Review of Victoria Bazin, Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine (2019) Bartholomew Brinkman

Journal of European Periodical Studies, 6.1 (Summer 2021) ISSN 2506-6587 Content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence The Journal of European Periodical Studies is hosted by Ghent University Website: ojs.ugent.be/jeps

To cite this article: Bartholomew Brinkman, Review of ‘Victoria Bazin, Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine (2019)’, Journal of European Periodical Studies, 6.1 (Summer 2021), 190–192 Reviews

Victoria Bazin, Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019). 259 pp. ISBN 9781474417303

Victoria Bazin’s Modernism Edited: Chapter two focuses on Moore’s Marianne Moore and the Dial Magazine editorial labor (so extensive that she did (2019) is the first full-length consideration not find time to write poems during this of a previously understudied moment in time) and her personal editorial habitus, the career of the modern American poet which both reinforced and complicated Marianne Moore: her editorship of the the Dial’s established institutional habitus. Dial magazine between 1925 and 1929. As The considerable cultural capital ‘Miss such, it makes key contributions to modern Moore’ brought to the magazine gave her periodical studies, Marianne Moore a transgressive authority (partly enabled by studies, and literary studies more generally the periodical form itself) that allowed her — drawing connections between modern to challenge Thayer and Watson in service textual production and reception within of the magazine itself. As Bazin argues, the context of one of the most prominent Moore’s ‘editorial performance of an modern American magazines. Bazin’s core aesthetic purity detached from the pressures argument is that in order to fully grasp the of the marketplace put into circulation impact of Moore’s editorial practice at the a model of avant-garde feminism that Dial, it is necessary to understand the ways challenged the misogynist tropes of in which she negotiated the magazine’s modernism and, more fundamentally, existing ‘institutional habitus’ (p. 8).1 queered femininity itself ’ (p. 56). In many Bazin illustrates this thesis throughout ways, Moore stood as an outsider and an her book, focusing on the ways in which ‘other’ to the founding editors in terms of Moore worked within the magazine’s economic and aesthetic priorities as well already distinguished reputation to shape as in assumptions surrounding gender and individual contributions and the magazine sexuality. as a whole, while foregrounding the Chapter three looks specifically at importance of gender and sexuality in the the editorial comments and promotional production of modernism. advertisements Moore wrote for the The first chapter examines how the magazine. As Bazin argues, Moore’s groundwork for the Dial’s institutional editorial comments use ‘instinct’ and habitus was laid by its founding editors ‘feeling’ to ‘move with breathtaking and owners, Scofield Thayer and Sibley swiftness between items, categories, Watson. It outlines the ways in which ideas and images deploying the “force of content, advertising, and bibliographical omission”, dispensing with connectives codes presented the magazine as a fine and “too academic adverbs”, achieving cosmopolitan magazine that could yoke what Moore describes as “compactness together established and experimental compacted”’ (p. 93). This selection and writing, positioning it between the avant- assemblage of textual materials draws garde little magazines and the middlebrow upon Moore’s interest in curatorial theory quality journals. as well as the formal resemblance of the museum and magazine form as it recalls an ‘aesthetics of display’ in many of her poems. 1 Bazin derives the term from Matthew Chapters four and five examine Philpotts’ discussion of Bourdieu in ‘The Role of Periodical Editor: Literary Journals and Moore’s specific editorial decisions at the Editorial Habitus’, Modern Language Review, Dial. Chapter four focuses on Moore’s 107 (2012), 39–64.

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(in)famous revision of Hart Crane’s poem, pattern in magazines, while not wholly ‘The Wine Menagerie’, into ‘Again.’ within editorial control, are, nevertheless, Moore had previously adapted her own a vital component of editorial agency’ poetry as a contributor to the Dial by (p. 167). Such agency, which Moore turning to a more direct free verse, and frequently exercised in order to foreground now as editor, she aimed to continue to gender in particular, is evident through the satisfy its readership. This often involved formal arrangement of individual issues collaborating with other contributors in as well as across multiple issues. As Bazin order to thread the needle between their notes, her ‘arrangements of women writers, artistic independence and the perceived artists and critics in associative clusters needs of the magazine. The handling of reproduced in terms of design the kind ‘The Wine Menagerie’ exemplified this of condensation that Moore desired in practice; Moore would ‘practise a form language’, bringing together such poets as of distillation on Crane’s poem, thereby Lola Ridge with visual artists like Hermine solving the problem of Crane’s desperate David and Georgia O’Keeffe (p. 170). need for money while maintaining the There are opportunities to magazine’s image of distinction’ (p. 134). strengthen some of the insights in Such revision, however, did not only cut Modernism Edited through additional the length of the poem in half and remove engagement with recent scholarship the wine-reverie setting of the poem that on both Marianne Moore and modern brings about the speaker’s ecstatic state, but periodicals. For example, Bazin’s likening it also importantly ‘severs the poem from a of the Dial to the limited-edition book that queer tradition of poets who are punished enabled an aesthetics of display comparable for what are perceived to be their sexual to that of a museum collection has been and textual transgressions’ (p. 131). Ironic, located in other modern magazines, such to say the least, considering the ways in as Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Similarly, which Moore was herself attempting to Moore’s editorial practices of clustering, queer modernism in the magazine. layering, and juxtaposition of texts have Chapter five considers Moore’s been identified not only in her poems but editorial relationship with other key also in the manipulation of print snippets modernist figures: James Joyce, Gertrude in her personal scrapbooks kept prior Stein, D. H. Lawrence, and Paul Rosenfeld. to her Dial editorship. Engaging more It investigates Moore’s hesitations to fully with such scholarship would further publish Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’ (which illuminate formal similarities between the would eventually become part of Finnegans Dial and other modern magazines while Wake) and the ways in which Moore also strengthening the already convincing helped to repair the Dial’s relationship case Bazin makes between Moore’s with Stein, noting how ‘Moore was in editorship and her poetic production. the position where she could culturally Bazin, an accomplished Moore consecrate works that might otherwise be scholar, has with Modernism Edited dismissed as unreadable’ (p. 152). Moore’s helped to further pull back the curtain publication of these figures underscores on one of modernism’s most inscrutable her willingness to go toe-to-toe with figures, revealing how Moore wielded modernist luminaries, to promote the significant editorial influence at the work of those she felt had been unfairly Dial and underscoring the symbiotic maligned (largely due to gender), and to relationship between Moore as editor and look past her own aesthetic preferences to Moore as poet. At the same time, Bazin publish quality work. extends existing scholarship on women as Chapter six examines the Dial producers and editors of modernism in a on a more formal level, noting how ‘the book that is deeply attentive to both poetic affordances of display, arrangement and and periodical form as it demonstrates the

191 Reviews complex negotiations between individual editorial agency and a more general periodical habitus.

Bartholomew Brinkman Framingham State University

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