Dr. Peter Lowe

For me, there is something really enjoyable about finding, and getting started in, a new area of interest.  It’s quite possibly more enjoyable than actually doing anything with the material you accumulate, as if the curiosity itself were the really important thing.  I like that sense of surveying what seems to be a still-expanding horizon as new names and titles are added to your list of ‘things to follow up’ and you begin to get a sense of the terrain you’ve begun to explore.  It’s like the first year of a PhD, but without the angst.  Perhaps there’s something to be written up here, you think; conscious that in a work sense ‘research’ takes on significance if it produces something, particularly if there is an expectation as part of your professional life that it really ought to do so.  Or perhaps there isn’t an article to be written, because plenty of other people have (unknown to you) been here already.  Perhaps what matters more than thinking solely in terms of ‘output’ is the moment when you come across something about which you know very little, and realise that it’s something about which you would like to know a lot more.

These moments come and go, and not all of them produce anything concrete or, indeed, turn out to be quite as fascinating as they seemed at first sight.  Right now, though, I find myself particularly interested in 1930s literary magazines and periodicals.  More specifically, in the various iterations of New Writing (and Penguin New Writing)and Horizon that appeared in the years from 1936 to 1950. 

Many of the contributors to these are well-known names: from Auden, Spender, and Isherwood to Sartre, Brecht, and Pasternak.  Others, however, are new discoveries to me – short story writers or poets drawn to write about the social and economic conditions of the thirties, or the upheavals or wartime.  And behind these magazines are the editors and publishers: John Lehmann and Cyril Connolly working to devise and constantly refine their offering while, at various times, Allen Lane’s Penguin Books and the Hogarth Press produce the texts themselves.

It was Lehmann’s dealings with the Hogarth Press, his friendship with Julian Bell, and his intersection with Bloomsbury that first drew me in here.  I was intrigued by the brief crossing of what seemed like two very different cultural currents – Bloomsbury’s aestheticism and the more politically committed voices of the Thirties poets – in the anthologies New Signatures and New Country that Lehmann convinced Leonard and Virginia Woolf to publish in 1932.  From there, I learned of his New Writing venture, and of its move from Lawrence & Wishart to the Hogarth Press in 1938.  In all, only eight of these book-length, hardback anthologies appeared between 1936 and 1939 but the range of material included is fascinating, both as a record of the literature of the time, and of the concerns of writers and readers as the “low dishonest decade” (in Auden’s later words) worked its way towards the Second World War.  I can only imagine what it might have felt like to pick up the latest of these volumes, with its brightly-coloured jacket and list of contributors, when they were first published.

Out of this interest I learned of Lehmann’s 1940 arrangement with Penguin Books (on account of the significantly greater access to paper than Lane’s business enjoyed) and the success of Penguin New Writing both in wartime and beyond.  These 140-page paperbacks sold upwards of 80,000 copies a month and proved such a success with readers and other writers with their blend of fiction, poetry, reportage, and social commentary.  And alongside this runaway success there stood Lehmann’s ongoing hardbacks for the Hogarth Press, Folios of New Writing and later New Writing and Daylight – the latter keeping a valuable European dimension alive for a British reading public in wartime.  From these I learned of Horizon, and Cyril Connolly’s belief that a magazine of essays, art criticism, poems, and reproductions of modern paintings was not only viable but important in the midst of a world war and in the work of rebuilding afterwards.  None of these publications lasted into the 1950s, but in many ways they anticipated and helped prepare the intellectual ground for much of British post-war cultural life.

I had known of these magazines before, but I had certainly never thought about them at any length.  Now, with a range of autobiographical works, critical studies, and anthologised collections to work with, I’m enjoying finding out much more, both about the magazines and the people who made them what they were.  People who believed in the value of literary activity in a world that must so often have seemed destined for ruin, and who maintained a conviction that there was a reading public out there in need of new material and new ideas.  My interest is raised here, I think, by the high hopes Lehmann, Connolly, and others had for their ventures, and the undoubted successes they found in the least auspicious of circumstances.

Having access to many of these magazines, either online or from the library, has made it easier to move the project along.   The frequency with which I find myself at the library desk, though, while staff work out how to issue books to me that haven’t left the building since the 1990s and don’t show up on the electronic system suggests that it’s been a while since anyone else has followed some of these lines of enquiry!  And, of course, there is the irresistible temptation to shop around online to see if any of these books or magazines might still be available and within my budget.  A blend of library visits and mornings spent waiting to see if a padded envelope has arrived in the post certainly gives one a good sense of a project gaining momentum, and a growing pile of things to read.

Is it a research project?  I wouldn’t want to say right now.  But it’s proving to be a very enjoyable time, surveying and getting a sense of a subject about which I look forward to learning a lot more.  And that blend of interest and promise is always a nice thing to have.