More Often Than Twice a Year

Dorothy Norman and her “Little Magazine”

Jonathan Patten, Wesleyan University

(Oh did that loved one live
it were revived
were flown at once to his sweet lips
once more to give it life)

STIEGLITZ

 

“ ‘As long as such books are being published,’ an American liberal once said to me, ‘everything will be all right.’ ” Thus James Baldwin, with characteristic sardonicism, exposes a particular attitude regarding a particular kind of literature, an attitude that conflates insight, action, and effect with the mere existence of political writing. In this instance he is speaking specifically of the American protest novel, a genre (or, as he might say, a gesture) with the ostensible intent of enabling progress, yet achieving, by his observation, results quite to the contrary; such an account, a so-called “report from the pit,” persuades the reader that ideas are being thought, that work is being done, while simultaneously displacing the reader’s attention from the issue to the ‘revelation’, and, by that shift, skirting a real treatment of (and even maintaining the durability of) the matter at hand; “it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone.”[i] These claims he directs at the protest novel specifically – yet they might just as well be used to interrogate any literature, especially that of deliberately political nature. Is this work a shadow of the zeitgeist? Is it token? What can be said of its promise? And what is the relationship between its promise and its fruit?

With regard to promise, the journal Twice A Year is unequivocal – an editors’ statement in the inaugural issue plainly declares opposition to “all political dictatorship.”[ii] Every aspect of the publication finds its source in this basic premise, for here ‘politics’ and ‘dictatorship’ are applied rather comprehensively; the former comes to refer to any manner of individual or national expression, the latter to any manner of encroachment on or repressive direction of such. Thus, Twice A Year opposes censorship; religious and ethnic persecution, domestically and internationally; war when possible, yet, when war is inevitable, it opposes pacifism in the face of cruelty; and, by the same principle, it opposes genre, national, or temporal bias, publishing a variety of forms from an international cast of contemporary and historical cultural figures. Likewise, to treat these subjects – politics, civil liberties, the arts – as if they were separate would be an act of dictatorship, by obscuring or denying the crucial relationship between them. Even the journal’s title reflects this refusal to dictate or reduce; from the same editors’ statement: “a title has been chosen that shall neither label nor limit the contents. Even a broadly suggestive term might tempt one to judge what one reads on the basis of whether it corresponds to the title, rather than for itself. Twice A Year wishes to remain free of all restricting formulae.”

Dorothy Norman, the journal’s conceiver and editor, began to crystallize her plans for it 1936. In that year, Lewis Mumford and Paul Rosenfeld, then editors at the American Caravan literary yearbook, invited Norman to join them there; she declined. “I realized it was not a purely literary magazine with which I wished to be affiliated,”[iii] she said of that decision [emphasis mine]; and indeed, the alternative she went on to produce was certainly not one. Compelled by a synthetic impulse to present artistic and political work as necessary counterparts in a common mission (to conflate Literature, the Arts, and Civil Liberties, as the journal’s subtitle advertises), inspired by the art and guidance of Alfred Stieglitz, and encouraged by conversations with Mary Lescaze (future associate editor, married to architect William Lescaze), Norman, toward the end of 1936 and beginning of 1937, launched an aggressive campaign to solicit content for her project, directing nearly a hundred letters to established and unknown writers alike, at home and abroad, in any field – to any person seemingly in accord with her vision. Mumford responded prophetically to her pitch: “There is need for such publication… Your notion about actually bringing a group of people face [to face] is important: it is for lack of this contact, as it is for lack of someone to hold them together, that so many fine ideas get dissipated and so many initiatives are lost… You might influence the feeling and thought of a whole generation, if you would devote yourself to bringing into a social-intellectual relationship the creative spirits around you.”[iv]

The first issue of Twice A Year was composed during the run-up to the Munich Pact; its publication, in early October of 1938, coincided almost to the day with that decisive step toward war. “It is not strange,” Norman observes in an introductory statement to this issue, “that [the issue] should be concerned to so great an extent with war. For everyone had been constantly haunted by questions pertaining to war long before Munich… How to avert war? How to be clear about what one might do in the event that war were to befall us?”[v] The tension between those last questions – a tension that challenges the limits of pacifism and asserts the occasionally inevitable exercise of force – is the crux of this issue. (The impetus of that tension – that is, a rigorous rejection of isms, a steadfast belief that, in Norman’s words, “each case has to be decided on its own merits all over again”[vi] – is likewise a crucial premise for the journal itself.) Engaging that concern are several essays by and on conscientious objectors – by Roger Baldwin (founder and director of the ACLU), and by Randolph Bourne – figures genuinely admired by Norman; alongside these are Thoreau’s Plea for John Brown, “who although a pacifist and determined never to bear arms, did bear arms in order to maintain his self-respect according to his own vision of the wrongs that he felt must be righted at the time of the Civil War,”[vii] and excerpts from André Malraux’s Man’s Hope – from Malraux, who fought for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, and would go on to serve in the French Army in the Second World War.

Also included are wartime letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, published for the first time in English here; a reproduction of an essay by Theodore Dreiser on Bourne; nearly forty pages of the aphorisms and observations of Stieglitz, as recorded by Norman; an essay by E. E. Cummings on aesthetics; work by Kafka and Anaïs Nin (James Laughlin of New Directions considered Norman courageous for printing the latter, and dedicated an issue of his anthology to Twice A Year[viii]); several pieces by Italian writer Ignazio Silone… Even Norman herself was astonished at the quality of content in this inaugural issue; she could offer no reputation, no experience, no money with which to pay the contributors, no party affiliation or truly quantifiable agenda – “yet something in [her] impassioned call finds response.”[ix]

The same was true of her audience – readers met the journal with “unexpected approval.”[x] A small community grew around it, coalescing at Stieglitz’s gallery An American Place – Norman’s second home and the base of operations for Twice A Year. Many of the contributors came to meet with gallery insiders and with the general readership there; the site and the journal provoked mutually inspiring conversation. Norman intended the journal especially for local university students (besides the network of established intellectuals she was building among her contributors and their peers); she was content with a small circulation, so long as the audience was sincere. The first issue ran at one thousand copies.[xi] They were made available to city bookstores and libraries, and were distributed by mail

Interestingly, a bureaucratic miscommunication at the post office concerning the mailing of the first issue proved a fundamental challenge to the journal’s very premise. The copies were initially mailed at the periodical postage rate; all were returned the day after they were sent out. When Norman confronted Postal Service officials, she was informed directly: “You are not a periodical.” (A periodical must appear at least four times a year.) Upon inquiring what, then, she was, the official told her: “I don’t know.” Ultimately, a more courteous employee there recommended classifying Twice A Year as a book, rather than a periodical, in order to earn the book rate. Thus, A Semi-Annual Book of Literature, The Arts, and Civil Liberties became A Book of such (which, at two to five hundred pages per issue, it really was all along). To the same end – that is, toward discerning the journal’s identity – it should be noted that, during its ten years of activity, only once, in 1939, did Twice A Year live up to that name. Though Norman had at first intended on releasing one issue in the spring and fall of each year, all but three of the seventeen numbers were published as ‘double numbers’, combining a year’s worth of material into a single volume. This renovation of what was really one of the journal’s only pillars was credited to “exigencies of the present world situation;”[xii] not wishing to hold certain documents and information, on account of timeliness, publication came far ahead of schedule, and only once a year.

1942 was such a year, the double number VIII-IX that appeared then such an issue. Number I had been preoccupied with the possibility of a war; by this time, possibility had become reality. The editors’ statement – now a lengthy and eloquent essay, where the first had been a brief two pages of introduction – is a relentless assertion of the necessary interrelation between art and political activity; there can be no choice between art or political issues – because to isolate them is to fail them both, because a serious, humanizing approach to any one field is a faithful reflection of democratic work at large. Cited here is Max Lerner’s characterization of Twice A Year, as a forum “to help ‘create freedom to create’;”[xiii] thus, freedom and creation are inextricably linked. (It’s difficult to tell whether these introductory remarks quote Stieglitz heavily or whether they’re an approximation of his style – because the voice is definitely his (“The voice of the artist is the prophetic voice of man. … The artist forces society to look more deeply into itself, to question itself, – to become ever more selfless, to dedicate itself ever more fully to the whole man; to all men.”[xiv]). In any case, this indicates the extent to which Stieglitz’s vision influenced the journal – in tone, in exaltation of the artist and the individual, in a distinct nationalism tempered with a respect for global cooperation and exchange.) To that end, the content of this issue consistently affirms expression in the face of darkness, affirms the maintenance of integrity in time of war. George Sand energetically rebuts Flaubert’s assertion of the “irremediable misery” of humanity in a letter proclaiming her own dedication to love and serve the public;[xv] essays by Stieglitz, Henry Miller, and others honor the nobility of artistic expression and its eternally necessary role; minute records of contemporaneous Supreme Court decisions and specific civil liberties concerns mark the journal’s dedication to presenting “the realities, not the mere theories involved… to take the field of civil liberties out of the hands of those who will merely utter abstractions about it,”[xvi] especially during war, when the interests of the individual are so often curbed in the name of the nation’s interest.

“That we are at the end of what may properly be called an ‘era’ is suggested in multiple fashion by the World War’s end; the discovery of atomic energy; a breakdown of belief in such oversimplified panaceas as Communism, Socialism – and all other isms for that matter; the awakening to the need for world government; the recent, swift succession of deaths of various figures in the world of the arts who helped to forge what we have long since taken for granted as the so called ‘modern’ era.”[xvii] Such is the premise for double number XIV-XV, appearing in late 1946. Despite the magnitude of the former signals, that swift succession of deaths was the most devastating for Norman; and most devastating among those deaths was that of Stieglitz, who died of a stroke in July of that year. Dreiser had gone shortly before him, in December of 1945; Paul Rosenfeld, precisely one week after Stieglitz; Gertrude Stein, precisely one week after Rosenfeld.

However alarming, this sad sequence, coupled with the aforementioned world developments, did not read as some kind of coda to a great period for Norman; it did not signify that war was over, or that modernism had been fulfilled, that peace and artistic integrity had been ensured. Though this issue was dedicated to those four departed figures, its content was less a memorial than a challenge to keep up their tradition, to press on with an equal spirit and ambition. And “the material published in this issue goes back not only to the beginnings of the ‘modern’ movement, but concentrates also upon the beginnings of the crumbling of our modern world that was to have been made ‘safe for democracy’ not so long ago;”[xviii] this was a moment to learn lessons, to admit and begin the work that had to be done.

Perhaps most striking among these works of invigoration is a series of photomontages by Dada artist John Heartfield, and most striking of that series is his piece Fathers and Sons, that prophetic and bitter illustration of a nation’s endless march toward war. Alongside his work is a drawing by George Grosz, a watercolor by Luis Quintanilla (from his series Totalitarian Europe), and an official Air Force photograph of the Nagasaki mushroom cloud – all equally disturbing. (Also reproduced, as a counterpoint to last, is a cloud photograph by Stieglitz, representing “a feeling about the world directly opposed to that which makes the dropping of an atomic bomb ‘necessary’ or possible.”[xix]) There is a large section devoted to Dreiser, Stieglitz, Rosenfeld, and Stein, honoring their works and maintaining their energy. There are essays on the origins and persistence of Fascism by Camus and Thomas Mann; a short essay by Sherwood Anderson, called “The Dance Is On”, tracks a powerful contemporary hunger, as alive in combat as in commerce, in wartime as in peacetime – and, at all times, “it is up to man, who made it, to control it.”[xx] A section on discrimination in America keeps the country on the hook for claiming victory over a deeply racist regime while maintaining that very same tradition at home; it includes several essays by Richard Wright, one of which reports on the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem. The characteristic civil liberties section features a lengthy transcript from the U.A.W.-General Motors wage negotiation hearings, and a draft of a World Bill of Rights as proposed to the recently formed United Nations.

Two additions the journal’s editorial staff were made during the formation of this issue. Brom Weber, a young writer dedicated to Hart Crane, met Norman in An American Place; his enthusiastic support for Twice A Year earned him the title of assistant editor. Norman met Wright at about the same time. Increasingly devoted to French writers – the existentialists in particular – and sensing an interest in the journal’s premise there, he offered to represent Twice A Year in Paris upon his expatriation, to incorporate as thorough a treatment of French, and European, issues and writers as had been done in America. On that account, he becomes associate editor.

Wright does go to Paris, and Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir do publish in the next issue, but this new direction is short-lived – it is Twice A Year’s last. The subtitle for that issue – Art and Action – is a concise restatement of Norman’s conviction of the necessary relationship between the two; and at five hundred and eighty-three pages, the issue is quite an affirmation of that conviction. But the financial cost had become too much – Norman had funded publication almost entirely out of her own pocket all along, at a loss all along, and she simply could not continue to do so. Thus ended the ten-year run of Twice A Year, in 1948.

Money and the urge to divert it toward the greater good: Norman seemed to have possessed both since birth. She was born Dorothy Stecker, in 1905, daughter to a prominent German-Jewish clothing manufacturer in Philadelphia. She recalled an awareness, even in her earliest youth, of the discrepancy between her family’s wealth and the relative lack of privilege in the lives of those around her. That spirit of social consciousness, a desire for a life larger than that of her couched upper class family, carried her, by her own prerogative, to The Wheeler School in Providence, Rhode Island, and then to Smith College. A bout of flu during her freshman year returned her home, where she studied briefly at Penn before she met and married Edward Norman, son of the founder of the Sears-Roebuck empire. Sharing a budding dedication to social justice, they relocated to New York City in 1925; Edward involved himself in the consumer cooperative movement, and Dorothy volunteered with the nascent ACLU, where she met and worked with Roger Baldwin and began to develop her commitment to civil liberties.

There are two peculiar trends in Norman’s character that recur and stand out in her own accounts of her life. The first is a magnetic attraction to people who hold forth, provided they know what they’re talking about; the second is an uncanny habit of chancing across people and situations that are not only in supreme accord with her interests and needs but are in accord with her interests and needs at that very moment.

At the age of fifteen, she would attend the Philadelphia Orchestra and marvel as the conductor wheeled around to lecture the audience for clapping inappropriately or for trying to leave early. She later studied modern art at the Barnes Foundation, where she would be required to stand before a single painting for an entire class period, looking only at this one painting and being told by the instructor how to understand its form. Her first impression (and second, and third, for that matter) of Stieglitz, upon entering his gallery: “There was a man standing in the room, talking. And he didn’t stop talking.”[xxi] She hears his words, and “an inner music soars.”[xxii]

At nineteen, after studying sociology at Penn and becoming enamored with a magazine called Survey – a publication covering housing and race relations that seemed to be a constant revelation for her – she met Edward, who was then on the staff of Survey. “I really could not believe it,” Norman recalls. “The fact that a human being was standing in front of me who actually was involved with that magazine, was overwhelming. The Survey changed, just as had the Barnes Foundation, my life.” She became involved with Stieglitz and The Intimate Gallery, with The New York Post where she had a column for four years, with Natacha Rambova, friend and spiritual instructor, and with Jawaharlal Nehru in much the same way – “this again was walking into something or having it walk into you;”[xxiii] “Again I have found the very person whom I should listen to at just the right moment.”[xxiv]

These aspects – a fascination with the outspoken and a knack for meeting them – certainly seem to have been products of her lifelong urge to identify and fight social problems; and they were, in turn, important to enabling the manifestation of that urge. Her marriage, her employment with the ACLU, and her affiliation with Stieglitz and his galleries – each of these a deliberate choice made to develop her political and artistic inclinations – crucially extended her network of peers, which network became the source and measure of her influence. Of those affiliations, that with Stieglitz was undoubtedly the most significant, in terms of the community of artists and intellectuals that it opened to her and in terms of the education she was to receive among them.

“She was one of those people who adored Stieglitz,” Georgia O’Keeffe recalls, pejoratively, of Norman – a foolish, spoiled girl ignorantly infatuated with his persona.[xxv] Despite the definite bias of that account – O’Keeffe, married to Stieglitz, was offended, to say the least, by the young lady’s rapport with her husband – it is to some degree accurate; she did adore him, very openly, in every conceivable sense – as a friend, as a lover, as an instructor, even as something of a guru. She would ardently record his words, compelled by their beauty and incision; as mentioned above, these notes reveal the extent to which her own principles are informed by his. “I have wanted to destroy labels since they constantly get in the way. People become so satisfied with the label, they seem not even to notice whether what they are talking about is, in fact, happening,” he has said; those words might as well be Norman’s own. Or: “To know what you do, not what you think or say you do, or should do. Only through the quality of your own clarity and acts can you free either yourself or others. The act came first and then the word.”[xxvi]

Though enabled, to a certain degree, by Stieglitz, and though she operated out of his American Place, Twice A Year was totally Norman’s own project: she conceived it, she funded it herself, and she sustained it by her own incredible energy. The impetus to assemble content from a range of forms and fields, covering a range of concerns, originates from her unique equation of art and action – her belief that “it is just such literature [that is, lawyers’ briefs, judges’ decisions, speeches and articles concerning civil liberties, and the like] that is responsible for many of the most significant changes in the mores of man – in the direction of achieving greater decencies among men, – the same decencies that all the arts are fighting for.”[xxvii] “It bothered me,” she remembered in an interview, “that the artists were not more interested in the Civil Liberties Union because their freedom depended on the success of an organization of just that kind. … At the same time, I found it frustrating because although I admired the lawyers and other workers in the civil liberties field, I couldn’t discuss with them or share with them my feelings about the arts.”[xxviii] It is this frustration that led to her creation of Twice A Year, that led her to champion Stieglitz and Baldwin in the same pages, to introduce (or, to be able to introduce) Wright to Sartre and Beauvoir in her apartment, which she did in 1946, to mutual excitement. These are but high-profile illustrations of her influence; as the above will have thoroughly shown, Norman, through her journal, came to assemble a remarkable network of artists and writers from across the globe.

Her readership, however, never matched her content in magnitude; “it will certainly not have a popular audience,”[xxix] she predicted before the publication of the first issue, and that remained true right through to the last. Greatly respected by those who knew it, Twice A Year did not circulate much beyond that community. That the it always had such a small run; that it existed for such a brief period; that, as noted above, it appeared so infrequently; that it comprised such eclectic content – all beg the questions, What was this journal? and, What was its purpose? Clearly it was something of an oddity, but the quality of its pages and contributing body, the nature of its mission, certainly merited a broader appreciation than it has enjoyed. Why has it been forgotten, while Partisan Review – active in New York City during the same period, and with a somewhat similar intent – achieved a distinctly larger following (though still a little magazine) and an influence that has only in recent times expired?

“Although Partisan Review is a magazine of literary experiment, it differs from the other little magazines in the emphasis it puts upon ideas and intellectual attitudes,”[xxx] Lionel Trilling observes in The Liberal Imagination, in an evaluation of the role of that magazine in particular and of the little magazine as a category; “to align yourself with PR was to oppose the defenders of the Moscow trials and to deplore Stalin’s cynical pact with Hitler,”[xxxi] says a later critic. Grappling with Communist ideology was basic to Partisan Review, marking the intellectual development of the individual writers and underlying the magazine’s fundamental stance; by virtue of that affiliation, its content could be distinctly placed on a tangible political spectrum. The same cannot be said for Twice A Year. While cogent and meaningful to its contributors (and what an illustrious, accomplished group that was), the journal’s devotion to the individual, to crossing disciplines, to opposing totalitarianism, cannot be clearly quantified or described in concrete political terms. This lack of political clarity – which, no doubt, was central to its mission – seems in large part responsible for Twice A Year’s minor reputation. “We must not attempt… to build ‘one world’ in so abstract a fashion that we shall forget about the need for personal liberty and the fulfillment of the individual,”[xxxii] Norman wrote; it appears, in such pursuit, that she ultimately achieved the opposite effect – a testament to personal liberty and fulfillment by a politically abstract method.

Yet Partisan Review was, even by Trilling’s assessment, an exceptional case; the critical and common aspect of the little magazine was its unflagging allegiance to literary quality over prestige, to a “coterie” over the masses. This is precisely the Twice A Year model. “This magazine is an Ivory Tower,” claims a contemporaneous critic, though by that he refers not to “the refuge of the craven, but the citadel of the free soul that spurns compromise.”[xxxiii] Trilling, grudgingly admitting the inevitable political nature of man’s fate, warns that “unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind that we will not like.”[xxxiv] To insist that point is the highest aspiration for a little magazine. Norman seems to have come independently to the same conclusion: “If man has bread alone, and not other such fulfillments [the fulfillment of love and art, of freedom to know and create], one might safely predict that he will not long have even the bread.”[xxxv]

Defined that way, Twice A Year was a little magazine of the highest caliber, not bending in any way to a national audience, but vigilantly protecting its most precious intellectual principles. It operated less as an outlet for the general dissemination of significant work than as a forum in which intellectuals the world over could meet, exchange their disparate wares, and take heart; it was no substitution for thought or action but a platform on which those who were already doing and acting could stand. (Of that, James Baldwin would likely have approved.) Twice A Year has faded from public memory – but it was never truly there in the first place, nor was it meant to be. Executing a thankless and mostly invisible task, its real influence was essentially ‘behind-the-scenes’ all along; the journal – and its dynamic founder – became a vital hub for a highly  influential network of international figures, and its (and her) ultimate, and real, value was in the singular and expansive fulfillment of that role.

Dorothy Norman’s memoir, Encounters, could not be titled more aptly, given her remarkable and sustained habit of meeting, courting, and orchestrating the very significant. These lines from it accompany her memory of Twice A Year’s discontinuation: “No prevision can compare with the concrete testaments of living, breathing men and women, whose pages have come to us like so many treasured guests bidden by an invitation of undeniable faith.”[xxxvi] Modesty wouldn’t allow her to admit that the “undeniable faith” was herself – yet that’s just what she was, undeniably, tirelessly invigorating and reinvigorating that community of her own compilation. That the journal was in effect an annual tome, not a periodical, is revealing; its process was not geared toward regular representation of a group but rather to constant labor and exchange among it, a process that, curated by Norman, achieved its affirmative intention more often than its name suggests.