Little Mags and revisiting Provence

A couple of recent Fordian news items might be of interest to Society members…

Little Magazines

Sara Haslam has been in touch to point out this letter to the London Review of Books (21 May), correcting the record on the origin of “little magazines”, and mentioning Ford’s English Review and its much earlier and short-lived predecessor The Germ, started by the pre-Raphaelites in 1850. Copies of the latter can be viewed at archive.org, or at the Rossetti Archive.

Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, launched in Chicago in 1914, lasted rather longer than these predecessors, continuing until 1929. In four editions from January to September 1918, it serialised Ford’s essays “Women and Men”, that would later be published as a single volume in 1923. The magazine’s Foreign Editor at the time was one Ezra Pound.

More information on the Little Review, and copies of several issues, can be found at the Modernist Journals Project.

Provence from NYRB Classics

For anyone looking for some summer holiday reading, Max Saunders has spotted that New York Review Books is releasing an edition of Ford’s Provence on 7 July,¹ as part of its NYRB Classics series.

Now considered a cult classic […] this whimsical, personal, and sensual overview of Provençal life, culture, architecture, and history will transport you straight to the south of France.

Ford’s love affair with the region began in the 1920s when he visited Provence several times with Stella Bowen. His impressionistic love letter Provence: From Minstrels to the Machine was published in 1935 when he was living in Toulon with Janice Biala, whose accompanying drawings are retained in the new edition. More information about Ford’s time in Toulon can be found here.

With a cover featuring Van Gogh’s “Road with Cypress and Star” (painted during his voluntary confinement in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence), the NYRB edition includes a new introduction by Nicholas Delbanco, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan and author of over 25 books including Group Portrait (1982), tracing the interconnected lives of Ford, Conrad, Henry James, H G Wells and Stephen Crane. Delbanco’s travel memoir Running in Place (2001) covers his own experience of living and writing in the South of France.

1. It appears that the release date might be later (18 August) in the US ↩︎