Little Magazine, World Form

LITTLE MAGAZINES, LIKE people, can be exiled. In 1916, the German government provided financial support for a group of Iranian intellectuals to publish Kāve, one of the so-called exilzeitshriften (exile magazines) that lasted until 1922.¹ In 1917, Francis Picabia eluded military service in France by fleeing to Barcelona, where he started 391, bringing issues out sporadically until 1924 from New York, Paris, and Zurich. In 1919, Lajos Kassák fled to Vienna from Budapest to escape Admiral Miklós Horthy’s repressive regime and continued to publish Ma until 1925.² And when scanning through the list of the more prominent titles from the 1920s, you may even begin to suspect that exile was a necessary precondition for magazine making. Broom (1921-1924), Secession (1922-1924), Gargoyle (1921-1922), the Exile (1927-1928), Tambour (1929-1930), and This Quarter (1925-1932) were all designed by Americans who migrated to countries like Italy, Austria, France, and Germany; the transatlantic review was the brainchild of a Brit with a German father who moved to Paris; the trilingual Veshch-Gegenstand-Objet was designed by Russians in Berlin for German, French, and Russian readers; and transition came into being when a twice-displaced Frenchman moved back to France after spending his youth and adolescence in the United States.³

All of this exile in the universe of little magazines didn’t go unnoticed at the time, inspiring reactions that ranged from quiet envy to outrage. One commentator in the New Orleans-based Double Dealer smugly observed in 1922 that the urge to go abroad is so “vigorous” that “we find ourselves now well in the midst of a new crop of ‘magazines for the discriminating,’ which though published in continental Europe can nevertheless hardly escape the stigma of America.”⁴ Four years later, the review editor of Eliot’s the Criterion was already joking that an entirely new category for “Exiles” needed to be inserted in the “Foreign Periodicals” section to accommodate these misfits.⁵ A year after that, Ezra Pound started the Exile in Rapallo, Italy (and printed in Dijon, France, for distribution in the United States, Paris, and England), to pick up where Broom, Secession, Gargoyle, the transatlantic review, and This Quarter had left off, and Eugene Jolas was right there with him, launching transition in Paris because he believed that such an enterprise would have been impossible in America.

By 1930, the “little exiled magazine,” as Malcolm Cowley dubbed it, was already making its way into the premature histories of the medium.⁶ When William Troy compiled his “Story of the Little Magazines” for the Bookman, he admitted, albeit begrudgingly, that “any résumé at present must conclude with that volatile group of expatriate journals, those internationals of letters, which have found better reasons for being born on European soil than on our own.”⁷ In Pound’s retrospective on American little magazines, published that same year, he singled out a handful of “fugitive publications” from the 1920s that had attained their “recognized right to exist by reason of work performed.”⁸ These “fugitive publications” were short-lived, but in the other sense of the term, they were also on the run, in esilio, and wandering far from home. This particular incarnation of the little magazine, Pound observed, helped to move modern literature forward in the twentieth century, and at the time he was writing on the subject, it didn’t show signs of disappearing from the magazine-scape any time soon.

And here, you could say, these early accounts were necessarily incomplete. When taking inventory in 1930, Troy and Pound had to limit their observations to a single decade, focusing on titles published by editors who voluntarily fled to western European countries in search of cheaper paper, better printing, and experimental content. With the rapid decline of the U.S. dollar after the stock market crash and the rise of Nazism and Fascism in the 1930s, this production/distribution model just wasn’t viable any longer, and instead of having American exiles making magazines in Europe, there were European exiles performing the same task in North and South America or wandering across Europe to escape the repressive political situations in their native countries. Das Wort, for instance, was printed in the Soviet Union between 1936 and 1939, with its German editors, Bertolt Brecht, Willi Bredel, Fritz Erpenbeck, and Lion Feuchtwanger, planted in Paris, Denmark, and Spain; Lettres françaises was edited by Roger Callois, a Frenchman, in Buenos Aires between 1941 and 1947; Dyn was printed in Mexico City between 1942 and 1944 under the direction of Wolfgang Paalen, an Austrian; and VVV came out those same years as a platform for exiled Surrealists like André Breton, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp when they were waiting out the war in New York. Taking this wider look, the exile magazine was clearly not reserved only for that lost generation of Jack Rose-drinking Americans.⁹ It also belonged to groups of involuntary exiles from western and eastern Europe eager to use the medium of the magazine to reconsolidate movements (international Communism or Surrealism) and reconnect individuals.

Instead of fostering the idea of a unified international community located somewhere “out there,” the exile magazine could also reinforce the distance between contributors, editors, and their audience, and this distancing had a lot to do with the fact that the displaced site of production and the multiple sites for distribution generated a cultural field that made it impossible for everyone involved to get the coordinates right and figure out just where they fit in and with whom. And while, for some people, the exile magazine could conjure up feelings of community, for others, it also had the power to reinforce a dreaded isolation, reminding the exile just how far he actually was from home and the friends, family, and colleagues that were once part of it.¹⁰

Writing The Little Magazine in the mid-1940s, Frederick John Hoffman, Charles Albert Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich were well aware that the little exiled magazine was part of a more complex history of the medium, though they still preferred to emphasize its American roots.¹¹ Indeed, that seemed to be the case for the reviewers as well, even if the evidence was there in the annotated bibliography to suggest otherwise.¹² One reviewer, for instance, was stunned by the “geographical spread” of little magazines, pointing out that “a hundred and thirty-nine of the 540 little magazines and 43 of the 96 ‘fellow travellers’ are listed as published outside the United States.” But even with the hard facts in place, he fails to go any further, mentioning casually that “it is interesting, if nothing more, to find three of them published in Mexico, three in Spain, eleven in Australia, three in the USSR (at Moscow).”¹³ “Interesting, if nothing more” seems to have been the common refrain in the decades that followed, with critics noting this strange circumstance but refusing to figure out if there was something more to it after all. And even if this same reviewer was willing to acknowledge, like Eric Bentley before him in a review of the same volume, that “the little magazine movement has not been so much international as homeless,” the truth is that this homelessness has never been examined.¹⁴ How, after all, can a little magazine be homeless? Is it a condition related to the routes of distribution, the location of production, a combination of the two? And how does this model of exilic production and consumption change our understanding of the magazine as a medium in an increasingly globalized literary field in the first half of the twentieth century?

And why, finally, might any of this even matter? For one thing, the very existence of exile magazines asks us to consider how any little magazine can be national, international, transnational, or global in the first place.¹⁵ As it is now, the location of production defines provenance regardless of the geographical range of the distribution: Novyi lef is Russian (printed in Moscow), Noi is Italian (printed in Rome), the Dial is American (printed in New York City), Kallol is Indian (printed in Calcutta), Sur is Argentinian (printed in Buenos Aires), and so on. The location of production is one of the most common ways we identify just what this or that magazine is, and it is very often a point of departure for questions related to design, quality, format, material, even size, cycle, and circulation patterns. But what do you do with little magazines such as Broom or VVV the one printed in three different cities in that many years, the other fixed firmly in New York for its entire run? If we follow critical protocol, then Broom should, by all accounts, be Italian or German even if the contents were entirely in English and the readership American. VVV, on the other hand, should be American, even if it was a Surrealist outpost for mostly French exiles under the direction of André Breton and David Hare and intended to pick up where Minotaure left off in 1938, that is, in Paris.¹⁶

In both cases, the identification of a nationality requires that we disregard the location(s) of production in order to emphasize their site(s) of distribution. While such an approach is certainly convenient for identifying things such as readership, it fails to account for what is, in reality, an exilic mode of production that influences how we can even begin to understand what was involved in the entire production and distribution process before the reading experience was under way. Broom may have ended up in the hands of American readers, but it was made in Europe; and the people who flipped through its pages consistently remarked on the quality of the paper (Fabriano when made in Italy, an unnamed “exclusive paper” when printed by Labisch and Co. in Berlin), the oversized format, and the page layout (with three-inch margins). It was this materiality and design as much as the physical journey through the international postal system that made Broom American and something else: a foreign import that looked like a little magazine from Europe.

VVV is another case. It was printed in New York City and read in the United States because transatlantic distribution was blocked during the war. Unlike Broom, however, VVV did not have to travel to another country to benefit from “foreign” craftsmanship. It was consciously designed to follow the tradition of the glossier Surrealist magazines printed in France by commercial firms like Skira. In addition to the luxurious format, it was filled with high-quality photographs, many of them of paintings, sculptures, drawings, experimental collages, and sketches. If VVV looked foreign to an American audience, in this instance, it had little to do with the location of its production. Rather, it was the way VVV was designed as an object printed in New York City but intended to look as if it came from France. And what can be said of Broom can be said of VVV: instead of becoming denationalized, or deracinated, as a result of this exile, the reverse was true. Exile was one of the reasons that these magazines achieved some abstract, and often misunderstood, national character.

That, of course, was the paradox. The national quality of exile magazines was actually generated by processes we identify more broadly with globalization. Increased mobility and displaced production, in particular, were making the little magazine move in ways, and in directions, it never had before, and they were also forcing the little magazine to undergo concrete checks, monitoring transnational movement in a world that was, as Roman Jakobson noted in 1921, becoming isolated “by visas, currencies, and cordons of all sorts.”¹⁷ Take Pound’s the Exile as one more example. The first issue was printed in Dijon by Maurice Darantiere, and three hundred or so copies were shipped to the United States, where it was going to be distributed by J. M. Price.¹⁸ Because there was no month printed on the cover (only the year) or stamp indicating its country of origin, U.S. customs officials refused to recognize the Exile as a magazine, instead designating book status, which came with a 25 percent tariff and a 10 percent penalty on top of the regular postage costs and customs fees. Pound, of course, was enraged not only because the Exile was, in fact, a little magazine that would, under American law, have deserved access to second-class mailing privileges, as was true with the Little Review, but even more importantly, because it was an American magazine. Yet, as he came to discover, according to the U.S. postal regulations, the Exile was not American. It was a foreign import arriving from France and looking for distribution rights within the United States. The exile of the magazine was complicating its national affiliation in some unexpected and inconvenient ways. By the second issue, Pound got the point. With the help of Pascal Covici, he moved the printing to Chicago (then New York) so that international postage delays and customs surprises could be obviated entirely. In Without Copyrights, Robert Spoo has also revealed how this plan to print the Exile back in the United States was also motivated by Pound’s desire to secure U.S. copyright for the writers appearing in his magazine (many of them foreign), an issue I discussed in chapter 2 in relation to the French “anthology” he edited for the Little Review.¹⁹ In this instance, however, Pound was forced to accept that the manufacturing clause of this same U.S. copyright law required that books and periodicals be set, printed, and bound in the United States to secure copyright, and it stood in the way of “legal protection for transatlantic writers.”²⁰ There’s a good chance that the Exile would have survived longer if printed in Europe, but then Pound would have had to deal with the vagaries and costs of the international postal system and, of course, the reality that printing anything abroad would keep it unprotected and open to piracy at home.

Exile magazines were at the core of modernism’s expansive “mediascape.”²¹ They were exiles not because of who or what they carried but how they carried, where they were produced, and in what directions they traveled. The materiality of the medium, then, is one of the places where this condition of exile becomes manifest. Exile leaves traces on the paper, in the ink, and in the printing, traces that are critical for helping us understand what it actually meant for this medium to exist in the world in such a displaced way. And none of this would have been lost, finally, on the individuals who were supposed to pick up and read. Exile magazines were different because of how they looked, how they felt, and even how they smelled at times after the journey in crates and by steamship across oceans and past customs officials, and that multisensory experience was enough to indicate that something was arriving from afar. “Typographie E. Desfossés, 13, Quai Voltaire—Paris, Le gérant responsable Simon de Vaulchier,” one reads on the contents page of Gargoyle; “Impreso en la Argentina,” “Imprimé en Argentine,” and “Printed in Argentina” on the back of Lettres françaises. In these cases, exile was printed very clearly on the page, but that was because these magazines were following the laws governing print production and circulation within the countries where they were made. For Gargoyle to be read in France, for instance, the name and address of the printer and a local gérant was required by law, and for Lettres françaises to arrive in France or America, customs officials on both sides needed to see the country of origin.

Modernity in the magazine, as I argue throughout this chapter, was connected with this condition of homelessness. In continuing to unpack this idea further, I want to return to that distinction Bentley made between an international and homeless little magazine culture. International implies the relatively free and easy circulation across national borders. And regardless of where exactly this movement takes place, there is an origin, a locatable point from which the journey begins, and it is one that can be traced back no matter how far any single title travels. Homelessness, however, works differently. It implies that even if there once was a point of origin, there is no fixed point where the little magazine is destined to end up as it travels through the world to nowhere in particular. We tend to think about modernist little magazine production as something that begins domestically and often ends internationally. For exile magazines, it turns out, production was international before the distribution even began. And as was often the case, distribution worked in reverse, moving magazines from the international site of production back to a national or “home” base. Homelessness does not imply that national boundaries and origins have been dissolved. For some little magazines, it was one way to find the nation in the first place, and for others, it was a way to acknowledge its absence. That, in effect, was one compelling reason why a homeless little magazine movement could be contrasted with an international one, because it defines a state not of cosmopolitan urbanity, of being at home wherever the production takes place, but rather of not being at home precisely because the distribution is always intended for somewhere else.

Seen in these terms, then, the exile magazine was involved in a series of complex transnational negotiations that influenced not only the shape any single title could take but also the way it might even change shape while moving through the world, at different speeds and in different directions and durations. Exiled or not, the little magazine was never free to go wherever it wished, and that was especially true if it had any intention of using the national and international postal networks instead of the more covert channels provided by pass-along readerships (as so many of the Dadaists preferred). That last point brings me back to the issue of production. Exile magazines were made to move in the world, but we cannot fully explain how they helped to generate such a dynamic cultural field if we keep our eye out only for information regarding print runs and sites for circulation (assuming they are even available, which they so often are not). Instead, we need to analyze how a transnational experience was encoded within the materiality and form of the magazine itself and, in doing so, to discover how modernism between the world wars was something happening somewhere, anywhere, and, above all, elsewhere.

The story behind Broom’s clean sweep has been well documented.²² Its editor, Harold Loeb, an enterprising Princeton graduate with literary ambitions, some influential connections (including his cousin Peggy Guggenheim), and sufficient capital to get started, set off to Italy in search of cheaper paper. At least that’s part of the story he tells in the autobiography he later published about this whole experience abroad. Loeb arrived in Rome in 1921 looking to make a little magazine that he could have shipped back home, and he actually managed to pull it off for a few years, printing the first eleven issues in Italy and the next four in Berlin before the entire enterprise was relocated to New York City and handed over to other editors. Indeed, paper may have been the principal reason for all of this wandering, but, as it turned out, there was more to the cost of exile and the economics of this exchange than Loeb or anyone else at the time could have imagined.

“Foreign exchange” was the phrase Loeb used to describe the situation in his first editorial for Broom. “Economic oppression and spiritual coercion,” he writes, were the primary causes for the departure of so many American artists after the war: the effect was a “proximity of foreign culture” that had the potential to reinvigorate contemporary literature (that’s American literature).²³ His own position in the field as the editor of an exile magazine was less clear. Broom was going to be a vehicle for this exchange, but it really worked in one direction: America would be getting imports from abroad instead of exporting, and Broom would intervene in an American little magazine market that was more or less isolated from a European one (even if there was limited distribution in a handful of European bookshops). As Loeb looked back at the end of his European tour, he was more direct about his motivations: “Owing to the valuta, it was possible to provide an exotic luxury in makeup, which attracted many readers who otherwise would have failed to single out from the scores of literary periodicals that spring up and pass along with the seasons?”²⁴

Valuta: exchange. Even the decision to use the Italian word reflects an ironic distance from a moment that has passed, a word that was once on the lips of so many Americans on the continent that it became, albeit briefly, a catch phrase for opportunity. Valuta is what drove Loeb overseas, making that “exotic luxury” possible. Without it, Broom would have been just another magazine on the shelves struggling to make it past a single season in New York City. But this raises an important point about valuta and the profit of exile: the exchange rate at the time, which significantly favored the American dollar, made it possible for Americans to buy more expensive materials and services for magazine production. And it was a primary, not a secondary, consideration. Americans like Loeb benefited enormously from a debilitated Italian and German currency after World War I, and they were capitalizing on this overseas opportunity.²⁵ Valuta was really about value, getting more for your money and transforming economic capital into literary capital while the European economy was on its knees. This was good old-fashioned American capitalism at work, but that didn’t make it entirely fair. Malcolm Cowley, who wrote a poem by the same name and published it in Broom after Loeb’s editorial appeared, later recalled that there was something a bit insidious about it all: “We too were waiting: a few dollars in our pockets, the equivalent of how many thousand crowns or pengos, we went drifting onward with the army of exploitation.”²⁶

Rather than argue about the ethics of this editorial “exploitation,” which included shipping jobs overseas, I want to emphasize that exchange was about the procurement of high-quality material, something that would make the magazine different from all the others in the American periodical world. In this regard, Gorham Munson’s Secession provides an interesting point of comparison. It was also printed in several different European cities during the same years, but unlike for Loeb, luxury was not a primary concern for Munson. Munson opted instead for lower-quality paper and printing so that his magazine could stay afloat longer, and on top of it all, he gave away more copies than he sold.²⁷ Secession, then, wasn’t designed to stand out on the shelves back in New York City, and, in fact, as one bookstore owner wrote in to complain, the small size and shape made it easier to “lift” for those who were unwilling to pay at all.²⁸

In the fifth issue of Secession, Munson attached a “Market Report” to the subscription slips that exposes the contradictions of the valuta within the little magazine economy (figure 4.1). Included among a list of American oil companies are a few recognizable titles—Vanity Fair, the Double Dealer, Secession, the Dial—with their rising and closing costs for the day. Secession is not faring well in these fictional numbers, but a larger and more serious point is being made here: Secession, even though printed in Europe, is part of an American economic system made possible by American dollars that are getting spent abroad. And in this way, it is, like these other titles, American and not European, made by an American dollar that has gone up in value in the international market. There are no European titles on this list because Europe is not where Secession belongs, and, in fact, this international economy is the reason: Secession is being made to function within an American cultural sphere that is lagging behind, in the hope that the valuta will, in fact, make it catch up.

National magazine production in exile, then, was enabled by the formation of an international economy. This point raises questions about the way that literary competition at this moment and in this medium was being organized. Instead of passing through metropolitan European centers and working within a critical apparatus of foreign publishers and critics, the kind described by Pascale Casanova, national magazines were instead getting beamed back to a domestic audience that provided a strange kind of protection from foreign influence and opinion.²⁹ The European marketplace was never the primary destination, making it possible for these magazines to create an autonomy that translated into a form of economic and cultural protectionism. Exile, in this case, was all about economic opportunity, but it was creating a literary field that was getting more, not less, nationalistic.

The foreign exchange rate that was making these new forms of production possible was also responsible for allowing another mode of distribution that bypassed the rules of an international literary/cultural exchange. Broom would be judged at home and within a domestic cultural space even if it was made abroad out of Italian/German materials and through Italian/German labor. So when Loeb sings the song of valuta, finding in it an opportunity for the rejuvenation of American letters, he inadvertently identifies the existence of a much more antagonistic system for literary production and consumption that was built on the outsourcing of skilled labor, the quality of foreign materials, and the fluctuation of foreign currencies. All of these factors, in fact, were bound up with the three things that Loeb needed to keep Broom alive: paper, printing, and an international, transatlantic postal system.

Paper. Little magazines in the United States were not typically known for the quality of their paper.³⁰ Leafing through any of them today, in fact, you can feel the low-grade pulp used in the manufacturing process. Since so many little magazines were produced with shoestring budgets, it’s logical to assume that questions about quality would be irrelevant. Munson, as I mentioned, didn’t even think paper was a legitimate expense, arguing instead that well-leaded type and “neatness of format and readability of text” would do the trick.³¹ For the more discerning little magazines with bigger budgets, however, it mattered, and the situation was complicated for anyone looking to make a magazine in the United States during World War I, when demand in the marketplace was exceeding supply even though the mills continued to run full tilt. By 1916, prices were higher than they had been in previous years because the international transport cost for paper stock, chemicals, and raw materials from other countries, including Canada, increased.³² After the war, the price of paper was still relatively high, but the industry recovered by 1923, when new mills and new machines were built to meet the demand, thereby lowering the price.³³ When Loeb came up with the idea for an exile magazine, the cost of paper in the United States had fallen, but he also realized that he could benefit even more from the devaluation of the Italian lira and the deutschemark. And so his tour began.

But Loeb wasn’t just interested in volume: he wanted the highest quality paper his American dollars could buy. And that was what he got through the assistance of Giuseppe Prezzolini (paid US$40 a month), an established writer and critic who had already been involved with some of the most influential Italian riviste of the period, including La voce, which he founded with Giovanni Papini and edited on and off between 1908 and 1914.³⁴ No doubt with Prezzolini’s help, the Italian issues of Broom were printed on Fabriano paper, which averaged 5,500 lire per ninety-six-page issue: that’s roughly US$240.³⁵ Considering that the average monthly paper expense for the Dial at the same time was US$667 per issue, that was certainly a significant difference.³⁶

None of this was lost on Loeb, who, upon receiving the first issue, was dazzled by the “fine paper, the three-inch margins, and the orange and blue cover.”³⁷ Nat Shaw, his assistant back in New York City, agreed. “The quality,” he reported, “is superfine. People say so here, too. Not the newspapers, but the advertising fraternity, the bookshops, and the readers—which is a damned sight more important, believe me. And by readers I don’t mean the self-appointed critics and would-be contributors, but the people back in the country.”³⁸ One of these self-appointed critic/readers “back in the country” was Pierre Loving, who speculated in the Double Dealer that “each issue represents a comfortable fortune invested in hand-made paper.”³⁹ That “superfine” quality might have earned Broom lavish praise from various quarters, but none of it would last if the contents couldn’t keep up with the carta. It wasn’t long before Loeb began to worry that “little distinguished Broom from the other experimental magazines except the James Stephens’s story [which appeared in the first issue], the elegant paper, and the large size.”⁴⁰ He was right: little did distinguish Broom from what else was out there, especially in France, Italy, and Germany, where the most innovative little magazines were getting published by the Dadaists, Russian and Italian Futurists, and Constructivists. But Loeb was somehow missing the point here. Broom was an American magazine intended for consumption by an American audience. The fact that it was printed in Italy on handmade Fabriano paper and transported by steamship back from Naples to the United States is what made it different. Broom wasn’t just a foreign import according to international postal regulations: it looked like an import, and this material fact was what kept it going at first.

The expense reports and other documents make it impossible to ignore something else: the symbolic value of that paper far exceeded the actual cost, which was on average 5,500 lire per issue and did not include cover paper (about 1,000 lire), paper transport (about 750 lire), or the printing (5,000 lire).⁴¹ In order to cut expenses, Loeb fired Prezzolini (December 1921) and bought out his partner, Alfred Kreyemborg (sometime between April and May 1922), who cost 2,500 lire per month, but he never let go of that “luxurious format” even though it would have been possible to downgrade. This makes you realize just how significant paper was to Broom’s entire project. There was a materiality to the exile of Broom, one that was there in the page, waiting for the quality of the contents to catch up (which it more or less did).

Printing. The words and reproductions, of course, needed to be there too. In order to get them on paper, Loeb relied on two reputable printers: L’Universelle imprimerie polyglotte in Rome and Labisch and Co. Graphische Kunstanstalt in Berlin. What was true of the paper was true of the printing: it wasn’t better when compared with the experimental magazines printed by the European avant-gardes, including G., Procellaria, Zenit, Ma, and De Stijl, but it was when compared with what else was coming out in the United States—and not because of the typesetting, which, after all, could be done just as well (though it would be more expensive). Rather, the presence of these foreign printers was manifest on the page itself: the three-inch margins had the effect not only of enlarging the page, which was already big enough (22½ cm x 31½ cm), but of emptying it out, leaving space so that the words (whether prose or poetry) and images would appear uncluttered.

Typos, on the other hand, were another problem entirely. That was part of the risk that Loeb ran when he decided to rely on printers who did not speak English. Typographical errors in little magazines, of course, were quite common since cheaper printers were often poorly skilled, reducing cost, and overworked, taking on too many jobs at once to maximize profit. In this case, however, the skill was there, as was the prestige of the printing press, but it was the language that could confuse the compositors responsible for setting the type in reverse.⁴² The occasional typo was certainly more painful to Loeb than any of his readers, but issue 11 was an exception. It arrived a month later than expected from Naples with significant water damage and a slew of typos, one more hilarious than the other. Among them was a line planted in a poem and attributed to the wrong author that substituted “white-veiled buns” for “white-veiled nuns”; Lenin was given an extra e at the end of his name; and an article on the language of Joyce’s Ulysses received the title “One Thousand and One Nights in a Bar-Room,” which seemed as if the type might have actually been set in a barroom. Loeb, who was given a few advanced copies before the crates were due to be sent out from Naples, was horrified, but there was nothing to be done. A month passed, the issues finally arrived on the SS Colombo water soaked, and his new assistant, Lola Ridge, who never received the errata slips from Loeb in the meantime, substituted all of the nuns for buns by hand, three thousand of them (figure 4.2).⁴³

Typos are not unique to the exile magazine. In this case, however, the number of typos per issue would, I suspect, be higher in Broom than in most other little magazines set by compositors who knew the language of the type they were setting. Whatever the case may be, the point remains that the typo, this error on the page that comes from either misplacing, disordering, or omitting letters and words, was a necessary risk in the production process. It was, in effect, another sign of Broom’s exile, a flaw in the actual fabric of the text that pointed to its status as a transnational object, something generated by a process that depends not only on the separation of production and consumption but also, and in a quite literal way, on human labor, in this case, the hand picking and choosing the letters and arranging them on the printing bed.⁴⁴

Readers who stumble on the typo are asked to recognize the apparatus itself as an apparatus, the machine that makes it possible to see the word not once but three or four thousand times in the “same” place. The typo screams out from the page, and even if the letters on the type bar are standardized, made of steel, the imprint on the page foregrounds the invisible presence of flesh and blood. What was lost in translation from the page proofs to the compositor’s eye and hand was found in production, and this imperfection, which may have marred particular texts within the magazine, ended up providing a degree of authenticity that it might have otherwise lacked. And what Theodor Adorno said about his own books, the ones packed up in crates, shaken up, and knocked about during his immigration to the United States and back to Germany, applies to the little magazines: they are “real,” the damaged ones that have suffered and persevered.⁴⁵ Typos were like passport stamps, and whether funny or tragic or a bit of both, they were there to signal the presence of an elsewhere. A flawless, typo-free version of Broom might have been possible had it been printed in New York City (and set by compositors fluent in English) from the beginning, but then it would have been something else, another little on the edge of the United States with its eye straining to see what was happening far away on the other side of the Atlantic.

Looking for traces of exile in Broom’s typos is not unlike decoding an individual’s personality through samples of handwriting, where the slightest variation in the line of a letter could reveal something unsaid and, perhaps, unsayable.⁴⁶ Created by the imprint of the type bars against paper, type has its own secrets to share, but they are hidden less in the rigidity, angle, or looseness of the letter that leaves its mark on paper than in the misplacement of letters in the word (or the missing word) that appear on the page (and do not). There is not an individual personality waiting to be discovered in or behind the typo, someone who, like compositors B and E from Shakespeare’s First Folio, can be identified by their variant spellings or mistakes. The personality in these pages is the process itself, the one that involves the reproducibility of a little magazine by an anonymous someone setting and missetting “foreign” words in reverse.

Postage. The exile of Broom was organized around the paradoxical repetition of a homecoming that was intended to take place on a monthly basis. I say “intended” precisely because things never worked out so smoothly: there were always snags on both sides of the Atlantic, crossed lines, delays, and dropped communications that threatened to dismantle any hopes for serial regularity. Issues 1 and 2 arrived late in the United States for no particular reason, but 3 was one of the more egregious cases.⁴⁷ After delivering four crates of Brooms to the American Express office in Rome on December 15, 1921, where they would then travel to New York via Naples on the SS Canada on January 11, 1922, Loeb awaited some form of confirmation. In a letter dated January 28, Shaw finally reported that the ship did indeed come in, but there were “no brooms on board.”⁴⁸ When they were finally tracked down, minus one of the crates that had been left with the customs appraiser, it took three more weeks to get them released. The January issue, then, finally appeared in the middle of February, with number 4, the February issue, fast on its heels. When writing to American Express about a reimbursement for the damages and delay, Loeb argued that it wasn’t just about the money: “To that must be added the loss in prestige, as an advertising medium, the loss in confidence of prospective subscribers as well as the undoubted undermining of our general reputation for punctuality and reliability.”⁴⁹

Two different issues in a single month: that was the problem.⁵⁰ Reputation was contingent on punctuality even with such a complicated, and indeed more costly, distribution arrangement. Loeb may have dreamt about cheaper paper in the beginning, but transatlantic postage proved to be a real nightmare and not just because of the delays, which continued with the publication of the next nine issues in Italy.⁵¹ Costs to transport Broom across the Atlantic and then throughout the United States were much higher than Loeb anticipated. Consider, for instance, some of the expenditures for the first issue that appeared in November: Kreyemborg’s salary: 2,450 lire; Prampolini’s cover design: 300 lire; cover paper: 1, 020 lire; printing: 5,688 lire; and another 3,313.90 lire for the wrapping, glazed paper, additional cover paper, and wrapping paper for cases (figure 4.3). Added to this in the following month was the “extraordinary expenses” for shipping issue 2 “express,” 2,588.70 lire. In a single month, it cost half as much to ship Broom as it did to print it. And that was even before issues were distributed to bookstores and subscribers on the other side of the Atlantic.⁵² Back in New York City, Nat Shaw delivered issues by foot and/ or taxi to bookstores and newsstands, but the rest required stamps, which averaged between 700 and 800 lire per month and were put on envelopes specially sent from Italy (250 lire per month).⁵³

If high-quality paper was cheap in Italy, the postage back to the States was not, and it contributed significantly to Broom’s financial woes. By the time issue 11 was published, Loeb had already relocated his headquarters to Berlin (still keeping the New York office), motivated by the hyperinflation of German currency that lowered the costs on production and raw materials. Unfortunately, by the time issue 12 was ready for the printers, the price of paper had doubled.⁵⁴ The moment for “big savings” may have passed, but paper for the first Berlin issue still only cost US$100, half of what it was back in Rome.⁵⁵ Strangely enough, there is no documentation for postage from Germany to be found either in the Broom archive or Loeb’s memoir (though he does provide a detailed breakdown of other costs). In the end, that didn’t really matter very much since their self-imposed exile was coming to an end largely because the well was finally dry: after four issues, and less than six months, Broom left Berlin for New York City, where it appeared for another five issues, noticeably thinner and smaller than before: forty-eight pages in an eight-by-eleven-inch format. After so much hard-won success abroad, Broom was finally back home, cut down to size and looking more American than it ever had before.⁵⁶

Coda. Exile was one possible strategy for making little magazines, but it was dependent ultimately on finding material worth printing in the first place. When Broom cleared out, others were ready to jump in and capitalize on its absence. In the 1920s, exile was driven as much by opportunities for foreign exchange as it was by the desire to find experimental work by writers and artists from all camps. As Loeb and so many other editors discovered, there was never enough to go around, making little room for more than one or two exiled titles at a time.⁵⁷ The first issue of Ford’s transatlantic review appeared the same month as the last issue of Broom; This Quarter popped up a few months after the last issue of the transatlantic review; the Exile arrived in April 1927, the same month as transition but with significantly less stamina. After four issues, Pound’s printer was unable to support the “luxury” of a little magazine, and transition trudged on until late 1938, making the title a prophecy of sorts. Indeed, transition was, according to Cowley, the last of the “little exiled magazines” that managed to span two decades, living long enough to see a European literary field that had grown inhospitable to experimentation.⁵⁸ By the time copies of transition were thrown on top of a bonfire at a Nazi rally, Jolas could no longer ignore the fact that the door to one era had shut forcefully behind him, and there was no way of knowing what the opening of another one would bring.⁵⁹

When bands of Surrealists finally landed at various destinations in North and South America after the German invasion of France, they understood something about the exile magazine that many of their British and American precursors did not: because of the relatively low cost for photographic reproductions, it was an ideal space to exhibit works of art, especially when exhibition spaces were already so hard to come by, fellow artists were scattered far and wide, and detractors were all too eager to declare that surréalisme est mort.⁶⁰ In what follows, I explain how these exhibitions were staged within VVV one of the most exemplary Surrealist magazines of the early 1940s, which continued a print practice that first began during World War I, when, as Emily Hage has shown, the Dadaists first started using magazines as traveling exhibition sites to distinguish Dada from the place-bound display practices of Futurism, Cubism, and Expressionism.⁶¹ Surrealist experiments with word and image have long been a topic of discussion among art historians, including Dawn Ades and Rosalind Kraus, both of whom have singled out illustrated magazines as the “true objects produced by surrealism.”⁶² And though the Surrealists’ example has certainly been followed by a long tradition of artists who have used the magazine as an “alternative space” to display works of art within a work of art, the connection with exile has been lost and with it the larger point that by using the magazine as an exhibition space in exile (and outside of western Europe), the Surrealists were preparing for a geopolitical shift that would involve the struggle over decolonization and the uncertain fate of Surrealism in the postwar years.⁶³

But first a few words on the exhibit: As photographic reproductions became more affordable, magazines, big and little, increasingly came to incorporate images. Not all of them were intended as works of art, but for avant-garde movements in particular, with so many of their members geographically dispersed, reproductions were a cheap and easy way to open their studios and circulate works that were normally bound by time and place. Walter Benjamin, as always, was quick to notice that something was different about these exhibition sites. “The scope for exhibiting the work of art,” he writes, “has increased so enormously with the various methods of technologically reproducing it that, as happened in prehistoric times, a quantitative shift between the two poles of the artwork has led to a qualitative transformation in its nature. Just as the work of art in prehistoric times, through the exclusive emphasis placed on its cult value, became first and foremost an instrument of magic which only later came to be recognized as a work of art, so today, through the exclusive emphasis placed on its exhibition value, the work of art becomes a construct [Gebilde] with quite new functions.”⁶⁴ For the magazine, already a reproducible object stripped of an aura, there is no cult value to speak of. And yet Benjamin has put his finger on something here: the potential for immediate, widespread, and simultaneous exhibition through a reproduction changes the work of art from its inception.⁶⁵ You could even say that reproducibility changes the work of art during its inception long before anyone has been able to experience the final result. With works of art made for reproduction (and circulated in multiple copies simultaneously), there is never a process by which they obtain some kind of cult value before the transfer from an original to a copy begins. They are always already copies even in their status as originals, which is why the reproducible work of art is a construct with a different (social) function: because it is made for reproduction, it is not automatically part of a cultural sphere that would prize, say, the space of the museum over the page of the magazine.

It is precisely in this change in the social and political function of the Surrealist exile magazine where we can see its singularity. It doesn’t just exhibit works of art through photographic reproductions: it produces them by using the space, format, and materiality of the magazine itself. Let me focus, then, on a few examples to explain what I mean. The first one is taken from the second issue of VVV, where it appeared under the title “Le reglement des comptes,” sponsored by the fictional “Banque obscurantiste ‘pour l’etranger.’” Positioned horizontally on the left-hand page, this “poème-montage (à une voix hélas) atmosphérique, prophétique, e autocritique” looks like a bank statement with separate columns for “Operations,” “Debit,” “Credit,” and “Balances, Sources ou Points de repere” (figure 4.4). Because it is a Surrealist bank statement, however, things are not quite what they seem. In the first slot under “Operations” are the words “Traintrain,” followed by a series of hyphens (tracks perhaps) under “Debit,” a few poetic phrases under “Credit,” and the words “Poésie ‘moderne’” accompanied by the dates 1914-1918, 1939-Alger 1943-194?” under “Balances, Sources ou Points de repere.” Since this is, as the title states, a document settling accounts, one reading implies that Breton and his friends are taking inventory of modern poetry since World War I, while also alluding to contemporary historical events, in this case the recently ousted Vichy government in Algeria (November 1942).

The generic design of the bank statement was reappropriated for a Surrealist montage, but I would add that the concept of “foreign exchange,” which recalls the title of Loeb’s editorial for Broom, conveys a rather different message. Exchange, in this instance, does not involve the explicit use, or abuse, of international currency rates. If anyone is benefiting from the exchange, it is the Americans, who, in a sense, are getting the cultural capital from the seasoned avant-gardists who have landed on their shores. As presumptuous as it may sound, Surrealists like Breton, Ernst, and Duchamp didn’t need the Americans for artistic development (economic sustenance was another story). In fact, you could say that the reverse was true, with this Surrealist influx spurring on the development of Abstract Expressionism in the United States.⁶⁶ For the first time since the European avant-gardes came on the scene, there was a branch anchored in America and carrying on with the traditions and techniques it carried from the Old World. The magazine was one of the things it carried. The Surrealists, of course, didn’t need any help getting it all together, and they made that perfectly clear from the précis they attached to the back inside cover of the first issue, indicating that “VVV will be in the tradition of those European reviews which published (immediately upon completion) imaginative works of unusual interest whether they be in poetry, the plastic arts, anthropology, psychology, sociology, the evolution of science, comparative religion, or in what may simply be called the field of the wonderful.”⁶⁷

The “tradition” belongs specifically to Surrealism, but it’s also necessary to point out that VVV wasn’t going to be an Americanized version of something the Surrealists had already done before (figure 4.5). After a lineup that included the varied formats of La révolution surréaliste (1924-1929), Le surréalisme au service de la révolution (1930-1933), and Minotuare (19331938), the Surrealists were ready to experiment again in another country, and the results were extraordinary.⁶⁸ There was, as Jeanne Reynal recognized at the time, “nothing else like it” in the wartime magazine world, and that same assessment could be applied retroactively and expanded: nothing had ever been quite like VVV for as long as the little magazine was around.⁶⁹ Monica Sawin argues that this had a lot to do with the fact that the design and quality of the form matched the eclecticism of the content: “Inconsistencies in typefaces and colors of paper, combinations of drawings, photography, and old engravings, and uneasy juxtapositions of texts that might be anthropology on one page, poetry on the next, made perusing an issue of VVV at the very least an adventure in the unexpected.”⁷⁰ One page to the next, two pages together, two pages divided, one page back: an older design was repurposed to accommodate an entirely new reading “adventure.” Instead of seeing the little magazine as a container for texts and images, the Surrealists began to imagine it as an interactive three-dimensional object with intrinsic artistic properties that could be manipulated. The bank statement was one example. Printed horizontally on the page, it forced readers to turn the magazine clockwise so that it could be read. Even this gesture, simple and clean, is an acknowledgment that the magazine is an object in space, something that should be moved and turned around. And that was just the beginning. Once readers finished trying to make sense of this page (assuming that they did), they were confronted on the page opposite with an image of Jacqueline Lamba Breton seated on the floor with her legs wrapped under a skirt and looking away to the right; whatever there is above her has been covered over by another sheet of white paper. Turning this half sheet over, readers came across two works of art at the same time: one, the printed reproduction of an ethereal green watercolor by Max Ernst, the other a photographic reproduction of a large canvas (in black-and-white) hanging on the wall above Breton (figure 4.6).

An exhibition is very much in progress here. Readers are not just leafing through a magazine: they are strolling through a gallery, and the effect of movement comes from the interactivity that takes place in and between the pages. When turned around, Ernst’s untitled image hangs on the left of the page as if it were tacked on a wall just like the reproduction of Breton’s “real” canvas on the page opposite. Equally striking is the juxtaposition of the green shades against the black-and-white photograph, which makes Ernst’s image pop out while Breton’s recedes into the distance, part of it blocked in the photograph itself by a hanging bar and a house plant.

The aura may have been destroyed by technologies of reproducibility in a medium like film, but this particular sequence and format in the magazine offers a unique counterpoint. Indeed, the Ernst is a reproduction, and yet it is also an original that was made exclusively for VVV and intended for the lucky readers who happened to pick up the issue. Breton’s canvas, on the other hand, is an original that appears in a photograph, and it looks even more like a reproduction that very few people will ever see directly. It is there in black-and-white resembling a staged photograph, the kind used to corroborate the authorship of a work of art, not its authenticity as a work of art. The third and final issue (no. 4) is filled with exhibition sequences like this one, half-page color sketches inserted between two page spreads made to look as if they’re hanging on the “walls” of the magazine. In addition, there are enlarged, caption-less photographs mounted across two pages that jump out at unsuspecting reader s/viewers without any context: a rocky desert landscape, for example, that looks like a painted canvas as seen through a microscope or a series of mystical drawings that can be unfolded beyond the frame of the magazine. And it’s clear here that a new mode of reading/viewing is encouraged, one that forces readers to interact in unusual ways with the structure of the magazine.

As compelling as all of this is, however, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that the innovation of the exhibition was connected with this new experience of exile for the Surrealists. It is happening in these pages because Breton, Ernst, and Duchamp have left France behind, and the magazine was made to function like an impromptu gallery. Exhibition in the magazine was a tactic first developed by the Dadaists during World War I, but at this moment, it was adapted for another historical and political context and in another place. The Surrealists, though eager to get their work circulating, were equally interested in creating the kind of experience that would bring the audience to them. In the 1938 Surrealist exhibition designed by Duchamp, they had already come up with ways to turn spaces inside out, in this instance by incorporating the street into the bourgeois salon, covering the ceiling with twelve hundred coal sacks and lining the inside with mannequins. Something similar was happening here as well. The magazine, normally reserved as a place to announce an upcoming exhibition or report on it, was being transformed into an exhibition hall, placeless, made of paper, and capable of evading (or at least disguising) all the trappings of the bourgeois institution that controlled them.⁷¹

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Marcel Duchamp’s “L’allégorie de genre,” a piece that was first commissioned as a cover for a special Americana issue of Vogue but later rejected and subsequently picked up by VVV (figure 4.7a). It’s not difficult to see why such a work might have been found unsuitable. Look closely: is that a map, a profile of a head with strips of blood? And what are those black lines against the blue? And does the title “Prince of Blood,” attributed to Roberto Matta, on the left-hand side correspond with what’s there on the right? For this ingenious readymade, Duchamp designed a paper cutout that combines the profile of George Washington’s rounded globe on the left with Abraham Lincoln’s jagged dome on the right. Turn the entire magazine counterclockwise, and you are staring at a map of the United States, with Texas positioned where Washington’s nose used to be and silhouettes of Canada and Mexico above and below. That’s just the beginning.

Turn the page, in fact, and you are staring at the “Prince of Blood,” a black-and-white reproduction of Matta’s colored triptych (canvas), through the heads of Washington and Lincoln, who have now switched positions (figure 4.7b). At this point, however, the stripes are revealed more clearly on the right-hand side as stains of blood on a piece of gauze with gold stars stamped in. One more turn, and you see Washington and Lincoln embossed on a white sheet of paper, this time around with the title of the piece and its author finally revealed at the bottom, providing a compelling spin on the very idea of allegory, which in this case associates two of America’s presidents with violence and bloodshed (figure 4.7c). The title, though in French, puns in English on the word gory, which is, in fact, the adjective that best describes this particular image and its attempt to convey the idea that while a war is raging across Europe, exiles like Duchamp are trying to imagine it from afar under the protection of America’s Stars and Stripes.⁷²

And there’s more. Turning another page, the reader comes across two more images; one is a half-page colored sketch by Enrico Donati, and the other is a black-and-white photograph of a wooden mask from Alaska (figure 4.8). Particularly striking about this moment in the sequence is the way that Duchamp’s “Allegorie” continues to haunt the experience. Instead of simply turning the page and moving on to something new, it remains, the delayed identification of the piece still visible along with the design while the other works are on display. And it’s possible to imagine that the titles for these works could be switched without too much trouble. Duchamp’s cutout as “La rose d’oiseaux” or Donati’s sketch as “L’allegorie de genre”: both would work, but only by changing the meaning of the images they were supposed to name. Indeed, what we have here is a pronounced version of montage. The juxtapositions in image and text, the layout and design, the multimedia content, and the variety of different textures and shapes let VVV function like a work of art on wheels, moving through the world precisely so that it can establish some sensual connection between the works of art, their makers, and the readers/ viewers who experience them.

The politics of VVV during these years were necessarily complicated, and Duchamp’s “Allegorie” was itself a representation of the reality facing so many displaced Frenchmen, who were thousands of miles away from the battlefield. Tristan Tzara, who stayed in France, was disgusted by the Surrealist flight, all of it made worse by the fact that in VVV one couldn’t find “the slightest allusion to the war and the Occupation.”⁷³ When the war ended, Tzara was convinced that Surrealism no longer had a place in French intellectual or political life: “What is surrealism today and how does it justify itself historically when we know that it was absent from this war, absent from our hearts and from our activities during the Occupation?”⁷⁴ Tzara’s comments raise a number of poignant questions about political commitment and artistic practice. I will only say here that it influences how we understand just what VVV was doing in America during the war. It wasn’t delivering propaganda or broadcasting nationalist messages or encouraging political debates. Instead, VVV functioned un-apologetically as a site for the publication of art, literature, and criticism. Tzara may have seen these exiles and their magazine as an apolitical haven for cowards, but on the other hand, it still allowed for artistic production to continue, giving the Surrealists a place to circulate their art and writing during wartime.

Exhibition in exile was political. It represented a stubborn refusal to be silent and was an expression of creativity, imagination, and spirit, the very qualities, in other words, under attack by the Fascists and Nazis. That, I think, is why Tzara got it wrong. Commitment in VVV was happening through the exhibition, the title itself announcing the desire for freedom by adapting the two Vs used by black American soldiers, who were fighting the war abroad and racism at home. In this case, however, the third V was aimed at another target: colonialism. Breton’s interest in the subject had been growing throughout the 1930s, leading to a number of significant encounters with artists from Senegal, Martinique, Algeria, Morocco, and Haiti. For Breton, as for so many others, colonialism was the most pronounced expression of a post-Enlightenment delirium that was founded on principles of reason skewed deliberately to justify the irrational domination of other races.

This anticolonial message in VVV is framed subtly. There are no manifestoes or editorials explicitly denouncing the colonial situation in Africa or the West Indies, but there is the constant presence of Aimé Césaire, the poet from Martinique, educated in France, who founded L’etudiant noir with the Senegalese poet Léopold Senghor in 1935 and in 1939 returned home, where he remained for the rest of his life. Césaire’s poems appear in every issue of VVV along with an advertisement at the back for his magazine Tropiques, published under the watchful eye of the Vichy government, which temporarily suspended publication in 1943, before it was overthrown.⁷⁵ That in itself wouldn’t be so compelling if it wasn’t for the fact that Césaire is one of the few outsiders allowed to occupy such a prominent position within the magazine. And I want to focus specifically on the way that the space of VVV accommodated both the poet and his work through exhibition techniques already discussed.

Césaire was not in exile when he published his poems in VVV. He had already returned to Martinique and was continuing to revise Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal, a poem documenting his exile in France, a version of which first appeared in the French journal Volontés in 1939, while he edited Tropiques and wrote other poems for what later became Les armes miraculeuses (1946). Much has been made of the fact that Breton first met Césaire accidentally in 1941 when his ship stopped over in Fort-de-France en route to New York City, but I want to emphasize that it brought the newly minted exile face-to-face with the returnee, who was actively transforming his experience into art. Once Breton had VVV up and running in New York City the following year, Césaire became the voice of the exile, someone who, having lived through the experience, was already capable of describing it through a style of writing that was both surréaliste and étranger.

In VVV, exile gets expressed as exhibition. Césaire was an unknown quantity in the United States in the early 1940s, and for that reason, the Surrealists were responsible for preparing his introduction to a new audience.⁷⁶ To do so, they capitalized on the fact that Césaire’s race would not be identifiable by name alone. For the first two batches of poems, then, all of them composed in French without English translations, it would have been impossible to know exactly who he was by race even if the location was there at the end to identify where he was from. By the third issue, however, Breton and his fellow editors staged a performance that would dispel any doubts. A page before Césaire’s poem “Batouque” begins, there is a photograph of the poet in a white suit, standing on a rooftop with a few buildings and mountains visible in the background (figure 4.9). In the bottom left-hand corner is Césaire’s name, with a poem by Philip Lamantia on the page opposite. By turning the page, the reader comes across a photographic reproduction of a sculpture by Maria Martins, accompanied underneath by the beginning of Césaire’s poem. After four pages of single lines layered at different lengths, the poem ends with a full-page black-and-white photograph of the Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, crouched in front of an oversize canvas and holding a paintbrush (figure 4.10). Lam, who is pictured in his studio in Havana, painted La jungle after visiting the Absalon forest in Martinique with Césaire while en route to Cuba from Paris. He was on the same ship, in fact, that brought Breton to America, and the painting that he is pictured in front of was actually on display in 1943 in New York City, where it received rave reviews. In this instance, the photograph of La jungle gestures toward a shared experience together in Martinique as exiles and, as it were, the transformation of that experience into art: the painting for Lam, the poem for Césaire, and the magazine for Breton.

All of the elements for the exhibition within the magazine are here, including the remediation that makes it possible to incorporate reproductions of visual artworks on the printed page. Particularly striking, however, is the sequencing of the images: Césaire appears before his poem like the painters who pose in front of their canvases. In this case, however, his poems have already preceded him in the previous issues, and once readers get to see the black man behind them, another one is already in progress, surrounded on both sides by a network of artists working within traditions from Africa, South America, and the West Indies. This rapid-fire exhibit of artists effectively unites them, making the poet from Martinique part of a diasporic tradition involving the painter from Cuba and the sculptor from Brazil, and all of it is orchestrated by a group of displaced Frenchmen waiting out the war in the United States.

Envoi(x). By appearing in VVV as an exhibition imported all the way from Fort-de-France, Césaire was effectively brought into the Surrealist movement as a fellow exile, but the affiliation also worked in reverse, identifying the exiled Surrealists with an anticolonial struggle that was gaining momentum during those years and that involved the ousting of the Vichy government from Martinique in 1943, followed by Césaire’s appointment as its mayor and the redesignation of Martinique’s status in 1946 from colony to département d’outre-mer. And if, as has been suggested, VVV was an explicit reference to the VV (Double Victory) of black Americans fighting in the war, I argue that the extra V identifies, more subtly perhaps, the voice [Fr.: voix] of poets like Césaire, the one who Breton accidentally stumbled upon in 1941 when he picked up a copy of Tropiques in a bookshop in Fort-de-France and immediately noticed “la voix de l’homme n’était en rien brisée, couverte, elle se redressait ici comme l’épi même de la lumière.”⁷⁷ It was the same quality, in fact, that Suzanne Césaire recognized in “la grande voix” of Breton, the one who, in his exile, was quick to hear “à New York, au Brasil, au Mexique, en Argentine, à Cuba, au Canada, à Alger…des voix qui ne seraient pas ce qu’elles sont (timbre et resonance) sans le surrealisme.”⁷⁸

Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich were right: the list of exile magazines is long.⁷⁹ But what I want to foreground above all is the way that this condition of exile got inscribed within the materiality, structure, and design of the magazine itself for more than two decades: the paper and typos, the silences and sequences, the exhibitions and excisions. Other titles, of course, are part of this list (Alejo Carpentier’s Imán in Paris, Wolfgang Paalen’s Dyn in Mexico, Roger Callois’s Lettres françaises in Buenos Aires, Vicente Huidobro’s Creación in Madrid and Paris), and there will be ways that they elaborate on, and perhaps depart from, some of the arguments I’ve already made.⁸⁰ What remains, however, is the fact that the little magazine became modern in the twentieth century because of its adaptability as a communications technology and the way that it could be “refunctioned” to accommodate concrete economic and political changes in the world, which, in the interwar years, involved fluctuating exchange rates and the forced displacement of so many individuals and movements around the globe.

Fascists and Nazis, it turns out, couldn’t stamp out the little magazine no matter how hard they tried. And this same resilience would be required once again in 1975, when a group of exiled Arab Surrealists in Paris started Le desir libertaire, an antireligious, antinationalist magazine banned from the mail and bookstores in every Arab country.⁸¹ Published in mimeograph, Le desir libertaire used the freedom it found in France to take an oppositional stance against the religious and political hypocrisy it identified across countries in the Arab world. Once again, the little exiled magazine was symptomatic of an intellectual restlessness and a place of refuge for the imagination. But it was also, as was true in Breton’s case, an unmistakable sign that one was in exile in the first place. Thirty years had passed since the founders of Surrealism returned to France and watched the original movement make way for the arrival of other avant-gardes. But the necessity for this magazine in the 1970s was a reminder that there always will be unreason to fight in the world, and thankfully there is, and always will be, a medium whose greatest virtue, it turns out, is a littleness that can be manufactured on the run just about anywhere.