“For a time it was fun.”
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In November 1923, Ford Madox Ford, “like everyone else in Paris,” was sick with flu. Yet he was optimistic. He dashed off letters from a typewriter set on “a table across my bed.” In 1908, Ford founded The English Review, and edited its first fifteen issues. Now, as he wrote his daughter, he was “at my old game of starting reviews” again.
The Transatlantic Review had an almost preternatural birth. Paris “gyrated, seethed, clamoured, roared with the Arts. Painters, novelists, poets, composers, sculptors, batik-designers, decorators, even advanced photographers, so crowded the boulevards that you could not see the tree-trunks.” Ford had a “vague sense rather than an idea” of what to do about this “immense seething cauldron” of artists, who “bubbled and overflowed,” but lacked a practical vision. His brother Oliver suggested a magazine. (The original name of the magazine was to be the Paris Review. The name was switched because the first serial advertisement was from Compagnie Transatlantique.)
Ford soon promised H.G. Wells that the first issue of his new magazine, to be published in January 1924, would be better than the inaugural edition of The English Review, which boasted work from Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. Ford hoped that the magazine would “[widen] the field in which the younger writers of the day can find publication.”
“The review is very shabby in my opinion,” quipped James Joyce to Robert McAlmon, whose story appeared in the debut.
The name was rendered in lowercase as the transatlantic review. William Bird, whose printing shop at 29 Quai d’Anjou was used by Ford as the magazine’s office, explained that it was the only way to fit the name in Caslon Old Face on the cover. Ford, who always sought connections and patterns, remembered a shop on the Boulevard “without capital letters and had rather liked the effect,” and the first issue opened with lowercase poems by E.E. Cummings.
Ford had his skeptics. “The review is very shabby in my opinion,” quipped James Joyce to Robert McAlmon, whose story appeared in the debut. Equally cantankerous and hyperbolic, Joyce could be forgiven; the magazine’s first issue was rather uninspiring, and he had a grudge. As one condition of their support, the magazine’s original financial backers pressured Ford to never publish Joyce. (Joyce didn’t let it go. He later wrote: “Between lack of funds, printers’ errors, absconding secretaries and general misunderstandings, [the magazine] appears to be shortening people’s lives.”)
The second issue featured three poems by H.D., and the third issue began with a Christmas story by Selma Lagerlöf, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature. That issue also includes the first published version of the poem “Last Words of My Grandmother” by William Carlos Williams about “an old woman // impossible to get on with / unless you left her alone / with her things.” The narrator pleads to bring her to the hospital, and while they ride along in the ambulance, she stares out the window and says: “What are all those / fuzzy looking things out there? / Trees? Well, I’m / tired of them.”
The fourth issue was one of Ford’s finest; a snapshot of literature at the moment. Gertrude Stein began her serialization of The Making of Americans. Djuna Barnes, who would later publish an experimental novel, Ryder, contributed “Aller et Retour,” a story about a Russian widow living in Paris. “Man is rotten from the start,” the woman tells her daughter. “Rotten with virtue and with vice.”
Once the magazine launched, Hemingway would spend his Thursday’s at the office reading manuscripts and throwing punches some more, Ford lamented, “at the files of unsold reviews, and at my nose.”
Despite the earlier opposition to his work, James Joyce also makes an appearance in the issue. Titled “From Work in Progress,” the story is noteworthy for being the first publication of his manuscript for Finnegans Wake. Joyce already had his cadences: “And there they were too listening in as hard as they could to the solans and sycamores and the wild geese and gannets and the migratories and mistlethrushes and the auspices and all the birds of the sea, all four of them, all sighing and sobbing, and listening.”
The Transatlantic editor who worked on Joyce’s manuscript complained that the writer’s additions to the proof were all “in microscopic handwriting.” That pugnacious young editor was Ernest Hemingway. “Indian Camp” also appeared in that issue, a sign that Hemingway’s influence on the magazine was more than marginal.
Hemingway and Ford had met in October 1923, at a party where Hemingway was “shadow-boxing in a dim corner of the room.” Once the magazine launched, Hemingway would spend his Thursday’s at the office reading manuscripts and throwing punches some more, Ford lamented, “at the files of unsold reviews, and at my nose.” Hemingway carried his sparring to the page, where, in an editorial note in the fifth issue, he took aim at recent contributor Tristan Tzara: “Dada is dead although Tzara still cuddles its emaciated little corpse to his breast and croons a Roumanian folk-song, written by Princess Bibesco, while he tries to get the dead little lips to take sustenance from his monocle.”
Hemingway’s influence on The Transatlantic Review increased. In the next issue, he published “The Voice of the Office” by Nathan Asch, a talky, impressionistic piece, and “Running Away” by Kennon Jewett. Both were Hemingway’s protégés, although he was less fond of Jewett: “It is discouraging to try to help people do something in their own way and then just have them imitate.” Asch would continue to appear in the magazine, as did Hemingway himself, with several more stories in successive issues, and a resigned eulogy for Joseph Conrad: “And now he is dead and I wish to God they would have taken some great, acknowledged technician of a literary figure and left him to write his bad stories.”
Although Hemingway had succeeded in wresting control away from Ford—who’d traveled to America during the late summer, his large suitcase stuffed with copies of the magazine—it was a pyrrhic victory. The death of John Quinn, the magazine’s main financial backer, exposed Ford’s mismanagement.
When the magazine’s release was delayed, he wrote a patronizing explanation: “What really happens to a household that receives its favourite periodical a day or two late? Does the dining-room clock stop; do the dachshunds go off their feed, the father the family stamp his slippered feet upon the heart-rug?” The end was in sight.
The first issue of The Transatlantic Review included correspondence from T. S. Eliot: “It is your business to help create the younger generation, as much as to encourage it. It does not need much encouragement.” Good literature, Eliot affirmed, “is produced by a few queer people in odd corners: the use of a review is not to force talent, but to create a favourable atmosphere.” Eliot ended his letter: “I have only one request to make: give us either what we can support, or what is worth our trouble to attack. There is little of either in existence.” Although it only lasted for a year, The Transatlantic Review achieved Eliot’s request.
