Please cite/quote the version published in Textual Practice
“How Writers Work”: Interviewing the Author in Everyman
Rebecca Roach
Abstract:
Drawing on the archives of publishers and individuals, this article analyses the space of the study and the marketplace in a series of interviews by American journalist Louise Morgan, published in the London-based middlebrow Everyman magazine in the early 1930s. A form largely unstudied by literary scholars, the interview offers an important space for exploring issues of publicity and privacy, representations of literary labour and the profession of authorship in this period. In the moment before Q. D. Leavis published Fiction and the Reading Public, before literary studies began to be institutionalised, before New Critical distaste for authorial intention, personae and study of the marketplace largely excluded the interview and the middlebrow from critical study, Morgan’s series offers a productive site from which to consider the space of production, the marketplace and, indeed, the work of writing itself.
The genuine artist has never had an easy time, but his difficulties are more monstrous now than they have ever been, for art nowadays is not only commercialized but (worst of all) fashionable.[1]
On the publication of The Apes of God (1930), a savage attack upon the literati, Wyndham Lewis was interviewed by journalist Louise Morgan. The interview expresses sustained anxiety over the effects of advertising and publicity upon the “true” artist’s ability to find an audience. In doing so it plays into more widespread concerns in this period about the atomisation of the public sphere, the commercialisation of the book trade and the status of modern authorship. The flood of printed matter onto the market in the first decades of the twentieth century had engendered alarm in many authors and critics about the possibility of the work of the genuine artist being submerged in the sheer weight of new books. The inability of the individual to read all of these titles meant that the advertiser and the reviewer, what Q. D. Leavis was to call “middlemen,” became crucial in refining the selection down to a manageable portion.[2] Luckily, the readers of this interview are reassured that, in “Wyndham Lewis: The Great Satirist of our Day,” they have a sure arbiter of taste and, indeed, an example of the genuine artist.
That it is an interview that takes up these issues might seem surprising. Frequently viewed as part of the very commercialisation and “‘stage business’ of public life” it here decries, the “monstrous” interview has been largely ignored by literary scholars.[3] This is despite their “fashionable” proliferation in this era and their frequent discussion by contemporary commentators.[4] Moreover, interviews far from suppressing frequently enact the tensions around art and commerce, journalism and literature, the public and the private, and the stratification of the market and public debated generally in the newspapers, periodicals and on the airwaves. I contend that reading interviews can contribute much to critical reflections on these topics.
The Lewis interview is part of a lengthy series that ran in the London-based weekly Everyman. Entitled “How Writers Work,” the interviews emphasise the labour of writing and delineate the private space of the study, offering it up as an important site from which to reflect upon the position of the writer in the marketplace in this period. What also makes the Everyman series intriguing is the diversity of writers interviewed by American émigré journalist Louise Morgan. Authors now considered modernist, whether those associated with the Bloomsbury Group, whose presence in the series is considerable, or the heiress Nancy Cunard, circulate alongside popular and now largely forgotten writers such as Gilbert Frankau and Warwick Deeping, who bore the brunt of Leavis’s anxiety in Fiction and the Reading Public around transformations in the marketplace. In miniature the series offers a fascinating view of the literary marketplace across the brows.
Later made into a book published by Chatto & Windus, the interviews, and their archives, are also valuable for evincing how crucial the place of publication and production – whether in the study, the publisher’s office or at the printers – is in shaping cultural boundaries of privacy, publicity and authorial persona in the marketplace. In focusing particularly on how space is constructed in the interview we can also productively challenge too easy bifurcations between journalism and literature, production and publication, modernist and middlebrow, gossip and criticism in the twenties and thirties.[5]
Notably too, by attending to the reception of Morgan’s book, published the year before Leavis’s study, we can identify a brief moment in 1931 when the interview was more fluidly situated in the literary marketplace than we might expect. Shortly afterwards, as the stratification of the reading public was perceived to deepen and disciplinary boundaries were constructed, the interview was to lose its mobility in the literary sphere. Despite the popularity of the New Yorker profile, the Sunday supplement or the celebrated Paris Review “Art of Fiction” interview series, this is a loss still affecting the interview today. In part then this article is an act of recuperation; an illustration of how productive reading interviews can be.
Everyman and “How Writers Work”
When Q. D. Leavis pointed to Everyman as addressing “several publics, loosely linked together” and serving to “standardise different levels of taste” in 1932, she was not to know that it was soon to be a casualty of the Great Depression, left to languish in footnotes and asides in subsequent book history studies.[6] The weekly had originally been an offshoot of J. M. Dent’s popular Everyman book series. Launched in 1906 the series consisted of an expansive collection of classic works made available to the public at the inexpensive price of one shilling a volume (until 1916). The price was kept down thanks to Dent’s bold decision to print in large runs and his investment in purpose built printing works and binders.[7] In 1912 a magazine of the same title was launched, in part to advertise the series. The series having folded in the aftermath of the Great War, in 1929 Hugh Dent revived Everyman. Similar in style, content and readership to its rival John O’London’s Weekly (JOLW), Everyman never reached the latter’s high figures of 100,000 copies a week.[8] The paper lost money and from 1932 went through a series of changes of ownership before it was discontinued.
During its limited runs, the twopenny weekly was aimed at a similar audience to that of the continuing book series: the expanding reading public who had benefitted from the educational reforms of the late nineteenth century and had a desire to improve their knowledge and social position. The “Letters to the Editor” series is particularly engaged – in the early Summer of 1931, for example readers and contributors extensively debated the claims of Joyce, and later Eliot, to be considered literary innovators or merely “enjoying a great joke at the expense of the literary critics” through their deployment of a difficult style.[9] In contrast, contributors included Wyndham Lewis, Vera Brittain, D. H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Gordon Craig, Richard Aldington, John Grierson, J. B. Priestley, Rose Macaulay, Edmund Blunden and Vita Sackville-West, amongst others. Articles also abounded on individuals such as the Sitwells, Friedrich Nietzsche and Rainer Maria Rilke, Havelock Ellis and Sergei Eisenstein. Hemingway and Woolf were positively reviewed and Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire was first serialised in the magazine, accompanied by the Vorticist-inspired designs of John Hargrave, leader of the Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit in the thirties.
Such debates, articles and contributors were tempered in the publication by the inclusion of articles entitled “How to Form a Library” or “Write a Best Seller in Seven Weeks.” These mingled with reader competitions, advertisements for self-help books, dictionaries and writing courses. The publication emphasised the commodity function of literature for its readers through complementary editorial and advertising pages. Books and learning were presented as leading to better job prospects and social status. Everyman magazine, like its counterpart series in book form, simultaneously promoted the material worth of reading and writing and offered its readership access to subjects and writers of considerable note.
Although since neglected, Everyman offers a fascinating site for exploring the relation between the interview form, the space of production and the marketplace.[10] In the late twenties and first years of the following decade, Everyman was a vibrant and heterogeneous title where, for a brief moment, diverse authors, subjects and values came together.
It is in the interview series that these negotiations are most obviously played out. One of the most extensive of its time, the Everyman interview series was conducted by Louise Morgan Theis (1883-1964). A one-time college lecturer with a PhD in English from Bryn Mawr (1912), she had left her husband in 1923 and moved to London to marry fellow-American Otto Theis, literary editor at The Outlook and later editor, translator and literary agent. In 1929 Morgan joined Everyman, acting as editor from 1931, when editor C. B. Purdom went on sick leave, until the journal closed. She and her husband were close friends with Nancy Cunard, and through her, with Wyndham Lewis, Richard Aldington and others.
Given their friendship with Lewis and Cunard, it is not surprising that the Theis’s relations with the Bloomsbury coterie were cool. This is especially true in the aftermath of the publication of The Apes of God, a book that Everyman had helped to publicise by interviewing Lewis twice and through other articles. In 1961 Morgan privately noted that “Neither of us likes Leonard Woolf. Otto met him in the 20’s and did not like him” and when inviting Morgan to a party in 1932, William Plomer wrote “Virginia Woolf will be among them so if you would rather come another time please tell me! However, the atmosphere won’t be Bloomsbury at all, but mixed”.[11] Despite the apparent antipathy for the Bloomsbury set in general and the Woolfs in particular, it would seem that Morgan did attend. Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary that ‘In came Louise Morgan, the interviewer, nerve drawn, lined, crimson, agile’.[12]
In spite of her private feelings, Morgan did successfully solicit contributions from those affiliated with Bloomsbury and other literati. In the interview series too, entitled ‘How Writers Work,’ the Bloomsbury coterie and affiliates was surprisingly well represented: Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Bertrand Russell, Vita Sackvillle-West and Frank Swinnerton all appeared. Morgan had even requested an interview with Woolf, but the writer declined with the declaration that “I cannot break my rule never to be interviewed”.[13] The interview series also included a more diverse range of subjects; W. B. Yeats was interviewed as was Sinclair Lewis and Rose Macaulay. The series also included popular authors, some of whose names have not remained as prominent through the years, including Norah Hoult and Henry Handel Richardson. The writer, as conceived of in the Morgan series, was a many-coloured beast.
The Interview and the Study
The interview form itself, while often derided as gossip, an invasion of privacy or a tool of marketing, has been a key site for negotiating conceptions of authorship since its inauguration in the mid nineteenth century. The form purports to offer a type of autobiography: a revealing, authentic confession by the author talking in private. This impression is underlined through a whole host of tropes that encourage the notion that reading the interview is an act of uncovering the private self of the author. The interviewer will frequently emphasise the travails required before they can gain entry to the hallowed private sphere of the study; tropes of exposure, surface and depth recur; and direct quotation is utilised along with hesitations, non-sequiturs and repetitions to give a sense of immediacy. These strategies are common to the interview across publications and eras. I term such tactics, and the modes of reading they encourage, the “fictions of access”.
The term “fictions” is deployed consciously. Although styling itself as the confession of an individual, the interview is a unique genre of life writing that deeply troubles the model it simultaneously promotes. Despite promoting the individual voice of an author, the interview is the product of collaboration; despite emphasising privacy, both parties are usually aware that this is a conversation destined for the public sphere; despite promising the genuine speech of the author, interviews are often highly edited. The fictions of access are precisely that: fictions.
Nevertheless, these are valuable fictions, indicative of cultural and individual attitudes and promotional or creative manoeuvres on the part of the interviewer, editor, publisher, subject or reader. In the case of Morgan’s series, attending to the representations of the labour of writing and the author’s position in the marketplace as presented in these interviews can be highly suggestive. The supposedly private space of the author’s study was (and still is) in fact a highly visible, and loaded, site of public debate, and to read Morgan’s interviews is to reflect on the import of these issues.
The interview with Wyndham Lewis is a case in point. Having expressed profound anxiety about the difficulties of discriminating in the modern world, Morgan points to Lewis’s surroundings as evidence of his authenticity. His room demonstrates “to perfection the difference between the pseudo and the genuine artist.”[14] His workroom might be the site of bohemian chaos, but Morgan is careful to explain that Lewis’s “room exists not for itself, not for show, but as the most convenient workshop possible for its owner.”[15] The artist’s room is here no longer the straightforward key to personality that one might suppose. Under the glare of publicity utility becomes the key to determining authenticity for Morgan. Lewis creatively uses a barrel as a table, not because it might make for good publicity, but because his books are then easily accessible from his chair. In Morgan’s portrayal, Lewis’s rooms are the genuine article and, as a consequence, so too is he.[16]