‘Most 21st Century readers won’t wait three months for a long article about a long-dead writer’

Eye-catching, but how will literary magazines attract in an online world?

THE history of literary magazines is long and littered with stories of failure and fallings out. Periodicals, journals, small independent presses, call them what you will: the pattern is almost always the same. The ones which are remembered – let’s not call them successful – begin with the grandiosity of a manifesto, some literary loudmouth drawing a line in the sand and declaring a redefinition of art or literature or both; they flourish for a time, attract a lengthy list of luminaries, and then die, without fanfare, with more of a whimper than a bang. Much longer, of course, is the list of publications nobody remembers at all. So why start a magazine?

We can’t escape the fact we are working within a long and noble (and foolish) tradition. Since the late eighteenth century, when the mechanisation of the printing process and rising levels of literacy inspired a boom in the public desire for reading matter, little magazines have been at the nexus of the culture of ideas. In the nineteenth century, popular magazines like Dickens’ Household Words and All The Year Round captured huge audiences by serializing novels in weekly or monthly instalments. Dozens of the great works of English Literature now seen as indisputably canonical – Great Expectations, The Woman in White, Far From The Madding Crowd – were first written and read in this way.

The success of these stories as the soap operas of their day is widely known, but it is little remembered that the magazines in which they first appeared also comprised a healthy dose of serious nonfiction, long essays concerning the social issues of the day. All The Year Round brought international journalism to the masses for just 2d. With circulation reaching over a hundred thousand, the magazine was a huge commercial success for Dickens, who, after the launch of the magazine stated:

“So well has All the Year Round gone that it was yesterday able to repay me, with five per cent interest, all the money I advanced for its establishment (paper, print etc. all paid, down to the last number), and yet to leave a good £500 balance at the banker’s!”

Dickens’ barely concealed glee was also the result of his vindication, All The Year Round having succeeded Household Words after a dispute with his publishers over editorial control. Not for the first time in history a literary magazine was born out of writers seizing the means of production from the publishers and going it alone. Dickens managed to make a success of it through a combination of the dazzlingly prolific brilliance of his writing and sheer hard work, but more often the bravery of writers taking control of business affairs has had disastrous consequences.

The Germ, one of the earliest and most famous examples of the literary magazine of high ideals, was not in any conventional sense a success. Set up by Dante Gabriel and William Michael Rossetti as an outlet for the poetic and artistic musings of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, it existed for only four issues: from January to April 1850. William Michael himself, in his memoir of his brother, recalls of Dante Gabriel’s idea:

“I feel pretty sure that at first every one of his colleagues regarded the enterprise as rash, costly, foredoomed to failure, and an interruption to other more pressing and less precarious work.”

This probably holds true for almost every literary magazine ever embarked upon. Still, William Michael remembers, ‘Rossetti was not to be denied. The magazine was enacted in his mind; it was to be.’

The Germ itself is a Victorian curiosity, a hotchpotch of mediocre poetry, vaguely interesting essays and self-indulgent reviews; its importance lies not in the (actually very little) insight it gives into the juvenilia of the Rossetti family and their friends, some of whom went on to become fairly great artists and one of whom – little sister Christina – a fairly great poet, but the way that it set a template for so many other periodicals which were to gain fame – and infamy – for their equally bold manifestos about redefining art and literature.

This, for much of the twentieth century, was what literary magazines sought to be. No longer was it enough to collect some poetry, some stories, some criticism, an interview perhaps. Now a magazine was a challenge to authority, to convention. Now a magazine was an act of self- or group-definition.

It has often been said that the nineteenth century didn’t really finish and the twentieth century didn’t really start until that fateful day in Sarajevo when the Archduke Franz Ferdinand took a bullet in his neck. Enter BLAST, thirty-three days before the beginning of the First World War. With its notorious pink cover – called by Ezra Pound ‘the great MAGENTA cover’d opusculus’ – the single word BLAST in capital letters diagonally heading toward the bottom-right hand corner, the magazine lasted only half as many issues as The Germ, but is recognized as a seminal moment of modernism.

This was the journal of the so-called Vorticists, anti-Futurists. Although writing to James Joyce about it, Pound didn’t seem altogether sure: ‘[Wyndham] Lewis is starting a new Futurist, Cubist, Imagiste Quarterly… I can’t tell, it is mostly a painters magazine with me to do the poems.’ The second – and final – issue came out in 1915 and was unsurprisingly billed as ‘The War Number’, and the Great War was to rip the heart out of the English avant-garde, with almost all the leading players in the movement killed or disillusioned by the horrors they had witnessed.

But BLAST had done its job, and set a precedent for what literary magazines were to be in the early part of the twentieth century: ridiculously serious and deadly playful. The final points of the BLAST manifesto were:

9. We only want Humour if it has fought like Tragedy.
10. We only want Tragedy if it can clench its side-muscles like hands on its belly, and bring to the surface a laugh like a bomb.

From now on, groups of like-minded writers and artists would gather themselves around a central idea, drink and talk and argue, write manifestos they would later disown and finally fall out over ideas or money or both. Magazines would become the place to experiment with language and form, the place where new ideas would germinate (maybe the Pre-Raphaelites’ mistake was to rename their journal ‘Art and Poetry’ after issue two), the place to question literary and social convention, the place for the unknown writer to make a name for himself, the bridge between a small coterie or even a small country and the rest of the world.

To generalise where no generalisation is possible, the literary magazines that tend to blaze like fireworks for a short time before disappearing in a puff of smoke tend to be the ones which rely on the efforts – both physical and literary – of a small group of individuals; the ones which last longest tend to be those with a more open door and a succession of editors who keep pushing forward, adapting the magazine, changing with and reflecting the times.

Poetry, published in Chicago since 1912, is one such magazine. Founded by poet and art critic Harriet Monroe, the magazine’s opening statement was a counterblast to all of the narrow coteries and –isms that had come before:

“The Open Door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end the editors hope to keep free from entangling alliances with any single class or school. They desire to print the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written. Nor will the magazine promise to limit its editorial comments to one set of opinions.”

In a circular she sent to poets, Monroe said the magazine offered:

“First, a chance to be heard in their own place, without the limitations imposed by the popular magazine. In other words, while the ordinary magazines must minister to a large public little interested in poetry, this magazine will appeal to, and it may be hoped, will develop, a public primarily interested in poetry as an art, as the highest, most complete expression of truth and beauty.”

This statement expresses much of what all literary magazines are about: in short, the art comes before the corrupting influence of commercial demands. Standing at almost opposite ends of the vast spectrum of little magazines, the point at which Poetry and BLAST (and The Germ and all the others) can be seen as companions is in their contention that ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘art’ and ‘poetry’ stand in opposition to the ‘popular’ and the ‘ordinary’.

Poetry published Pound, Yeats, Marianne Moore, Charlotte Wilder, Wallace Stevens, H.D. and William Carlos Williams, establishing itself as the one of the foremost magazines of its kind in the English-speaking world. Famously, TS Eliot’s first professionally published poem, ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ appeared in Poetry. Eliot was later to use his own magazine The Criterion, to publish ‘The Waste Land’; little magazines were where the most daring, most challenging new work first appeared: The Little Review serialized James Joyce’s Ulysses until the Nausicaa episode brought a prosecution for obscenity.

Then, in 1953, a giant entered the world of literary magazines. The Paris Review – called by Time ‘the biggest ‘‘little magazine’’ in history – was founded by a group of American ex-pats in Paris. Its first editor-in-chief, George Plimpton, held the post for 50 years, moving with the magazine to New York and continuing in his role until his death in 2003. The magazine has become legendary for the sheer quality of the work it has published decade after decade – Adrienne Rich, Philip Roth, VS Naipaul, TC Boyle and Rick Moody were all first published in its pages – but its initial mission statement, now much-quoted, was simple:

“The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they’re good.”

Kerouac, Calvino, Barthelme; Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides, and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections: this opening mission has succeeded beyond all expectation. And over and above the creative work, The Paris Review has become famous above all else for its interviews, long reflective pieces that have allowed generations of writers to speak for themselves about their work and about their craft. The best interviews have recently been collected in book format, and even after the publication of the third volume, the magazine still has an archive full of great writers sharing insights into the art of fiction to draw upon for a fourth. The list of interviewees reads like a who’s who of 20th – and now 21st – Century literature, from Faulkner and Nabokov through Didion and Morrison to Heaney and McEwan. One of the most famous interviews is with Hemingway, who Plimpton met in a Paris bar and of whom he later recalled was the only person he ever saw actually buying the magazine. Little magazines, then and now, have always relied on subscriptions.

In the 1960s, ‘little magazines’, in the form of the underground press or alternative media were a massive part of the counterculture, often politicized and strongly anti-establishment. The literary magazines of the time reflected the social revolution going on in the Western world; barriers were broken down. Like ‘sexual intercourse’ and ‘the Chatterley ban’, verse became freer. Here in Wales, Peter Finch’s second aeon followed the well-trodden trajectory of self-publishing growing into publishing friends and then publishing anyone who’s anyone: Neruda, Ginsberg, Snyder; Bukowski, Burroughs, Lorca; RS Thomas, Tristan Tzara, Iain Sinclair.

Then, in the seventies, there was another upsurge in activity and the most significant contemporary British literary magazine was born out of the ashes of an old Cambridge University rag. Named after the river running through the town, Granta in its original incarnation had been a periodical of student politics, student badinage and student literary enterprise. It already had a long and distinguished history publishing the early work of many writers who later became well known, including AA Milne, Michael Frayn, Stevie Smith, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Usually when a little magazine runs into the twin towers of apathy and money trouble, it quickly dies a death; wonderfully, in this case, a small band of postgraduates rescued the magazine by loosening its links with the university and reinventing it as a platform for ‘new writing’.

Since then, like The Paris Review on the other side of the Atlantic, Granta has attracted a stellar list of contributors: Amis, Barnes, Bellow, Carey, Carver, Carter, Chatwin, Fenton, Ford, Gellhorn, Gordimer, Kundera, Lessing, McEwan, Marquez, Rushdie, Steiner, Swift, Paul Theroux, Edmund White, Winterson, Tobias Wolff – and introduced readers to the first published prose by Bill Bryson, Romesh Gunesekera, Blake Morrison, Arundhati Roy and Zadie Smith. Like many of the more long-lasting literary magazines we have discussed Granta does not have a political or literary manifesto, but it does have a belief in “the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and make real.”

Of course, the world of literary magazines has not been changed by the success of magazines like Granta and The Paris Review, now hugely successful commercial operations with a suite of offices, a full staff and tens of thousands of subscribers. There are still hundreds of literary hopefuls working out of the proverbial dingy back bedroom. And every now and then there is still a gem, a little magazine that captures the imagination of its writers and its readers. Rebel Inc, the underground Scottish journal founded by Kevin Williamson in 1992 with the slogan ‘Fuck the Mainstream!’ published new work by writers such as Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Laura Hird, Toni Davidson and John King before any of them had books in print as well as an infamous interview where both interviewer and interviewee were under the influence of ecstasy.

The story of Rebel Inc is a classic illustration of the position the edgier ‘little magazines’ find themselves in: after the success of Welsh’s Trainspotting, the label was subsumed into Canongate, and after a series of exciting rereleases of counterculture classics from the likes of Knut Hamsun, Anais Nin and Alexander Trocchi, the imprint folded at the height of its success, the result of disagreements about the creative and commercial direction of the imprint and what Canongate called ‘financial restructuring.’

You would think that the age of mass media and the ubiquity of the internet would be a death knell for the ‘little magazine’, but as ever, things don’t stop, they change. If there are hundreds of little literary magazines in print, then there are thousands on the net, some of which have established – against all the odds – that most precious of commodities: a reputation. Often these days print journals will have an online presence to satiate the twenty-first century mind’s lack of patience with such things as printed pieces of paper arriving through one’s letterbox four times a year and sometimes projects that start as blogs or ezines end up morphing into printed journals.

The most celebrated printed literary journal of the internet age is probably Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, about which another blog – ‘Stuff White People Like’ – with its tongue firmly planted in its cheek, said:

“McSweeney’s is one of the most powerful forces in white culture. It is a literary magazine-publishing house that is so powerful that just knowing about it (not even reading it) is enough to gain the respect of white people… there is a steady group of writers who regularly contribute to the magazine… and they don’t just let anybody into the group. In fact, it’s sort of like the Wu-Tang Clan for white people.”

In addition to the career of Dave Eggers and his associates, McSweeney’s has also published the works of well-established authors such as Michael Chabon, Stephen King, David Foster Wallace, George Saunders and Joyce Carol Oates and its phenomenal success has spawned multiple spinoff projects, including a number of other publishing imprints, the online presence McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, The Believer, a successful magazine in its own right, and Wholphin, a DVD magazine.

Like all successful ‘movements’, McSweeney’s has had its fair share of critics, not least in n+1, another magazine run by young post-internet Americans, whose editors – in classic ‘little magazine’ tradition – began with two rules: the second was that they were going to publish no articles that they could imagine being published somewhere else, the first was that they were going to avoid dead people, despite that the ‘intellectual’ style of writing they were aiming for was inspired by Emerson and Nietzsche, both of whom are… well, dead.

*

In the original version of this article, published in the inaugural printed issue of The Raconteur, I ended by admitting that:

We could make all sorts of grandiose statements about why we are starting a magazine; we could come up with a ten-point manifesto that would shatter the literary world. But we know, really, that we’re just another literary magazine, part of a long and noble tradition. We might have been one of those magazines that come out with all guns blazing only to die out after an issue or three, mission accomplished, or not. But we’re hoping – and here’s the grandiose bit – that we’re here for the long haul, a steady ship founded not on a fad or the ideas of this moment but on something much simpler. Our commitment is to good writing, writing with passion, skill and wit; we ask no more, or less, of our writers.

Like all such projects, The Raconteur was – is – both glorious failure and self-fulfilling prophecy. We managed five issues in print, and a startling list of contributors to compare with those outlined above: Alain de Botton, Heathcote Williams, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Barry McCrea, Owen Sheers. But the odds, as they always are, were stacked against us. Within months of our launch, the UK’s largest stockist of specialist magazines, Borders, collapsed; as a consequence, none of the major distributors were taking on new titles. At the same time, social networking websites became this decade’s equivalent of what television was to the 1970s; people posted and pasted articles within seconds to a global audience. Most 21st Century readers won’t wait three months for a long article about a long-dead writer.

We knew all of this when we started, of course. We reveled in the romanticism of swimming against the tide. We were to be the last great print journal. Presumably like most writer-editors, we weren’t too worried about sales. I read somewhere that, even at its height, Eliot was selling between 800 and 1,000 copies of The Criterion. That kind of modest figure was achievable, surely, in this mass media age? Facebook ‘friends’, yes; magazine sales, no.

People were interested. Just not interested enough to fork out for a bundle of paper to be stuffed through their door four times a year. And who could blame them? There has never been a market for literary magazines; there has, however, always been a small, devoted readership. It is for these readers that we continue, and for ourselves, of course. Like Rossetti, Dickens, Eliot, Plimpton, Eggers and the rest, we do it mainly for love.

The Raconteur launches as an online publication this autumn.