Little Magazines

By Prof. P. GOSWAMI, M.A.
(The Gauhati University)

The Little Review, an American literary periodical (1914-1929), is considered one of the most outstanding of the Little Magazines. The Little Review championed all experimental movements of this century and published the work of eminent American and European writers. It was in this magazine that Arnold Bennett read fragments of Ulysses after having been told by Wells of the new writer Joyce. A taste of Joyce made Bennett puzzled, but the older author recalled “the time when I laughed at Cezanne’s pictures. I wondered whether there might not be something real in the pages after all.” The serialization of Ulysses nearly resulted in the suppression of the magazine.

In America the generic term has been taken as “Little Magazine” of which The Little Review is an example. In Britain however the term preferred is “Little Review”, taking its name from the famous New York Little Review. Should we use the term Little Magazine(s) or Little Review(s)? The chief aim of a periodical of this type is the promotion of literary experiment and reform and the encouragement of obscure and hitherto unpublished authors. This is done frequently in accordance with a definite editorial viewpoint in the matter of aesthetics or politics. Such a magazine is not concerned much with high sales or profit-making. By the very nature of its activity it cannot appeal to all and sundry, and if it can impose itself on a large public, well and good, but if it fails to do so, it does not care.

These Little Magazines are an interesting feature of the present century. Both in the U.S.A. and England there have been some influential periodicals of this type. One of the earliest in Britain was Katherine Mansfield and Middleton Murry’s Rhythm (1911). It was the first to publish Picasso and discuss Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Croce. And what was the financial status of this brave magazine? Stephen Swift, the publisher of Katherine Mansfield’s books and Rhythm, failed, leaving Mansfield and Murry with a printer’s debt of £400. They however decided to continue the magazine and clear the debt from the allowance she used to get from her father. The magazine belied their hopes and in July 1913 publication ceased. Another English magazine had more influence.

It was The Egoist, having in its coterie, among others, Ezra pound and T. S. Eliot. The Egoist published Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist in 1914 and 1915. It was in this magazine that T. S. Eliot made his famous statement of poetic faith: “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The essay repays perusal even now:

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism...the emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”

It was in The Egoist that in April 1918 May Sinclair wrote an article analysing the technique of Dorothy Richardson, the first exemplar of what was called “the stream of consciousness” method of writing fiction. A more influential magazine was the quarterly The Criterion, founded by T. S. Eliot in 1922 and edited by him till its disappearance in 1939. The first number of this magazine published The Waste Land and the fact considerably fortified Eliot’s critical reputation. The Editor broadcast a series of talks to Germany in 1946 on “The Unity of European Culture,” and in one of these talks he spoke on the policy with which he had started The Criterion. He made it clear that the magazine did not have any particular credo, excepting an unconscious assumption “that there existed an international fraternity of men of letters, within Europe: a bond which did not replace, but was perfectly compatible with, national loyalties, religious loyalties, and differences of political philosophy. And that it was our business not so much to make any particular ideas prevail, as to maintain intellectual activity on the highest level.”

The essays that T. S. Eliot wrote for The Egoist, the Atheneum, or The Criterion were the portents of a new movement in the literature of the present century. Another magazine of considerable influence was Cyril Connoly’s Horizon (1940–49). Some of the articles of this review were recently anthologized under the title The Golden Horizon.

Many of the little Magazines in America popularised Marxian socio-historical methods of criticism. The proletarian literature of the thirties had these as its organ, and sometimes the discussion of the philosophical aspects of Marxism and the application of its concepts to literature, science, history, and sociology that these magazines carried on, was of a high level. Professor Isaacs observes rightly:

“These Little Magazines are the foundations of the literature of our time, the battlegrounds of new movements and new ideas, the seed-grounds of all new literature, sheltering the young writers while they are growing, bringing them, while they are new, to the audiences ready for them, and offering them to the commercial world, which will decide their fame or their fate...The function of such reviews, as Mr. Allan Tate says, is “not to give the public what it wants, or what it thinks it wants, but what, through the medium of its most intelligent members, it ought to have.”

Indeed, how important these magazines with their rather restricted circulations have been will be evident, if we only remember some of the outstanding writers of this century who came to be first known through these vehicles–Katherine Mansfield, Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, E.E. Cummings, William Faulkner, Edmund Wilson, Dylan Thomas.

In India possibly most magazines are of the Little Magazine type. In a land where most of the population is illiterate and where all cultural moves have to be made by the educated few, however reactionary they may be on occasions, each magazine has its own coterie to inject it with life-blood and hope. Only as an exception does it attain to a wide circulation. In Assam it is more so. Assamese magazines do not have a wide audience, either because they are not well edited or because they are in truth Little Magazines. The fortnightly Jayanti (and its monthly shape during the war years) was a Little Magazine and it could patronise a handful of young writers who are going strong even now. Hemkanta Barua’s Pachowa was another such magazine. A more famous one was the Jonaki founded towards the end of the last century by three students studying in Calcutta. The Jonaki fought strenuously for the restoration of the prestige of Assamese in its home-place, for the language had been groaning under the imposition of Bengali, and ushered in what is known as modern Assamese literature. The literary history of the Assamese people cannot be rightly assessed without a consideration of these short-lived but influential vehicles of new thought and fresh experiment.