Witty
Francis King
The Little Magazines Ian Hamilton (Weidenfeld and Nicolson £4.95)
The 'little magazine' of yesterday could best be defined as a publication in which magnitude of ambition was in inverse proportion to meagreness of funds and of sales. In England at least, all that has changed; and it can now best be defined as a publication in Which meagreness of ambition and of sales is in inverse proportion to the magnitude of an Arts Council subsidy. Of the three English magazines dealt with by Ian ,Hamilton in this witty book—he also deals with three American ones--The Criterion was tinanced for most of its life by T. S. Eliot's firm Faber and Faber; Horizon by a wealthy Maecenas, Peter Watson; and New Verse by the sale of review-copies that Geoffrey Grigson received in his capacity as literary editor of the right-wing Morning Post. No one, however indignant with the policy of these editors, could fume: 'So that's how they spend our money!' But that, as Mr Hamilton will know only too well, is what the public is no' perpetually grumbling.
My favourite essay concerns The Little Review. The two thorny maidens who edited it, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, fell on authors with the excitement of countrycousins in town for the sales. Curiously, their gushing enthusiasm for a whole range of writers from Galsworthy to the bizarre Else von Freytag-Loringhoven isexpressed in a style not very different from that used by Geoffrey Grigson to hack cLown with his bill-hook every poet of the day with the exception of Auden. In each case the same hypermania seems to be at work; indiscriminate adulation and indiscriminate detraction absolve the writers from any true critical response.
Mr Hamilton is perhaps less than fair to Horizon—in complaining of a dearth of good stories, he seems to ignore some notable contributions from Elizabeth Bowen, J. Maclaren-Ross and Antonia White; and one wishes that he could have found a place for New Writing, which was far more influential than Horiion on the young of the time. But he has an agreeably sardonic eye for literary pretension and absurdity, and he has used it to most amusing effect.
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