Editor's Note, Spring 99

When my spirits flag, when my vision disarticulates--what the hell do I think I'm doing--I sometimes reach for that old testament, The Little Magazine in America: A Modern Documentary History. This 1978 volume of essays by 42 editors and publishers always cheers me up with tidbits like the career of Robie Macauley, who inherited The Kenyon Review from John Crowe Ransom, ran it for ten years, then decamped to become fiction editor of Playboy--in those days, short stories were thought to be of redeeming social value! (Today's cheering career move: Andrew Hultkrans, an assistant here for one issue in '89, has just been named editor of BOOKFORUM. Godspeed.)

For dark moments in the future, I will be able to turn to a new old testament, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980, published last year by Granary Books and the N. Y. Public Library, which had mounted an exhibition of its holdings of little magazines and presses from the period of "the mimeo revolution."

Mimeograph (and ditto) machines--to bring younger readers up to the mark--were ways of xeroxing avant la lettre, using a typewriter (quod vide) to produce a stencil that could be inserted into a machine that would crank out reasonably clear copies of the desired texts. Which could then be stapled together in booklet form. Anyway, A Secret Location offers statements about and the covers of some 90 classics, such as the eponymous FUCK YOU/a magazine of the arts and Kenward Elmslie's premonitory ZZZZZ. The aggregate list of contributors--the usual suspects--reminds us of how small the world was then, how much it was just us and our friends against the universe. Now dozens of perfect-bound litmags are available in bookstores everywhere. To say nothing of zillions of zines and e-zines.

Of all the heroic editors of High Modernist litmags--Peggy Little Review Anderson, Tom The Criterion Eliot, Windy BLAST Lewis, H. Poetry Monroe-- I have been most intrigued of late by Ford The English Review Madox transatlantic review Ford. Yes, he ran two different journals, each for only a year, '08 & '24, each stuffed with the era's stars: "Only one contributor to my first two numbers did not tell me that the Review was ruined by the inclusion of all the other contributors."

After one particularly long day with the slush pile in '08, Ford came upon a packet submitted by the colleague of a (shy) schoolteacher in Nottingham. Ford read the first paragraph of "The Odour of Chrysanthemums," tossed the ms. into the accepted pile--he was proud to be a quick read; "I just know," he liked to declare--and announced to his secretary that he had found "a big one this time." Then he went upstairs--his office occupied what would otherwise have been called his drawing room--and dressed for dinner.

The occasion was a hip new social event, a Dutch treat dinner, at the Pall Mall Restaurant. Ford sat at a table of heavyweights--H. G. Wells, Hilaire Belloc, and G. K. Chesterton. The pious, boisterous Belloc was mouthing off about Our Lord yet again, when Ford, "to turn the discussion," remarked to Wells that he had discovered another genius. Wells, not missing a beat, yelled over to the next table: "Hurray, Fordie's discovered another genius!" And so, "before he even knew that any of his work had been submitted to an editor, Lawrence's name was already known in London."

In due course, the son of a collier paid a visit. His first words, upon slinking in, like a fox, were: "This isn't my idea, Sir, of an editor's office." Ford was not unduly put out: "I was at least spared--since I did not know it was Lawrence--the real pain that his 'Sir' would have caused me had I known. For I should have hated to be given what I will call a caste Sir by anybody who could write as Lawrence could. But I was able to take it as the sort of 'Sir' that one addresses to one's hierarchically superior social equals, as the junior master addresses the Head, or the Major the Colonel." (Ford had been a captain of cricket; he was also Roman Catholic, a gardener/farmer, a golfer, a lover of Provence, pro-Suffragette, for Home Rule, for a Zionist state. With Conrad, he liked to shoot at rats and play dominoes.)

Ford showed Lawrence around--the family Chippendales, his portrait by his grandfather, the pre-Raphaelite painter Ford Madox Brown. "That's all very well," said the younger man, "but it doesn't look like a place in which one would make money."

"Oh, we don't make money here," Ford replied. "We spend it."

Exactly, and funders (and writers), please take note: On any future site-visits, kindly disregard our chintzy futon-sofa, our fluorescent-orange poster proclaiming POEMS is WAR! by the L.A. artist Eric no-relation Junker and remember: We're here to spend money, not earn it.

I like Ford because he knew and loved writers. His empathic literary memoirs are simply wonderful. As a boy, he'd met Turgenev, Swinburne, Wilde et al. at his grandfather's--Wilde seemed delighted to be where he could be himself, dull. Ford's father had studied with Schopenhauer, become a music critic, and, setting a good example, lost many £s publishing quarterlies! In '98, when Ford was 24, a childhood friend fixed him up to collaborate with the still-struggling Conrad. They wrote three undistinguished novels together. When the Master was indisposed and unable to make the serialization deadline on Nostromo, Ford worked up the necessary pages; they spent three days perfecting the last paragraph and forever thrashing out the theory of the New Novel.

Later, Ford took daily walks with his neighbor Henry James. He "patronised" another neighbor, Stephen Crane. For a spell, he had breakfast every day with Galsworthy. He recognized Pound instanter. He picked up, fell in love with, and inspired Jean Rhys. He championed W. C. Williams. He was the best man at Katherine Anne Porter's wedding. He visited Allen Tate in the summer of '37 in Clarkesville, TN, while a young Robert Lowell camped out in a tent on the front lawn. (That fall Ford taught at Olivet College, Michigan, inspiring a young Robie Macauley to claim him as "my first teacher and editorial mentor.")

Ford had initially wanted a career in the military or the Indian Civil Service, but he had a bad heart--or liver; he told different stories. He had already passed 40, at which age, he declared, a man was ready to write a novel, which he did, when the Great War gave him a chance to be gassed, wounded, and shell-shocked. Parade's End, his four-volume novel about a fortyish gentleman in the trenches of divorce & Belgium, is very moving. Commanding a labor battalion, he said later, was rather like running a review, only easier.

Conrad had hated the thought of a writer squandering himself as an editor: "1) it's a waste of time and 2) it raises for you such hordes of enemies that eventually they will bring you down." Ford maintained his sense of perspective: When Hemingway, a sub-editor of transatlantic--which was where Fitzgerald saw Hem's story he forwarded to Max Perkins--began serializing The Making of Americans, but then offered the rest of it to The Criterion for "real money," Ford wrote Stein: "I should be very sorry to lose you, but I was never the one to stand in a contributor's way: indeed I really exist as a sort of halfway house between non-publishable youth and real money--a sort of green baize door that everyone kicks both on entering or leaving."

Hemingway (posthumously) savaged Ford in A Moveable Feast. Ford, himself long dead, would have understood: "That is Nature asserting itself. In the end the young cockerels must bring down the father of their barnyard. Without that the arts must stand still."