The Dial, The Little Review and Modernist Canonicity
by Alan Golding
(originally published on Third Factory in 2001; article here, context here)

Thinking that he had lost the chance to publish The Waste Land, which he had not yet actually seen, Scofield Thayer, joint owner and editor of The Dial, wrote to his staff in March 1922 that "if Eliot's long poem was anything like Pound's Cantos, perhaps we are unwillingly blessed" in losing it. Accepting the poem subsequently under pressure from his partner James Sibley Watson and his Paris correspondent Pound did not improve Thayer's opinion of it (Joost, Scofield Thayer 160). In October 1922, the month of The Waste Land's publication, he wrote to his prospective new managing editor Alyse Gregory: "I feel forced to refrain in the future from publishing such matter as the silly cantos of Ezra Pound and as the very disappointing 'Waste Land' and I should like to secure for The Dial the work of such recognized American authors as Edith Wharton" (qtd. in Joost, Scofield Thayer 111). Thayer was about to preside over a turning-point in the institutionalization of Anglo-American modernism, and in the positioning of his own magazine within that institution. Under the circumstances, these hardly sound like words calculated to make The Dial one of the most influential literary reviews ever published in America.

Yet the aesthetic conservatism implied in Thayer's choice of examples--Wharton over Pound and Eliot--was, paradoxically, necessary to The Dial's promotion of aesthetic revolution. Already an established magazine, under Thayer and Watson The Dial put experimental modernist work in a context that made it more palatable to a general audience. Meanwhile, The Little Review (1914-1929), a contemporary of The Dial (1920-1929) and perhaps the quintessential little magazine, provided a first outlet and encouragement for much of that experiment. Through examining the relationship between these two equally important, though very different, magazines we can better understand how together they--and little magazines generally--helped shape one version of an emerging modern American poetry canon. The relationship between The Dial and The Little Review also demonstrates how, in its rapprochement with a mainstream publishing outlet, early twentieth-century American avant-gardism bears a very different relation to its mainstream contemporaries from that of the European movements from which canonical theories of the avant-garde derive. Thus we need to theorize the relationship between the avant-garde and modernism differently for the American scene--to think in terms of avant-garde tendencies, impulses, and moments rather than movements. Mainly, however, I want to propose here a historically based model for considering how the shaping of taste by magazines is a collective project, not a matter of the atomized influence of single publications. Such a model would complicate center-margin oppositions by suggesting how The Dial and The Little Review needed each other to accomplish their cultural work. This is not to deny that some magazines do not have a longer-lasting and deeper impact than others. It is to argue, however, that even those magazines--like individual canonical authors--have their meaning and effect not in isolation but in relation to others.

To understand their simultaneously conflicted and complementary relationship, it will help to review the clear differences between The Dial and The Little Review. Although The Little Review enjoyed a greater longevity (15 years) than most publications of its kind, it had all the characteristics of the classic little magazine; indeed, it came to define, starting with its name, what the very term "little magazine" meant. It was programmatically non-commercial, lived constantly on the edge of bankruptcy, could not pay its contributors, and--relative to The Dial--had a small circulation of never more than two thousand (Hoffman 57) and probably closer to one (Mott 5:171). It was politically engaged, in its explicit and enthusiastic embrace of feminist and anarchist principles. Its tone was vigorously avant-garde, and its audience mostly one already converted and committed to the value of artistic innovation, even while its lively correspondence section courted controversy about the magazine's own contents in a way that The Dial never did. And it quickly came to see its primary audience as other artists, announcing itself (in a new epigraph proposed by Pound in 1917) as the magazine "read by those who write the others." In a characteristically avant-gardist move, then, The Little Review sought to influence the art of the future--to influence production as well as reception.

The Dial, by contrast, took a more cautious or muted tone, generally avoiding political controversy and any appearance of internal debate. Its intended audience was the interested, informed general reader rather than the specialist or initiate of the avant-garde, its goal to extend the audience for modernist art by reaching potentially sympathetic but as yet unconverted readers- -primarily, that is, to influence reception. It paid contributors and, backed by Thayer and Watson's personal wealth, remained financially stable even as it lost money. And in ways important for my argument here, it consciously saw itself engaged in dissemination as much as discovery.

Despite these differences, the magazines started out as complements rather than as rivals. Although The Little Review campaigned more explicitly and energetically, and was more committed to innovation for its own sake, both propagandized in favor of modernist art. The Dial even helped The Little Review financially in various ways. The magazines shared numerous contributors (of the 34 Little Review contributors named in its 1920 Dial ad, 19 had also published in The Dial); they shared Pound's influence at crucial points in their lives as he negotiated between the more mainstream modernism and the aggressive avant-gardism that the two magazines represented; they shared the typical modernist sense of schism between high and popular culture, in a way that separates The Little Review from a European avant-gardism (otherwise well represented in its pages) bent on reconnecting those realms. The Dial praised William Carlos Williams, in giving him its 1926 Award, for "'Service not to that Juggernaut, the Reading Public,'" but "service rather to the Imaginative Individual, to him who is in our world always the Marooned Individual" (qtd. in Joost, Years 272); with these words it sounds surprisingly like The Little Review, which announced itself in the epigraph of its early years as "Making No Compromise With The Public Taste." And finally, perhaps appropriately, they expired in the same year, sharing an obituary in the September 1929 issue of Poetry (although The Little Review had functionally ended with its last-but-one issue of spring/summer 1926).

This combination of similarities, overlaps, and differences led to a relationship both mutually sustaining and conflicted--though the sense of conflict derives more from the embattled Little Review side. Early in the magazines' relationship, The Little Review came to see The Dial as stealing its ideas and contributors. In its first year, for instance, The Little Review had started a "New York Letter," a "London Letter," a theater section, and a section of short book reviews, all of which showed up in only slightly different form in The Dial. The Little Review started to criticize The Dial in its September-October 1920 issue, when the "new" Dial was less than a year old; in its own view, The Little Review published first the kind of work for which The Dial later got all the credit. One Little Review subscriber wrote complaining of The Dial, "Can't they do any pioneering of their own?" Jane Heap responded, and fuelled the fire further, by calling The Dial "a de-alcoholized version of The Little Review," linking The Dial with the repressive temperance politics of Prohibition. Yet this very complaint helps clarify the developing relationship between the two magazines--a relationship between two kinds of publication, the avant-garde little magazine and the more mainstream literary review, both of which played interdependent roles in the development of Anglo-American modernism. The Dial helped to canonize what The Little Review helped to discover, and thus in some sense The Little Review exercised its influence through The Dial.

From the beginning, The Dial apparently saw itself as consciously entering and engaging the processes of canon-making and institutionalization. The "Comment" for August 1920 observes that

the engines for accelerating and predisposing favourable opinion are grown remarkably in our time. The dynamics of reputation are a serious study, the mechanism for creating fame is always in smooth and certain motion. (217)

One historian of the magazine, William Wasserstrom, describes The Dial as "a magazine whose chief function was to provide a center, train an audience, and acquire a public for the arts" (Time 79). It fulfilled this function successfully enough that, in Nicholas Joost's succinct summary, through its efforts "what had seemed shatteringly novel in 1920 was acceptably orthodox in 1929" (Scofield Thayer 23). Acceptable orthodoxy is hardly the deliberate goal of any avant-garde, but it is usually a risk the avant-garde runs and nearly always the fate it suffers. When Pound admonishes Williams to submit more work to The Dial and "crowd out" Amy Lowell (Paige, Letters 159), he is revealing the (American) avant-garde's paradoxical desire to become the art of the future by occupying an institutional center; Pound wants to establish an experimental poetics by mediating it through a mainstream magazine. In turn, the successful canonization through a mainstream journal of the movement that it has promoted severely reduces the raison d'etre of a little magazine like The Little Review; its apologias for the new carry the threat of its own demise.

The Dial exercised its influence by acting as "mediator between the avant-garde and the general reader" (Wasserstrom, Time 134). Michael True echoes this assessment in locating The Dial in a middle ground "between the arts magazine and the general publication" (13). And the magazine itself articulated this position on its own behalf. The first "Comment" section of the "new" Dial, for February 1920, starts by claiming the cultural politics of the little magazine: "a magazine ought to print, with some regularity, either such work as would otherwise have to wait years for publication, or such as would not be acceptable elsewhere." But then an important qualifier is added: these pieces should be combined with less "'impossible'" ones "in the interests of completeness" (408). In the interests of completeness, then, The Dial will both represent and soften the edge of the otherwise egregious avant-gardism reflected in The Little Review's 1922 self-description as "AN ADVANCING POINT TOWARD WHICH THE 'ADVANCE GUARD' IS ALWAYS ADVANCING."

This position is maintained as late as the "Comment" for September 1927. The anonymous author (apparently James Sibley Watson) here distinguishes two types of literary magazine. The first type, of which The Little Review would be an example, is the little magazine edited by its own contributors and existing mainly for the writer's sake, to support new work. The writer of "Comment" says "Magazines of this type are often more immediately encouraging to interesting new writers, not to mention movements, than magazines like THE DIAL." The second type of magazine is one like The Dial that "pretends to general interest" and that must therefore remain more oriented toward the mythical general reader. As The Dial writer rather sarcastically concludes, "many writers will continue to appear first in small 'group magazines'. Our business is to furnish a not too scattered public for what they write well" ("Comment"154). To put this another way, The Little Review brought writers together, made them aware of each other, gave them an outlet, and thus contributed significantly toward making "modernism"-- whatever exactly we might mean by that--a movement. The Dial made its contribution in publicizing that movement by drawing attention to its supposedly best products. From the magazine's point-of-view, then, Marianne Moore--acting and then full editor in the years 1925-29- -seemed the quintessential Dial poet. In citing her for the 1924 Dial Award, Thayer describes her poetry as designed "for 'the informed literary middle-of-the-road' combining 'the rewards of experiment with the comforts of custom'" (qtd. in Hall 59).

T. S. Eliot's career illustrates concretely how the two kinds of magazine that The Little Review and The Dial represented worked almost symbiotically to shape poetic taste. The Little Review played an important role in Eliot's early career by publishing him and keeping him encouraged. The magazine published four of his poems in July 1917, four more in September 1918--more, if less distinguished, work in poetry than The Dial ever published--and promoted the slim volume Prufrock and Other Observations via sixteen separate references to it between 1916 and 1919. Further, these eight Little Review poems made up two-thirds of Eliot's second book, the 1920 Poems. In a letter for the magazine's final issue in 1929, Eliot wrote that in the late 'teens, "The Little Review was the only periodical in America which would accept my work, and indeed the only periodical there in which I cared to appear" (380).

It is Eliot's association with The Dial, however, that demonstrates the power of an influential magazine to promote successfully a still relatively unknown poet. By the time Eliot resigned as The Dial's London correspondent in December 1922, the magazine had in two years published ten separate items by him in poetry and prose, given him the 1922 Dial Award for achievement in American letters, published reviews of his work by Moore and cummings and a lengthy essay by Edmund Wilson, and praised him in editorial comments. The Dial management also arranged with Boni and Liveright for book publication of The Waste Land on December 15, 1922, on the heels of the poem's appearance in the November 1922 Dial and the October 1922 Criterion; and they contracted to buy 350 copies. With the visibility that The Dial brought The Waste Land, the book's first edition of one thousand quickly sold out, necessitating a second run of a thousand copies (Ackroyd 126). This promotion was reinforced in other magazines: in the space of eight months betweeen June 1923 and February 1924 Vanity Fair reprinted a batch of earlier Eliot poems and carried three articles by Eliot and an article on him (by Clive Bell), and in December 1922 Gilbert Seldes, a member of The Dial's staff, published an essay in The Nation praising Eliot and explaining the form of The Waste Land.

The Dial thus played a crucial role in the canonization of one particular cornerstone of high modernism, and in the institutionalization of a previously coterie poetics, but a role still best understood in relation to other magazines. Offering a provocative analysis of The Waste Land's publication in marketing and institutional terms, Lawrence Rainey argues that it "marked the crucial moment in the transition of modernism >from a minority culture to one supported by an important institutional and financial apparatus, . . . from a literature of an exiguous elite to a position of prestigious dominance" (91). Rainey presents the triangle of possible outlets that Eliot considered or negotiated with as a triangle of mass culture (Vanity Fair), the avant-garde (The Little Review), and high culture (The Dial). In particular, The Dial was in conscious competition with Vanity Fair for the rights to the poem. For The Dial, The Waste Land would represent a key investment in the emerging commodity known as modernism: as Rainey puts it, "what they had decided to purchase was less a specific poem, more a bid for discursive hegemony" (88). In this argument, canonization is synonymous with assimilation into the very market economy that high modernism claims to resist, with the three journals simply occupying different points "within a shared spectrum of marketing and consumption" (99).

Rainey's move to unify a wide range of cultural activity under the umbrella term "market" offers a suggestive blurring of boundaries among avant-garde, high and mass culture. At the same time, however, publication in The Dial constitutes a particular choice within the nexus that actually helps to reinforce those boundaries. To argue that "the Dial . . . differed from the Little Review and Vanity Fair in its tone of high seriousness and gravity, not in substantive ideology" (Rainey 95) is to miss that the different magazines' relation to capital is itself an ideological difference inseparable from their aesthetic stances. The Little Review both expressed and ironized its own need and desire for advertising revenue when the June-July 1915 issue ran seven pages of small notices suggesting what businesses might have advertised there--businesses unlikely to be attracted to a venue that foregrounded the anarchist Emma Goldman or that ran a blank issue in September 1916 due to an alleged lack of quality submissions. Thus it is strikingly appropriate that both the return to Europe of the German Dadaist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a Little Review favorite, and Margaret Anderson's relinquishing The Little Review's editorship and moving to Paris in 1923 coincide with the reprinting of Eliot's poems in Vanity Fair. Rainey reads The Waste Land's publication and reception as the culmination of an always immanent convergence of avant-garde, high and mass culture. I would suggest, however, that Eliot's success in 1922-23 and Anderson's move to Paris mark both the crowning achievement of the first stage of modernist poetry and the end of modernism's kinship with the avant-garde. It is the site of the divergence between a previously more connected modernism and avant-gardism (connections reflected in the multiple affiliations of many writers), the point at which modernism becomes Modernism. The early Little Review had been part of a historical moment "when a revolution in poetry seemed naturally to entail a commitment to social change, when all the arts were in ferment and aesthetic innovations were politically inflected" (Nelson 230). Eliot's reception in The Dial and Vanity Fair, one can speculate, symbolized the end of that moment, at least for Margaret Anderson.

I've mentioned the Baroness Elsa, and her highly visible presence in The Little Review marks a telling difference in the two magazines' versions of an international modernism. Both The Dial and The Little Review were internationalist in their thrust, open equally to work from both sides of the Atlantic. The Dial, however, tended to neglect European avant-garde movements such as Dada and surrealism, which such Dial contributors as Pound, Williams and Stein were all well acquainted with. Consistent with the respective magazines' aesthetics, The Dial tended to publish work from the European mainstream and The Little Review from the European avant-gardes--as illustrated by the fact that The Little Review carried more work by the Dadaist Baroness Elsa than any other publication, along with early concrete and sound poems. Even though The Dial was often accused of supporting older European writers at the expense of younger Americans, both it and The Little Review can be said to have constructed a transatlantic axis for modernism from their New York base, creating an additional center for the movement outside of European capitals. Together they did much to advance a cosmopolitan American modernism, pushing writers of an internationalist bias like Pound, Eliot, Crane, and Stevens over the democratic or popular modernism of nativists like Lindsay, Sandburg, and Masters.

This latter group had in fact been well represented in both magazines until the arrival of Pound on the Little Review scene and Eliot at The Dial. But the alleged conflict between a national and an international poetry, one that was enacted in both magazines' pages and that represents competing definitions of American modernism, actually concerned questions of craft and originality as much as questions of nationality. In The Little Review for October 1918, Edgar Jepson reprinted an essay >from The English Review called "The Western School," arguing against the claim that Lindsay, Masters, and Frost represented a new, genuinely indigenous poetry. He did not deny that these writers were echt American. He denied that they were any good. According to Jepson, Lindsay wrote "rank bad, jingling verse," Masters "bad, bald, prosy prose," and Frost "maundering dribble" (6-7). Jepson's alternative model for craft and innovation was Eliot, in contrast to whom the other poets "create no new diction, no new idiom. They create nothing" (8).

Pound, always well attuned to the zeitgeist, knew that The Little Review's readers were likely to be almost obsessively committed to newness, prone to dismiss work even five years old. He himself agreed with Jepson's negative diagnosis of Frost, Masters, and Lindsay, as he wrote in a May 1918 letter to Jepson following the essay's original publication in England:

Frost, Masters, Lindsay . . . are dead as mutton so far as the L. R. reader is concerned. The L. R. reader in America, anyhow, has had all he can stand of that lot. He knows what their stuff looks like etc. Masters we have said farewell to. Frost sinks of his own weight. Lindsay we have parodied. (Letters 151)

In this letter Pound both prophesies accurately the future hierarchy of a long-dominant version of the modernist canon and notes how that canon is starting to be composed of contributors to, and proposed by readers of, avant-garde little magazines:

Mi credo, Masters, Frost, Lindsay are out of the Wild Young American gaze already. Williams, Loy, Moore, and the worser phenomena of Others, to say nothing of the highly autochthonous Amy [Lowell] (all over the bloody place) are much more in the 'news.'

While Pound saw The Little Review as an organ of the 1918 avant-garde, however, he did not, looking back, regard the magazine as concerned with newness alone. In retrospect he found in The Little Review a commitment to "the best" that, in a 1940 letter, he contrasts deliberately with what he sees as The Dial's more superficial commitments. (In framing the difference as one of editorial policy, Pound finesses the fact that the magazines held differing definitions of what counted as "the best.") Anyway, he writes:

No editor in America, save Margaret Anderson, ever felt the need of, or responsibility for, getting the best writers concentrated--i.e., brought together in an American periodical. She started in Chicago, went to S. Francisco, then N. York and ended by publishing The Little Review in Paris. Evidently the aim was alien to American sensibilities.
The Dial might fool the casual observer; but its policy was not to get the best work or best writers. It got some. But Thayer aimed at names, wanted European celebrities and spent vast sums getting their left-overs. (Letters 346)

In a related critique, Pound explicitly contrasts The Dial's centrism with the editorial risks taken by The Little Review. Recommending in 1920 that Joyce submit something to The Dial, he tells his impecunious friend that "it wont be as much fun as the L. R." (Pound / Joyce 164) but at least it pays. A few days later he writes: "The Dial will never print 'Ulysses.' The Dial will never be any real fun."

Some of The Dial's harshest critics come from among its most consistent poetic contributors, who, fairly or not, perceived it as resistant to artistic innovation. Although The Dial and The Little Review published many of the same poets, they were perceived very differently by those poets. Not surprisingly, The Dial was at its liveliest and best while Pound exercised some influence on its editorial policy and gathering of material, between April 1920 and April 1923--a period during which, as G. A. M. Janssens puts it, "Pound's influence strengthened [The Dial's] family resemblance to The Little Review" (53). But Thayer's resistance to innovative American material gave even Pound--surely no literary nationalist--cause to complain as early as April 1921, when he wrote to Moore thus: "I have tried for a year to get Thayer to print--i.e., at least get--an article on younger American writers. No use." In a 1928 letter to Louis Zukofsky, Williams describes The Dial as "about as dead as a last-year's birds nest," and celebrates Zukofsky's appearance in the magazine with the gleeful if paradoxical claim that Zukofsky's work represents "another nail in the Dial coffin" (qtd. in Mariani 289). In 1924 he had complained to Pound that "I myself feel so disgusted with The Dial for its halfhearted ways that I am almost ready to agree with anyone concerning its worthlessness" (103). By November 1922, the month of The Waste Land, Crane was writing to Gorham Munson that "The Dial seems to have abandoned all interest in publishing American things, or anything, in fact, that comes to them unheralded by years of established reputation" (Letters 103). In other words, they only wanted the already canonical, or at least, in Richard Ohmann's term, the pre-canonical. Crane was still voicing essentially the same objection in 1927: "The decrepit old wind bag goes wheezing along month after month with dear old Schnitzler and Mann the main bellows-workers" (Parkinson 102).

The Dial thus came to be criticized on two related scores, its perceived reluctance to support American writing and experimental writing. In 1923, for instance, Henry Seidel Canby accused The Dial of trying to institute "another age of Longfellow," of encouraging American writers to follow English models (qtd. in Seldes, "Comment" 52). In 1927 Watson had to respond to a similar complaint from The New Republic, that The Dial had "not encouraged a single interesting new American writer since 1920" (qtd. in Watson, "Comment" 153). From The Dial's point-of-view, however, it simply resisted use of the local or national as a criterion of critical judgment. When Thayer announced Eliot's winning the 1922 Dial award, for instance, despite his misgivings about The Waste Land, he praised Eliot for not pleading the "'localism' which . . . takes so much of American writing out of the field of comparison with European letters . . . and requires for American writers a special standard of judgment" (Dec. 1922). This context gives added weight to Williams' notorious complaint that, just when American little magazines were approaching "a new art form . . . rooted in the locality which should give it fruit," "out of the blue The Dial brought out The Waste Land and all our hilarity ended" (Autobiography 172). To Williams, The Dial was responsible for obstructing an emergent American modernism represented by little magazines. The Dial's critics remained willing to publish there, however. Pound saw his choices, to quote a letter, as contending either with "lunacy" at The Little Review or "stodge" at The Dial. But like many of his peers, Pound published in both places. He realized the necessity of combining lunacy and stodge if his version of modernist poetry--one rooted in avant-garde practice--was to occupy a central position on the American literary stage.

Alan Golding
University of Louisville

WORKS CITED

[Note: this bibliography is a part of a longer in-progress version of the above shorter essay, so it contains a number of references to texts not cited in the shorter text.]

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