UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Let's Start a. Magazine
S own, taking his hat off to people, does he? " asked Peter bitterly. He was in his Disraeli period, and a virulent Royalist. I told him that, after all, a delighted Left- wing Government paid him £100,000 a year for it and., any- way, if bonnetades were the stamp of democracy, there was always Henry Ford : he probably took his hat, off to no one. No Sir. But Peter gloomily assured me that one day the Con- gress of the Federation of Amalgamated American Industries would be paying Henry Ford VI a good deal more than £100,000 to curtsey on the side-walks of Detroit. Still, at the moment capitalists were the thing. We decided to become capitalists. Now for obvious reasons there are very few ways an undergraduate can do this. We went through most of the less expensive enterprises from ice-cream vending to small-time bookmaking, but finally came to rest on pub- lishing. It was reputable; it was pretty safe; and it was easy. Above all it was cheap—at any rate, the way we intended to do it. A very little Little Magazine would cost about £25 to print; sell 1,000 and you covered your outlay. Then there were advertisements. With insertions at £5 the full page a magazine looked a good thing.
There are two details, on starting, which have to be settled right away : what you are going to put in the magazine and what you are going to call it. The first was easy. Verse costs less to print than prose, and anyway story-writers, unlike poets, occasionally expect to be paid for their work. Choosing a title proved more difficult. Peter, still full of Dizzy, wanted to call it Enilymion, but was quickly persuaded that Varsity reviewers—who are commonly cruel, long-faced young men learned in astro-physics—would probably decide that Endy- mion was the Greek word for Cupid, and we might be let in for some sneers about golden and leaden arrows. On the whole, however, the names of university magazines tend to follow a well-defined tradition, and when we finally hit on Tonic we felt we were safely within it. With the defunct but glorious names of Panorama, Imprint, Oasis and Workshop at our backs, we composed a slashing editorial mainly concerned with regretting the fact that we came too late to be a prophyl- actic, but promising to act as a tonic on Cambridge writing. Then we made the discovery that we had probably offended en passant most of the people we hoped to persuade to write for us. Tonic was abandoned, and we adopted the title Delta, determining to go without the luxury of an editorial which would cost us money in any case. We found that an alarming number of established Cambridge poets had either written themselves out or were hoarding their work to publish in their own magazines. This made us very altruistic. Our avowed aim now was to destroy the clique, to become catholic, to print all that superior poetry no one knew about, but which was only waiting for an enlightened editor. We made pilgrimages to men reclusing near Cherry Hinton, to unfashionable men who did not believe in " form." And we were rather surprised to discover some very good poetry indeed. Ultimately we were able to reinforce this collection by harrying the Old Gang and by begging a contribution from a distin- guished elder poet. After a month of frenzied appeats we managed to coax a set of proofs out of the printer. The mistakes ranged from the surrealist to the cloacal. An inversion produced a couplet straight out of David Gascoyne : The loveless quais where hull The blind unblinking hiss, and the line : And recognise no greater prince came out of the Press as : 'And recognise no greater privie.
After this effort we gave up the theory that our compositor had had his training with Debrett, even though one of the contributors did appear with an unclaimed but highly aristo- cratic partitive.
In the month which passed while we waited for the corrected proofs we set about organising our selling system. We deter- mined to exploit a useful tradition and outwit the rapacious bookseller by doing an Oasis. This means cajoling or coercing as many of your acquaintances as possible into selling your magazine on the streets. Oasising is rather less difficult than it sounds, and, since our friends and our friends' friends proved loyal, we found that it was no worse persuading people to sell Delta than it was persuading them to write for it.
But we wanted to have more than one string to our bow; so one day Peter and I disappeared from Cambridge, mysteri- ously telling everyone who was interested that we were going " to fix the London end." Peter finally led me to a kind of Poets' Pub moored in the Thames. We found the entrance swarming with policemen with walkie-talkies and newspaper- men from the Express with fawn mackintoshes and note-books, someone having discovered that the barge was moored to a private car-park. The police and the Fourth Estate were foiled at last by starting up a dinghy service to the floating pub, and we were able to settle down to a pleasant business chat. Frankly, I do not remember the arrangements we made, and for all I know our London Publicity Manager is busily corking copies of Delta into his empties and dropping them overboard for the enjoyment of lightermen and River Police. Nevertheless, on the strength of this episode we were able to assure prospective advertisers that we should be selling in London as well as in Cambridge. It did not cut much ice. Apart from the invaluable Arts Council, who furnished us with a very cultural block, and a few of the booksellers we were robbing of their rightful percentage, no one was particularly interested in us. We eventually went into print with only two advertisements worth a paltry two-pounds-fifteen each. This did not leave us much of a profit margin, and the effect was to intensify our altruism. It is at this point that you begin to tell people who do not know you very well: " Oh, we're quite certain to make a loss, but for Art's sake, you know. . . ." It is also at about this time that you suddenly find it very much easier to market your own verse. All you have to do is to send something off to a poet-editor together with a polite enquiry as to whether he will oblige by contributing to the next issue of your magazine. He invariably will; a second issue is always a more attractive proposition than the first. And equally invariably he prints you. And if you feel like it you can also saunter round Girton like a tired business-man with a bunch of dud film-contracts in his pocket. Selling things in Cambridge streets does not present any great problem. The inhabitants are resigned to never-ending flag- days and the like, and undergraduates will buy anything if you tell them it is the latest thing. All the same, when the selling- day came round we found we had to work rather harder than we liked. I made a speciality of American servicemen, deciding after a few tentative approaches that they had been given some sort of directive by the High Command to be nice to the natives. One young man with his sleeves stiff with inverted chevrons refused a copy of Delta, but gave me six- pence, supposing, no doubt, that it was in a worthy cause. Our first issue must be scattered from Seattle to Boston by now. The copies left over from the day's exertions we worked off at night by door-to-door salesmanship in the women's colleges—incidentally disproving a legend, for we found a very large proportion of these much-sought-after nymphs spending their Saturday evening working hard behind sported oaks.
On the whole, This Birth Was hard and bitter agony for us, though interesting. Yet I would do it again, but set down, this set down, this: in spite of selling out we only made enough money to fling a party for our collaborators. Why, I do not know; I am sure it was a good idea. But I am too tired of adding up figures that refuse to balance to go further into the matter.
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