Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Paris in the 1920's. Mention the place, and the period, to anyone interested in 20th Century literature and they will almost certainly think of the Expatriates, Gertrude Stein's famous "Lost Generation", the fast-living, hard-drinking crowd immortalised by Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, who spent their days writing and their nights in the Montparnasse bars. Well, some of them may have done, but my own experience has been that nights spent drinking invariably result in days recovering from hangovers and one's writing tends to get neglected. Douglas Goldring, reminiscing about the 1920's, once said of writers, "The harassing nature of their work, and the physical and mental toil which it involves, discourages disorderly living and prolonged over-indulgence in alcohol."

Of course, some writers do drink to excess, and there's perhaps a fair amount of truth in the maxim "all writers are drinkers" which was used by Jimmy Charters, the famous barman, as a chapter heading in his memoirs of the 1920's. It's always best to remember, however, that a couple of heavy nights in print hardly sustain a legend of several years of alcoholic indulgence.

The interesting thing is that the handful of writers who did perhaps come closest to the popular conception of the Expatriate are now almost unknown, except to students of the period. When most of us think of Paris we think of Hemingway, Stein, Joyce, Pound, and the others who have since been accepted as major literary figures. They were not a "lost generation", in fact they knew precisely where they were going and they eventually got there. But who reads Robert McAlmon or Ernest Walsh or John Herrmann anymore?

McAlmon, it's true, is not completely forgotten. Professor Robert E. Knoll wrote a short study of his life and writings a few years ago, and later edited a selection of McAlmon's prose. And surprisingly enough an American paperback publisher issued a thin volume containing four of McAlmon's best stories, though the cover and the title of the book had obviously been designed to appeal to an audience which was hardly likely to know, or care, who McAlmon was. These were all American publications, however, and with the exception of the paperback, had a limited circulation.

McAlmon's life was almost a complete working-out of the real Expatriate experience. He was born in the American middle-west in 1896 and after a somewhat scrappy and undistinguished academic career he drifted to New York and became involved in the literary life of Greenwich Village. He had already published in Harriet Monroe's famous magazine Poetry, and he soon teamed up with William Carlos Williams and founded Contact, a publication which, in its short lifetime, featured many young American moderns in its pages. A marriage of convenience took McAlmon to London where a small volume of his poems was published by the Egoist Press, but his restlessness, and his boredom with the English literary scene, eventually forced him to move to Paris. With money given to him by his wife's family he started Contact Press.

He published quite a few of his own books in the Contact series, but it should not be forgotten that he also made available work by Pound, Stein, Hemingway, and Carlos Williams, and this at a time when commercial publishers were not interested in these writers. "The Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers", edited and published by McAlmon in 1925, had work by Ford Maddox Ford, Djuna Barnes, Edith Sitwell, Mary Butts, and others, and is surely an example of McAlmon's awareness of the current trends. He made it his business to know the new writers. He was friendly with James Joyce and Ezra Pound, met Morley Callaghan when the Canadian author spent a summer in Paris, and in fact nearly every autobiography by a writer active during that period contains a reference to McAlmon. He crops up in fictional guise in more than one novel or short-story. Sisley Huddleston's 'Mr. Paname', a now-forgotten 1926 novel which was, to quote the jacket, "a charming romance laid against the Bohemian background of the Latin Quarter of Paris", contains references to a writer by the name of Bob MacIntosh.

If McAlmon's activities as a publisher, personality, and general public-relations man for the new literature, do not earn him a place in the literary histories, his own writing should. It is extremely rough in places and he was reputed never to have been interested in re-writing, but to read it now is to discover a toughness, and honesty, born of a desire to set down things as he had experienced them. He hadn't the patience to work at his craft like Hemingway did, and James Joyce probably summed up his problem when he suggested the title, A Hasty Bunch, for McAlmon's first collection of short-stories. He was once described as "a tubercular bantam with sharp, querulous hair and a thin, exasperated mouth", and the exasperation comes through in his writing and is no doubt responsible for its varying quality.

The central character, or the narrator, of a McAlmon story, or novel, is always McAlmon himself, a heavy-drinking, easily-irritated drifer who constantly kicks against middle-class standards, in particular those which we would now refer to as being formed under the influence of the White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant ethos. In 'Deracinated Encounters', a typical formless McAlmon piece, Alaric, the American, is sitting in a bar when he overhears a young Egyptian defending the English. The drink, and his natural irritability, force Alaric to intervene in the conversation. 'I don't get why you so strongly defend England, her public-school system, and her snob-class attitudes", he says, "From what I gather you had a unhappy time going to school there. Damn them, with their games, and the kind of patronising that is bred into them at the schools. Nothing wrong with your country. Why are you so sold on the inherent rightness of the English thing?".

To my mind his best work is to be found in the small collection which he rightly sub-titled Grim Fairy Tales. The long story, 'Distinguished Air', set in Berlin, and with a cast of pimps, dope pedlers, homosexuals, and petty crooks, is blunt and savage in its picture of a corrupt and decaying society. A further story, 'Miss Knight', would seem to be a forerunner of the work of John Rechy in its grasp of the language and customs of the homosexual underworld. McAlmon's writing in these pieces has a control, and incisiveness, which is often lacking in many of his stories and novels.

McAlmon was sometimes cynical and often bitter. He constantly harked back to his homeland in his writings, but was unable to stay there for more than a few months at a time whenever he returned. Towards the end of the 1920's, when the majority of the Expatriates had returned home, McAlmon was still in Europe, and although he did eventually spend some months in Mexico and the American southwest he soon drifted back to Paris. He was still writing and his stories and poems were published in the well-known magazines of the day and in such anthologies as The Best American Short Stories, an annual publication which collected the finest work from the contemporary journals.

As the political emphasis of the 1930's became more apparent McAlmon's work was less in demand, and his last magazine appearance was in 1935. A book of his poems was published in the U.S.A. in 1937, and his autobiography, ironically called Being Geniuses Together, appeared in this country in 1938. Neither book had much success, and McAlmon took to drinking more and more. The fast life of the 1920's, as exemplified in the Berlin stories, had taken its toll, and when he returned to the U.S.A. at the start of the war in Europe he was a sick man. He moved to the dry deserts of the south-west and, after years of obscurity, died there in the middle-1950's, a lonely, embittered old man, forgotten by all but a few of the people he'd helped make famous.

The conflicting desires for experience and security, for a freedom from domestic ties and yet a bond with a background to which he could relate, were strong in McAlmon. He came from a young, exciting country, and yet felt that it was jaded and backward in many ways. As an individual he summed himself up best. When told that someone had described him as having "a genius for life", he replied, "if despair, a capacity for indifference, long and heavy spells of ennui which takes bottles of strong drink to cure, and a gergarious but not altogether loving nature, is a 'genius for life', I have it".

There was, in 1927, an interesting issue of This Quarter, one of the most dynamic of all the Expatriate magazines, which was dedicated to Ernest Walsh and also included work by McAlmon and John Herrmann. Walsh, a tubercular poet, who knew he was dying when he came to Europe, and who eventually passed away in 1926 in Monte Carlo, wrote such lines as"I promise you/Every thought of me shall be/Cognac to your blood/Every thought of me/shall be fire to you/I who am dead shall warm you and urge you". Scme of his poetry was written in a kind of Chaucerian English which was obviously an attempt to get the language to approximate the sound of his voice. Whatever he did, though, either writing poetry or editing This Quarter he seems to have invested it with some of the urge to burn brightly for a time which he, as a dying man, must have felt.

Walsh was, in a way, spared the kind of obscurity which overtook McAlmon, but John Herrmann appears to have suffered the latter's fate. His novel, What Happened, had been published in the Contact series and, like much of McAlmon's work, it dealt with life as lived in the American middle-west. Herrmann contributed to transition, Blues, and other Expatriate magazines, but actually spent little time in Paris. He married the journalist and novelist, Josephine Herbst, in the middle-1920's, and after returning to the U.S.A. became involved with the growing left-wing literary movement. He was present in the role of observer at the Second World Conference Of Revolutionary Writers, held at Zharkov in the Ukraine in 1930, and in 1932 his novelette, "The Big Short Trip", published in Scribners Magazine, earned him not only a 5,000 dollar prize, but also a place in later critical studies of American radical literature.

He seems to have drifted off the literary scene in the middle-1930's, and it is said that he later peddled venetian blinds for a living in New Orleans. It's ironical that Herrmann, in his article "The New Multitudes", referred to Robert McAlmon as being 'on the verge of greatness', and that McAlmon showed his enthusiasm for Herrmann's work by publishing his novel. Neither of them successfully outlived the 1920s and both eventually had to take jobs which, if there wasn't a touch of the ludicrous about them, would make them appear pathetic. Herrmann sold his venetian blinds and McAlmon, after his return to the U.S.A., worked in a surgical-goods supply house selling trusses. As Edward Dahlberg said, "What an odd and bawdy occupation for a magnificent and lewd nature". Ernest Walsh at least escaped the jokes which fate seem'n ly plays on the forgotten.

McAlmon, Walsh, and Herrmann, were not great writers, but they were honest, and it may be this honesty, the desire to set down without frills what they knew and felt about their time, which has been their downfall. Perhaps they were too honest? They were not romantics like Hemingway, nor did they go in for the over-publicised protest of the Dadaists. McAlmon, for example, thought the Dadaists were mainly phoneys, and he made no bones about saying so. And yet he is forgotten and the Dadaists have books written about them. One cannot help thinking that we prefer them because we know they offer no real threat, whereas McAlmon's personal, and almost painful, bluntness disturbs us. Edward Dahlberg summed it up best when he said of McAlmon and, by implication of the others, "We tolerate so many mediocrities but cannot forgive an unusual man. One should save one's stones for the mercenaries of letters, and not cast them at a broken Ishmael of truth".