Literary Criticism: Can a literary magazine ever be anything more than a vehicle for the promotion of a coterie? Brendan Barrington reviews The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain by Jason Harding.
Should it even try to be? Some of the most influential literary figures of the 1930s thought not.
"The eclectic is usually impotent; the alternative to eclecticism is clique-literature," wrote Louis MacNeice in 1935. "The best poets of today belong to, and write for, cliques."
Geoffrey Grigson, looking back in 1950 at his own journal, New Verse, praised it for avoiding "that dotty inclusiveness, that mental masturbation which has come to be the character of 'little' magazines". And in 1980: "There is no excuse for such a magazine unless it promulgates the strong message of a new clique or group."
MacNeice and Grigson flourished during a brief and fevered period. New Verse was launched in 1933 and ceased publishing in 1939, by which time its clique was no longer new, nor indeed any longer a clique. T.S. Eliot's designs as a magazine editor were more ambitious, and required a more flexible, durable instrument.
"To be perpetually in change and development, to alter with the alterations of the living minds associated with it and with the phases of the contemporary world for which and in which it lives: on this condition only should a literary review be tolerated" - so wrote Eliot in the January 1927 issue of his journal, The Criterion, which appeared continuously from 1922 to 1939.
What Jason Harding's book shows, in a roundabout, ungraceful way, is that while The Criterion and the other English literary magazines of its time produced spirited founding manifestoes and a steady flow of editorial comment, none managed to hold a consistent political or artistic line; all of them contradicted themselves; all of them turned on their friends and embraced former enemies. Thanks in large part to Eliot's editorial pull - which derived from his reputation as a poet and his position at Faber - The Criterion, unlike some of its rivals, was all the stronger for its promiscuity.
It was at its worst when engaging in manufactured controversy. Between 1923 and 1927, Eliot and the editor of the Adelphi, John Middleton Murry, colluded in a staggeringly arid debate over the relative merits of "classicism" and "romanticism". If the names were changed, one would have no difficulty believing that the two editors' statements on this weighty question (under headings like "More About Romanticism" and "Towards a Synthesis") had issued from a pair of clever, earnest 15-year-olds. The awfulness of this stuff - and of so much of the editorial commentary that Harding quotes from The Criterion and other periodicals - ought to be a lesson to present-day editors of little magazines: your own opinions are probably not as sharp or as print-worthy as you think they are.
The Criterion was at its best in its commitment to new writing. It was more internationally minded than its English rivals; during its early years it exchanged copy with the Nouvelle Revue française, and throughout its run it published work in translation from several European languages.
I would have liked more on its relationships with other international journals of the time, such as The Dial, but Harding's concentration on "periodical networks" in London - a subject that turns out to be less interesting than he can have imagined - does not allow much space for this.
Harding's treatment of the politics of The Criterion is judicious, bordering on dry. He acknowledges the callous brutality of Montgomery Belgion's notorious 1936 dismissal of a prescient report on the persecution of Jews in Germany, but argues that the magazine was not programmatically anti-Semitic, and provides some supporting evidence.
Though personally hostile to socialism, communism, anarchism, pacifism, Freudianism, surrealism and most of the other "isms" that were in the air during the 1920s and 1930s, Eliot gave space to proponents of all of them, alongside the right-wing thinkers who were closer to his own heart.
"It is a trait of the present time," Eliot wrote in 1927, "that every 'literary' review worth its salt has a political interest: indeed that only in the literary reviews which are not the conscientious organs of superannuated political creeds, are there any living political ideas."
There is still some truth in this, and though the cultural and political influence of little magazines is surely much diminished, there is less cause for nostalgia than we might imagine. Reading an old copy of The Bell or a Partisan Review anthology can be a strangely dispiriting experience.
Even so, the idea of perpetual decline retains its force in literary journalism, and an editor's commitment to the new is almost always, in fact, a commitment to a vague but powerful notion of the old. Unlike most editors, Eliot understood this very well.
The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Inter-War Britain. By Jason Harding. Oxford University Press, 264pp. £35
Brendan Barrington is the editor of the Dublin Review