The little magazine is a recognizable and peculiar phenomenon associated with the growth of the modern poetry movement in this century. In Canada, this type of magazine can be said to have appeared only after 1940, although a number of forerunners having some claim to be ranked as little magazines appeared earlier. It is with the period after 1940 that the kind of literary activity and movement‑poetry that had arisen in England just before World War I and in America during the 1920s began to flourish in Canada. A clear idea of the real nature of this type of magazine and of its role in Canadian literary developments is certainly preliminary to the understanding of our poetry and some of its motives.

The literary magazine of this type marks a stage in the history of printing, a retreat into intimate, or cénacle publication, after the extreme extension of literacy and printing for mass audiences: it is also the stage at which printing and paper become economically available for such private and limited publication. In literary terms, it is the embattled literary reaction of intellectual minority groups to the commercial middle‑class magazines of fiction and advertising which had evolved in the nineteenth century.

First Stement

The profit motive as a drive in periodical and newspaper publishing had, by the beginning of this century, outbalanced and displaced the literary and scholarly values that had normally entered into the act of publication in the past; money had taken the rudder of editorial taste into its own hands, and in the notorious work of Harmsworth and Newnes—not to mention American publishers like W. R. Hearst—newspapers had become sensational mass entertainment media designed to season the advertising matter that provided their main source of income. Magazines had taken the same direction as newspapers, although the full effect of such popularization was not to appear until after 1920. The quality magazines of the educated middle class, such as Harper’s and the Atlantic, if uncontaminated directly, drifted into a state of ineffectual dotage—so far as publishing poetry or imaginative prose is concerned—since they were oblivious to the nature of the spreading corruption and published only a small quantity of epigonic poetry and story‑telling, when more vociferous writing was needed. It is against this advertising‑dominated journalism of the twentieth century and its decadent quality‑magazine culture that the little magazines of literature arose. “To hell with Harper's and the magazine touch,” wrote Ezra Pound when Poetry (Chicago) was in its early months. He defined the new poetry and the central drive of the new movement—away from the popular culture shaped by the big magazines and newspapers.

The Canadian part of this revolt against the tyranny of the subjugated majority came, like most Canadian artistic contributions, late and with some confusion of intent. Our first modern poets, A. J. M. Smith and F. R. Scott, were more concerned with learning a fashion from Eliot, Yeats and presently Auden, than in expressing their own aroused resistance on native grounds; and A. M. Klein was partly withdrawn into a parochial idea. Smith and Scott started the McGill Fortnightly (1925‑1927), in some sense a little magazine, but one whose very name identifies it with the staid journalism of the nineteenth century (The English Fortnightly, edited by G. H. Lewes, John Morley, etc. founded in 1865) not with the new intellectual bohemian fringe (cf. Blast, Exile, Transition). The Canadian Mercury (1928­-1929), The Canadian Forum (1920‑ ) and The Canadian Book­man (1919‑1939), by and large have followed the same pattern: they are not little magazines. As for Canadian Poetry Magazine, the official organ of the Canadian Author’s Association, that is the kind of magazine that is antithetical to the “little magazine”: it pub­lishes the poetry of appeasement, of gullible sentimentality.

The depression carried the new poetry in Canada into political channels of a conventional kind; and Scott especially, as we know, became a sharp and effective proponent of social action against Canada’s lethargic and outdated colonial capitalism; but as poets, not one of our moderns, Scott, Smith or Klein, committed himself entirely to poetry, and therefore could not draw upon a personal drama displaying the pain or indignation of a poet in a world of barbarism (the drama of Eliot’s and Pound’s poetry), though Klein came nearest to expressing this drama in his “Portrait of the Poet as a Nobody” (later retitled “Portrait of the Poet as a Landscape”). Smith voices a personal malaise which is the correlative of such a subject matter; and Scott has all the subject matter in his social satires without any of the malaise or dramatic involvement.

Northern Review

Nor did these poets as yet take full action in producing the maga­zines and books which are everywhere a part of the intellectual resistance to advertising journalism and to “popular” or “mass” culture. It was only in their college days that they undertook the abortive Fortnightly, and of such campus by‑products every univer­sity has a certain supply. In 1936, too, Scott and Smith persuaded the Ryerson Press [New Provinces was published by Macmillan not Ryerson] to bring out a thin book, New Provinces, con­taining somewhat pale modernist work by six contributors. But it was fifteen years or more [i.e., after the Fortnightly] before Scott, Smith, or Klein were each to bring out a separate book of poetry. In short, Canada in the 1930s had no “little magazine” or “little press” move­ment: no magazines of poetry and experiment representing the rebellion of the creative minority against the profit‑motive literature of mass‑readership and cultural appeasement.

The long delay in the appearance of such a movement in Canada has been attributed usually to the Depression of the 1930s. A point of note, also, was the departure of A. J. M. Smith to teach in the United States: he should have been sought out by some brilliant college president and given a post in Canada. The conservatism of Toronto publishers has also been remarked, though in fact the Ryer­son Press alone has done more to advance our literature than any other single force. More real than any such explanations must be the bare fact that our modernist poets had not yet fully awakened to the nature and requirements of the job they had undertaken. The new poetry was—and still is—an active campaign of the poets themselves against the machinery of publication and the mortified mind of the existing arbiters of taste: it demands a special kind of enterprise on the part of poets, such as had been shown by Margaret Anderson, Harriet Monroe, Harold Monroe, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot (with Faber and the Criterion), and a whole army of editors of little magazines in England and America. Our Canadian poets—“the meticulous moderns,” as I have sometimes called them— published no such poetry magazines, nor did they even publish their own separate books, until the next generation came on the scene in 1940.

Contemporary Verse (1941‑1952) in Vancouver broke the ice. This magazine, a true little poetry magazine on the American pattern, was edited by Alan Crawley, who was handicapped by blindness and cornered in the far west; but a group of leftist poets, Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, and Floris McLaren, had initiated the scheme, invited Crawley to edit, and continued to collaborate in the production. The defect, however, was that Contemporary Verse was not a fighting  magazine with a policy; it was concerned only with publishing “good poetry”—which, in itself, can embody an affirmation—but it did not in addition work out any program of ideas which this poetry could ‘fire. It lasted for ten years, however, carrying sparks from any source  which might show a flicker in that period.

A more aggressive “second stage” was reached in Montreal. Almost at the same time, and without any relation to the Vancouver magazine, Preview (1942‑1945) was launched by a group of young people in Montreal. The characteristic impulse and direction was given to that magazine by Patrick Anderson, an Englishman who had come to Montreal via New York and Columbia University, from Oxford, bringing with him a mellifluous and hyper‑eloquent manner of speech (that overwhelmed our literati) and a fertility of imagination that soon became the model or emulation for the poets writing in Preview. Of the younger poets attached to the magazine, P. K. Page, Bruce Ruddick, and Neufville Shaw seemed to close the list; while, of the  earlier generation, Scott, and even Klein, contributed to the ferment. The magazine, though mimeographed only, was ambitious, in its literary and political aims, and in its intellectual intensity; it was exclusive (the list of permanent contributors appeared on the printed cover) and oriented toward a strongly Left political line. (Anderson suggests in his recent autobiographical fantasy, Search Me, that it was actually run off somewhere on a Communist underground machine; but as we know, there were clear differences between members of the group, certainly between Scott and Anderson.) The magazine was soon hailed in Chicago as “brilliant”; it was “read by Auden” in New York; it was the admiration of Canadian critics.

In retrospect, it seems that Preview, although it was a real “little magazine” and a magazine of protest, was still derivative, in its leaning on Auden, in its excessive adulation of the Oxford‑English Ideal in Patrick Anderson, and in its esoteric unawareness of the need for local literary stimulus, for variety, for native expression. Such a native product appeared on the scene when Preview turned down some poems by John Sutherland, then just out of college, and he turned to the launching of a new magazine of his own, First Statement (1942‑1956), [1942‑1956 spans the combined lives of First Statement (1942‑1945) and of Northern Review which continued First Statement and Preview from 1945 to 1956] which was to outlast Preview by more than a decade. His first assistants were Audrey Aikman (later Mrs. Sutherland) and Robert Simpson; soon these were joined by Irving Layton and myself, and strengthened by contributions from new poets in Toronto, Miriam and Patrick Waddington, and Raymond Souster.

The poets writing in First Statement were often rough and crude in expression (“lumpen intellectuals” in contrast to the “meticulous moderns”), and their aims perhaps were less formulated, less doctrinaire, than those of Preview; but their work was more visceral, their convictions hotter and more truly expressive of the pressures of life: they were working‑class poets. The magazine, also, was open to new writers. It had many of the characteristics of fringe literature: anarchic attitudes of rejection, anti‑literary leanings, a certain irresponsibility combined with a puritanical conviction in the prime virtue of integrity. Obviously unwashed behind the ears, our First Statement at least had a shining morning face.

After a few years of struggle (these magazines are always expensive to the editors and never profitable except to the soul), the Preview and First Statement groups combined to form Northern Review under a grand joint Editorial Board. The main fact, however, was the demise of Preview under this arrangement. Within a few months, editorial disagreement over a review by Sutherland led to a complete break‑up and Northern Review proceeded under the management of Sutherland and Layton. In the days of First Statement we had acquired a printing press and had gradually improved the production; in Sutherland’s hands, and with the support of his wife, the magazine grew to be a reputable literary review. But the new poetry movement had by this time broken up.

It had all been generated by the release of the war, the end of Depression, and the loosening of Canadian lethargies after 1939. Even in the midst of war, Raymond Souster with the help of Bill Goldberg, both of them Air Force men, had been able to edit their own mimeo magazine, Direction, from various outposts. Another offshoot, Elan, ran for a time in Montreal. Reading, a guide to good books, was edited for a few issues by Robert Simpson. But during and after the war, the poets of the Preview‑First‑Statement axis had scattered somewhat—P. K. Page to Ottawa, myself to New York, Anderson back to England—so that the sense of exciting activity subsided. Layton resigned from Northern Review, as Sutherland became convinced that the movement had been a complete failure, that all modern poetry was misdirected, that the truth lay in Roy Campbell and in the Roman Catholic Church.

Delta

In the meantime, other enterprising magazines of the genuine “little mag” variety continued to arise: Impression in the mid‑west, Protocol in Newfoundland, P.M. in Vancouver (where Earle Birney was now active), and a very expensive adventure in Toronto, Here & Now. Clearly a vigorous movement of modern poetry had been set going by the Montreal magazines and by Contemporary Verse. In the West Coast area, Earle Birney, Roy Daniells, Phyllis Webb, Anne Marriott, Dorothy Livesay, Al Purdy and Daryl Hine were to emerge through the medium of magazines. In Toronto, James Reaney, Anne Wilkinson, Souster, the Waddingtons, W. W. E. Ross (resurrected), and more recently Jay Macpherson, Peter Miller and Kenneth McRobbie, have appeared. And in Montreal, the poets already mentioned: in fact Montreal became a virtual centre to which poets from all parts of Canada congregated; Mandel, Hine, the Waddingtons, Miss Webb, Purdy, Miss Macpherson, all settled here for a time. Fredericton, N.B., also has added to the activity by the publication of Fiddlehead, by the critical writing of Desmond Pacey and the poetry of Fred Cogswell, Robert Rogers, Elizabeth Brewster and others.

After about 1950, the retreat of John Sutherland into Catholicism and into literary conservatism began to be countered by a resurgence of independent magazines backed or begotten by members of the old First Statement group. Souster has edited two mimeo magazines, Contact, and recently Combustion, mainly intended for poets; these cultivate translation (especially from the French, including Canadian), contact with American young poets, and a poetry of iconoclastic forthrightness and honesty of statement. In Montreal, CIV/n (code word for “Civilization”), edited by Aileen Collins, published seven memorable numbers of a magazine of fine vigour and aggressiveness: it brought out Leonard Cohen, Eli Mandel, and other new poets.  Yes (still in action), edited jointly by Mike Gnarowski, Glen Siebrasse, and John Lachs—all of whom write poetry—has added to the ferment, struggling toward an affirmation in the midst of disorder. Delta, a quarterly now in its fourth number, of which I am the editor, publishes a complex of poetry from all quarters of Canada interlarded with prose that aims to shake up the conventional subject matter of verse.

In Toronto, Tamarack Review has for the past two years supplemented the ancient reliable Canadian Forum by publishing both prose and poetry in an impressive and distinguished format. Though not as extravagant in this as was the magazine Here & Now (or the recent beautiful UBC campus publication Raven), it is probably too expensive to be practicable in the long run; and its contents confirm an ambiguous definition of aim. Tamarack Review, as Robert Weaver, one of its editors, recently noted, is “not a little magazine”; in format and editorial direction it resembles an English quarterly, a quality journal of literature and ideas.

With this we can return to our original purpose, which was to define the aim and the role of the little magazine in Canada. This type of magazine is not simply a repository of the best that is being thought and said. That role would be a misty illusion in this century, if we accept the cultural analysis of our best poets and critics; it is a role, for example, that is proposed to be filled by such journals as the Times Literary Supplement and the dull pot‑bellied quarterlies of our universities. Such periodicals are holding to old standards in an alien and chaotic new world. The representative magazines of present‑day culture are of course Look, Life, Time, and their English counterparts, Sketch, Everybody’s, Illustrated, John Bull and the rest. The veritable “little magazine” of literature is a vociferous reaction to this latter form of readership; also to the radio, movies, and TV, that supplement and now replace the printed page; and to any deaf traditionalism that hopes to carry on without immersing in the destructive element of reality.

Canadian literary magazines which have most directly attacked this problem have only appeared since 1940; and in Canada there is very little understanding as yet of what the whole quarrel is about. It is about the issue in Allen Tate’s statement a few years ago that “the central literary tradition is being fostered today by three or four journals whose combined circulation does not exceed three thousand.” It is about the same issue described by T. S. Eliot when he closed the files of the Criterion: “For this immediate future, perhaps for a long way ahead, the continuity of culture may have to be maintained by . . . the small and obscure papers and reviews, those which hardly are read by anyone but their own contributors.” (He does not mention the quarterlies, the quality  weeklies, the university publications stuffed with culture and “scholarship.”) In Canada such “small and obscure papers and reviews” are continuing at present on several fronts, and they promise quietly to create a vital literature of salutary value for this country before they run their course. They have few readers; but their eventual influence will be measured by the survey of Canadian Literature in A.D. 2000, not by the readers they had within their time.