Index of Modernist Magazines

The Klaxon

Facts

Title:
The Klaxon

Date of Publication:
1923/1924

Place(s) of Publication:
Dublin, Ireland

Frequency of Publication:
Once

Circulation:
Unknown

Publisher:
Unknown

Physical Description:
27 pages. A frontispiece of “Negro Sculpture in Wood.” A “well-printed, nicely designed little magazine, with a decorative Vorticist-like cover, professional looking yet decidedly avant-garde” (O’Malley 4).

Price:
One shilling

Editor(s):
L.K. Emery (pseudonym of A.J. Leventhal)

Associate Editor(s):
None

Libraries with Original Issues:
Unknown

Reprint Editions:
Unknown

Description

Described by Tim Armstrong as the “Irish Blast,” The Klaxon took off in Dublin, Ireland, with an ambitious purpose (1). Self-described as “an Irish International Quarterly, published in Dublin, concerned with the activities of all Nations in matters of Art, Music, and Literature,” The Klaxon lasted only one issue before collapsing. William T. O’Malley points out that, although the solitary issue is dated Winter 1923/1924, it was reviewed in the Irish Statesman on Jan. 17, 1924, and was likely published in the first week of 1924. The Klaxon was the first little magazine to be published in the Irish Free State.

The magazine was edited by Lawrence K. Emery, a pseudonym for esteemed Dublin intellectual A.J. Leventhal (O’Brien). It featured poetry (prose and verse), a manifesto of sorts (titled “Confessional” in a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment of Ireland’s religious heritage), a translation of Brian Merriman’s 19th century Gaelic poem “The Midnight Court,” and two critical defenses of modernist artistry in Ireland at the time.

The magazine took as its leading symbol the boisterous and riotous klaxon, and proclaimed that “with all the arrogance of youth, we step forward naked and unashamed as though for us the fig tree never grew” (Klaxon 1). Emery and his collaborators sought to “wake” Ireland up from what they saw as a moral slumber that rendered them irrelevant, and they proposed to do so by asserting their “lustiheaded youth” (“Beauty Energised”). The magazine ultimately failed to continue for financial reasons, and its contributors and editor sought other means of bringing Ireland to an artistic enlightenment. A.J. Leventhal (Emery) continued to publish in fellow Irish magainze Tomorrow and went on to replace Samuel Beckett at Trinity following the completion of his doctoral thesis (O’Brien 20).

Manifesto

The Klaxon’s manifesto was published in two parts, one by the editor, Lawrence K. Emery, titled “Confessional” (1),  and the other by F.R. Higgins, titled “Beauty Energized” (2).

“Confessional” is self-referential, establishes a collective audience, and ventures a tentative index of beliefs, Emery’s “seven articles of faith”:

“We are the offspring of a gin and vermouth in a local public-house. We swore that we were young and could assert our youth with all its follies. We railed against the psycopedantic parlours of our elders and their old maidenly consorts, hoping the while with an excess of Picabia and banter, a whiff of Dadaist Europe to kick Ireland into artistic wakefulness.”

“We Produced our seven articles of faith: announcing primarily our belief in ourselves and a catholic aestheticism that would include the xylophone as well as the spinet. Picasso and Ingress, Shakespeare and Aldous Huxley, Beethoven and the Organ Grinder, Chaplin and Chaliapin were mingled in our incredible credo. We put the psychologist on his knees before the gymnast and punched our fellows into believing in the divine right of artists. We put the four corners of the world round Ireland and clacked our heels together with merriment at the resultant  macédoine de fruits”  (“Confessional” 1).

Emery concludes with a declaration of action: “we fling our speculative bonds on the waters and assert our lustiheaded youth.”

Higgins adds, “We are no more dreamers, but drunkards, standing on the remote spaces of Ireland with our eyes to ends of the earth. Those last years have mellowed our youth: we are tasting life, as athletes desiring the virility of those greeks before the squabbling days of Socrates” (2).

Editors

Lawrence K. Emery (A.J. Leventhal) (1896 – 1979)
Editor: 1923

Lawrence K. Emery was the pseudonym of Irish intellectual, A.J. Leventhal, who was the sole editor of the short-lived Klaxon. Leventhal, born in Dublin in 1896, was educated at Wesley College before being invited to London for his work in the first Zionist Commission. Following his return to Dublin, Leventhal became involved in the propagation of modernism Ireland, contributing to the Dublin Magazine, and ultimately starting The Klaxon with the intent of publishing his review of Joyce’s Ulysses. After the dissolution of the magazine, Leventhal completed a doctoral thesis and occupied the lectureship position of French Literature at Trinity College only recently vacated by Samuel Beckett. He continued to contribute to Irish newspapers and magazines as well as publish pieces of criticism on the works of Beckett and Joyce among others (O’Brien).

Contributors

L .K.E.
“Confessional”

F.R.H.
“Beauty Energised”

Percy Ussher
“The Midnight Court (from the Irish)”

H. Stuart
“North”

John W. Blaine
“Cheese”

Sechilienne
“The Will of God”

Lawrence K. Emery
“The Ulysses of Mr. James Joyce”

F. R. Higgins
“Cleopatra”

 G. Coulter 
“An Inghean Dubh”

Thomas McGreevy
Criticism

Bibliography

Armstrong, Tim. “Muting the Klaxon: Poetry, History, and Irish Modernism.” Modernism and Ireland: Poetry of the 1930s. ed. Patricia Coughlan. Cork: Cork University Press, 1995. pp. 43-74.

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

O’Brien, Eoin. “The Writings of A.J. Leaventhal: A Bibliography.” Dublin: The Con Leventhal Scholarship Committee.

O’Malley, William T. “Modernism’s Irish Klaxon.” Technical Services Department Faculty Publications. (2003).  Paper 19. Web. 9 Jun 2016.

“The Klaxon” compiled by Riley Ambrose (Class of ’13 Davidson College)

The Exile

Facts

Title: 
The Exile

Date of Publication: 
Spring 1927 – Autumn 1928

Place(s) of Publication: 
Dijon, France (Spring 1927)
Chicago (Autumn 1927, Spring 1928, Autumn 1928)

Frequency of Publication: 
Semiannual

Circulation: 
The initial print run of the first issue was 500 copies.

Publisher: 
Maurice Darantière, Dijon, France (Spring 1927)
Pascal Covici, Inc., Chicago (Autumn 1927, Spring 1928)
Covici Friede, New York (Autumn 1928)

Physical Description: 
19 cm. Red-orange cover with black text; no cover illustration. 110-120 pages of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.

Price: 
50 cents per issue

Editor(s): 
Ezra Pound

Associate Editor(s):
Unknown

Libraries with Original Issues: 
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Kent State University; Yale University; Columbia University; Michigan State University; Adelphi University; Hamilton College; University of Massachusetts, Amherst; University of Rhode Island; University of Nebraska, Lincoln; University of Texas; University of California, Santa Cruz; Stanford University; University of Delaware; University of Florida

Reprint Editions: 
New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1967

Description

Ezra Pound has long been considered a major player in the world of little magazines. From 1905 on he was published frequently and widely across little magazines and edited several, including Poetry, The Egoist, Blast, and The Little Review. He became well known for his domineering editorial style and his unwillingness to compromise with coeditors and contributors.

Pound’s motivation to start a little magazine came with the death of American poet and editor Ernest Walsh in October 1926. Walsh’s magazine, This Quarter, had provided a venue for publication for American expatriates writing in Europe; the community feared that Walsh’s death, and that of his magazine, would leave a void. Pound began to develop The Exile that same year, writing to his father that he was “having foolish ideas about starting a magazine” (Monk 430).

The Exile provided a place for Americans in Europe to publish their work: in its four issues, the magazine published both poetry and fiction by writers of varying degrees of recognition, including Ernest Hemingway, W.B. Yeats, and William Carlos Williams. The Exile is also known for its endorsement of the emerging Objectivist movement and the poets Louis Zukofski and Carl Rakosi.

The Exile is, however, first and foremost an organ for Pound’s personal and aesthetic philosophies. He wonders in the first issue “whether there is any mental activity” in the “colossal monkey house” that is America, and he calls Fascism and the Russian revolution “interesting phenomena,” reprinting news of the “Bolshevik atrocities” from the Chicago Tribune (88-92). Pound does, however, state his primary desire to “produc[e] something that will be enjoyable even after a successful revolution” and argues that art and artists exist above and beyond politics (90). The Exile is also notable for its complete exclusion of female contributors; Pound even instructed his American partner John Price not to “waste postage” sending him works by women, writing that “the whole of american publicationdom [sic] is submerged with females. Until a female invents something let us conduct this magazine by male effort” (Pound, qtd. in Monk 437).

Though The Exile was short-lived, it did, as Craig Monk aptly states, “illustrat[e] the ingenuity that coloured the creativity of modernism and the exclusivity that anticipated its limitations” (444).

Manifesto

In The Exile’s inaugural issue, Ezra Pound introduces his creation: “In 1917 [the year Pound became London editor of the Little Review], I presented a certain program of authors; in starting this new review I intend to present, or at least to examine the possibility of presenting an equally interesting line-up. If the job bores me I shall stop at the end of Vol. 1″ (88).

Pound’s initial ambivalence is somewhat disingenuous, and he goes on to explain his larger goals for Exile:

“At present, in that distressed country [America], it would seem that neither side ever answers the other: such ignoring, leading, in both cases, to ignorance. I should like to open a small forum in which the virtues or faults of either side might be mentioned without excessive animus.

Both Fascio and the Russian revolution are interesting phenomena; beyond which there is historic perspective. Herrin and Passaic are also phenomena, and indictments” (89).

Despite professing a surface interest in politics and current events, he clarifies that his true cause is art and the artist:

“As to our ‘joining revolutions’ etc. It is unlikely. The artist is concerned with producing something that will be enjoyable even after a successful revolution. So far as we know even the most violent bolchevik [sic] has never abolished electric light globes merely because they were invented under another regime. [. . .] The artist, the maker, is always too far ahead of any revolution, or reaction, or counter-revolution or counter-re-action for his vote to have any immediate result; and no party program ever contains enough of his program to give him the least satisfaction. The party that follows him wins; and the speed with which they set about it, is the measure of their practical capacity and intelligence. Blessed are they who pick the right artists and makers” (90-1).

“The Exile.” The Exile 1:1 (Spring 1927): 88-92.

Editors

Ezra Pound (Oct. 30, 1885 – Nov. 1, 1972)
Editor

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho in 1885 and grew up in Pennsylvania (Moody 4). He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and began an affair with Hilda Doolittle, better known as the poet H.D. He transferred to, and eventually graduated from, Hamilton College in New York in 1905, and he returned to the University of Pennsylvania to complete his master’s in 1906 (14-18). In 1908 Pound moved to Europe and settled in London, where he found a home in the literary expat community, and began to publish his own poetry (68). In 1912 Pound and H.D. collaborated to launch the Imagist movement, which grew to include Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, and others. Pound’s interest in Imagism gave way to Vorticism, which he promoted alongside his friend and Blast editor Wyndham Lewis (218). Pound continued to write his own poetry and develop a discerning aesthetic philosophy, publishing in and editing several little magazines in Europe, including Blast, Poetry, and the Little Review (226; 235; 280). In 1915 Pound began his Cantos, a work that would consume the rest of his writing career. He was devoted to discovering and publishing new poets and writers, including T.S. Eliot and James Joyce (307; Wilmer n.p.). In 1924 Pound moved to Rapallo, Italy, where he was inspired to create The Exile. He lived in Italy until 1945, when he was arrested for his Fascist sympathies and his opposition to the war. Pound was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital to avoid a prison sentence, and he continued to write during his incarceration. Pound moved back to Italy after his release, where he died in 1972 (Wilmer n.p.).

Contributors

Richard Aldington 
“Natal Verses for the Birth of a New Review”

Morley Callaghan
“Ancient Lineage”

John Cournos
“Poems”

Ralph Cheever Dunning
“Poems From the Four Winds”
“Threnody in Sapphics”

Clifford Gessler
“Waikiki”

Joe Gould
“Art”

Ernest Hemingway
“Neo-thomist Poem”

Guy Hickock
“Or those synthetic states”

Payson Loomis
“Don’t Wake Me Up Yet”

Robert McAlmon
“Truer Than Most Accounts”
“Gertrude Stein”

Benjamin Peret
“Les Cheveux dans les  Yeux”

Ezra Pound
“Canto XXIII”
“Desideria”

Carl Rakosi
“Characters”
“Wanted”

John Rodker
“Adolphe 1920”

G.S. Seymour
“My Five Husbands”

Herman Spector
“Cloaks and Suits”

Howard Weeks
“Stunt Piece”

William Carlos Williams
“The Descent of Winter”

W.B. Yeats
“Sailing to Byzantium”
“Blood and the Moon”

Louis Zukofsky
“Poem Beginnning ‘The’”
“Mr. Cummings and the Delectable Mountains”

Bibliography

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

MacDonald, John W. “The Exile 3 Edited by Ezra Pound.” John W. MacDonald’s Weblog, 8 March 2005.

Monk, Craig. “The Price of Publishing Modernism: Ezra Pound and the Exile in America.” Canadian Review of American Studies 31.1 (2001): 429-446.

Moody, Anthony David. Ezra Pound: Poet: A Portrait of the Man and His Work, Volume I, The Young Genius 1885–1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Page, Douglass D. The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907-1941. London: Faber and Faber, 1982.

Wilhelm, James J. Ezra Pound: The Tragic Years, 1925-1972. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994.

Wilmer, Clive. “Pound’s Life and Career,” The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Rpt. in Modern American Poetry. ed. Cary Nelson and Bartholomew Brinkman. University of Illinois, 2000. n.p.

“The Exile” compiled by Abby Perkins (Class of ’13, Davidson College) 

Close Up

Facts

Title: 
Close Up: Devoted to the Art of Films

Date of Publication: 
July 1927 (1:1) – Dec. 1933 (10:4)

Place(s) of Publication: 
Territet, Switzerland: Jan. 1927 – Dec. 1930
London, England: Sep. 1928 – Dec. 1933 (3:3 – 10:4)

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly: July 1927 – Dec. 1930
Quarterly: Jan. 1931 – Dec. 1933

Circulation: 
500 copies in each printing

Publisher: 
POOL, Switzerland & London

Physical Description: 
5 1/2″ x 7 3/4″, 30 – 100 pages. Bound in pumpkin-colored cover and wrapped in three-inch white paper strip with the motto of each month’s issue.

Price:
1 shilling / 5 francs / 1 mark / 25 cents

Editor(s): 
Kenneth Macpherson

Associate Editor(s): 
Annie Winifred Ellerman, under the pseudonym Bryher
Henry Joseph Hasslacher, under the pseudonym Oswell Blakeston
H. D., did not appear on the masthead

Libraries with Original Issues: 
Northwestern University; University of California, Los Angeles; Columbia University

Reprint Editions: 
New York: Arno Press, 1971.
Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus Reprint.
London: World Microfilms Publications. (Little magazines series, 1889-1972) [Microfilm].
PDFs available at Archive.org and The Modernist Magazines Project

Description

Between 1927 and 1933, Close Up offered an analytical and literary examination of film and the future of the medium. It advocated film as an artistic medium and developed a forum for the discussion of film technique, theory, criticism and technology. Kenneth Macpherson served as editor while Winifred Ellerman, the heiress of a large shipping fortune, financially backed the magazine and served as its assistant editor under the pseudonym “Bryher.”

Macpherson and Bryher hoped that rigorous analysis of film would help the medium achieve recognition as an artistic form. They employed correspondents in many international cities to try to globalize their pursuit. The magazine boasted a wide audience with readers and contributors in America, England, France, Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Switzerland, and was published in English, German, and French. This international focus gave Sergei Eisenstein and other Soviet and Eastern film theorists a voice in the West, and helped promote children’s film and African American film. Closer to home, Bryher and Macpherson established POOL Film Projects with the aspiration of raising the standards of British film, and produced three films: Wing Beat, Foothills, and Monkey’s Moon.

Manifesto

After a lengthy analysis of film’s development from “trash” to “art,” Kenneth Macpherson outlines his hopes for Close Up:

“I want to arrange that people making films, and experimenting in all sorts of ways shall be able to see what others are doing in the same way. Which means public showing, in Paris and London, one hopes….something must be done to give films their due…The first two numbers of Close Up will deal with the film problem as a whole. After that we propose in each issue to deal with special conditions in Europe and the States with numbers on the Negro attitude and problem and on the Far East in their relation to the cinema.”

“As Is” Close Up 1:1 (July 1927). Reprinted (Donald 36-40).

Editors

Kenneth Macpherson (1903? – June 14, 1971)
Editor: July 1927 – Dec. 1933

Although Scotsman Kenneth Macpherson displayed an early interest in art, photography, and writing, he eventually developed a deep attachment to filmmaking. In 1927, he helped establish Close Up and began to produce films that experimented with new techniques. Of Macpherson’s three short films – Wing Beat (1927), Foothills (1928), and Monkey’s Moon (1929) – only fragments of Wing Beat survive. His only feature-length film, Borderline (1930), took on the difficult subjects of race and gender relations. Produced in the experimental and thick style which Macpherson advocated, the film was not received well by critics. After this negative response, Macpherson withdrew to his initial interests in art and writing. Macpherson moved to New York and then to Italy where he died in 1971.

Bryher (Sept. 2, 1894 – Jan. 28, 1983)
Assistant Editor: July 1927 – Dec. 1933

Bryher was born in 1894 in Margate, Kent, England as Annie Winifred Ellerman. Second in wealth only to the royal family, the Ellerman family provided well for their daughter, who adopted the penname Bryher in 1920, after her favorite Silesian Isle. Bryher’s family stipulated that for her to inherit her share of the family fortune she must be married, so she held marriages to Robert McAlmon (1921 – 1927) and then to Kenneth Macpherson (1927 – 1947), despite her homosexuality and close companionship with H. D. With her family money, Bryher supported Close Up financially and she contributed to the magazine substantially as an editor and writer.

H. D. (Sept. 10, 1886 – Sept. 27, 1961)
Assistant Editor (not listed on masthead): July 1927 – Dec. 1933

H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) was born in Pennsylvania in 1886. At Bryn Mawr College she became friends with Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, who introduced her to European literary circles. Although she married Richard Aldington, she also had intense personal relationships with D. H. Lawrence and Bryher for most of her life, who both influenced her work. Her imagist poems appeared for the first time in Poetry in 1913, and she was a frequent contributor to The Transatlantic Review, The Egoist, and The English Review. Although she is most well-known for her poetry, H. D. was also interested in film, and appeared in two POOL Productions films, Foothills (1927) and Borderline (1930). She also acted as an assistant editor to Close Up and was one of the magazine’s main contributors.

Oswell Blakeston (1907 – 1985)
Assistant Editor: Jan. 1931 – Dec. 1933

Oswell Blakeston was the pseudonym of British writer, artist, and film-maker Henry Joseph Hasslacher. After an apprenticeship as a camera boy with Gaumont Studios, he secured an editorial position with Close Up. The little magazine launched his long career in the arts. In his lifetime, he published mystery novels, volumes of poetry, cookbooks, travel books, books on cinematography, photography guides, and contributed reviews and artwork to magazines.

Contributors

Oswell Blakestone
“British Solecisms”
“Freud on the Films”

Rene Crevel
“Les Hommes aux milles Visages”

Nancy Cunard
“Scottsboro”

Sergei Eisenstein
“Statement on Sound”

Barbara Low
“Mind Growth or Mind Mechanization”

Marianne Moore
“Fiction or Nature”
“Lot in Sodom”

Dorothy Richardson
“Continuous Performance”

Hanns Sachs
“Modern Witch-Trials”

Upton Sinclair
“Thunder Over Mexico”

Gertrude Stein
“Three Sitting Here”
“Mrs. Emerson”

Bibliography

Donald, James. Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus. Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998.

Friedberg, Anne. Writing about Cinema: Close Up 1927-1933. Anne Arbor, MI: DAI, June 1984. 3522A-3523A.

Hernandez, H. “A Brief Biography of H. D.” The H. D. Home Page. 17 May 2009. 9 July 2009.

Macpherson, Kenneth, ed.. Close Up: Devoted to the Art of Films. London: POOL, 1933.

“Macpherson, Kenneth.” Screenonline. 27 Oct. 2004.

Marek, Jayne. “Bryher and Close Up.” H. D. Newsletter 3:2, (1990) pp 27-37.

“Oswell Blakeston: An Inventory of his Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center.” The University of Texas at Austin. 9 July 2009.

“Camera Work” compiled by Sabrina Rissing (Class of ’06, Davidson College)

Broom

Facts

Title: 
Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts

Date of Publication: 
Nov. 1921 (1:1) – Jan. 1924 (6:1). Nothing published Mar. 1922 and Apr.- Jul. 1923

Place(s) of Publication: 
Rome, Italy: Nov. 1921 – Sept. 1922 (1:1 – 3:2)
Berlin, Germany: Oct. 1922 – Mar. 1923 (3:3 – 4:4)
New York, New York: Aug. 1923 – Jan. 1924 (5:1 – 6:1)

Frequency of Publication: 
Monthly

Circulation: 
Approx. 4000 by 1923

Publisher: 
The Broom Publishing Company, Inc.

Physical Description: 
33 cm in length. Contained book reviews, illustrations, criticism, short stories, plays, poems, reviews of cinema and theater. Frequent reproductions of paintings, sculptures, and woodcuts. Advertisements began appearing in April 1922 (2:1). Issues typically ran approx. 100 pages in length.

Price:
50 cents per issue / $5 per year

Editor(s): 
Harold A. Loeb (Nov. 1921 – Jan. 1924)
Alfred Kreymborg (Nov. 1921 – Feb. 1922)
Lola Ridge (American editor)

Associate Editor(s):
Slater Brown
Matthew Josephson
Malcolm Cowley

Libraries with Complete Original Issues:
Harvard University, Houghton Library; Ohio State University

Reprint Editions: 
New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1967
Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI, 2004 (Little Magazines. American, 1920 – 1929) [microform]
PDF of Aug. 1922 issue (3:1) available online at GoogleBooks

Description

In 1920 novelist Harold Loeb convinced Alfred Kreymborg to join him in editing a magazine that would publish any European or American writer they deemed worth reading. With Loeb’s financial backing Broom became a reality in November 1921. The magazine was “heavy of weight, rich in color, fine in binding and printing…nothing quite like its aristocratic format had ever been seen in America” (Hoffman 103). Yet after one year of publication Kreymborg left, as he felt the magazine was too conservative and didn’t feature enough American experimental writers. Loeb moved the magazine from Rome to Berlin, where he produced only four more issues before his money ran out. Matthew Josephson took over the funding of the magazine in New York, but he published only five more issues, the last of which never circulated.

During its time in Europe, Broom had an international tone and “introduced unknown or little known European writers and painters to America” (Hoffman 105). The loose editorial policy, wishing only to publish the best living artist and writers, made for a wide cross-section of contributors, from the up-and-coming to the well-established. The magazine reproduced the art of Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Joseph Stella, Juan Gris, Man Ray, Jacques Lipschitz, Rockwell Kent; it also showcased literary contributions from William Carlos Williams, E. E. Cummings, Jean Toomer, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Frank, Amy Lowell, John Dos Passos, Kay Boyle, and many more. Broom is not known for being a pioneering little magazine, but its “importance lies in the fact that it was in the vanguard of an intellectual movement, in the fact that it helped win the fight against the sentimentalities of the genteel tradition” (Hoffman 107).

Manifesto

Broom‘s first and only manifesto appeared in the magazine’s opening issue. Below is an excerpt:

“Broom is selecting from the continental literature of the present time the writings of exceptional quality most adaptable for translation into English.
These will appear side by side with the contemporaneous effort in Great Britain and America.
The painters and sculptors will be represented by the best available reproductions of their work.
Throughout, the unknown, path-breaking artist will have, when his material merits it, at least an equal chance with the artist of acknowledged reputation.
In brief, Broom is a sort of clearing house where the artists of the present time will be brought into closer contact.
The permanence of this project is assured absolutely if supported by the subscriptions of those sympathetic to it.”

Broom. 1:1 (Nov. 1921): inside back cover.

Editors

Harold Albert Loeb (Oct. 18, 1891 – Jan. 20, 1974)
Editor: Nov. 1921 – Jan. 1924

Born into a wealthy family with investment bankers on his father’s side and Guggenheims on his mother’s side, Harold Albert Loeb seemed an unlikely candidate to have become a little magazine editor and writer. Indeed, it wouldn’t be until 1917, after exhausting cattle farming, concrete pouring, and a New York City desk job, that Loeb looked to writing as a more interesting occupation. When he began working for the Sunwise bookstore in Greenwich Village, he became acquainted with a number of writers and artists. Among them was Gilbert Cannon, who took Loeb abroad to Paris. Once there, Loeb joined Alfred Kreymborg in establishing Broom. After editing the Little Magazine for four years, Loeb devoted his time to his own writing. He wrote several novels, including Doodab (1925) and The Professors Like Vodka (1927), and a memoir, The Way It Was.

Alfred Kreymborg (Dec. 10 1883 – Aug. 14 1966)
Co-Editor: Nov. 1921 – Feb. 1922

Alfred Kreymborg grew up in a working class family in New York City and became interested in modern art, photography, and writing while living in Greenwich Village. He founded The Glebe in 1913, which was “one of the first periodicals to sponsor experimental writing” (Hoffman 46). With a donation of $276 from Walter Conrad Arensberg, Kreymborg went on to found Others, a magazine dedicated to experimental poetry. Editor of Broom and American Caravan and contributor to Little Magazines well into the 1950s, Kreymborg achieved popular acclaim touring America with his puppet plays (1920-1) and a radio play he produced (1938). When he died in 1966, he had published forty books and served as president of the Poetry Society of America and as judge for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Lola Ridge (Dec. 12 1873 – May 19, 1941)
American Editor: Feb. 1922 – Jan. 1924

Lola Ridge’s personality and her sympathy for the proletariat gave her considerable fame as a writer and a revolutionist in the 1920s. The Irish native attended Trinity College in New South Whales, Australia, before moving to San Francisco in 1907 to pursue writing and exercise her radical political viewpoints. Even when she gained literary fame for a sequence of poems titled “The Ghetto” published in New Republic, she and her husband lived a life of poverty as an exhibition of her devotion to the working poor. She served as associate editor to Alfred Kreymborg’s Others until it ceased publication in 1919, and then rejoined the writer in 1922 when she began to serve as American editor to Broom. In this position she ran a Broom salon, where she broke her vow of poverty to mingle with American writers. Ridge left Broom when she felt it was becoming overly avant-garde and modernist, and spent the rest of her career publishing increasingly conservative and politically-minded pieces.

Matthew Josephson (Feb. 5, 1899 – Mar. 13, 1978)
Associate Editor: 1922 – Jan. 1924

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1899, Matthew Josephson graduated Columbia University in 1920 and became a highly experimental poet, enjoying the company and influence of poets Kenneth Burke, Hart Crane, and Malcolm Cowley. When he moved to Paris in 1921 he became entranced by the Dadaists, whose interests in American modernism and industrialism helped Josephson embrace his culture. In 1922 he joined with Gorham Munson to publish Secession, a magazine he hoped would enlighten the world as to the aesthetic importance of the machine age. When Kreymborg offered him an editorial position with Broom in 1922, Josephson seized the opportunity and monopolized on the magazine’s large circulation to dispel his artistic beliefs. Although widely embraced in Europe, his Futurist and Dadaist literature and his collection of poems, Galimathias, failed to impress an American audience when Broom moved to Manhattan. When Broom collapsed in 1924, Josephson took a position on Wall Street for two years which transformed him into a new writer by 1926, and he denounced his former Dadaist ways. He turned to nonfiction, and produced a best-selling biography of Émile Zola, Zola, His Time: The History of His Martial Career in Letters (1928). From 1928-29, he worked as American editor for transition, and blasted William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pounds for being expatriates who refused to embrace their culture. At his death, Josephson was a renown biographer, particularly interested in American capitalism and French literature.

Contributors

Conrad Aiken
“Portrait of a Girl”

Sherwood Anderson
“The Contract”

Kay Boyle
“Morning”

Malcolm Cowley
“Mountain Farm”
“Young Man with Spectacles”

Hart Crane
“The Springs of Guilty Song”

Gordon Craig
“Dedicated to the Enemy”
Tragic Mask

e. e. cummings
“Three United States Poems”
“Sunset”

André Derain
Portrait

John Dos Passos
“Two University Professors”

Feodor Dostoyevsky
“Stavrogin’s Confession”

John Gould Fletcher
“To a Starving Man”

Waldo Frank
“Candy Cigar and Stationary”

Juan Gris
Painting
Drawings
Still Life

Matthew Josephson
“Made in America”
“After and Beyond Dada”

Rockwell Kent
The Young Sailor
Newfoundland Dirge

Harold Loeb
“The Mysticism of Money”

Amy Lowell
“Lilacs”

Henri Matisse
Interior
Still Life

Marianne Moore
“Snakes, Mongooses, Snake-Charmers and the Like”
“Hymen”

Pablo Picasso
Drawing of Igor Strawinsky
Ballerinas

Man Ray
“Seguidilla”

Lola Ridge
“Capital Nights”
“Waste”
“Maple-Sugar Song”
“Hospital Nights”

Carl Sandburg
“Four Steichen Prints”

Gertrude Stein
“If You Had Three Husbands”

Joseph Stella
The Swans
On Painting

Wallace Stevens
“Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion”

Jean Toomer
“Kabnis”
“Seventh Street”

William Carlos Williams
“Fish”
“Hula-Hula”

Yvor Winters
“Drifting Deer”

Virginia Woolf
“In the Orchard”

Bibliography

Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts. 1924. New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1967.

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

“Lola Ridge.” Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit, Gale 2000. Literature Resource Center. Davidson College Lib., Davidson, NC. 26 June 2009 <http://galenet.galegroup.com>.

Sarason, Bertram D. “Harold A(lbert) Loeb.” American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939. Ed. Karen Lane Rood. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 4. Detroit: Gale Research, 1980. Literature Resource Center. Davidson College Lib., Davidson, NC. 23 June 2009.

Shi, David E. “Matthew Josephson.” American Writers in Paris 1920 – 1939. Ed. Karen Lane Rood. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 4. Gale Research, 1980. Literature Resource Center. Davidson College Lib., Davidson, NC. 23 June 2009.

“Broom” compiled by Simone Muller (visiting student), Theodore Emerson (Class of ’06, Davidson College) and Emily Smith (Class of ’06, Davidson College)

ADAM

Facts

Title:
Adam: International Review. 

Date of Publication: 
Founded in 1929 in Bucharest and published in London from September 1941–1995.

Place(s) of Publication:
Bucharest, Romania (1929-1941); London, England (1941-2, 1945-89)

Frequency of Publication: 
Irregular, but announced as monthly between 1941 – 42, and after a wartime interruption, 1945 – 66.  Quarterly from 1966 – 1995.

Circulation:
~1,000

Publisher: 
St. Clements Press, London NW 11; Emperor’s Gate, London SW 7

Physical Description: 
33 cm

Editor(s): 
Miron Grindea

Associate Editor(s):
None

Libraries with Original Issues: 
Bodleian Library; British Museum; Cambridge University Library; King’s College London; National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; Trinity College Library; University of London Library

Reprint Editions: 
None

Description

Adam – acronymic for Arts, Drama, Architecture, and Music – was an international review published in English and French. The original periodical began in Bucharest in 1929. In 1938 the magazine fell into the hands of editor Miron Grindea, who published the first London edition in 1941. The review had many famous contributors, including Pablo Picasso, Tristan Tzara, Jean Cocteau, and E.M. Forster.

Adam published pieces ranging from poetry to manuscripts to letters, such as the unpublished childhood memoir reproductions of Virginia Woolf’s early attempts at writing. The magazine also had issues devoted to individual artists, such as Baudelaire, Dickens, Beethoven, and Chopin. Adam published several contributions in French, including Grindea’s editorial introduction to the Graham Green tribute titled: “A la Recherche de Graham Greene.” The review regularly had about 1000 subscribers, and published its last issue in 1994 – over 50 years after its first English number.

Adam was one of the longest running little magazines: Alvin Sullivan attributes Adam’s longevity to the magazine’s “diversity of material”; Cyril Connolly who claims he knew “of only three magazines which survive unaltered from the ‘thirties: Partisan Review, The Wine and Food Quarterly and Miron Grindea’s indestructible Adam” (qtd. in “Adam” 4). In the 200th issue of Adam, Miron Grindea quoted T. S. Eliot’s commentary on The Criterion from July 1938 in his own defense of the little magazine: “so far as culture depends upon periodicals, it depends upon periodicals which exist as a means of communication between cultivated people, and not as a commercial enterprise: it depends upon periodicals which do not make profit” (qtd. in “Adam” 5).

Manifesto

Adam did not publish a manifesto, perhaps because its editor, Miron Grindea, wanted to let its content speak for itself. The periodical did have a consistent devotion to offering a diversity of works, serving as an outlet for international artistic conversation, and forfeiting commercial popularity for the deliverance of high quality avant-garde art and writing.

Editors

Miron Grindea (Jan. 31, 1909 – Nov. 18, 1995)
Editor: 1941 – 1995

Miron Grindea, the editor of Adam, frequented avant-garde circles in pre-World War II Paris. He moved to Britain in September of 1939, the month that World War II was declared. He was married to the pianist Carola Grindea, and the couple had friendships with prominent artists such as Eugene Ionesco and Jean Cocteau. Thanks to Grindea’s relationships with celebrity artists, Adam was able to publish the works of writers like T.S. Eliot. When he died, he was working on the 500th edition of the magazine.

Contributors

Nicholas Bentley
Cover design (No. 400)

P. Bien
“A Hartley Biography”

T.S. Eliot  
“Reflections on the Unity of European Culture” (No. 158)
“The Amis of Poetic Drama” (No. 200)
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night”
“The Hollow Men”
“A Song for Simeon”

Bernard Kaps
Wrote a drama of Ezra Pound’s despair after his imprisonment in 1945

D. Day Lewis
“The Watching Post”

Charles Moncheur
Published French translations of T.S. Eliot poems, including:

Raymond Mortimer
Issue celebrating Beethoven’s centenary

Jeremy Reed
“The Ides of March”

Ronald Searle
Cover design (No. 200)

Bibliography

“Adam International Review.” British Literary Magazines: The Modern Age, 1914-1984. 1st ed. 1986. Print.
“Adam International Review.” British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’. 1st ed. 2006. Print.
Adam International Review: H.G. Wells issue. Digital image. Galactic Central. N.p., 2012. Web.

Grindea, Miron. Adam International Review. Digital image. Derringer Books. N.p., 2012. Web.

–. Adam, International Review. Digital image. Trussel. N.p., 2010. Web.

–. Adam International Review 200th issue. Digital image. Bibliopolis. N.p., 2012. Web.

Kemsley, Rachel. “Adam International Review.” King’s College London Archives Services – Summary Guide. King’s College London, n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2012.

Schüler, C.J. “Miron Grindea: The Don Quixote of Kensington.” The Independent. 1 Apr 2006. Web. 23 Feb 2016.

“Adam” compiled by Bettina Lem (Davidson College, Class of ’13)