Harking Back to the Future / Features / Untitled Books

"It's only the first issue and it's clearly run by clever people, so it should develop more of its own voice. Besides, any magazine that's attempting Paris Review-like emulation has my full support, and there is some enjoyable stuff here."

Harking Back to the Future

Reinvention and respect for the past inform the latest crop of literary and culture magazines, says Anna Goodall.

Why start a magazine in the twenty-first century? Especially why start a literary magazine? It's a crowded marketplace, and with the digital explosion, it's evermore complex and harder to turn a profit. Having run one myself for five years and having only recently thrown in the towel I'm both bemused by my previous, and others' current, devotion to the task, and at the same time can't help but see the question as purely rhetorical. Something akin to: why write a book? Or, why do anything creative at all?

Asked to consider the current crop of new literary and culture magazines, the theme that was quick to emerge was editors taking inspiration from print magazines of the past; trying to reignite the emphasis on quality writing and quality production values whilst capturing the attention and pounds sterling of the internet-fixated, social-networking-obsessed, instant-news generation to whom printed magazines needs must be objet d'art. So how do they fare?

PORT, 'the intelligent magazine for men', was launched this spring to much fanfare. The editor Dan Crowe, founder of Zembla and literary editor for AnOther Magazine, is both well connected and an experienced hand. Issue 1 of his and his team's latest adventures in print features Daniel Day-Lewis (a black and white portrait of whom adorns the cover) in an extended piece about daily life in Gaza, a story from Will Self, and an open letter by Samantha Morton, to name but a few of the big names involved. It's a large format, beautifully designed glossy affair with high-end adverts and a luxurious feel (though it's worth saying that despite the large format, it's easy to read and pleasant to hold, so form does not restrict reading of content).

All content is available online and via an iPad app, but the printed magazine is promoted as 'a collector's item in its own right'. (Though personally I'm getting slightly sick of being told magazines are collectors' items on the basis of nothing.) Whilst presenting men's fashion, lifestyle, and design in big glossy spreads, the magazine has a more serious raison d'être - to bring back 'the grand extended magazine interviews of the mid-60s.'

And there are certainly some interesting pieces here - one might wonder why it has to be a Hollywood actor reporting on Palestine, but this ungenerous thought becomes irrelevant when you read the piece. It's perhaps not as balanced as the strictest reportage should be, but it's a moving, well-written piece and Day-Lewis effectively conveys the genuine shock he feels on encountering day-to-day life in the Gaza Strip.

Then there's comment from Jon Snow on journalism's 'golden age', Nathaniel Rich on the strangeness of New Orleans post-Katrina, and an insightful piece about coming to terms with her American identity by global-conflict journalist, Janine di Giovanni. The documentary photos are absorbing, and big issues are covered - war, global warming, commerce, social change.

But, despite this, the journalism still feels a little light - the articles each take about five minutes to read. There is nothing especially in-depth apart from Day-Lewis's report, as if the editors, despite their claims, are unwilling to truly test the reader's attention span with anything too lengthy or intellectually engaging. It gives a pleasant feeling of informative quality, but shifts away from really challenging the reader.

That said, it's a good read - a starting place for ideas, perhaps, rather than somewhere they are fully explored, but enjoyable all the same. And it does well to fulfil its self-defined brief of placing things into a cultural context whilst not alienating a more mainstream reader.

Returning to the more strictly literary side of things, The White Review, which launched in early February, is a new printed literary quarterly that very specifically draws its inspiration from history: La Revue Blanche - a Parisian magazine of the late nineteenth-century. This fin de siècle publication was an avant-garde literary and art magazine with liberal political views whose extraordinary roster of contributors included Apollinaire, Debussy, Toulouse Lautrec and Tolstoy.

As this unashamedly direct reference point may suggest, there is something a little earnestly over-intellectual about TWR, something too self-conscious. A feeling further cemented by their explanation in the editorial that their interviews 'give well-known figures in the arts the opportunity to talk about their work'. Considering the two key interviewees for issue 1 are Tom McCarthy and Paula Rego, one feels that's a little strong. Tom McCarthy, for example, has been talking endlessly (and absolutely brilliantly) about his work in the press for the past year.

Some of the writing, too, gives a sense of not being able to fulfil its own literary pretensions, it's desire to be as good as, say, The Paris Review - the Tom McCarthy interview is entirely carried by the author's own brilliance, whilst some of the other feature and essay writing feels a little forced and imitative, a little overly dense for what it's actually saying.

But it's only the first issue and it's clearly run by clever people, so it should develop more of its own voice. Besides, any magazine that's attempting Paris Review-like emulation has my full support, and there is some enjoyable stuff here.

For a start it's the most beautifully designed of all the new magazines I'm considering (and their website is also the best): the photography is gorgeous, the font and typesetting lovely, and I was rather fond of the rich marbled inlay and accompanying bookmark. The Rego interview was stimulatingly blunt, Tom McCarthy was a dazzling and inspirational as ever, and, like all good new magazines should do, this issue introduced me to a new writer I'd never heard of but am now keen to follow.

D.W. Wilson's whimsical 'On the Notoriously Overrated Powers of Voice in Fiction, or How to Fail at Talking to Pretty Girls' is infused with the cleverness and wit the rest of the magazine sometimes lacks. Part-essay, part-fictional imagining of a conversation with a girl on whom our humble narrator has a 'massive crush', it deftly and comically illuminates the complex, multi-layered nature of the much-bandied around idea of fictional 'voice', whilst using it as an opportunity for some gentle self-lampooning and simultaneously telling a good story - writing despite itself, as it were.

Having 'discovered' this writer - his short story collection is being published by Hamish Hamilton Canada this year and a novel is on the way - it was satisfying to also find him appearing in The Drawbridge. Not a magazine searching out inspiration from past glories as far as I know, but one that has recently reinvented itself from the newspaper-format short journal it adopted for its launch five years ago, to a weighty, book-sized quarterly. Funnily enough Wilson's straight fiction story, whilst drawing on similar material, is not as successful as his essay... but this young writer is definitely one to watch.

Meanwhile, after the youthful seriousness of TWR, The Drawbridge provides a welcome feeling of more experienced editorial hands with less to prove. The content is all narrative prose of one kind or another, with short fiction dominant. Despite showcasing such different writers as Italo Calvino, Tishi Doshani, George Szirtes and Jules Renard, the issue's loose theme of 'Flight' succeeds in building connections and establishes a unifying tone which threatens to grow monotonous at times, but is ultimately satisfying for the reader.

Particular highlights include a story by Barry McKinley, an Irish writer who is another to keep an eye on. He's prolific at the moment, and a really interesting writer. 'In the line of fire' is a brilliant short evocation of a boy caught up in The Troubles via a moment of violence that unleashes and reveals sinister but inevitable patterns in his young life.

There's an extract from David Vann's stunning first novel, Caribou Island, and a great contribution by David Means, and although some stories by established authors don't work so well, they're invariably enjoyable. I very much liked the lead non-fiction piece by Mario Vargas Llosa on how he lost his fear of flying... by reading a good book, of course. It's also refreshing that The Drawbridge has always published work by dead authors and artists alongside the living as if there is no difference; their written words and images are as alive in the moment without need of explanation or reverence.

The high production values, stunning photos and a cool matt finish make it a very attractive object, and it's a good size - on the heavy side, but easy to read and portable - with charming sketches of the authors beside each story. On their infrequently updated website (more info between issues, please!) they claim the magazine is: 'an independent quarterly of thought, wit and reflection giving equal focus to literature and visual arts.' I think they may win the prize for coming closest to their mission statement, though the uppish cover price may put some punters off from discovering this.

Finally, Night & Day is another new literary publication that has clear links to the past, whilst attempting to bring the literary journal into the twenty-first century. Run by two young editors at Chatto & Windus and Jonathan Cape - Parisa Ebrahimi and Tom Avery, respectively - the first issue's theme is 'Reinvention'.

And this is direct reinvention: Night & Day was first born in 1937 as a short-lived weekly periodical published by Chatto & Windus and edited by Graham Greene. Greene famously both persuaded great writers to contribute on an array of unusual subjects - a brief history by Jeremy Lewis in the reincarnated first issue recounts 'Louis MacNeice covered the activities of the Kennel Club... the serious-minded Herbert Read... revealed unexpected comic gifts as a reviewer of detective novels', Evelyn Waugh reviewed many odd titles, whilst contributions by H.E. Bates, Nancy Mitford and Henry Miller 'were declined'.

Greene famously got himself into libellous difficulties over his article in N&D about Shirley Temple in which he described her 'dubious coquetry' suggesting she was intended to be sexually desirable to adult males. To toe the line was not on this publication's agenda.

The new version, which was officially launched on March 24, is a quarterly and digital only, (though a limited edition print version was made to commemorate the first issue) and available to read online, print as a pdf, or download to iPhones and other smart phones, all for free.

With such a prestigious, if short-lived, history to emulate, Night & Day mark II suffers a little from its harking back to the past. The tone is a little too reverential, and some of the features border on the pretentious. Perhaps they should consider that whilst Greene was never much known for his sense of humour, his commissioning of articles and editorial style would always show irreverence for the format and a disdain for the conventional.

In issue 1 a conversation between novelists Ali Smith and Chloe Aridjis is a little smug, as they discuss being 'prestidigitators'. They may be conjuring verbal tricks here, but it's not too entertaining. Take Aridjis's answer to Smith's first questions 'Does plot thicken?' to which she responds:

"Most of the time yes, like the woods - the reader enters more deeply, the trees gather round... One robber becomes three, an abandoned house appears, the window opens. More trees. Branches, twigs, splinters."

At another point, Smith recounts a sleight of hand by a small girl when she was holiday on the Greek islands: 'I was in awe of being robbed. It was the opposite of crudeness. It felt like magic. I actually felt bad about cancelling those travellers' cheques.' But you did cancel them, right?

And though I appreciated his writing style in a way, there are further opportunities for entries to Pseuds Corner when the poet Paul Batchelor discusses his translation of Rilke's French poems:

"[A]n image cluster that he might, writing in German, have captured in a single compacted dazzle of contradiction is now parcelled out in sequences. The prism of an alien language refracts the light beam into a spectrum."

However, with the quality of contributors on offer there is some of the good stuff too. As a bookseller, I absolutely enjoyed the anonymous 'At the Coalface - Tales from Modern Bookselling' piece. I'm seriously thinking of getting the slogan 'Books are not T-shirts' put on a T-shirt! And Adam Thorpe's piece about translating Madame Bovary is wonderful, for me the highlight - a real insight into the precarious, painstaking but ultimately rewarding process. Other notable contributions come from poet Roddy Lumsden as he discusses the Eric Gregory Award and the writer Karen Russell's opening contribution to 'Writers' Habits'.

As with TWR there's loads of potential here. The editors just need to think about trying to entertain their readers rather than offering a closed shop of 'in' writers talking to and for each other - especially if they want to reach a wider audience, which presumably is the point for a publisher-sponsored free endeavour. There's always room for wit and entertainment, and reverence doesn't translate well on to the page.

So, whilst the idea of taking inspiration from the glorious literary and journalistic past is a good one, editors need to have the confidence and a little touch of arrogance that they can do it better: the past is a foreign country that it is richly rewarding to reconsider and be inspired by, but against all the odds, the future is looking very rich and exciting. New magazines need to reflect this with intelligence, humour and wit.

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PORT - published quarterly; £6.

The White Review - published quarterly; £12.

The Drawbridge - published quarterly; £14.50.

Night & Day - published quarterly; online only, FREE.

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Thursday, 21 April, 2011