Literary Journalism in Chicago
Lucian Cary
Nothing succeeds like an indiscretion. I was indiscreet enough last winter to speak my mind (a little of it) about The Little Review, The Dial, Poetry, The Drama, and the audience to which these papers appeal. The result is that I have been flattered or intimidated into speaking it ever since. In the present instance both methods have been used most charmingly—and shamelessly. You see, Miss Anderson and I live in the same village. And yet I said nothing, and have nothing to say about any paper except what everybody knows.
Everybody knows that The Friday Literary Review of The Chicago Evening Post under Mr. Francis Hackett and, later, under Mr. Floyd Dell gave us the most alert, the most eager, the most intelligent, and the best-written discussion of literature in the United States. That eight-page supplement did what had hardly been done west of England before: it made book reviews worth reading. There was almost as much difference between the Friday Review and The Dial as there is between Mr. George Bernard Shaw and Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler, almost as much difference between the Friday Review and The New York Times Literary Supplement as there is between M. Anatole France and Mr. Henry Van Dyke. There was good writing in the Friday Review and good thinking behind it. It was almost never dull; and if it was young it was not wholly unsophisticated; and if it was sometimes dead wrong it was not stupid. If there were half as many persons interested in the discussion of ideas as most of us like to believe the Friday Review would inevitably have continued. It would, that’s all. But as things are it was fated. Neither the mechanics nor the economics of daily journalism permitted it. The Post could not continue to give us—it quite literally gave us—eight pages of what so few of us wanted so much.
Everybody knows that if a weekly paper dealing not only with literature but with all the other arts in the spirit and with the journalistic competence of the Friday Review were established in Chicago everybody would have to read it.
That is the point I wished to make. It is perfectly obvious that The Little Review is not the kind of newspaper of the arts I have in mind. The Little Review is published only once a month. It is therefore not a newspaper, but a magazine. It is three times as good as The Drama, which is published only once a quarter. But my point is that we ought to have something four times as good as The Little Review: in short, a weekly. It may be that The Little Review has other failings than its infrequency. But why consider these lesser matters? The Little Review has one virtue in addition to its eagerness. It is informal. Informality is the breath of life to journalism. Nobody can write anything the way people want him to unless he feels perfectly free to write the way he wants to. It is far more a matter of manners than a matter of truth. A journal which insists on formality almost never has any good writing in it. Good writing is nothing but the artistic expression of a personality. Scientifically speaking, it can be nothing else. Not that one must be thinking about expressing his personality in order to write well. The very point is that he must not be thinking about it. He has got to be thinking about what he has to say and nothing else. Take the use of “I” as an apparently trivial but actually significant example. If the paper for which he is writing regards the use of “I” as a breach of good form a man will find that one finger of his left hand is mysteriously drawn to the shift key and one finger of his right hand to the key between the “u” and the “o” in order to make an “I” all the time he is punching his typewriter. The least excusable riot of “I’s” I ever saw in print was in a journal of literary discussion which believes in the reality of that invention of the old-fashioned logician, “objective criticism,” and which regards the use of “I” by any but elderly gentlemen of the walnuts and wine school as impossible. I did it myself in the absence of the editor. In a paper which does not in the least object to the use of “I” writers soon forget all about it, and when they do that they begin to use it only when it is effective. It is the virtue of The Little Review that it permits its contributors to use “I” as often as they please; that it permits them to make fools of themselves occasionally. This means that it is not impossible to write well for The Little Review. I do not say that it is not possible to write badly for The Little Review. Perfect freedom to be idiotic does not inevitably eliminate idiocy.
But I have no more compliments for The Little Review.
Poetry is another matter. Miss Monroe’s magazine has printed some bad verse. But this is not, as its most envious critics imagine, its distinction. Every magazine prints bad verse. Poetry has printed poetry that nobody else dared to print. Poetry has boldly discussed the poetic controversy when everybody else hid behind language. Poetry introduced us to Rabindranath Tagore, to Vachel Lindsay, in a way, to Edgar Lee Masters. Poetry printed Ford Hueffer’s poem On Heaven. Poetry has heard of Remy de Gourmont and the Mercure de France—an incredible achievement for a Chicago literary journal. Poetry has done more than any other paper to furnish a meeting ground for writers in Chicago. If Poetry were concerned about novels it would not decide two or three years after intelligent people had discovered Jean Christophe that M. Romain Rolland is a successor to Tolstoi and, for the first time, print a few paragraphs about him. If Poetry were interested in psychology it would not ignore Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. But Poetry is not interested in these things. Its great wealth is devoted only to poetry and it comes out only once a month.
It is a pity. For the spirit of Poetry is nearer to the spirit of the old Friday Literary Review than anything else in Chicago. That is the spirit I like, that seems suited to the place and the occasion. But it needs a weekly paper of wide scope to express itself.
A man is an artist to the extent to which he regards everything that inartistic people call “form” as the actual substance, as the “principal” thing.—Nietzsche.
Epigrams
Richard Aldington