James Dempsey: With N.E. roots, The Dial became a Modernist monument

The first edition of the Modernist version of The Dial

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WORCESTER 

 When Scofield Thayer (picture at bottom) and James Sibley Watson put out their first issue of a radically restructured Dial magazine, at the beginning of 1920, the literati were unimpressed and  indeed acidly disdainful. Ezra Pound called it “one of those mortuaries for the entombment of dead fecal mentality.” “It is very dull,” said T.S. Eliot, “just an imitation of The Atlantic Monthly with a few atrocious drawings reproduced.”

Those drawings were by poet and painter E.E. Cummings, who came in for more than his fair share of bashing. Robert Hillyer mocked his sketches of “trollops with their limbs spread wide apart” as well as the seven “awful” Cummings poems in the same issue, which included the now much-anthologized “Buffalo Bill’’.

“A pink thread of juvenility runs through it,” sniffed poet Conrad Aiken.

Be that as it may, writers were soon falling over each other in an undignified rush to get their work into the pages of this little magazine. All the above-mentioned critics appeared in The Dial in its first year and frequently thereafter, and the magazine went on to become arguably the most important of the magazines to promote and discuss those creative works that would come to be referred to, for better or worse, as “Modernist.”

The Dial published the works of writers and  visual artists from 33 countries, many for the first time. Its scoops included T.S. Eliot's “The Waste Land’’ and "The Hollow Men"; E.E. Cummings's "in Just-"; W.B. Yeats's "The Second Coming"; Marianne Moore's "An Octopus"; Ezra Pound's “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”;  William Carlos Williams's "Paterson"; the first English translation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice; Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” and many others. The magazine also showcased such visual artists as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Gustav Klimt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Gaston Lachaise and Egon Schiele, often bringing their work before a wide public for the first time. Its regular correspondents included such luminaries of the period  as Eliot, Pound, Thomas Mann and Maxim Gorki. Criticism was provided by Edmund Wilson, Van Wyck Brooks and Gilbert Seldes. Philosophers Bertrand Russell and George Santayana were frequent contributors.

Scofield Thayer

Those who appeared on the contents page — always listed on the cover -- included 11 Nobel and 24 Pulitzer prize-winners, as well as five U.S. Poet Laureates. And the journal’s  particular emphasis on modern visual art was important  in creating New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Thayer, Watson and their editors, including Gilbert Seldes, Alyse Gregory and Marianne Moore, were undoubtedly judicious and far-sighted in their tastes. From this age of great magazines, Malcolm Cowley singled out The Dial under Thayer as “the best magazine of the arts that we have had in this country.”

Thayer and Watson knew exactly what kind of magazine they wanted. They kept the book-review section from the old Dial, but they dumped the politics and added art, fiction, essays and much more poetry. The goals were lofty: Thayer wanted to print what he felt was ahead of, and even outside of, its time, material that “would otherwise have to wait years for publication,” as well as work struggling to find an audience and that “would not be acceptable elsewhere.” But he was also astute enough to realize that the audience for such, though enthusiastic, was small. Further, he saw no reason to exclude from the magazine established authors who were still producing important work. W.B. Yeats and Joseph Conrad were not yet “wholly dead,” he drolly pointed out.

Throughout its almost 10 years of existence, the avant-garde persistently criticized the magazine for being too staid, and old-school aesthetes denounced it for being too modern. This careful balancing of material, though, was in fact one of the aims of The Dial -- to promote and validate the work of younger writers and artists by their proximity to those who had more secure reputations. This leveling carried over into the fees paid by the magazine: Rates for all contributors, famous or not, were the same.

By  its editors cannily blending the avant-garde with excellent but more established forms of visual art and literature, The Dial was transformed from a ploddingly progressive publication into a must-read for writers and artists of all stripes.  

Thayer and Watson’s Dial was based in New York, but its New England pedigree was thorough. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Concord essayist, philosopher and poet, launched the journal in 1840 as an outlet for Transcendentalist writing. Emerson, of Concord, Mass., hired the brilliant Margaret Fuller of Cambridge to help edit the magazine at $200 a year, a salary she never received. Amos Bronson Alcott called it “a free journal for the soul.’’

By the time that Emerson ended the magazine, in 1844, it had published Emerson, Fuller, John Sullivan Dwight, George Ripley, Samuel Gray Ward, William Ellery Channing, Frederic Henry Hedge, James Russell Lowell and Henry David Thoreau.  In 1860, minister, abolitionist and Harvard graduate Moncure Daniel Conway launched a new version in Cincinnati. Conway managed to win Emerson’s blessing for the enterprise but was never able to persuade him to write for the magazine. It ceased publication after a year. Francis Fisher Browne, who was born in South Halifax, Vt., had more success with his Chicago Dial, which he started in 1880. It was slowly transformed from a somewhat conservative and apolitical journal into a Midwestern redoubt of culture and progressive politics. Browne had no college education. After high school, in 1862 he enlisted in the Forty-sixth Massachusetts Volunteers, which fought at the battles of Kinston, Whitehall and Goldsboro.

Apart from Watson, who was from Rochester, N.Y., all the above-named principals of the magazine, from Emerson on, were born in New England. (Thayer was a native of Worcester.) Most, including Watson, attended Harvard. Fuller, who in her time was considered the best-read person in New England, was the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College.

Little magazines have usually faced many threats to their existence, one of the main ones being lack of capital. For The Dial, this was never a problem. Thayer and Watson didn’t expect to make a profit or even to break even, and they constantly raided their personal fortunes to shovel money into the enterprise. Some years it cost them as much as $100,000, a not-so-small sum at the time. (By contrast, the first issue of William Carlos Williams’s Contact was run off on a donated mimeograph machine.) The principals of The Dial were by no means profligate with money—Thayer was notorious for quibbling about bills with tradesmen and others—but they both saw the journal as essentially coming under an umbrella of patronage. He bought the works of young artists, sent money to penurious writers  -- James Joyce received $700 -- and established the annual Dial Award, a $2,000 gift for “service to letters”. And on some matters, expenses were never spared. When W.B. Yeats asked if he might change a line in “Leda and the Swan” after the issue had been sent to the printer’s, Thayer ordered the magazine containing the poem to be pulped and reprinted.

Nor did Thayer’s largesse stop there. E. E. Cummings was an ongoing charitable project, receiving $1,000 from Thayer to write a single poem, in addition to being paid for frequent contributions to the magazine, and even being given money to squire Thayer’s wife, Elaine, around New York City. (Soon after his marriage, Thayer became an acolyte of the Free Love movement and happily shared his wife, who had a child by Cummings, but that’s story for another time.)

Censorship was another threat. During the politically fraught times  during and after The Great War and the Russian Revolution, the owners, editors, staff writers and contributors at little magazines, which  tended to be politically and artistically radical,  constantly ran the risk of being charged with everything from sedition to obscenity. In 1917, for example, staff members of The Masses were charged with violating the Espionage Act. They were eventually acquitted after two trials, but the magazine ceased publication. The editors of The Little Review famously were taken to court in 1922 and found guilty for publishing the allegedly obscene “Nausicaa” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a decision that essentially banned the book in the United States.

The Dial navigated these tricky shoals of censorship by knowing just how far the envelope could be pushed without putting the magazine’s future at risk. The nervous business manager, Lincoln MacVeagh, constantly begged Thayer not to publish risqué art, which weakened sales on newsstands. When book publisher Henry Holt saw in The Dial a photograph of Gleb Derujinsky’s sculpture of Leda being ravished by a cygnified Zeus, he gasped “Why, it’s coitus” and promptly canceled his advertising in The Dial. And when John R. Sumner, head of The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, took umbrage at an article in the magazine attacking censorship, he was invited to submit a rebuttal. This he did in July 1921, and his piece made a very poor case, attacking “people in this country who like to bring forward something ‘foreign’ and hold it forth as an example of the way things should be done over here.’” The editors of that issue also made their own arch point by bookending Sumner’s piece with a George Moore sonnet in French and a Gaston Lachaise drawing of a naked and very buxom woman. At times, though, Thayer chose discretion over bravery; he vetoed reproduction of a painting by Georgia O’Keeffe as “commercially suicidal.” In some editorial decisions there was a cocking of the snoot at the authorities and in others the desire to ensure the future of the magazine. Thayer walked the line perfectly.

Thayer and Watson, both “Harvard men” from wealthy families, often clashed in their tastes. Thayer grew to abhor the productions of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, while Watson was a great champion of both. Thayer was strongly inclined toward the  visual art and literature of Germany and Austria, while Watson was a thoroughgoing Francophile. Thayer’s dislike of his former friend T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” almost cost The Dial the first American publication of what would become the poem of the century, and it took all the diplomacy of Watson and the promise of the $2,000 Dial Award and other considerations to entice Eliot back on board. Other disagreements were often settled by veto, each man being allowed a single unchallenged rejection per issue. On a couple of occasions, Thayer threatened to step down from the magazine, but the two hung in together for six years before the 1926 mental breakdown that caused Thayer to leave the magazine and withdraw from public life.  The Dial continued to publish until 1929, thus roughly  bookending that miraculous decade of  Modernism.

Thayer retired from the magazine and largely from public life in 1926. He had always been eccentric and suspicious of the people around him, but his mental condition deteriorated sharply in the mid-1920s, filling him with paranoia and a dread of being alone. He was eventually institutionalized and declared “an insane person”. For the rest of his long life (he died in 1982 at 92) he traveled among his homes with a nurse and servants.

Thayer had aspirations to be a poet, and constantly grumbled that his work on The Dial was preventing him from writing. But a century after he and Watson entered publishing, it is the magazine for which he is, and will always be, remembered.

James Dempsey, the author of The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer,  is an essayist, novelist and a writing teacher at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.