Defining Uncle Alfred

THE LITTLE MAGAZINE: A History and a Bibliography (440 pp.)--Frederick J. Hoffman, Charles Allen & Carolyn F. UI rich -- Princeton University Press ($3.75).

They are the uncompromising writers. As they grow up, they go on looking at people and things as they did when they were children, with a certain ulterior fixity of attention. The nervous and jovial object in the living room is Uncle Alfred, yes; but they cannot let it go at that; neither can they stop trying to define other things they see and feel. They are the writers who are born artists, and early in life this is apt to be a troublesome condition. It is a fact that they might write something exciting, one day to be regarded as a bud in the branching of a fine poet or novelist; it is another fact that it hasn't a chance of being printed in a mass-circulation magazine.

During the past 36 years these clashing facts threw off like sparks, bright, brief but sometimes kindling, the enterprises known as little magazines. There were hundreds, a 20th Century phenomenon. Mostly young people published them, wrote for them, read them, fought for them, ruined them, made them ridiculous or triumphant, stuck with them or more commonly got bored and moved on. Naturally no one took them as seriously as they took themselves, not even the three scholars who have now written a just and orderly account of them.

The Explosive Teens. A certain violence in the matter of defining Uncle Alfred became usual among the young during the years just before and during World War I. Uncle Alfred's Edwardian coziness aroused derision, his comfortable income insulted equity, his genteel tradition excited rage. In June 1914 a little magazine called BLAST appeared (long ahead of YEN2) in London, saying: "BLAST years 1837 to 1900; curse abysmal inexcusable middle class . . . BLAST their weeping whiskers. . . ." This tone continued for 30-odd years to reverberate at one extreme of the little magazine gamut. But the violence was also disciplined, in its way. In the U.S. it found one outlet in a literary war for imagism, a simple doctrine requiring poetry to be exact rather than mushy. The new little magazine Poetry, founded in 1912, fought to make verse exact as well as free. Vachel Lindsay, T. S. Eliot and others were published first in Poetry. When Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, H. D. et al. won, by the end of the decade, it was easier to admit the mild merit of rendering Uncle Alfred as, perhaps

This visitor who indents

The tight cheek of the sofa

With his hesitant subsiding. . . . Harriet Monroe, the determined little woman who brought out Poetry and edited it until her death in 1936, never found more than 3,000 subscribers.

Another, no less remarkable, was the Little Review, founded in Chicago in 1914 by a woman of even greater vim. Margaret Anderson wanted to fill it with "the best conversation the world has to offer," and for some years she pretty well succeeded. She lived for months in a tent by the shore of Lake Michigan in order to put out the magazine. In 1918, after moving to Manhattan, she began a three-year struggle to publish Joyce's Ulysses--in which Uncle Alfred, disguised as a Dublin Jew, suffered the most exhaustive and stylistically lavish scrutiny of the age.

The Seven Arts, which lived for a year (1916-17), "receives the credit for crystallizing in the public consciousness such American names as Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Eugene O'Neill, Randolph Bourne, John Reed, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and H. L. Mencken."

Any young soul who perceived and portrayed Uncle Alfred as a money-raddled bourgeois, a capitalistic waxwork ("We see you, Uncle Alfred, we see through you; your silk hat and morning coat, your paralytic smile, cannot conceal your mean little heart, throbbing with LUST for money") might find a welcome in the Masses (1911-17), edited in New York by Max Eastman and Floyd Dell. The "worker," successor to the workman, came into American letters largely by its agency; so, to Greenwich Village, came Sex, successor of love. The honesties and fun that went into it seem childlike enough after 30 years of rough and sobering history.

The Clever '20s. Young writers "followed the dollar" to Europe; psychoanalysis was in fashion ("everybody is being psyched these days"); it was a gay time, but intense. One of the discoveries made by the authors of this book is Ernest Hemingway's first published story, in the Double Dealer, a New Orleans regional magazine, for May 1922. Opening: "And then when all was come and gone, the Great Lord God strode out of the house and into the garden, for in the garden he found the deep peace of Rome. Bathtubs stood all around in heavy earnestness.... 'Where is Eve?' asked the Lord God, pulling at his beard and looking remarkably like Tolstoy. . . . 'She is gone out, God,' said the largest and weakest bathtub in a heavily earnest manner. . . ." Obviously a puerile work, this protosurrealist jest nevertheless savors of the decade: if earnest, you were careful not to be heavily so.

The most gifted group of young poets in the '203 lived near Nashville and called their magazine the Fugitive (1922-25). They included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Laura Riding, Donald Davidson and Robert Penn Warren--subtle writers whose audience was little and is not yet large. They invited few Europeans (or others), fought no crusades, blew no horns, never went to court and aroused little public alarm.

The Dial is the most famous name in little-magazine history partly because, in various reincarnations, it appeared over the longest span of years: first as a New England transcendentalist organ published by Emerson and Margaret Fuller (1840-44); then as an academic fortnightly in Chicago (1880-1916); a liberal competitor of the Nation and New Republic (1916-19); finally as an adventurous and illustrious review (1920-29). It was "arty," as people said then. As the judicious historians say now: "One might say that America learned from the Dial critics more about the artistic process and more about the value of art as experience than it had learned during our entire previous history."

The Dial acquired the astounding circulation of 18,000 in four years. It embraced the world of letters from Mann to Cummings. Dial people lived, according to Marianne Moore, editor after 1925, in an "atmosphere of excited triumph."

When the Dial succumbed in 1929, its function had already been taken up by the Hound and Horn, founded by Lincoln Kirstein. Narrower in taste than the Dial, it printed avant-garde work of high standards. Its Henry James issue, near the end of its career in 1934, led the way to what had become ten years later almost a popular revival of the great novelist.

The Striving '30s. The decade after 1931 brought for artists much grimmer obstacles, more massive threats than the mere fate of not being understood. This decade made it seem that "the West" (civilization) faced a breakdown. The young strove to achieve large and general, "responsible" solutions.

Through these ten years the little magazine transition, published in Paris by Eugene Jolas, printed the "Work in Progress" (later published as Finnegans Wake) of that great master James Joyce. With Joyce's gigantic experiment in evidence, transition's purpose "to revolutionize language" seemed a possible one; dadaists and automatic writers took renewed courage; and young poets dipped more consciously into the unconscious, in which Uncle Alfred swam like a kidney.

Radical esthetics made a brew with radical politics among the little magazines that now appeared. Thinkers in the New Masses and the Left Review suggested that Uncle Alfred should be written about primarily for Uncle Alfred's hired hands. The Partisan Review became "almost regularly representative of the best of modern writing"--first with Marxist, then Trotskyist policies, and finally partisan of nothing much but good writing.

The Southern Review, published on a grant from Louisiana State University (TIME, Feb. 2, 1942), brought together the "experimental" and the "Academic," civilizing both. Cleanth Brooks Jr. and Robert Penn Warren, the editors, were writers and teachers respected in both professions; both professions lamented when the Southern Review's seven-year term was up, in 1942.

Toward the '50s. From the look of things in the mid-'40s, those who essay to define Uncle Alfred are more likely than ever in the past 30 years to realize that they have something in common with him: humanity. One of the best and littlest magazines, Horizon, has kept going in London through all the blitzes since 1940, elegantly edited by Cyril Connolly; among its contributors "blast" is too thoroughly understood as a technical term to be wished on anyone. In the U.S., two old Fugitive poets, John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate, are editing the Kenyan Review and the Sewanee Review, respectively and passably, each at a college. And Uncle Alfred is still, indefinably, at large.

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