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The early days of the Transatlantic Review, before it became apparent that by no conceivable chance could it be made to pay, were great fun.1
Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible have argued: 'The story of modernism in magazines is a tale of complex entanglements between high art and intellectual thought, mass culture, and the commercial marketplace.'2 In this chapter I attempt to disentangle some of these threads in relation to the history of the transatlantic review. Unfortunately, much of the material that would aid a comprehensive study of the transatlantic was lost in a fire in 1929 at the offices of Duckworth, the English publisher. Subsequently, further damage was done to whatever records survived by enemy action in 1942 and by another fire in 1953.3
Ford Madox Ford's second attempt to edit a magazine resulted, of course, in the transatlantic review, a venture that is usually supposed to have not quite matched his success with the English Review. The origins of the magazine are not entirely clear, but it seems that Ford responded to a suggestion of his brother, Oliver Madox Hueffer, who was then living in Paris.4 In 1923 Ford had praised Harold Monro's Chapbook (he was then living in Monro's house in the South of France), so he may already have been thinking of editing a magazine again. By the early twenties the idea of the modernist magazine had received a boost by the arrival in Europe of the 'Lost Generation' writers, eager to experience life and to experiment with literature. Titles such as Gargoyle (1921-2), edited by Arthur Moss, Secession (1922-4), edited by Gorham Munson and Matthew Josephson, and Broom (1921-4), edited by Harold Loeb, had begun to appear; and in many ways these publications looked back to the pioneer work done by Ford in producing the English Review. Ezra Pound seems to have encouraged the new project from the outset. However, it is unlikely that anything would have resulted if it had not been for the financial encouragement provided by John Quinn, the American lawyer and patron of the arts. Ford had some money to invest, having recently sold his former Sussex home, Cooper's Cottage. These beginnings, though providing the encouragement necessity to turn an idea into a reality, also...