hannahs

Facts

Title:
Pagany: A Native Quarterly

Date of Publication:
Jan. 1930 – Mar. 1933

Place(s) of Publication:
Boston & New York City

Frequency of Publication:
Quarterly

Circulation:
~1,000 initially printed

Publisher:
Self-published by editor Richard Johns

Physical Description:
Roughly 9″ x 6″. Soft cover with a total run of three volumes. Each volume was comprised of four separate “numbers” with roughly 150 pages per number. The cover varied in color but always included the Pagany title in a black text, the titular symbol designed by Virginia Lee Burton (a tree with fruit, surrounded by a fence), followed by a list of all of the contributors in the same, capitalized type and size to symbolize equal importance. Each page allowed for forty-two lines of text with a long running line of type along the margins. There were no illustrations.

Editor(s):
Richard Johns

Associate Editor(s):
Sherry Mangan

Libraries with Original Issues:
University of Delaware Library; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Repository; Davidson College Library (microform)

Reprint Editions:
Halpert, Stephen and Richard Johns, editors. A Return to Pagany: The History, Correspondence, and Selections from a Little Magazine, 1929-1932, Beacon Press, 1969.

Description

Inspired by William Carlos Williams’ 1928 novel A Voyage to Pagany, writer Richard Johns set off to create a new little magazine. Though Williams’ usage of “pagany” referred to modern-day Europe, Johns instead reapplied the term to reference America, redefining it as: “our agreements and disagreements, our ideas, ideals, whatever we have to articulate is pagany, our expression” (Halpert 10). Williams declined Johns’ request to act as co-editor, and served as an informal mentor through the magazine’s run (Halpert 6). Johns published Pagany: A Native Quarterly‘s first issue in January of 1930, and released a total of three volumes each composed of four numbers. Pagany sought to cultivate “a uniquely ‘American’ literary enterprise by considering the country’s localities as small and appraisable, but interconnected” (Oxford 259). In an era dominated by conventional magazines and their radical opposites, Pagany attempted to find a middle ground in the newly emerging literary landscape (Oxford 259).

Endorsed by Williams and celebrated by its little magazine contemporaries, Pagany’s successful first and second volumes featured writers such as Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Erskine Caldwell, Kenneth Rexroth, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams (Halpert 94). Johns refrained from publishing well-known authors if he felt that their pieces did not contribute to the magazine’s overall thematic intention, even excluding submissions from William Faulkner and D.H. Lawrence (Brooker 263). Pagany consistently explored “American-ness,” providing a platform for individual American voices to enter the larger transatlantic debate around national identity (Brooker 259). Despite its early success, increasing personal debts and a series of personal tragedies (including a house fire and stolen manuscripts) forced Johns to conclude Pagany in 1933 with its third volume (Halpert 479).

Gallery

Manifesto

Announcement by editor Richard Johns:

“A new magazine should announce a reason for existence”: PAGANY, perhaps, more than another, for it will avoid any attempt to seek a standard, it is neither entering into connexion nor competition with any magazine trying to make a point, to formulate a policy. There is much danger in such freedom, in leaving unarticulated one or two precepts of editorial limitation. Yet even a hint of regimen is made impossible by the connotations of the title.

Pagus is a broad term, meaning any sort of collection of peoples from the smallest district or village to the country as an inclusive whole. Taking America as the pagus, anyone of us as the paganus, the inhabitant, and our conceptions, our agreements and disagreements, our ideas, ideals, whatever we have to articulate is pagany, our expression.

This Native Quarterly is representative of a diverse and ungrouped body of spokesmen, bound geographically. Wary of definite alliance with any formulated standard, PAGANY (as an enclosure) includes individual expression of native thought and emotion.

Manifesto by Williams Carlos Williams:

“The ghosts so confidently laid by Francis Bacon and his followers are again walking in the laboratory as well as beside the man in the street,” the scientific age is drawing to a close. Bizarre derivations multiple about us, mystifying and untrue as — an automatic revolver. To what shall the mind turn for that with which to rehabilitate our thought and our lives? To the word, a meaning hardly distinguishable from that of place, in whose great, virtuous and at present little realized potency we hereby manifest our belief.

Announcement and Manifesto are quoted as they appear in Pagany Volume 1, Number 1 (1930).

Editors

Richard Johns (Oct. 29, 1904- Jun. 17, 1970)
Editor: 1930-1933

Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Richard Johns (1904-1970) was the son of a wealthy Boston attorney (Brooker 259). After failing to complete high school, Johns published several of his poems in small literary magazines in New York and Boston (Halpert 7). While in New York, Johns occasionally studied literature at Columbia University, and became acquainted William Carlos Williams’ short-lived but influential magazine Contact, which ran from 1920 to 1921 (Halpert 7). In 1929, at the age of twenty-four, Johns wrote to Williams with an idea for a little magazine called Pagany, a title borrowed from Williams’ 1928 novel A Voyage to Pagany (Brooker 259). Though William’s gave Johns his blessing to use the title, he declined to serve as a co-editor, instead preferring to offer informal advice (Halpert 6).

Armed with a fifteen hundred dollar loan from his father, Johns printed 1,000 copies of Pagany in its first run, and devoted the next three years of his life to the magazine (Halpert 34). Johns operated under an “American only” policy, hoping to celebrate and explore American poetry and literature. In 1931, Johns relocated the magazine to Manhattan, allowing him to expand his literary circles. Johns contributed a number of poems and other literary works to Pagany throughout its run (Halpert 211).

Johns’ father died in 1932, significantly decreasing John’s funds (Halpert 423). Coupled with the Great Depression, Pagany’s run ended after a belated February 1932 publication (Brooker 265). In 1934 Johns married Veronica Parker, collaborating with her on a series of mystery novels before moving to Cuttingsville, Vermont, where he worked as a photographer and horticulturist (Halpert 501). Johns died in October of 1970.

Contributors

Richard Johns
“Solstice”
“The Tempering”
“‘Your Life, Sir!’”
“Recognition”

William Carlos Williams
“The Work of Gertrude Stein”
“Four Bottles of Beer”
“Flowers by the Sea”
“Sea-Trout and Butterfish”
White Mule

Kenneth Rexroth
“Into the Shady Westerness”

Gertrude Stein
“Five Words in a Line”
“Advertisement”

Horace Gregory
“Longface Mahoney Discusses Heaven”

Janet Lewis
“The Still Afternoon”

Eskrine Caldwell
“A Swell-Looking Girl”
“Perhaps Only”
“Inspiration for Greatness”
“The Empty Room”
“Warm River”
“After-Image”
“The First Autumn”

Yvor Winters
“Strength Out of Sweetness”
“Snow-Ghost”
“The Journey”

Mina Loy
“The Widow’s Jazz”
“Lady Laura in Bohemia”

Ezra Pound
“Three Cantos”

e.e. cummings
“Six Poems”

Bibliography

Brooker, Peter and Andrew Thacker, editors. The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II, North America 1894-1960. Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.

Halpert, Stephen and Richard Johns, editors. A Return to Pagany: The History, Correspondence, and Selections from a Little Magazine, 1929-1932. Beacon Press, 1969. Print.

Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich. The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography. Princeton University Press, 1947. Print.

Compiled by Hannah Sommerlad (Class of ’19, Davidson College) and Annie Maisel (Class of ’19, Davidson College)