A Passion for Letters

...The interchange of American and European letters in the Dial would ultimately leave its impact on both American readers and writers...

...The year in which IT published Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) the magazine's sales doubled...

...Instead he has sought out the incidents, the events that illuminate...

...Whether OR not a relationship existed between the growing national consciousness of the period and the flowering of American poetry in the second and third decades of the century, it I S possible that a certain sense of wonder about who we are and where we were going played a part in the abundance of poetic expression...

...These are afterthoughts...

...But Thayer's personal characteristics are not to be missed: his perfectionism as an editor (he would redo a whole issue for one error...

...Except for Hemingway and Fitzgerald (whose lives had direct bearing on their works), it was the work, not the man, that mattered...

...Taste combined with means and a sense of responsibility was the passport to his unique success...

...As we read, we are fascinated by the facts, particularly those which add human dimension to the story...

...3) Describe John Quinn's relationship to the writers of the '20s...

...A magazine like the Dial had much to gain, too, by the fact that specialization had not yet destroyed the possibility of a combination of the arts...

...The Dial, with its high regard for esthetics, respected that view more than any other publication, despite the temptation which its relations with so many prominent writers of the day must have presented...

...A literary quiz on the 1920s might consider the following questions: 1) What well known American woman poet set aside her writing in midcareer to edit a literary magazine for three years...

...Only artists confident in their own strength will let the door open to outside influence...

...Joost's book, though a slapdash job in some respects (it is longwinded, unfocused and at times needlessly imprecise), is an impressive example of imaginative publishing too rarely encountered these days when books are published with preconceived notions of what readers want and need...

...If so much of the material is fresh after so much shedding of print on the '20s it is because writers of that time had not yet become celebrities whose every idiosyncrasy was exploited for mass consumption...

...As for Thayer, his portrait unfortunately is still incomplete...

...Yet not really like any other...

...The avant-garde writing O F the day had not only superior literary quality but a broad humanistic base that counterbalanced much of the difficulty of the new esthetics...

...radical ideas and substantial wealth...

...This same feeling of confidence in our separateness (bluntly expressed by the magazine's art critic, Henry McBride: "I think the time has come when it is no longer necessary for the first-rate American to go to Paris") must have made it possible for the Dial to admit European writing in such profusion into its pages...

...Whatever Thayer's and Watson's avowed aims, the Dial from 1920- 29 proved (contrary to our current cynicism) that literary taste can be directed and ultimately improved...

...In all fairness to Joost's book, these speculations are never stated abstractly but only implied in the course of his minutely traced account...

...And that list, too, stretches...

...Together with many more such facts they have produced a book that is as absorbing as a Le Carre thriller and much more enlightening than many a gossip- ography currently cluttering the bookstands...

...No one at Southern Illinois University Press was apparently stopped by such considerations, and wisely...

...A Santayana could write on Freud, an Eliot on Stravinsky, and critics like Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley could direct their criticisms TO readers whose interests were as diverse as their own...

...Thayer was not the most infallible of editors (he rejected Hemingway, was unduly severe on O'Neill, said he "detested" modern art—on the last he had the good judgment to defer to Watson's views...

...his strongly held opinions, his footloose habit of disappearing from the scene at intervals (which necessitated strong staff support), his determination to get his way, though never at the risk of losing a major talent for his magazine...

...Art and letters he pursued but with a purpose so elevated and so impassioned that he remained insulated from the ironical comments about him...

...James Sibley Watson Jr...

...The Dial, as Scofield Thayer and his partner, Dr...

...And if the facts in themselves seem tangential, within the context of Nicholas Joost's Scofield Thayer and The Dial they become significant...

...Thayer, whose word portrait by Alyse Gregory is quoted above, was a young Harvard and Oxford man of cultivated tastes, with mildly * Marianne Moore served as managing editor of the Dial from 1926-29...

...What was the magic that made its idealism pay off, in terms of circulation —a significant jump from 3,000 to 22,000...

...Yet Thayer's Dial survived for 9 years, paradoxically increasing its readership in number while limiting it in kind...

...Thayer, whose interests ran counter to the prevailing concern with politics and social questions, was even less inclined to concede to mass appeal...

...if traditions were attacked, if the new psychology, the new ethics sought TO discredit the past, it never precluded the possibility of new utopias...

...Reviewed By NONA BALAKIAN Co-editor, "The Creative Present: Notes on Contemporary Fiction...

...In Joost's words, "the editors honestly believed that the publication of fine creative and critical work was an enterprise in civilization that would do something to stir America from the apathy of imagination that had fallen on it...

...Joost himself has also avoided the temptation to indulge in the kind of gossip that has filled so many memoirs of those years...

...How could the Dial do it...

...In his pages the Dial is palpably alive—not a relic of the days of Emerson (the original Dial dates from 1840) nor even the faded dusty rose item tucked alongside the "classics" of our parents' day...

...Similarly, in its art section, it would be hard to match such an assemblage as Picasso and Brancusi, Renoir and Braque, Kokoschka and Bonnard...

...And the list goes on and on...

...fashioned it, resembled nothing that had ever come before or has come since...

...If the answers* are not immediately forthcoming, it is not because the questions are esoteric but because they concern personalities in a period which (unlike our own) took less interest in the writer than in his writing...

...So infectious is Joost's enthusiasm for his subject —the parallel histories of a magazine and a literary era—that the most banal facts take on importance...

...He administered his wealth largely as a trust, supporting or helping to support many young writers and artists...

...One answer, of course, I S that it had money TO lose—sometimes as much A S $50,000 in one year...

...We see it as it was in its heyday, an organ of communication as vital as any we display on our coffee tables...

...3. Today little more than a name, John Quinn, a lawyer and art patron, was an impressive presence and benefactor...

...Needless to say, it was Thayer s good fortune that the contemporary art he championed was naturally irresistible...

...2) Who or what was "Bel Esprit...

...For the reader himself could not have guessed how deeply his interest would be engaged...

...Joost hardly enters into his personal life —whether because it is irrelevant to his story or simply because it is not yet for release, we are not told...

...A monthly magazine of new literature and art (predominently critical) with no political, regional or academic ties, the new Dial was an audacious venture such as no foundation today would risk...

...It is hard to imagine a current publication with an equivalent mixture of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, e.e.cummings and Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence and Dos Passos, Thomas Mann and Yeats, Ortega y Gasset and Santayana, Bertrand Russell and Anatole France...

...Similarly, what we learn about Pound's role in promoting the careers of his contemporaries should help raise our estimate of that poet's service to letters...

...When he acquired the Dial in 1920, that fortnightly magazine was "hanging on a shoestring," though its previous publisher, Martyn Johnson, had enlisted such "names" as Thorsten Veblen, George Moore, John Dewey and Randolph Bourne...

...This was far from the case...

...If modernism at its best was more palatable than much contemporary writing is today, it might be argued that, AT its source, IT was much less radical...

...4) Name the editor described below: "Slender of build, swift of movement, strikingly pale, with coal black hair, black eyes veiled and flashing, lips curved like those of Byron, he seemed to many the embodiment of the aesthete...

...But beyond these, the magazine's success hinged on a fortuitious set of circumstances...

...The involved story of the Dial's purchase of The Waste Land and of the poem's winning the coveted Dial Award is interesting not only for what it reveals about the poet's ability to drive a bargain (one really his due) but for what it suggests of the quality of the relationship that existed between editors and writers...

...Another answer lies in the prestige IT represented...

...But what he had in large measure was a passion for letters...

...2. Ezra Pound's name for his money-raising scheme fwhich never materialized) to help support T. S. Eliot and other needy, deserving writers...

...Balancing new and familiar names in both European and American writing, juxtaposing the mildly avant-garde in style with the more traditional, the Dial achieved in each issue a cornucopia of elegant, penetrating, witty, adventurous and, above all, esthetically satisfying writing...

...4. Scofield Thayer, of the Dial...

...Would that we had a few Thayers today...