Ian Hamilton, still fresh
Hamilton (in dark glasses) outside the offices of the New Review, early 1970s
Remembering the New Review forty years on
DAVID COLLARD
" In certain moods I used to crave expansiveness and bulk'', Ian Hamilton wrote in the introduction to his Fifty Poems (1988), but these are not to be found in his poetry, which was, Ian Sansom calculated, composed at a rate of eight words per week. For expansiveness and bulk you have to look elsewhere, and the place to begin is the New Review, which Hamilton edited from 1974–8 and was, depending on your point of view, either the best literary periodical of the past fifty years or an elitist folly lavishly bankrolled by the taxpayer.
What it was not was a poetry magazine. Hamilton claimed that there were no more than two or three poets he wanted to publish and in any case his interest in the poetry scene had by then lessened to what he saw as a marginal, policing role. Having said which, most of the poetry published in the New Review is outstanding – the first issue has ten poems by Robert Lowell and later on there are appearances by Douglas Dunn, James Fenton, Alan Brownjohn, Hugo Williams, David Harsent, Andrew Motion, Tom Paulin and Craig Raine. But that's not all – there are full-length plays by Simon Gray, Harold Pinter, Sławomir Mrożek, Dennis Potter and Christopher Hampton. There's James Fox's forensic account of the Lord Lucan affair; features on the IRA bombings and the 1977 Dutch train hijacking; polemical essays such as John Carey's "Down with Dons"; lengthy profiles (John Sturrock on Roland Barthes; Clive James on Kingsley Amis; Dan Jacobson on Philip Larkin); A-list encounters (Martin Amis with Joseph Heller, Melvyn Bragg with Robert Redford, Saul Bellow interviewing himself); fiction from John McGahern, Jim Crace and William Trevor, and the first appearance of Ian McEwan's short stories "Solid Geometry", "Pornography" and "Reflections of a Kept Ape".
The New Review still looks fresh, in a way that few magazines even from the recent past ever do. The striking covers make use of collage, caricature, cut-ups, photo-montage, photo-journalism, cartoons by Marc Boxer, pop art by Roy Lichtenstein, authors' mugshots, foreign film stills, and (an example of the blurring of cultural boundaries that became commonplace twenty years later) the footballer Jimmy Greaves. The spacious layout of double columns with generous margins is clean and modern, the high-quality paper still crisp and bright. There are no full-page colour ads for flashy aspirational brands such as BOAC, Johnnie Walker or Peter Stuyvesant. In fact, apart from publishers' announcements (which are a treat) there's hardly any advertising at all, which contributed to the magazine's financial failure. It's a tribute to the Editor's tenacity, hard work and powers of persuasion that it lasted for fifty issues.
It's not all good, of course, and the flaws are obvious. The editorials are often condescending and the layout can be less than scintillating, especially in later editions when money was very tight. While there are many fine pieces of reportage there is not much engagement with the zeitgeist. These were the tumultuous punk years, but apart from a cover image of a punk singer called Billy Karloff (who was employed by the New Review as a typesetter) and a fine piece by Hugo Williams on the pub rockers Dr Feelgood there is little that reflects this. There's some discreet logrolling, a certain cliquishness that is a hallmark of any little magazine, and one also realizes how very monocultural things were back then, how middle-class, how white. There are also times when the New Review appears to have no clear sense of direction, reminding us of the criticism Hamilton levelled at Cyril Connolly's Horizon: that on occasion it was not "able, (or even, as far as anyone was able to tell, willing) to provide more than just a place to print things".
I bought my first copy of the New Review in autumn 1978 – Volume 5, No. 2. The contents page promised Isaiah Berlin on Tolstoy, an interview with the promising new writer McEwan, John Bayley on William Empson, Larkin on Kingsley Amis, A. J. P. Taylor taking "vigorous exception" to the Times Atlas of World History, John Calder demolishing Deirdre Bair's biography of Samuel Beckett, Christopher Reid on Ted Hughes and Robert Hewison on Bob Dylan. A typically dazzling roster, but this issue was to be the last. The magazine closed down that month after losing its Arts Council subsidy. What I did not know then was what Hamilton stood for, or how fiercely contested the cultural ground occupied by his magazine was. For its detractors it was a vainglorious waste of public funds. For its supporters it was part of a continuing struggle to determine the future direction of literary culture at a time of often rancorous conflict between conservative anti-modernists and radical usurpers – a conflict that, because it was fought most bitterly in the small arena of publications and organizations concerned with poetry, became known as the poetry wars.
Before the New Review Hamilton had edited the Review (1962–72), co-founded with Michael Fried, John Fuller and Colin Falck, a much-admired poetry magazine in pamphlet-octavo that combined undergraduate prankishness with high seriousness, castigating whatever the Editor felt to be inflated, complacent, pretentious or modish. The Review, unarguably Britain's most influential post-war poetry magazine, had, Hamilton wrote, "a sense of its own necessity". It treated poetry as something integral to our culture and was involved in several early skirmishes in the poetry wars, although less in defence of any tradition than as an assault on the crass and the artless. In what Alan Brownjohn has called "a decade soft on crap" the Review's robust critical standards were especially sharp and provocative. Hamilton was appalled when Penguin published the Liverpool poets Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten in The Mersey Sound (1967). It sold 500,000 copies, which appalled him even more. Clive James observed: "It's better to be a half-witted Liverpudlian with a bedside manner than a mandarin with a sneer" and, while this may strike us as little more than complacent snobbery, James shrewdly anticipated a cultural shift that would see an end to the mandarin supremacy (with or without the sneer).
Throughout the Review years Hamilton championed poetry that combined emotional intensity, intellectual precision and the highest level of craft, in the face of alternative forms emerging on both sides of the Atlantic. His position was essentially unchanged some years later, when he said in an interview for the Reader: "Most of what is out there today isn't really poetry . . . . It might be a form of writing that is engaging and sharp and entertaining, but it is not poetry. It's important to make these distinctions". But it was these very distinctions that were being swept away, and in another conversation in 1993 Hamilton admitted that by the time the Review closed down, the battle was lost: "There seemed to be such a chasm between what was really going on in the general culture and the impact that the poems we were printing was likely to make".
What was really going on in the general culture was a process of radical democratization, a minor manifestation being the British Poetry Revival (the phrase coined by Eric Mottram), much of which took place outside the capital but which in its most concentrated and complex form was played out among the anarcho-modernists who had assumed control of the Poetry Society in Earls Court. In the early 1970s a group of radical writers (chief among them Mottram, Bob Cobbing and Jeff Nuttall) had taken over this drowsy institution (membership of around 1,000), transforming it into a countercultural hub subsidized by an increasingly embarrassed Arts Council of Great Britain. Sound, visual and performance poetry began to predominate – not all of it was negligible but much of it today seems twee and dated. As Peter Barry relates in Poetry Wars: British poetry of the 1970s and the battle of Earls Court (2006), this all took place at a time of conflict between opposing poetic camps, radical and conservative, and with an undertow of class warfare. In the elite corner (as far as its enemies were concerned) were the Review and the New Review, addressing themselves to a small community of cultivated readers who shared their Editor's values and standards. In the other corner was the rest of the poetry world, or so it seemed. A flavour of what was going on in Earls' Court can be found in testimony given by an anonymous Poetry Society staff member to the 1976 Witt Report (the Arts Council's investigation, quoted by Barry in Poetry Wars):
She said she did not know Jeff Nuttall very well, but when he had given a reading at the Society she had found broken eggs on the rostrum next morning, a tin of golden syrup underneath the piano, with a doll stuck in the syrup and there was talcum powder everywhere. Mr Nuttall had also run around in his underwear. There were only twelve people at the reading.
Things were set to change, however, and the Poetry Society radicals were ousted (or, if you prefer, staged a principled walk-out) in March 1977. Mainstream English poetry would for the next thirty years remain largely non-experimental and anti-modernist, a victory of sorts for the Hamilton line. Mottram and his colleagues are now part of what Iain Sinclair calls "deleted history", excluded from the discourse surrounding the subject, no longer occupying even the margins where they seemed most at home. Significantly, neither the conservative nor the radical poets of the 1970s were endorsed or promoted in the influential Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry (1982; edited by Andrew Motion and Blake Morrison, both New Review alumni) and we now live in what Paul Barry calls a "post-dualist" poetry world, diverse and tolerant. But something of value disappeared when the experimental modernist tendency – a line that extended back, via Basil Bunting, the Poetry Society's President, to Ezra Pound – was so thoroughly sidelined forty years ago.
Hamilton had first approached the Arts Council early in 1967, seeking financial support for the Review (he owed his printers £300), adding the caveat that "grants and guarantees of this kind are the minimum required to merely keep the magazine afloat. They would not enable us to pay contributors properly, nor to launch a campaign for new subscriptions. But perhaps these are luxuries". Two months later the Arts Council offered a grant of £250 payable in instalments on publication of each of six issues, thus initiating a pattern that would beset Hamilton for the next decade – that subsidy for each new issue of a publication would be swallowed up by debts accumulated from previous issues. By early 1970 Hamilton was applying for £1,000 towards the cost of four more issues.In January 1973 Hamilton wrote to Charles Osborne, the Council's Literature Director, saying that he felt the Review had served its purpose and was in danger of becoming predictable and repetitive. He wanted to enlarge the magazine into "a general literary periodical" covering both poetry and fiction and was upbeat about likely sales. Osborne was open to suggestions and had for some time wanted to launch a new magazine with Arts Council support, although the cost of doing so from scratch was daunting. The second half of Hamilton's letter referred to a backlog of debt and invited "an investment" of £1,000 to pay off his printers and to "give the Review a decent burial". (Its successor would carry a small print note on the title page stating that "The New Review incorporates the Review, a quarterly magazine of poetry and criticism founded in 1962".) The earliest reference to a provisionally titled New Review is in a letter dated September 9, 1973 from Hamilton to the Arts Council's Financial Director Anthony Field, in which he estimates that "the annual loss would not exceed £7,500" and requests a subsidy of £600 per issue. He concludes by asking for an immediate advance of £2,000 to cover pressing print and secretarial costs. The annual subsidy was soon confirmed as £7,500 (presumably based on Hamilton's estimate of the loss), payable in two instalments, and the following month an account was set up on behalf of the magazine, now officially called the New Review.
The first issue appeared in April 1974, which Hamilton later described as "the most melodramatically austere month in Britain's post-war history", a time of miners' strikes, power cuts and the three-day week, prompting criticism of such publicly funded extravagance at a time of national crisis. If not in a literal sense glossy, the magazine had a glamorous aura that contrasted with the standard offset litho publications of the time such as Private Eye, which sniped amusingly and relentlessly at the high-flown pretentiousness of it all. The first editorial contained no manifesto or statement of intent but kicked off by welcoming the appointment of John Gross as the new Editor of the Times Literary Supplement and raising the contentious if unelectrifying issue of reviewer anonymity (TLS reviews were traditionally anonymous and would remain so until later that year). The rest of the magazine was more impressive – the ten Lowell poems; long pieces by Edna O'Brien and Caroline Blackwood; Jonathan Raban's profile of Angus Wilson; a sparkling essay on Nigel Balchin by Clive James; Melvyn Bragg on popularization in the arts; a lengthy letter from George Steiner explaining why he wouldn't be contributing; and a clutch of reviews by Russell Davies, Martin Amis, Lorna Sage and others. Poignantly, there was also a Letter from Paris by the political commentator Francis Hope, who had died in the previous month's Ermenonville air disaster.
It was a promising start but things had already gone awry. Schedules were out of kilter because Oxford University Press, which had set up a special unit to manage subscriptions, insisted for financial reasons that the first issue should not only appear in April 1974 but be designated "April", while Hamilton wanted it to appear as the May issue, thus gaining some ground. This he never managed to do, and among the many criticisms levelled at the New Review was its irregular and late appearance. A combination of more commonplace problems – late copy, staff shortages, problems with printers and strikes at the bindery – along with a chronically unreliable cash flow, would beset the entire run. But more importantly two early gambles had failed to pay off – that the ambitious promotion campaign would result in 5,000 subscriptions and that after six issues the magazine would be in a strong position to seek backing from private or foundation sources (although these were never specified). The first issue was sent out to just 1,500 subscribers, around the same number as the Review, and although bookshop sales of 3,000 were higher than predicted they soon fell to 1,200, which was closer to the figure anticipated. Of the subscribers, two-thirds took advantage of a hastily concocted pre-publication offer of £8 per annum. The meagre cash reserves were quickly used up and, as costs mounted, a hand-to-mouth monthly routine was established: as each issue was produced, the Arts Council would send another cheque, "to ease pressure on your cash resource", which was immediately used to pay off accumulated debts. Hamilton later complained, not without reason, that contrary to popular belief the magazine was underfunded from the outset.
In issue No. 10 Hamilton's combative "Greek St." editorial looks back on the first year of publication and launches a spirited attack on the magazine's critics, arguing that "the ill feeling hasn't had its basis in ideas, or even in taste, and certainly not in any passion for expansiveness or detail. It has been almost exclusively concerned with money". He knows that the magazine is regarded by "the philistine and the envious" as an undeserving beneficiary of the public purse, and sets out to demolish that view. Getting into his stride, he continues:
The New Review is not subsidised by the Arts Council of Great Britain. It receives a grant-in-aid of £750 per issue [up from the £600 per issue in 1974]; this grant takes the form of a guarantee against loss and is payable issue by issue – in other words you get it when and if you have produced the goods. A princely sum? Not in the least. Our bill for contributors alone this month is near to £1,000. Our printing bills (including paper) are around £3,000 and will go up. Our office rent and overheads amount to . . . .
He breaks off here and invites the reader to calculate how many subscribers are required to cover these essential costs, then to factor in the cutbacks afflicting libraries and learned institutions and the reduction in publishers' advertising budgets. He adds "A charitable computer would, no doubt, mix into all this some chilly data on the present cash-fixated economic climate, but we don't insist on charity". What he does insist on is that the existence of the magazine "is certainly not guaranteed by public funds", which is true as far as it goes, but which doesn't go far enough in recognizing the Council's critical role. He signs off by claiming that the Council's own estimate for launching a monthly magazine had been around £75,000 (actually £60,000) and implies that in sponsoring the relaunch of the Review as a going concern the Council had actually saved the taxpayers money!
Hamilton recalled his difficulties with funding panels in his essay "The Trouble With Money": "Wild-eyed anarchic novelists would transmute into prim-lipped accountants. Tremulous lyric poets would rear up like tigers of the bottom line". But it wasn't just about money. Hamilton combined great charm, intelligence and honesty with a gift for alienating potential allies and supporters. An early spat occurred when in issue No. 12 the New Review's short-lived feature "Adrian's Diary" carried a disparaging reference to the Art's Council's funding of an organization called The Association of Community Arts – "a few amateur and largely talentless layabouts". The tone was unpleasantly de haut en bas and a clear breach of confidentiality, prompting a letter of protest from the Arts Council's Secretary-General Roy Shaw and another from Elizabeth Thomas, a member of the Literature Panel. She called for "a more diversified editorial policy" to "achieve a wide appeal and a good circulation", complained that "most of . . . the subjects, the writers, the reviewers, the poets are indistinguishable" from those in the Review and that the new magazine should seek fresh talent (she offers to provide a list). She adds that too much of the magazine's subsidy was "swallowed up in production costs". The unsigned response from the Editor ended with a withering put-down, that "remembering Mrs Thomas's performance as literary editor of [the fortnightly left-wing periodical] Tribune, we have to doubt that her idea of talent will accord with ours".
Thomas was right, however, about production costs. The use of quality paper in a ninety-two-page magazine meant that postage costs, especially to the United States, were crippling. Another problem arose from the commitment to publishing twelve issues a year. The Review had appeared as a quarterly for its first two years but very irregularly after that, usually once a year with the occasional "double number" or poetry pamphlet thrown in to satisfy subscribers. Hamilton eventually came to realize that a highbrow literary magazine with a small readership and very little advertising should probably be a quarterly, and although the last two issues appeared as such and in a more compact A5 format, it was too late to make a difference. The rackety finances led to fluctuating cover charges: 90p at the launch, cut to 75p from issue No. 28, increased to £1 for the "double issue" 34/35 of March 1972 with its provocative Hockney/Kitaj nude cover; then back to 75p before rising to 90p again from issue No. 42 (an increase announced by a last-minute tipped-in label in issue No. 41). These seem minor recalibrations until we take into account the purchasing power of a pound in the late 1970s. The last two issues in the smaller format cost £1.75 at a time when the weekly TLS was just 25p.
So, given that it was unpopular, over-priced, loss-making, insufficiently egalitarian and erratically managed, why did the New Review have to close? Colin Falck expressed a commonly held view: "The New Review was eventually destroyed – a victim of cultural committee wars – by a purportedly more democratic faction which saw Arts Council money as having been disproportionately hijacked by an enterprise that was elitist in spirit and which sold very few copies of its magazine on the streets". Charges of elitism were not without foundation; nobody could accuse Hamilton of having the common touch. David Harsent recalled asking what the magazine's circulation was and the Editor replying "About two thousand". When asked if he wouldn't like it to be more, say four thousand, Hamilton said: "Maybe. But I'd need to know who the other two thousand people were".
That's droll, but there's something self-defeating in the swagger. Hamilton's own poetry and the poetry he admired – Robert Lowell's, for example – was addressed to the individual reader invited to eavesdrop on intense private moments in the poet's experience, an intimacy that cannot be scaled up to inform the content of a commercial magazine. We may be reminded of the anonymous pundit, quoted in The Thirties: A dream revolved (1960) by Julian Symons, who reckoned the population of serious poetry readers in Britain at any given moment numbered around 100. Even catering for that tiny community might have made Hamilton twitchy. In a television interview in 1974 he claimed ironically that "readers are likely to contaminate the pure spirit" of a little magazine. This comes close to the advice given unironically to the poet Michael Hrebeniak by Eric Mottram: "Don't write anything you can get published".
When it finally closed down the magazine was riddled with debt and Hamilton had no defence. "It was all down to me: I was the sole owner, and, indeed, for years afterwards I was paying the bills, paying the rates, empty rates on this office we'd been thrown out of virtually. And mysterious bills would arrive from way back. It wasn't a proper company; it couldn't go bust." But it could, and did, and so did he. Long after the magazine folded the ex-Editor was hounded by creditors and the Inland Revenue. Hamilton's own poetry all but dried up during his Editorship of the New Review, and he later dubbed the period 1973–9 "the trashy years", ruefully remembering "the raggedness of everything, the booze, the jokes, the literary feuds, the almost-love-affairs, the cash, the somehow-getting-to-be-forty, and so on".
As the New Review's debts mounted and the cheques bounced and the bailiffs gathered on the office staircase, Hamilton's stoic-heroic demeanour contributed to an enduring myth of the embattled leader, the capo, the guv'nor, the Gaffer, celebrated in Another Round at the Pillars, the festschrift that marked his sixtieth birthday. The contributors to that book – all male – attest warmly to Hamilton's great charm, kindness, sardonic wit and extraordinarily high standards. The boozy sodality of the Pillars of Hercules, the pub next door to the magazine's Soho offices, generated many stories, some quite plausible. The view of Hamilton as a tough guy spoiling for a fight is the stuff of Soho legend, but it's not the full story. Although the importance of the New Review lies partly in its having given an early break to several male writers who later became famous and who loyally promoted Hamilton's legacy, women writers also featured very prominently – Jean Rhys, Caroline Blackwood, Beryl Bainbridge, Edna O'Brien, Lorna Sage, Alison Lurie, Patricia Highsmith, Nadine Gordimer, Margaret Drabble, Germaine Greer, Patricia Hale, Natasha Spender, Iris Murdoch and many others, at a time when the literary establishment was a largely male domain. Contrary to the received wisdom at the time, the New Review was a surprisingly egalitarian enterprise, was not monopolized by any Oxbridge mafia and, while never aimed at everyone, was open to anyone – providing they were good enough.
The New Review casts such a long shadow that it's easy to overlook a multitude of other little magazines in circulation at the time, most of them justly forgotten. A conservative estimate of the number in print during the period 1960–75 is 600, with a startling average of thirty-five new titles per year, a figure partly explained by the growing availability of cheap print technologies. More than 75 per cent of these were produced outside the capital and most were short-lived. What they lacked, as well as a substantial readership, was influence – it was the London periodicals and newspapers that set the national agenda for writing.
Funding was a particularly contentious issue. According to Arts Council archives, for the year ending March 31, 1977, subsidies were made to eleven literary magazines (including Ambit, Agenda, Bananas, Encounter and the London Magazine), amounting to just over £78,000 in all. The New Review received £35,200 – almost half the total allocation, and only £8,000 less than the sum for all ten of the other magazines combined. "A lot of people took personal offence at this", observed Hamilton, drily. Of course the New Review's grant covered twelve issues per year as against quarterly publication for most of the others. But resentment was widespread.
This was certainly the case in Manchester, where Poetry Nation (founded by Michael Schmidt and C. B. Cox in 1973, relaunched in 1976 as PN Review and still going strong) was published twice a year on a fraction of the New Review's budget and at almost twice the cover price. (PN's Arts Council subsidy in 1976/7: £2,100.) It was unremittingly hostile to the New Review and its Editor. Alan Munton depicted them as belonging to a decaying line in bourgeois humanism and Donald Davie questioned why a putsch on the London literary scene could never be mounted by literary-minded students from red-brick universities such as (say) Manchester, challenging the "Oxbridge stranglehold on our literary life". A "plague on both their houses" editorial denounced both "the unformed rhetorical gesture, the unwholesome poem, the sterile poetics" of the Poetry Society and the "small minded" coterie running the New Review. The animosity was still evident shortly after Hamilton's death late in 2001, when in a vinegary letter to this paper Schmidt, the Editor of PN Review, claimed that Hamilton's priorities had shifted from the Review's critical seriousness to the extended "literary profiles" and author features of its successor, "displacing steak with sizzle", his poetical perspectives becoming narrower as his influence grew. "He was reading lives", said Schmidt, "and that is how he spent the rest of his life."
Even if this was the case, it was no bad thing, because what Hamilton referred to wryly as his "so-called literary life" amounts to an impressive bibliography. Following the collapse of the New Review he published superb biographies of Robert Lowell (1982), J. D. Salinger (1988) and Matthew Arnold (1998). There were also brilliant studies of literary estates (Keepers of the Flame, 1992) and poetic reputations (Against Oblivion: Some lives of the twentieth-century poets, published posthumously in 2002); several collections of essays and reviews, twenty-six episodes as writer and presenter of BBC2's Bookmark and many high-profile editorships, including The Faber Book of Football and the Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English. Add to this a huge amount of intelligent journalism, some of the century's finest lyric poetry and two of the best literary magazines ever published: it amounts to a solid and enduring legacy.
Hamilton was reluctant even to upgrade his Adler Gabriele 25 semi-portable manual typewriter to an electronic version, and would not be at home in today's online publishing world. A website dedicated to his life and work (
www.ianhamilton.org) ensures his presence on the internet, but his absence in the real world as a poet, biographer, critic and cultural arbiter is keenly felt.
The Times Literary Supplement – an occasional series of readings: Tap here to listen to Alan Jenkins introduce and read a selection of poems written by Ian Hamilton.
