Big Little Magazines

The doughtiest people in the publishing business are those who put out avant-garde literary magazines; they seldom make a profit and rarely reach more than 5,000 readers. It must be love of literature that drives them-and properly so, for it happens that these "little magazines" have fostered the early work of the foremost writers of the 20th century.

Most of the magazines of past decades are collectors' items. But thanks to some remarkable detective work, Manhattan's Kraus Reprint Corp. has tracked down every issue of 104 U.S. and British little magazines, plus six French ones, and is republishing them in book form. Nearly 750 volumes are already available, and by year's end, the entire monumental series will be printed in 1,100 volumes ranging from $5 to $40 each.

Reproduced by photo offset, the authors' works appear in the form in which they were originally published. The whole of James Joyce's Ulysses was printed in 23 issues of the Little Review (1914-29) over a period of three years. The poems of William Butler Yeats and The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot first appeared in the Dial (1880-1929). For the single year that it survived, transatlantic review, edited by Ford Madox Ford in Paris, gave voice to such American expatriates of the 1920s as Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway. This Quarter, another European-based review, published the early writings of Aldous Huxley.

Shock & Excitement. Sprinkled throughout the publications are first, tentative works that show a glimmer of the authors' future power. Double Dealer, published in the 1920s in New Orleans, contains the early poems, stories and criticism of William Faulkner. His gothic eloquence is much in evidence, as is a penchant for backward-running sentences that caught on with other young experimental writers as well. One of his characters, a priest, rhapsodizes:

"How like birds with golden wings the measured bell notes fly outward and upward, passing with clear and faint regret the ultimate slender rush of cross and spire; and how like the plummet lark the echo, singing, falls."

Somehow, reading the works in their original setting recaptures some of the shock and excitement they must have given their first readers. Despite all the plays and movies derived from D. H. Lawrence and the countless exegeses, an early short story, The Woman Who Rode Away, emerges fresh and startling in a 1925 issue of the Dial. The proper American woman living in Mexico with a dreary husband goes off to the hills in search of fulfillment. Instead, she is imprisoned by Indians of such "terrible, glittering purity" that they ignore her womanhood and sacrifice her to their gods so as to win back the land from the white man.

Buried in the middle of transition, a book-sized Paris magazine, is a piece of nonsense called Studies in Conversation that displays Gertrude Stein at her purest. One typical passage:

Not, not asleep.

Honey cake as awake.

Borders borders to a lake borders of a lake the borders of a lake are those which the border of the lake is the border which does not unquestionably present itself. And so most often.

Interestingly.

Even wilder is an untitled E. E. Cummings poem published in a 1922 issue of Secession: life hurl my

yes, crumbles hand (ful released co-narefetti) ev eryflitter, inga. where

millions of aflickf) litter ing brightmil-lion ofS hurl: edindodg: ing

whom areEyes shy-dodge is bright

cruMbshandful, quick-hurl edinwho

Is ftittercrumbs, fluttercrimbs are float-fallin, g: allwhere:

a: crimbflitteringish is arefloatsis ing-fallall! mil, shy milbrightlions my (hurl flicker handful in) dodging are shybrigHteyes is

crum bs (alll) if, ey Es

Nomadic Editors. Every region of the U.S. produced its own magazines. In the Midwest, Midland (1915-33) published such indigenous authors as Paul Engle, Maxwell Anderson and Howard Mumford Jones. In California, a magazine sensibly titled Magazine (1933-35) printed Critics Yvor Winters and R. P. Blackmur. In Santa Fe, Laughing Horse (1921-39) celebrated the Southwest through the writing of such contributors as Upton Sinclair and Sherwood Anderson. Not all of the contributors by any means became well known; many of talent gave up, or turned to Hollywood or alcohol. "Some of the people now forgotten," says Robert Lowell in an introduction to the series, "are almost as interesting as those that survived. They are the underpinnings of the house."

For all the literary treasures buried in the little magazines, the Kraus editors found them singularly hard to locate. Few libraries had subscribed to them or stocked them. Often, the publishers found some issues in one place, the rest scattered in several others. One problem was that the magazines, entirely dependent on the energies and whims of their editors, tended to be nomadic. Secession, for example, moved in succeeding editions from Vienna to Berlin to the Tirol to Florence, finally folded in New York City in 1924. Story, which published the first works of Cheever, Capote, Salinger and Mailer, shifted from Vienna to Majorca to Paris to New York, where it, too, folded in 1964.

Forgotten Marianne. Even when Kraus located back copies, the editors had a hard time prying them out of the hands of owners who were reluctant to part with them even on a temporary basis. Many were fragile and falling apart, and the pages had to be separated in order to be photographed--a project requiring all the delicate art of the bookbinder. "It took almost a negative Wassermann test just to see the magazines," says Editorial Consultant David McDowell. But under persistent prodding, the owners eventually let them go--in exchange for a new volume of reprints. Even so, Whit Burnett, editor of Story, insured his copy of the first issue for $570 and kept calling up Kraus to inquire solicitously after its welfare.

Despite the steep cost of the project, Kraus expects to turn a tidy profit with the reprints. So far, about 50,000 copies have been sold, mostly to university libraries where for the first time they will be available for students' perusal. Though most of the magazines are in the public domain, Kraus scrupulously tracked down the editors and in most cases is paying them modest royalties on sales. As for the authors, they are happy to see their early efforts exhumed and once again in print. Much to her delight, Marianne Moore reported that she had come across some poems in a Kraus volume that she had forgotten she had written.

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