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• W4245536216 abstract "In January 1929, Sibley Watson came to the Dial offices to tell Marianne Moore that the magazine was closing. Launched by Watson and Scofield Thayer in 1920, the Dial played a significant role in the development of literary modernism. Most famously known for its landmark publication of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in 1922, the Dial was “one of the great tastemakers of the twentieth century,” as Adam McKible has shown.1 But, despite its considerable influence and prestige, the magazine was never profitable. Finally forced to relinquish this financial burden, Thayer and Watson decided that the magazine's last issue would be in July. Moore handled the news with characteristic grace. She thanked Thayer and Watson for providing her with some of the most “rewarding” work of her career, and she wrote to her brother, Warner Moore, to reassure him that she would be fine: “Any powers I have are not lessened by the discontinuing of the Dial. In fact I owe a prodigious amount to what its name has transferred to me of public confidence.”2There is something heartbreaking about this brief vignette, which arrives near the end of Victoria Bazin's Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine. “Miss Moore,” as she was widely known, served as the magazine's editor from April 1925 until its demise in July 1929. In this capacity, she wielded considerable literary and cultural authority. But Moore's career demonstrates the gendered arc of editorial work and modernist trajectories. Where Eliot's position as editor of the Criterion led to prestige and professional opportunity, the same doors did not open for Moore. Bazin astutely identifies the gendered dynamics that shaped Moore's editorial career and, furthermore, uncovers some of her subtle and collaborative accomplishments as a periodical editor, treating these as a crucial part of her literary career rather than a footnote to her poetry.Modernism Edited provides a richly detailed and nuanced reconsideration of Moore's work as editor of the Dial. By revisiting this late chapter in the magazine's history, Bazin challenges the prevailing critical assessment that the Dial peaked in its early years when Ezra Pound exercised some editorial control over it. According to Bazin, suspicions regarding Moore's editorial judgments and influence over the magazine have been fueled by gender bias. Mocked for her “feminine fussiness,” Moore, like Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine, was frequently cast as an enemy of the new and implicitly masculine forms of modernist experimentation (58). Hart Crane, for instance, famously derided the two editors as “hysterical virgins” and Pound similarly remarked upon Moore's “spinsterly aversions” (52). As Bazin shows, “A gendered critical discourse emerges in response to the wounds inflicted on male writers by women editors like Moore and Monroe. According to Pound, these editorial impositions threatened to ‘emasculate literature entirely’” (135).If, on the one hand, the woman editor had too much power and too little phallic gusto, on the other hand, Bazin demonstrates, everyone assumed she would take care of the magazine's administration and nurture its content like a mother or midwife. As Sarah Blackwood observes, “editing is particularly feminized labor.” When done right, it “erases itself.”3 Moore excelled at what Aaron Jaffe calls the “downstream work” of publishing and promotion: the everyday administrative and secretarial tasks, as well as the care work, which make art possible but which the art object itself cleverly conceals.4 In his autobiography, William Carlos Williams characterized Moore as “a rafter holding up the superstructure of our uncompleted building … one of the main supports of the new order” (35). Even less sexy than a spinster, Moore as “rafter” provides invisible yet essential support to modernism. Williams's architectural metaphor effectively captures the difficulty of analyzing this form of feminized labor, which resides in the very infrastructure of magazines.As these contrasting yet converging characterizations suggest, Bazin's recuperation of Moore's editorial work at the Dial will be particularly valuable to scholars studying the gender dynamics of modernist publishing. It has been more than twenty-five years since the publication of Jayne Marek's landmark feminist work, Women Editing Modernism, which emphasized the importance of women editors, including Moore, well before the study of magazines became central to the field of modernism.5 Bazin builds on many of Marek's key insights regarding the social and literary constraints women editors faced in this period, but she also adapts Marek's framework to bring it into conversation with more recent materialist and formalist approaches within modernist periodical studies, which have figured the magazine itself as a productive social space. Put simply, this methodology enables Bazin to explore how Moore both shaped and was shaped by the Dial. Rather than viewing her as an individual auteur, Bazin shows how Moore's “editorial agency” was formed in relation to the institutional habitus of the Dial—both the constraints and the powers conferred by the magazine (8).The book begins with an introduction and first chapter that lay the critical foundation for Bazin's reconceptualization of Moore's editorial practice. Chapter 1, “The Social Production of Modernism,” provides an overview of the various overlapping networks and conflicting affiliations that helped to create the Dial's institutional habitus and its aura of cultural distinction. As Bazin notes, the Dial's cultural ascendancy had nothing to do with market dominance. “The vast majority of the population were reading magazines,” Bazin writes, “but they weren't reading the Dial” (36). Instead, as Bazin shows, the Dial acquired its unique powers of cultural consecration by mediating between the mainstream and the avant-garde. The magazine brought together an uneasy assemblage of elite Harvard aesthetes and leftist and avant-garde writers, such as Moore, Williams, Kenneth Burke, Mina Loy, and Randolph Bourne, who migrated to the magazine from places like Others, Seven Arts, Nation, and New Republic. This productive fusion, Bazin says, lent “edginess to the former and a legitimacy to the latter” (11).Chapters 2 and 3 together provide a wholesale reevaluation of the nature and significance of Moore's editorial contributions to the Dial. Chapter 2, “Editorial Agency: Performing ‘Miss Moore,’” examines how Moore created an editorial persona that was bound up in the institutional habitus of the magazine. From her first editorial statement, Moore placed emphasis on the magazine itself rather than on the role of individuals or even money in sustaining the magazine. As Bazin writes, “‘Miss Moore’ became the public face of modernism, the signifier of integrity and aesthetic ‘intensity,’ the embodiment of a brand that ultimately had little to do with her own values or principles” (53). Drawing on correspondence from the Dial archives, Bazin shows how this performance effectively saved the magazine from Thayer and Watson's myriad missteps and allowed it to continue publication for another four years. Even as she embodied the Dial's brand, Moore also subtly satirized the publication's pretensions in the paraliterary content she wrote for the periodical. Chapter 3, “Promotional Prose and Editorial Comments,” shows how she playfully resisted the magazine's penchant for snobbery and categorical distinctions around class and gender, in particular. According to Bazin, this is the first critical study of the advertisements Moore wrote for the Dial.Chapters 4 and 5 analyze particular examples of Moore's editorial practice. Chapter 4, “Hart Crane Distilled,” revisits the controversy surrounding Moore's extensive revisions to Crane's “The Wine Menagerie.” Miss Moore famously condensed the poem down from forty-five lines to eighteen and changed the title to “Again.” These cuts, which edited all of the sex and sweat out of Crane's poem, earned Moore a reputation for prudery. However, as Bazin shows, Moore's edits of Crane are consistent with her predilection for “contractility,” a compressive logic that underpins her poetics and that shaped her editorial decisions fundamentally. Chapter 5, “Modernists Edited: Joyce, Stein, Lawrence and Rosenfeld” explores four influential examples of Moore's textual editing to highlight the judiciousness and creativity of her editorial practice.Drawing on Caroline Levine's concept of the “affordances” of form, the book's final two chapters analyze how Moore made use of the textual space of the magazine as a means of exercising her editorial agency. Chapter 6, “Periodical Form and the Dialogics of Gender,” documents Moore's practice of clustering women writers and artists together to create dialogic spaces where “the woman artist is no longer solitary, operating in the context of a predominantly masculine modernist aesthetic” (168-69). Chapter 7, “Poetic ‘Struggle’ as Modernist Production,” considers the poem itself as a material object that both requires and initiates nontextual reading strategies. The chapter focuses on a little-known poem by Williams, “Struggle of Wings,” which appeared in the Dial in 1926.These final chapters provide generative examples of how magazines might change the way we read modernist literature. Rather than looking deeply into individual texts, Bazin employs Sean Latham's method of “editorial reading”: a kind of wide-angle lens that looks at patterns, arrangements, and repetitions that run across a magazine.6 Bazin's use of this method to analyze the September 1927 issue, which featured works by Gertrude Stein, Genevieve Taggard, and Vanessa Bell, is especially illuminating. Although the Dial was edited by women for the better part of its nine-year history—Alyse Gregory preceded Moore from 1923-25—it was not welcoming to women writers. According to Bazin, over the course of its existence, the number of women contributors was approximately 14 percent (169). Moore was not able to change this number, but, as Bazin shows, she nonetheless altered the tone of the magazine's treatment of women and femininity in fundamental ways, for example, through her associative clusters.Focused narrowly on Moore's short career at the Dial, Modernism Edited may appear, at first glance, like a minor contribution to the field of modernist periodical studies. But the implications of Bazin's work are far-reaching. Moore's case bears importantly on the careers of many other modernist women editors, figures such as Monroe, Margaret Anderson, Jane Heap, Jessie Fauset, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Lola Ridge, among others. Like Moore, these women occupied positions of real authority in the 1920s, but their critical power began to wane in subsequent decades. More than a case study, Modernism Edited provides a framework for reinterpreting women's editorial agency in the modernist era. By making the creative and subtly transgressive aspects of Moore's editorial work visible, Bazin encourages us to look anew at this generation of women who began but were unable to finish the important work of institutionalizing modernism.Moore perhaps underestimated the force of the sexism she would face after the magazine's closure. For four years, Moore had propped up the Dial. Now, it appeared, the magazine would not be returning the favor. In her letter to her brother, Moore rightly credits the Dial with conferring upon her a new sense of “public confidence.” But this cultural capital, however valuable in its own right, did not convert readily into paid professional opportunities. After the Dial's closure, Moore and her mother moved away from the literary lights of Greenwich Village to the quieter suburbs of Brooklyn. Pound believed that Moore would be the ideal successor to Monroe at Poetry magazine, and he lobbied hard on her behalf. However, she was never offered the position, which went to Morton Zabel (223). While Eliot continued to play a leading role in the institutionalization of modernism in the coming decades, in spite of Moore's considerable “powers,” her word for her editorial prowess, her critical authority proved far less durable.Bazin's study both gives us a way of understanding this unwarranted obscurity and also of tallying the often invisible editorial contributions women made not only to the modernist canon but also to the periodical form. This may not be the story of liberation we were hoping to find, but it is an important step toward understanding how modernist magazines both constrained and enabled practices of freedom." @default.
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• W4245536216 date "2021-01-01" @default.
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• W4245536216 title "Review" @default.
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