The Transatlantic Review

Most literary magazines last long enough to be forgotten. The transatlantic review — Ford Madox Ford liked it lowercase — did the opposite: it lasted twelve monthly issues, January to December 1924, and became permanent. Issue for issue, no magazine of the century printed a higher density of writers who mattered.

The operation was gloriously improvised. Ford — the English novelist who had already co-written with Conrad and would soon produce Parade's End — edited from a cramped office at 29 quai d'Anjou on the Île Saint-Louis, renting a share of the premises from Bill Bird's Three Mountains Press, the hand-operated outfit then printing Pound's first Cantos installment. The money came from John Quinn, the New York lawyer and modernism's great checkbook, whom Ezra Pound — the movement's tireless fixer, here as everywhere — had talked into backing Ford. The magazine was printed and distributed through Gerald Duckworth in London, giving the whole enterprise its two shores and its name.

What Ford printed justified every franc. An extract from James Joyce's mysterious new project appeared under the label 'Work in Progress' — the working title that stuck to Finnegans Wake for the next fifteen years. Gertrude Stein's enormous The Making of Americans began its first serialization there, championed by her young admirer Hemingway. The list ran on: Djuna Barnes, H.D., Jean Rhys at the very start of her career, the Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven at the movement's wildest edge — and Ford's habit of printing unknowns beside monuments is precisely what made the magazine matter.

The best subplot involves the sub-editor. Ford had hired the young Ernest Hemingway on Pound's recommendation, and when the editor sailed for New York in the summer of 1924, Hemingway ran the August number as guest editor — promptly stuffing it with his own crowd and his own tastes, to Ford's partly amused, partly genuine horror on return. The apprenticeship cut both ways: Ford gave Hemingway pages and standing; Hemingway repaid him, years later, with one of the crueler portraits in A Moveable Feast. Editing the young, Ford might have observed, is a form of arming them.

The end was bookkeeping, not aesthetics. John Quinn died in July 1924, the funding died with him, and the December issue was the last. But the magazine's afterlife argues that longevity is overrated: its twelve issues form a nearly complete map of where English-language literature was headed, and in 1959 an American editor, Joseph McCrindle, founded a new Transatlantic Review purely to honor the name. Few failures have ever succeeded so completely.