copies at a time), but they allowed Pound to develop a two-magazine solution for the serialization of Ulysses. Instead of transporting issues in bulk across the Atlantic, they would be printed in London and New York at the same time.³⁴ “Egoist for controversy. L. Review for creation,” was Pound’s motto, with the promise of leading “to the complete culture and education of etc suffering humanity.”³⁵ Simultaneous publication obviated the need for an international postal network, and it was a way to bring Ulysses to two audiences at once, a serial simulcast in which the magazine would function more like a radio streaming a live event in two different places. The situation, as is well known, became more complicated as soon as the printing was under way: Egoist printers in England, who could be personally punished for violating censorship laws and libel actions, refused to set individual episodes (beginning with the first one), and even with the few that made it in, they regularly took the liberty of “editing” offensive passages on their own. All in all, then, only three and a half episodes appeared in the Egoist, a full year after their appearance in the Little Review.

But if this two-magazine solution didn’t work as planned, this back-and-forth between Pound and the editors of the Little Review (with the hope of keeping the Egoist in the loop) ended up shaping how the novel itself was produced and received. When Pound first contacted Joyce, a handful of episodes had been drafted, but Joyce was still plotting out the overall direction of the novel. Instead of publishing a collection of randomly ordered excerpts, then, they decided that complete episodes brought out in order would be a much more effective way to present Ulysses to the public.³⁶ And here’s how the arrangement worked: Joyce wrote episodes in Zurich and Trieste, paid for three or four copies to be put into typescript (where he made corrections), and sent two of them to Pound, who then forwarded one to the Little Review and the other to the Egoist. Joyce kept the third and sometimes fourth copies of the typescript for himself, anticipating the day when he could revise again and use them for the preparation of page proofs. This arrangement reveals just how out of the loop Joyce was during the entire process: once he sent Pound the copies of the typescript, that ended his involvement with the serial publication. He never had the chance to revise episodes published in these magazines and very often didn’t even receive issues until months after they were published (if he did at all).³⁷

It was precisely because of this transatlantic triangle that things got interesting. From the beginning, Pound was the self-appointed mediator, but he also took on the role as Joyce’s “dear editor,” reading and commenting on individual episodes and figuring out when/where they could be broken up for serialization. Interruption was one of Pound’s most important tasks in this process, a place where he had to decide when and where the longer episodes (those exceeding eight thousand words) could be divided, and it was an exercise that helped to transform Ulysses from a sequence of typescripts into a serialized novel.³⁸ Before looking more closely at how this process worked, it’s necessary to mention that Pound was completely in the dark about Joyce’s overall plan. Never having access to any “skeleton key,” Pound would not have known about the breakdown and structure of the episodes: every installment, in fact, was a surprise to him. Victorian novelists were often unsure of the direction for their plots as they were being serialized, but there was a major difference: they often corresponded directly with their editors during the serialization process. Joyce, to the contrary, worked through a third party, and he was never forthcoming about where he was going from one episode to the next. Nine months into the serialization, in fact, Pound finally wrote to him asking, “Has ‘Ulysses’ 24 Odyssean books? I don’t want to ask silly questions, and I hope it continues forever, but people are continually asking me about it.”³⁹ Readers of the serial Ulysses were in the same boat. Installments were appearing in the Little Review without any indication of when they might come to an end. In the May-June 1920 issue, containing the second installment of “Nausikaa,” one particularly anxious reader wanted clarification: “Now tell the truth—do you yourselves know where the story is at the present moment, how much time has elapsed—just where are we? Have you any clue as to when the story will end?” Anderson and her coeditor jane heap didn’t have any clue: “Nausikaa,” they replied, took place on Tuesday at 5:30, and the novel was going to end with the “Circe episode.”⁴⁰

Critics tend to mention serialization either when talking about the production of Ulysses as a book or when trying to settle a genetic discrepancy between the Little Review version and earlier and later drafts. Missing from the equation is any consideration that serialization—this process of printing individual episodes on a monthly/bimonthly, sometimes trimonthly, basis in a little magazine—could have affected its form, by which I mean, in the broadest possible sense, the novel’s structure and design (especially in this early phase of its development), the shape and direction of the plot, the length of individual episodes, even the arrangement and sequencing of events. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which was serialized in the Egoist between February 1914 and September 1915, provides an interesting point of comparison. Again, Pound was the force behind the entire arrangement. After reading the manuscript, he told Joyce, “I am sending it off at once to THE EGOIST.”⁴¹ In a year and a half, Portrait appeared in twenty-five installments (six sections per chapter when it was published bimonthly, three sections per chapter after it became a monthly), but the novel was written before serialization began. Joyce may have been revising the text from month to month, but he was not making any substantive structural changes along the way.

The situation was wildly different for Ulysses. Only a handful of episodes were written when the serialization process started. Joyce had a general breakdown of the number in mind (settling at one point on twenty-two and then on seventeen and then on eighteen after writing episode nine) and the order in which they were to appear, but the intricacies of the plot and the overall design were still being worked out. Which makes you wonder if we can really ignore the fact that the novel was being written as it was being serialized. Joyce may have been following his plot and his characters from one episode to the next, but the serial structure, and the material constraints of the magazine itself, would have made it more difficult for him to go wherever he wanted. We know, after all, what happened once the serialization of Ulysses in the Little Review stopped: you end up with a monstrous episode like “Circe.” I don’t think anyone would want Ulysses to be longer than it is, but in the early stages of the composition, Joyce was figuring out how to prepare for publication within a restricted form, roughly sixty-four pages (and around twenty-five thousand words) per issue.

Once these episodes got too long for a single installment, however, it was Pound’s job to figure out where they could be interrupted.⁴² The typescript, as I mentioned before, was arriving from Zurich, and Pound, in London, would read and correct it before passing everything on to America. After receiving the first batch, he immediately wrote to Joyce asking for clarification: “Your 17 pages have no division marks. Unless this is the first month’s lot, instead of the first three months, as you wrote it would be, I shall divide on p. 6, after the statement that the Sassenach wants his bacon, and at the very top of page 12.”⁴³ Pound’s response reveals just how confusing this editorial arrangement from afar could be: Pound was expecting three months of material (Joyce sent a single episode); Pound contemplated dividing this batch into three installments (Joyce intended it to be published together all at once). Nevertheless, this first exchange provides a peek into the subsequent challenges that Pound faced as the transatlantic mediator. There is no evidence to suggest from the surviving typescripts that Joyce would ever indicate where later, and longer, episodes like “Lestrygonians,” “Scylla and Charybdis,” “Wandering Rocks,” “Sirens,” “Cyclops,” “Nausikaa,” and “Oxen of the Sun” should be divided (and it was Joyce’s habit always to send full episodes). “Lestrygonians” is particularly strange because it could have fit into a single issue, but instead it was broken up into two installments, one of twenty-three pages (8,371 words) followed by four pages (1,453 words) the next month.⁴⁴ Indeed, it is possible that the printer ran out of space late in the production of the issue; whatever the reason, it was here that the first interruption was staged, and it tells us a lot about how this process worked. In this instance, the first installment of “Lestrygonians” ends just as Paddy Leonard orders another drink at Davy Byrne’s pub immediately after Bloom leaves. “Ay, Paddy Leonard said, a suckingbottle for the baby.” The next installment of “Lestrygonians” opens with Bloom out in Dublin walking down Dawson Street, with the implication that some time has elapsed since his departure.

“Scylla and Charybdis” was divided into two installments as well (thirteen pages with 4,440 words, seventeen pages with 6,446 words). The first one ends with the arrival of Buck Mulligan in the library during Stephen’s lecture on Shakespeare; the second one picks up with his humorous quip, “You were speaking of the gaseous vertebrate, if I mistake not?” Already in these two examples, we see that Pound was coming up with some inventive strategies for interrupting Ulysses. In the first in-stance, he capitalized on a spatial shift in the plot, one that occurs when the action moves from the pub to the street. In the second instance, he interrupts the episode, brilliantly enough, after the interruption of Buck Mulligan, and it gets followed up with a question that is itself a recap of what’s been happening when he was not there. In subsequent episodes, editorial interruptions were staged the same way, involving a change in location/perspective (“Wandering Rocks,” “Sirens”) or the creation of an artificial pause in the action (“Cyclops,” “Nausikaa”). “Nausikaa,” which appeared in three installments, plays off both, but I suspect that Pound was up to something else here as well. After Joyce sent him the episode, he knew that the censors were going to stage their own interruption (a.k.a. confiscation) of the entire issue (“I recd. in London & forwarded Nausika [sic] Bloom by the sea waves & the lady of the delectable shins”⁴⁵). On October 31, 1920, after the issue was already seized by the U.S. postal authorities, Pound made the point to John Quinn that while it might not be obvious that Bloom is going off “in his pants at the sight of Nausikaa’s leg,” he remembers making cuts to the manuscript before sending it on, suspecting that Anderson “may have erased” the “black pencil.”⁴⁶

In addition to these excisions (which were ignored if they were ever made), Pound had other editorial tricks up his sleeve. When breaking up “Nausikaa” into three installments, he framed the action more around the character of Cissy Caffrey and less on Leopold Bloom and Gerty Mac-Dowell. The first installment, then, ends with Gerty’s thoughts on Cissy (“but she was sincerity itself, one of the bravest and truest hearts heaven ever made, not one of your twofaced things, too sweet to be wholesome”); the second installment ends with Cissy returning to Gerty after speaking with the “man on the beach,” Bloom. All three installments of “Nausikaa” open with flowery descriptions of the beach at sundown, two of them involving the sermon that can be overheard in the distance. “Nausikaa” is one of those episodes in Ulysses to have a natural break, which occurs immediately between the fireworks on the beach, when Bloom goes “off in his pants,” and afterward, when he walks away. To frame “Nausikaa” in this way would not only have featured Gerty and Bloom more prominently: it would also have made the orgasm of this scene, and the aftermath, function as both crescendo at one end and opening at the other. Despite Pound’s clever editing, however, this issue ended up in the hands of the daughter of a New York lawyer, who brought it to the attention of the district attorney, and the rest was history. John Sumner and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice brought the Little Review to court, Anderson and Heap lost the case, and the serialization of Ulysses, which was in the process of bringing out the first installment of “Oxen of the Sun,” was over.

As I’ve been arguing so far, Ulysses assumed the form it did in the Little Review and the Egoist because of the conditions surrounding its transatlantic publication. The simulcast, the interruptions, the excisions, the communication delays and/or blackouts, and the editorial misunderstandings: all of these factors determined how two little magazines separated by the Atlantic Ocean could (and could not) bring out the same novel at the same time. No matter how familiar the serialization process might have become, things just never went as planned: and when the war ended and the possibility for a true simulcast was a possibility, the censors were waiting on one side of the Atlantic (New York City), and the printers, who refused to set the type, were walking away on the other (London). The serial Ulysses was, among other things, part of a failed transatlantic experiment, and all that I’ve been talking about so far—the interruptions, the two-magazine solution, the triangulated transmission from author to editor to printer—these were not just unfortunate circumstances in the publishing world at the time. They were part of a mode for transatlantic literary production that determined just what this novel and the little magazines—where it was published—became in England and the United States between 1918 and 1920. When Ulysses finally appeared as a book in Paris two years later, it was still banned in the United States, and its safe transatlantic journey as a book was postponed for another decade.

III

The lessons of Ulysses, good and bad, didn’t stop T. S. Eliot from orchestrating his own “transatlantic simulcast” with The Waste Land in 1922. In fact, considering how well the international publicity ended up working in Joyce’s favor, it’s more than likely that Eliot was deliberately following his lead. Shortly after completing his poem, and at a time when he was preparing to take on the role as editor of the Criterion, Eliot wrote to Pound (March 12), “I see no reason why some things should not appear in this [the Criterion] and in the Little Review concurrently.”⁴⁷ Half a year later, when preparations for a simulcast of The Waste Land were all set, he was also entertaining the possibility that his poem should appear in “two sections in the first and second numbers” of the Criterion, as a way both to bring in new readers and to ensure that he wasn’t pigeonholed as a “prose essayist.”⁴⁸ But given what I’ve said so far about the mechanics of transatlantic circulation, one magazine for The Waste Land should have been sufficient: the war was over; the international postal system, including the route between the United States and England, was open again; and regulations on the importation of bulk mail in England were lifted. Still, Eliot in these immediate postwar years decided that two little magazines for The Waste Land were better than one. Why?

There’s money, of course: two payments, when you can get them, are usually better than one (especially if the Dial, with its generous contributor’s fees and the promise of a cash prize, gets involved). There’s prestige: the possibility of assembling a larger transatlantic audience using two different magazines with their own subscription lists and bookdealers. There’s precedent: it already worked well for Ulysses, and Eliot would have had to worry significantly less about attracting the attention of the censors. And there’s copyright: orchestrating publication in England and America simultaneously would provide a better chance of securing the “dreaded and elusive American copyright that the poem’s coeval, Ulysses, famously lost.”⁴⁹ For Lawrence Rainey, this particular transatlantic arrangement between the Dial and the Criterion was more of a secondary outcome than anything else, and it came out of the difficult negotiations that went on behind the scenes between Eliot, Thayer, Watson, and Pound as they were trying to determine when and where The Waste Land would appear.⁵⁰ In a careful reconstruction of these events, Rainey argues that Eliot’s decision, and the contract he managed to negotiate, was motivated as much by the need to earn some cash as it was by the desire to publish his poem in a magazine with the appropriate cultural pedigree, nothing too low/little, à la Little Review, and nothing too big/commercial, à la Vanity Fair.⁵¹ The Dial, Rainey argues, had its own “sensibility” and was associated with a “form of production supported by massive and unprecedented patronage that facilitated modernism’s transition from a literature of an exiguous elite to a position of prestigious dominance.”⁵² Coupled with the Criterion, which was based on a similar model of production supported by elite patronage, the cultural, noncommercial “dominance,” in England and America at least, would be complete.

As compelling as the evidence behind Eliot’s decision to choose the Dial over Vanity Fair may be, it still does not explain why two magazines in two different countries bringing out The Waste Land at the same time was so desirable.⁵³ I want to suggest that Eliot’s simulcast still had more to do with a basic reality about transatlantic publishing in little magazines at that time, a reality that Pound and Eliot knew all too well from their firsthand experience in the teens: neither the Dial nor the Criterion could do it alone. In spite of their prestige and the promise of cultural dominance, neither of them could engineer the kind of transatlantic production and distribution that Eliot wanted, and I want to suggest further that the transatlantic immobility of each magazine wasn’t caused only by the more immediate material circumstances involving international postal transport with its woeful delays or the unreliability of book dealers. There was also the increased institutionalization of an elite little magazine culture both in America and in England that was bringing with it a more restricted national focus.⁵⁴ And there were reasons for this. By the early 1920s, the little magazine was entering another stage in its development: many experimental writers had already achieved critical notoriety and, in some cases, commercial success. Bigger little magazines like the Dial and the Criterion, then, were less interested in breaking new ground than they were in showcasing consecrated writers already discovered in the wartorn teens. It was also very much the case that both magazines positioned themselves as border guards standing at the gates separating the literary-cultural field in and between England, America, and France. For both of them, this role of cultural mediator within the medium of the little magazine was contingent on a nationally defined exclusivity: the Criterion for England, the Dial for America, and both for The Waste Land.

For Eliot, there were obvious reasons for this exclusivity. In his mind, the form of the Dial was all wrong.⁵⁵ Not long after it was revived in 1920 by Thayer and Watson, who offered Eliot a regular position as their London correspondent (which he declined), he complained to Quinn that there was just “too much in it.” This excess, he worried, would make it necessary for the Dial to publish too much inferior material, which, in turn, would compromise “the good stuff.”⁵⁶ And there was more: each issue had too many articles about similar subjects without the presence of separate “departments” that would, in clearly delineating where each article belonged, make them more “readable.” Eliot was soon to become an editor himself, and he was thinking a lot about magazine form at this time, coming to the conclusion that British and American little magazines tended to be different from one another in structure and appearance and that these differences dramatically influenced how they would be received on domestic and foreign soil alike. To him, it was clear: the Criterion in America, positively; the Dial in England, negatively.⁵⁷ His explanation deserves to be quoted in full:

I think it might be possible for The Criterion to secure a small circulation in America and I do not see why it should interfere with the success of The Dial. Of course I should not want to compete with The Dial in any way but I think that the two papers will be so different in form and appearance that there should be no risk of this. I wish that The Dial could secure some circulation in this country, but that seems to me a much more difficult matter. For one thing it is a monthly and the more often periodicals appear the less easily they can be transplanted. For another thing it contains a great deal of local matter and in order to make it really successful in another country, the editors would have to give it a form perhaps which would make it less valuable at home. If The Criterion were a monthly, we could of course work a good deal together in exclusive fields, but of course it would be impossible for me to edit a monthly magazine unless it were to provide enough income for me to devote myself to that and no other regular work.⁵⁸

Form and frequency are everything, it seems, when mobility is at stake. They have the power to determine transplantability abroad and rootedness at home, and any deliberate attempt to try and adapt will more than likely backfire, making a magazine like the Dial a driftless vessel caught somewhere in the Atlantic instead of one firmly anchored on either coast. Taken further, Eliot is suggesting that the Criterion is just the kind of magazine that can successfully straddle both. Indeed, the circulation numbers in England would be higher, but an unspecified “small number of readers” could still be found in America.⁵⁹ The Dial, however, was a “more difficult matter”: its movement was limited by a form that just couldn’t be changed. When Eliot tried to explain all of this directly to Thayer (as he reported to Quinn), including his negative assessment of the Dial’s bulkiness, its lack of diversity in the rubrics, the improper sequencing of the articles, and the fact that it “was not got up brightly enough for the British public,” he was met, as one might expect, with some opposition.⁶⁰ Thayer, offended by Eliot’s bluntness, refused to take the criticism seriously. “The present form,” he reported to Watson, “was the best for America.”⁶¹

All of this begs the question of what Eliot means by form. He’s making some big claims here for the identification between magazine form and the success and failure of assembling a national and/or transatlantic readership. The British, he claims, have one idea about how form works in the little magazine, the Americans another, and it is the American form, in particular, that lacks any transatlantic adroitness. If you compare the September 1921 issue of the Dial, when this letter was written, with the first issue of the Criterion a year later, when it first started, you begin to see more clearly what Eliot means. The Dial, though certainly not a literary miscellany in any pejorative sense, is still a hodgepodge, made up, in this issue at least, of twelve pieces that include criticism, short stories, poems combined with commentary, letters (from London, Paris, and Dublin), book reviews, brief blurbs, and a chatty bit of commentary from the editors. Not only does the Dial lack any overarching editorial focus, but it fails to indicate how all of these moving parts might fit together. Moving from a piece of criticism on Greek tragedy by Arthur Schnitzler to a single poem by Yeats to an essay on Balzac by Benedetto Croce to a short story by Paul Morand, readers would certainly pick up on the fact that an intellectual and international eclecticism was prized above all—but, they would probably be left wondering, to what end? The Dial was designed to appeal to this general reader with broad literary tastes, but the connections between these subjects, disciplines, and fields would not have been so easily discernable.

For Eliot, this same judgment could not be leveled against the Criterion. Order in these pages was king, and Eliot, in trying to get the form right from the beginning (which would necessarily take some tweaking over the years), was following the lead of the Nouvelle revue française (NRF), which was, by this time, one the most important general culture magazines in Europe.⁶² Interestingly, though, the order that he seems to value so highly is not immediately visible from the explicit organization of the contents. There are no sections defining these pieces by genre, field, or discipline or an overarching editorial statement explaining how they might be related to one another, and unlike the NRF, there is still no section for letters, reflections, and notes. Still, the form he’s thinking about is something that emerges from within the contents of the magazine itself: an essay by George Saintsbury, critical notes for a novel by Dostoevsky (translated by Virginia Woolf), an essay by T. Sturge Moore, a poem by Eliot, a short story by May Sinclair, a survey of contemporary German literature by Herman Hesse, and an essay on Ulysses by Valery Larbaud (translated without indication by Eliot). Read together and in this sequence, it’s obvious that there’s a deliberate internationalism and eclecticism in the Criterion, as there was in the Dial, but with a marked difference: the material was consistently made up of “the good stuff,” indicating, albeit subtly, the unmistakable presence of a discerning editor behind the scenes who knows the difference. In addition, there were fewer pieces in the Criterion (seven total, compared with the twelve of the Dial), making the entire issue feel more condensed, helping to foreground the effect of a unified “tendency,” the word that Eliot uses in his 1926 essay “The Idea of a Literary Review,” to describe the cultural connectedness that the formally perfect magazine is capable of creating between “editor, collaborator, and occasional contributors.”⁶³

“Tendency” was not to be confused with program, the kind so often promoted by literary movements, with a rigid set of principles that frequently led to personal infighting. For Eliot, the term had a more catholic valence and was associated with the spirit of the modern age, which, at this moment at least, could be identified with a collective European culture united by liberal democratic ideals. Of course, the success of this communication would inevitably depend on the reader, who may or may not be able to identify it. As Eliot explains in the essay I just referenced, “Even a single number should attempt to illustrate, within its limits, the time and the tendencies of the time. It should have a value over and above the aggregate value of the individual contributions. Its contents should exhibit heterogeneity which the intelligent reader can resolve into order.”⁶⁴ What a novel like Joyce’s Ulysses did for the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history,” as he explained in “Ulysses, Order and Myth” (published a year later) is precisely what a magazine like the Criterion could do as well: shape, order, control the chaos of modern life, giving it a universal meaning (The European Mind) that transcends any single moment (or issue). Whether this will happen depends on how tuned in that reader is to the currents of contemporary history and life, but at least it is something attainable if the proper form within the magazine gets found.

Returning, then, to Eliot’s belief that the Dial could not circulate successfully in England, I suspect this had a lot to do with the assumption that the proper “tendency” wasn’t embedded in the form. Even more to the point, by making the Dial “too bulky,” its editors were ensuring that each issue would seem more like a collection of individual contributions and less the “aggregate” of an age waiting to be resolved “into order” by the “intelligent reader.” I’m not arguing here about whether I think Eliot is right about this distinction between good and bad form in the little magazine, but it is useful for continuing to think about the way that the concept of form itself was getting used by him at this moment to distinguish between the compatibility and incompatibility of these transatlantic literary cultures, which came to define Anglo-American modernism as we know it. Known for his own unapologetic Anglophilic tendencies, Eliot’s judgment might seem like a backhanded slap at the stupid Americans who always seem to miss the point. In this instance, however, it’s the Americans who actually come out on top. One of their most serious little magazines, the Dial, might have had a hard time attracting British readers, but they would be prepared for the challenge were a magazine like the Criterion to arrive on America’s shores, which, as I’ll explain shortly, it never really did.

Even with all of the formal faults of the Dial, it was still valuable to Eliot as an American ally. In 1923, Eliot and Thayer even began to kick around the idea of forming a transatlantic cooperative, the details of which remain vague. On the basis of the few pieces of correspondence that exist, it’s possible to determine that the proposition was first introduced by Eliot not long after Thayer’s copies of the Dial were failing to arrive in Vienna on time. Though completely in the dark about the Dial’s limited circulation in England, Eliot took the opportunity to offer Thayer some advice: “I think that if you could have a London office or even simply a London Agency to which English subscribers could address themselves, and if you could advertise a bit in some of the best English papers, that your circulation would be greatly increased.”⁶⁵ The suggestion of a “London office” that could cater to British subscribers, something the Little Review had with the indefatigable Pound, soon developed into the possibility that the two magazines could share office space, with the assumption, of course, that they could both benefit from the affiliation by cutting down on production, advertising, and distribution costs.⁶⁶ I suspect further that because of their serious reputations, both would benefit, and it is likely that working together at such close quarters would have inevitably triggered various exchanges and certainly increased the possibility for more simultaneous publications between them.⁶⁷

Thayer, already soured on Eliot after the tense negotiations over The Waste Land, began to suspect that the Dial would inevitably lose out on the deal, even going so far as to accuse Watson of plans to defect: “It seems to me that from your point of view association with Lady Rothermere, and Eliot, and The Criterion to make out of The Criterion an Anglo-American sheet, with you perhaps as American editor would ensure to you much more field and scope for your heart’s desires than association with me and the Dial.”⁶⁸ Though irritated by Thayer’s accusation of an Anglo-inspired careerism, Watson concluded a few months later, and without any explanation, that “there is no longer any attraction nor hope of gain in a U.S. mag. circulating in England, nor of an English journal circulating in the States.”⁶⁹ Thayer, touched by Watson’s change of heart, took the pleasure of informing Eliot, “it would not be of pecuniary advantage to us.”⁷⁰ All parties agreed, the deal was dropped, the Criterion continued to cater to a British audience, the Dial to an American one, and the myth of transatlantic magazine mobility somehow lived on.

So far, I’ve been arguing that a more restricted national self-definition and its expression through the magazine form was happening, in part, because of this increased institutionalization and restricted geography of a little magazine culture. Now I want to focus on the way that this all played out with the publication of The Waste Land itself. I’ve mentioned a few times already that The Waste Land was “serialized,” and, of course, I’m aware that “serialization” is a mode of literary production usually reserved for novels, not poems, even more so when they appear in a single issue.⁷¹ In this instance, however, I’m using the term (as Eliot himself did) to identify the staggered publication of each version of The Waste Land, first in the Criterion (in its October issue, published on October 16, 1922) and then in the Dial (in its November issue, published around October 20).⁷² Serialization defines the lag between installments in different magazines in different countries and, in this instance, highlights the fact that even if the words of The Waste Land were the same (give or take a few variant spellings and botched spacings), the timing and the overall formatting were not.

Eliot, as is well known, was outraged by what the Criterion’s printers did to his poem: standardizing spelling, changing punctuation, and altering the spacing in and between lines. But in the version that appeared in its pages (which came after the setting of the Boni and Liveright proofs for a book version that were subsequently used for the Dial), a number of other details are revealing: the poem appears fourth in the list of contents (instead of first), there is no epigraph from Petronius’s Satyricon, there is no nameplate (present with a date), and there are no Roman numerals before each of the five sections. In both versions, there is also no consensus about what foreign words and phrases should be italicized: Baudelaire’s “hypocrite lecteur” is in both, but Dante’s “Poi s’acose nel foco che gli affina” is in one and not the other. The list of variations is much longer, and though they reveal a great deal about house printing styles, they are, most of all, a sign of something else. In that week or so in October 1922 (when both issues appeared), there were two Waste Lands in the world, not one, and this formal multiplicity is the concrete expression of a transatlantic reality, one that was followed up by two printings of the book: the Boni and Liveright one in December 1922 and the Hogarth Press one in September 1923. Had it been possible for The Waste Land to move in a single magazine, one version would have been enough before book publication. But each magazine was, in a sense, appropriating Eliot’s poem for its own purposes and adapting it to established formatting conventions. The Dial’s nameplate at the top of the very first page of the November issue, then, functions more like a passport stamp, marking The Waste Land’s arrival in America and reaffirming the magazine’s own role as cultural arbiter in the transatlantic transfer. As might be expected, it was also packed with a wide range of critical and creative pieces that would have given the issue its characteristic bloatedness.

The situation was different with the Criterion. For one thing, it was the inaugural issue, and Eliot was keen to strike the proper tone. As if the severe look of the cover wasn’t enough, Eliot made sure that the organization would fulfill his objective of finding the proper form. The Waste Land’s embedded placement within the first issue of the Criterion among a series of critical essays (including the one by Larbaud on Ulysses that had already appeared in the NRF) was as much an expression of Eliot’s forced humility as it was an announcement that modernist experimentation was fast becoming institutionally acceptable. “If the poem threatened outrage,” as Michael Levenson suspects, then it was “the intellectual pedigree of the adjacent essays” that helped provide “reassurance.”⁷³ And it was a reassurance indeed for British, not American, readers.

Here we find another example of this entrelarder of poetry and commentary: that’s how Pound got his French anthology into America after all, and, as it turns out, that’s how Eliot got his long poem into England, planting a “bomb” right in the middle of the Criterion so that it would function more like an experimental menace awaiting unsuspecting readers.⁷⁴ What I want to emphasize here, however, is the fact that the “form” of each little magazine actually determined the shape that the poem would take not just on the page but in the entire issue. The two Waste Lands of October 1922 were symptomatic of a real divide between different literary cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, and they were, as was true of Ulysses, organized around a temporal interruption. In this case, however, the time passing in between didn’t lead to a new or continued episode as it did with Ulysses. Instead, it involved the delivery in America of something that British readers had already glossed, a point that Eliot himself was careful to ensure also by stalling the delivery of complimentary copies to American agencies and bookstores until after the Dial appeared. Who knows, finally, what American readers would have made of the version that appeared in the Criterion, but in the end what matters most is the fact that there was never a decision to make in the first place.⁷⁵ The Waste Land was printed and posted both in England and in America, complete with all of the discrepancies regarding spelling, spacing, italicizing, formatting, and even the choice of typeface.⁷⁶ And is it really a surprise to discover that in the two versions of the poem, neither acknowledges the existence of the other, as if The Waste Land itself was ever meant for publication in one magazine and not two?

IV

Ford Madox Ford’s transatlantic review was intended to counteract the national entrenchment of literary cultures in the years immediately following World War I, a bridge that would connect London, Paris, and New York and include a wide range of writers and critics from allied and hostile countries alike. It was a noble idea, indeed, guided by postwar idealism and betrayed, finally, by ignorance. “There is no British Literature, there is no American Literature,” Ford wrote in the circular he sent to potential subscribers and contributors, adding further that there “are no English, no French—for the matter of that, no Russian, Italian, Asiatic or Teutonic—Literatures.”⁷⁷ The mere wish for a denationalized literary field, Ford soon discovered, did not make it so, and what made the situation even more difficult was the expatriation of so many Americans in Paris in the early 1920s, the dearth of British writers interested in modern experiments, and Ford’s personal disinterest in avant-garde developments within France, Germany, Russia, Italy, and elsewhere.

In short, what you find in this particular example is a transatlantic wish in 1924 that was divorced from the reality of the literary situation in America, England, and France. Even Eliot, who contributed a guarded letter for the opening issue, refused to accept Ford’s characterization of the contemporary cultural scene, arguing instead that literary nationalism can actually be productive when it is properly directed: “If anyone has a genuine nationality—and a genuine nationality depends upon the existence of a genuine literature, and you cannot have a nationality worth speaking of unless you have a national literature—let him assert it, let the Frenchman be as French, the Englishman as English, the German as German, as he can be: but let him be French or English or German in such a way that his national character will complement, not contradict the other nationalities.”⁷⁸ French, German, American, or English: it didn’t matter. Ford believed that by throwing everyone together in the pages of a single magazine, almost always in English translation when necessary, the transatlantic exchange would inevitably happen. This is not what motivated Eliot, as can be seen from his comment. Literary internationalism to him was a way of importing foreign writers so his British audience would be aware of what was going on elsewhere. Ford’s model worked differently. Because the transatlantic review was not destined for publication within a single city or country, it tried to cater to all three. In doing so, and much to Ford’s chagrin, he found that all three locations were dissatisfied about their position within the transatlantic circuit. And just think how difficult striking that balance could be: with bridges between Paris, New York, and London, regulating the flow and maintaining a fair balance would prove impossible.

Here’s one way it happened. Look closely at figure 2.3: it’s the July 1924 issue of the transatlantic review with a fragment of Paris’s motto (“Fluctuat nec mergitur”), the Greek-blue color evoking the cover of Ulysses, a list of the contents organized under different categories, and the address of the British distributor, Duckworth & Co., positioned prominently in the center at the bottom, above the ones for New York and Paris. You may have already begun to suspect from the arrangement of these distributors, the ones at the very bottom set in smaller type, that there’s more to the story. And, indeed, there is. This is a cover from the transatlantic review, but to be more specific, it is the British cover, the one that was printed in England and attached after the contents of the issue arrived by ship from Paris. For the American edition, Thomas Seltzer Inc., assumed Duck worth’s place at the top, both of them relegated to the bottom when issues were bound in Paris.

2.3 Cover of the transatlantic review 2, no. 1 (July 1924).

What’s not immediately discernible, however, is the fact that the date at the top on the American version would have been a month behind. The June issue printed in Paris, in other words, would actually be the July issue distributed in New York City. Though Ford later claimed that this adjustment was necessary to secure copyright in America, Thomas Seltzer believed it was a practical solution to the unavoidable delays caused by transatlantic shipping.⁷⁹ Instead of worrying too much about bringing the transatlantic review to the United States a month late, Ford modified the date on the cover so it appeared to be arriving right on time, even if readers in Paris would already be flipping through the next issue.⁸⁰ Following in the wake of so many other little magazines that had tried, and failed, to cross the Atlantic with any real success, the transatlantic review, at least from issue 6 onward, was convinced that it had found a way to make the journey as smooth as possible: print the contents in one place, and put on the backdated covers in another. This particular arrangement sounds logical enough, and by 1924, six years after the war had ended, giving the international shipping business enough time to get back on its feet, there was certainly reason to believe that the infrastructure would be secure enough to make the dream of simultaneous publication come true. That’s not what happened. The transatlantic review wasn’t, as the motto promised, capable of “floating” on the open seas for too long: after one year and twelve issues, it ended up shipwrecked like all of the others before it that dared to make the journey, one more little magazine that started out with enough hubris to believe the Atlantic Ocean was made for crossing.

Instead of blaming it all on the vicissitudes of transatlantic distribution, which would also involve the noncollection of funds from overseas distributors, I want to emphasize something else: lateness. No, I’m not talking here about the strange fact that Ford decided to reserialize a novel he cowrote with Joseph Conrad sixteen years earlier (Nature of a Crime) or the twenty-year-old one that Ernest Hemingway managed to commission from Gertrude Stein (The Making of Americans). Lateness, as I’m using it, describes this disconnect between the transatlantic review and the world it inhabited. It is a condition of being behind the times instead of ahead of them or even in step with them, and of course that’s not normally a quality we associate with modernism’s magazine culture. And yet, in this case, lateness is a likely diagnosis for what was, in effect, one of the transatlantic review’s many weaknesses from the start. It was created to unite three different countries without realizing that the moment for this mode of connectivity had already passed. Little magazine cultures by the mid-1920s may have been open to the introduction of foreign writers and critics, but the act of importing a foreign magazine was another story entirely. Nation-based literary cultures were providing space for outsiders, but it was the local magazines that continued to dominate. And for the transatlantic review, coming in from the outside in every direction (France, England, the United States), this proved to be particularly problematic since it was created precisely to counteract these national forms of literary belonging.

Over the years, critics have tended to treat the transatlantic review as the clearest expression of a magazine-inspired cosmopolitanism whose origins can be traced back, in the Anglo-American calendar at least, to 1910.⁸¹ What they fail to acknowledge, however, is the fact that the form itself and this model for its production and distribution had undergone a number of significant changes before and after World War I, changes that I’ve already discussed in relation to the Little Review, the Egoist, the Dial, and the Criterion. By the time Ford set out to produce a truly transatlantic magazine, he still had his eye on these earlier days and was unwilling, or perhaps unable, to learn from the mistakes of the people around him. Consider, for instance, the frequently cited statement, first introduced by Ford himself, that the transatlantic review was picking up where the English Review left off, that is to say, in 1908, when Ford served as an editor for one year before getting forced out.⁸² On the one hand, it’s tempting to think that Ford was merely referring to the good old days, when he managed to assemble an impressive crew of established and newly emerging writers. On the other, the idea of a revived English Review under a different title and printed in a different city also has the stink of nostalgia about it, anchored as it is in the assumption that the same results could be arrived at sixteen years later even after the literary field, and the European world at large, had undergone such revolutionary changes.⁸³

It’s a heartening prospect but highly unlikely. For one thing, Ford, relying a great deal on Pound’s guidance, was hoping to create a magazine modeled on one Pound never even got the chance to edit, one that was, in turn, based on the Mercure de France, a magazine that Ford admired greatly in his early days.⁸⁴ The transatlantic review, you could say, is the child of this strange coupling between the English Review and the Mercure de France, with the Transtlantic Vortex Monthly as the benevolent fairy godmother standing in the background. But, as I said before, the question, at this moment, involves lateness, which I’m associating here with the idea that the transatlantic review just didn’t arrive in England, France, or the United States at the right time. Had such a magazine and such a distribution model been in place around 1908-1909, it might have actually worked. The war put an end to all that, and even if literature was becoming international and the lines of influence more intertwined in the postwar years, this did not counteract an increased literary nationalism that was receiving its clearest expression within the market where magazines themselves circulated.

I suspect that this failed cosmopolitanism has something to do with the fact that the mechanics of a transatlantic literary culture had changed, and Ford, for one, wasn’t making the necessary accommodations.⁸⁵ Consider, for example, the basic production and distribution arrangement. Paris, in this case, is the production hub, with New York City and London as the main circulation sites. Presumably, these three cities are equal, with the same number of magazines getting parceled out each month. It’s impossible to know exactly what the final breakdown was since Ford failed to keep track himself, but Bernard Poli suspects that the five thousand or so issues were likely divided equally into thirds.⁸⁶ This would mean, of course, that every country received roughly sixteen hundred issues per month. What Ford failed to realize, and what Eliot himself already knew a few years earlier when he was thinking of that “small circulation” for the Criterion in America, is the stubborn national rootedness, as I have called it, of little magazine cultures in the early 1920s. So while Eliot was aware of a problem without any immediate solution, Ford was moving ahead with the belief in a denationalized cosmopolitanism where writers from three different countries could communicate without getting tangled up in the barbed wire at the borders.

Worse, perhaps, was the fact that Ford underestimated the power that these national magazine cultures had to determine the success or failure of a foreign import. Poli concludes in his diagnosis of the situation that by attempting to unite three different national literatures at once, the transatlantic review ended up unable to satisfy any one of them completely. It was, as he puts it, “too expensive and not interesting enough for French readers and was too foreign to compete favorably with locally published periodicals in England and in the United States.”⁸⁷ Indeed, Poli provides two different reasons here, one economic (too expensive), the other cultural (too foreign). If, in the first instance, a high price kept French readers at bay, it was the foreignness of the content that turned off its Anglo-American audience. It’s an interesting hypothesis but one that contradicts Poli’s more damning indictment that the transatlantic review failed to live up to its name: it promised equality for all but delivered a much compromised and limited vision of the international literary scene. Ford may have decided to print his magazine in Paris, but he was uninterested in local developments on the ground, which, by 1924, would have involved the various avant-gardists either stationed in Paris or passing through. In the few French contributions he did manage to print, only a few of them were experimental, and the effect, overall, was that the Parisian literary scene was largely absent from the entire arrangement, more of an island isolated from the rest of the world than an international hub.

There was the added fact that the American expatriates and exiles in Paris ended up dominating each issue, and this was happening, in part, because Ford was unable to find enough British writers, young or old, interested in modern experiments. But the transatlantic review was not an exile magazine, the kind, as I explain in chapter 3, meant for production in one country and consumption in another. It was a transatlantic review, which meant that it was bound for audiences in three different countries at the same time. And if, as I’ve already suggested, this particular incarnation of the medium arrived on the scene too late to serve any real purpose, it also failed to capitalize on the fact that it could have transported French and other European writers to England and the United States. In twelve issues, there were no big discoveries, and what appeared between the covers, with the exception of excerpts from Finnegans Wake and Gertrude Stein’s The Making of the Americans, could just as easily be found elsewhere. This is why a magazine like Broom, which was printed in Rome and then Berlin, could succeed where the transatlantic review did not. It was precisely by moving abroad and focusing on contemporary developments in Europe that Broom ended up giving its American audience literary examples that would have otherwise remained out of reach. Issues, then, ended up crossing the Atlantic, but they were only meant to go in one direction, that is, back home.

In 1924, Ford edited another review, but it was not, in the end, transatlantic in the way he had hoped. This comes as a surprise when it might have seemed from the previous examples that peace between foreign nations and a more reliable transportation network were all that stood in the way. It turns out, in fact, that transatlantic mobility was also contingent on other factors, including the ability of a single magazine to become entrenched in the culture of its production even when intended for audiences elsewhere. This is why the title itself is so ironic, taken as it was from the name of a French shipping company, Compagnie Générale Transatlantique, but translated into English and made to appear as if it belonged equally to everyone, the French included. But even the owners of the Compagnie knew something that Ford did not. When they launched their famous luxury liner, the Paris, in 1921, they went to great lengths with the decor and haute cuisine so that it would feel like a “floating bit of France” even when docked in New York. The point is, finally, that the identification with one culture can actually bring you one step closer to a meaningful engagement with the others. And that, after all, might have been one of the reasons why Ford should have stuck with the original title: the Paris Review.

After Ford’s magazine folded, he began to express his own misgivings about the three countries he tried to connect, resorting to generalizations about national character to explain it all away: the French were unreliable, the British apathetic, and the Americans untrustworthy.⁸⁸ As part of the diagnosis, he should have also been thinking about the timing, placing, and design of a magazine that arrived more than a decade too late. During this time, the little magazine may have continued to function as the primary vehicle for contemporary literary distribution, but the transatlantic spirit that Ford wanted to harness was simply not going to be the same everywhere; and the challenges would be even greater when it involved a magazine christened on the Seine but made to look as if it was equally at home in the docks of the Hudson and the Thames, which it was not.

Less than two years after the transatlantic review ceased publication, transition arrived on the scene and managed to succeed where its predecessor had failed, coming out in quarterly installments until 1938 (with an interruption between 1930 and ’32 and a relocation to the United States in 1936).⁸⁹ The title itself is a useful starting point when trying to figure out possible reasons why it managed to survive for so long when so many others were falling by the wayside. “Bridge” and “Continents” were two of the early possibilities, and it’s clear that like Ford, continental connectivity was a primary consideration for Eugene Jolas, founder and editor of transition.⁹⁰ But you can see why these titles, in particular, wouldn’t have worked: as generic nouns, they lack any kinetic energy. And Jolas, ready to pave the way for this revolution of the word, was looking for something that could, as he put it, “best symbolize the epoch”: transition, spelled and defined the same way in French and English, was it.⁹¹ There is the lowercase t, of course, which Jolas later identified as a publicity stunt to attract the attention of journalists (bypassing the affiliation with the transatlantic review), and it’s the first letter of the prefix, which, as I explained earlier, defines movement. But whereas transatlantic identifies the location of that movement, transition keeps it necessarily vague. For that reason, it is less focused on a specific geographical frame, direction, or destination and more open to a general application that would allow it to have a “temporal” valence as well: transition as a passage in time, the movement from one age to another, with the potential to be peaceful or violent, smooth or abrupt.

In practical terms, this meant that transition was openly announcing its desire to be a magazine in the present, tuned in to what was happening on multiple national fronts and aware all the while that the clock was ticking. As Malcolm Cowley looked back on his European adventure in the 1920s, with Broom, Secession, This Quarter, the transatlantic review, Tambour, Gargyoyle, and the Exile starting up and then folding in rapid succession, he noticed that transition was different. Instead of publishing the same old American expats, many of them simply moving through each of these magazines as if caught in a game of musical chairs, transition opened up its pages to a wider range of movements and individuals, many of them blocked from the transatlantic review’s itinerary a few years earlier: André Breton, Hans Arp, Franz Kafka, George Grosz, Italo Svevo, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Kay Boyle, Samuel Beckett, Antonin Artaud, Philippe Soupault, Alfred Döblin, Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, and Kurt Schwitters were among them. This openness turned out to be one of transition’s most enduring strengths: it was able to find common ground with magazines like De Stijl, Der Sturm, the Double Dealer, and Nouveaux cahiers alsaciens, opening its pages to Surrealists, Dadaists, Expressionists, and Constructivists alike, and in doing so, it became, as Celine Mansanti puts it, “un gigantesque panorama rétrospectif des avant-gardes historiques,” one that involved the publication and republication of so many classic avant-garde texts.⁹² At the same time, it was making history by bringing out installments of Joyce’s Work in Progress (eighteen in all), which was itself one of the works that synthesized transition’s larger objectives: it prized literary experimentation and was interested less in consolidating modernism and more in helping it evolve in real time.

Whereas transition was live, the transatlantic review was dead: when transition was right on time, the transatlantic review was late in coming, and the repercussions of these differences were significant. transition managed to become a fulcrum for experimental, international modernism at a moment when there was the switch to political magazines organized around a collective ideological program, a majority of them springing up after the Great Depression and in response to Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. This is not to say that transition refused to acknowledge that the world was changing or that it was unable to play an active role. Rather, it continued to provide one creative response to the increasingly repressive social and political environments across Europe. And the point, finally, is that transition was there in Europe in a way that the transatlantic review, with an orthodoxy that Ford attributed to his Toryism, never was or could be. Determined to capture the “epoch,” that ever-changing, amorphous spirit, transition was able to see contemporary literature actually coming into being with every issue that came off the press.

Part of being on time also requires knowing when to leave. By 1938, Jolas realized that the transition he managed to document with his magazine was nearing its end. In twenty-seven issues distributed over the course of a single decade, transition was a linchpin between a middle and late modernism with roots that extended back to Dada and ahead to Beckett. All the while, it always kept one foot firmly planted in the present, ready and able to register the changes that were taking place all around. Up until the last issue, the goal was to showcase the “intellectual and artistic forces of Europe and America,” the ones that were not “already enslaved by the shallow realism that had been introduced by the totalitarians.”⁹³ To this end, Jolas provided the necessary space for the American expats (many of them back home) and European independents, placing them alongside the Expressionists, Surrealists, Dadaists, and Constructivists, who continued to represent an artistic freedom that was increasingly under attack.

transition turned out to be transatlantic without announcing it. And it did so, in part, by accepting the fate of its transatlantic immobility from the start. More than one thousand subscriptions were sent to individual American readers every month, with five hundred copies reserved for its main distributor, the Gotham Book Mart, in New York City (principal agent after 1928).⁹⁴ That left roughly thirty-five hundred copies per month for France and the rest of Europe. By this time, however, there were no illusions about simultaneous publication, worries about the equal representation of writers from America, France, or England, or the assumption that two-way communication would take place in and between Paris, London, and New York. transition was actively transporting works that wouldn’t appear in British or American magazines, and part of its popularity in America at least had to do with the fact that so many expats from the ’20s still craved this contact with the literature coming out of Europe. It was a contact, however, that wasn’t to be confused with communication. This particular transatlantic dispatch worked only one way, with issues getting printed not far from Paris and arriving in America three to four weeks later, which, by this time, shouldn’t have surprised anyone at all.⁹⁵

V

“THERE IS NO PERIODICAL WHERE ONE CAN LOOK FOR CURRENT KNOWLEDGE OF EVERYWHERE.”⁹⁶ That was Pound (in all caps) in 1915 complaining, as he always did, about the limits of international communication. And in the quarter century that followed, nothing of the sort ever came into being, but that was because the little magazine, alone or in mixed company, wasn’t designed for such a task. Finding the knowledge “OF SOMEWHERE” turned out to be challenging enough. What we see again and again in the history of this medium is the desire for a mode of literary communication that was, finally, impossible: little magazines came on the scene with big hopes, but every one of them was quickly forced to acknowledge its limits, including the direction of where, when, and if it could travel. Serial simulcasts, distribution cooperatives, and cover replacements were designed as short-term solutions, but none of them could conquer the Atlantic, let alone capture the elusive ideal “OF EVERYWHERE.” Going ahead, critics interested in continuing to develop this concept of a transatlantic modernism will need to think more seriously about the materiality of this medium, and doing so will require dismantling this preconception of an international, borderless mode of literary production and consumption that has been around for decades. Don’t get me wrong: there was indeed transatlantic mobility at the beginning of the twentieth century, but it was not a luxury reserved for the little magazine. And that, in the end, is what made all of these modernist crossings and recrossings possible, not the freedom of movement but the fate of immobility.