Small is only sometimes beautiful
Supposing I were remotely discontented with being a 52-year-old Englishman living in London at the end of the 20th century, then I should certainly have been happy to find myself in a similar situation at its beginning. Very well, distance lends an inevitable enchantment to the view, and the tinkle of barrel organs and the rattle of hansom cabs may strike too ingratiatingly on the mind's ear, but was there ever a richer, more invigorating age in which to enjoy a decent existence as a writer than the period stretching roughly from the death of Queen Victoria to the outbreak of the Great War? In those halcyon years of Conrad, Bennett and Wells, with Lawrence getting into his stride and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield each finding an appropriate voice, the culture of the word reigned supreme and the seduction of alternative entertainment forms such as the gramophone and moving pictures was still a cloud no bigger than a man's hand. Book reviewers, taken more seriously than they have ever been since, got elbow-room in their column inches and there were plenty of enterprising publishers free from the menace of takeover by wolfish American and German conglomerates. This was also the grand climacteric of the little magazine, dozens of them indeed, catering to everyone from easily bored administrators in remote colonial outposts to aristocratic adulteresses with literary inclinations who got asked down to Taplow for a Saturday-to-Monday with darling Ettie Desborough. Where these publica- tions have all gone in the interim, and the causes of their demise, belong in another article than this one, but their doom in many cases was sealed after 1945 by an unholy alliance between international paper shortage, commercial greed on the part of distributors and the gradual decline of the type of the small, independently owned bookshop where they were unlikely to appear out of place. Imagine coming across a rack full of them amid the neutralising, aseptic gloom of a Waterstone's or a Books Etc! These matters are ordered better across the Atlantic. Topping a batch of little maga- zines currently on my desk is a copy of the Paris Review, an almost self-parodic exemplar of the genre and a magnificent demonstration of that unembarrassed high seriousness which is both the glory and the nightmare of American literary culture. Between advertisements for poetry read- ings at the 92nd Street Y, for the Frederick Exley Fiction Competition Open to every- one except employees of Conde Nast and their families') and for another magazine called Literal Latte, lie 200 pages without so much as a hint of compromise with that amorphous life form, the General Reader. The Paris Review (published in New York) has always set its sights high, giving its writ- ers enough space in which to prove their mettle, as opposed to being a glamour index with exiguous literary samples attached. Interviews focus on the subject rather than the interrogator, the short fic- tion and offcuts from work in progress are substantial as much as appetising, and there are more good poems than you could shake a stick at, everything from a Browningesque monologue by a retiring footballer to a cheeky sonnet sequence about clearing blocked drains.
A long list of benefactors at the back of the magazine reminds us of how willingly Americans pay for the privilege of serious writing. The British poetry quarterly, Agen- da, whatever its venerable status among poets themselves, survives more modestly as a charitable trust assisted by the Arts Council, and its single-mindedness, by the same token, seems the more heroic. In the introduction to a recent number antholo- gising modern Greek poets, the guest editor, David Connolly, notes plaintively that though writing poems is a visceral pas- sion among the Hellenes, verse is losing out to fiction 'largely due to the marketing policies of Greek commercial publishers'.
Such laments are universal these days, and there is a distinct sense of Agenda as a cultural frontier station, cherishing polite learning even while the scent of barbarian cooking fires drifts in across the ramparts. This is what little magazines ought to be doing, as opposed to grandstanding for celebrities and coming on as a hybrid of a weekend supplement and some upmarket men's lifestyle glossy magazine, exercises on which Granta has wasted too much of its collective energies. Until recently I was a pronounced Granta heretic. I loathed it under Bill Buford's editorship when issue after issue looked like a New York A-list book-launch, illustrated with grainy pages of standard-issue stateside photorealism full of clapped-out diners, sagging tele- phone cables and battered Chevvys. Culti- vating chic but playing safe, it was our fin- de-siècle equivalent of those watered silk annuals, The Keepsake or The Book of Beauty, which graced the boudoirs of 1830s Belgravia.
Granta's ambiguous status as a little magazine which is also a commercial prod- uct whose print runs require shifting like any mainstream paperback in high street retail outlets is less of a misfortune than the fact that it lacks any obvious British rivals. Ian Jack and Liz Jobey, the present editors, however, show signs of being dis- cerning and independent. In its latest incar- nation, now wilder and less predictable than before, the paper has turned several degrees towards becoming what it should have been all along, a showcase for writers we don't know as much as a gallery full of those we do.
One literary periodical which has guard- ed its integrity over the years, contriving to appear smart precisely because it has never strained after being fashionable, is the London Magazine. What most of us want from publications like this, having laid out our £5.99, is to carry home a micro- cosm, to be let inside a world whose per- spectives are deeper and more varied than we could possibly imagine from a modest compass of 120 pages. The London Maga- zine has always accomplished this multum in parvo act without fuss or parade. Along- side the poetry, the short stories, book reviews and art criticism lie memoirs, batches of letters, essays in polemic or reappraisal, creating a context, both his- toric and actual, for the new writing this magazine has always championed.
Anybody writing for the London Maga- zine is thus flattered, whether on purpose or accidentally, through being thrown into a sharper relief by its busy, allusive, cos- mopolitan literary backdrop. The paper has its distinctive flavour, easier to define through what we wouldn't expect to find here — Dirty Realism, brow-furrowing analysis of post-Berlin-Wall Eastern Europe or Chatwinesque look-at-me travel pieces — than through what we would. Under Alan Ross's editorship it has never knowingly published rubbish, a significant mark of distinction for what is in some sense the last avatar of the little magazine.
Jonathan Keates
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