WREY GARDINER AND POETRY QUARTERLY

By Jim Burns

 

Keeping a little magazine alive is never an easy task, and keeping one alive through the 1939-1953 period, when war and austerity brought paper shortages and other problems, must have taken a great deal of time and energy. Wrey Gardiner became associate editor of Poetry Quarterly in 1939, and at some early stage took over the editor’s chair from Katherine Hunter.  It’s a little magazine worth looking at because it was a publication which included American poets in its contents, and some of them were among those who can be said to have helped shape the Beat outlook, at least in its early years.  

Charles Wrey Gardiner was born in 1901 in Plymouth, and was a student at Oxford for a period, though he left without taking a degree. He spent some time in Paris, then moved to London, where he was based for the rest of his life. At some point he established the Grey Walls Press, which over the years published a mixture of new and old poetry, along with translations from the French and other languages. Two books which stand out in connection with American writers were Henry Miller’s Remember to Remember and Kenneth Patchen’s Outlaw of the Lowest Planet.

There were also five volumes of New Road, a hardback anthology. I have a copy of the fifth issue, published in 1945, and it includes excerpts from Patchen’s The Journal of Albion Moonlight, poems by Denise Levertov (in her pre-American days), and prose by Henry Miller. There is also a verse play by Gardiner, and among its characters are a poet, a lunatic, and an anarchist, with the action taking place in a derelict house.  I think it gives an idea that his thinking wasn’t inclined to the conventional.

Gardiner also published several volumes of autobiography. His effusive style, with its emotive responses to people, places, and situations might not find much favour now, but it was very much of its time : “I realise that I am a little mad. Mimi has gone home to her respectable life. I have walked back to the cottage in the moonlight past the house where Rossetti lived in Red Lion Square. Mimi and I seem to play our tragedy on the platforms of tube stations – Piccadilly Circus for preference. She says she dreams that I shall be murdered in my cottage. I have bought a picture today for twenty-two guineas. It is called Three Fools in a Storm and is by Cecil Collins. I am a little drunk after spending the evening at the Café Royal with Paul Potts and Ruthven Todd”.

Gardiner died in 1980 and a poem by Derek Stanford in The Spectator a few years later referred to him “behind a coffee stall with some young Mimi/sharing with her a new anthology/without a penny and without a care”. Stanford had known Gardiner in in the 1940s and, in his book Inside the Forties : Literary Memoirs 1947-1957, he devoted a chapter to him in which he recalled his initial meeting with Gardiner: “I first encountered the latter at Hammersmith Tube Station during one of my Army leaves. Jack Baylis and I were to meet there to escort him to a party being held just over Hammersmith Bridge in a block of flats opposite a pub known by bus conductors as the Boiler Arms, its French name proving intractable. I recall how disappointed I was to find myself introduced to a quiet-looking man in a neat double-breasted brown suit who carried both those emblems of a City gent, a small suitcase and an umbrella”.

Stanford quickly realised that Gardiner’s appearance was deceptive and, as he says, “still waters run deep”. He soon began to regard Gardiner as “an introspective being though provided with a rare gargoyle wit. Though he may have worn his heart on his sleeve as far as women were concerned he was only knowable by degrees. The reasons for this were twofold – first because he kept his guard up until he learnt that one was not hostile and secondly because he existed in a world exclusively his own. If any man had a temperament naturally solipsist it was Wrey”. Stanford went on to say that, despite his five autobiographies, Gardiner “remains  a misty complex figure”.

It could be that even though Gardiner was kept busy with all the books that Grey Walls Press published, not to mention the five autobiographies and several collections of his own poetry, he’ll perhaps be remembered most for editing Poetry Quarterly until it closed down in 1953. A.T. Tolley, in his book, The Poetry of the Forties, said that the magazine “published some poets of quality and potentiality and with a certain regularity”, though as with any little magazine there was bound to be variations in what was in each issue. Tolley’s overall view tends to question a lot of what appeared in Poetry Quarterly. He was clearly not in tune with what he described as the “New Romantics”, and he thought that after 1945 or so “Poetry Quarterly lost what vitality and character it had picked up during the war years”. But he did assert that Gardiner “was out in front in recognising how influential American writing was to be. Like George Woodcock, he published work by American writers who were still far from achieving recognition in their own country – among them Kenneth Patchen, a selection of whose poems, Outlaw of the Lowest Planet (1945), he published from the Grey Walls Press”.  Patchen was also in several issues of Poetry Quarterly, along with Kenneth Rexroth.

The reference to George Woodcock relates to his magazine Now, with its anarchist leanings. I have three issues and in number 6 there are poems by Rexroth, William Everson, and Harry Roskolenko, though he was more aligned with the American Trotskyists than with the anarchists. Paul Goodman’s name also crops up in the contents list, as does that of Dachine Rainer. I wonder how many people are aware of her Greenwich Village novel, The Uncomfortable Inn, published in 1960 ?.  Issue 7  of Now had poems by Jackson Maclow and Philip Lamantia, and a “Letter from America” by Kenneth Rexroth. Both issues are undated, though I’d guess they’re from around 1946/47. An article by Woodcock in the “Poetry of the Forties” issue of Aquarius 17/18, edited by Eddie Linden in 1987, relates to Now and its contributors.

This short essay has not aimed to do more than draw attention to Wrey Gardiner and Poetry Quarterly, with a few additional items of interest thrown in. It occurs to me that Reginald Moore’s magazine, Modern Reading, also published Kenneth Patchen, along with work by Nelson Algren and Henry Miller.

 For me, little magazines have always been a source of interest, information, and pleasure. Their editors are often overlooked, though without them many publications would never have existed. Few little magazines have ever made money and always depended on the good will of their editors to find the funds to pay the bills.  

NOTES

Derek Stanford. Inside the Forties: Literary Memoirs 1937-1957. Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1977.  Stanford’s poem, “I.M. Charles Wrey Gardiner (1900-1980)”, was published in The Spectator, 13^th January, 1986.

A.J. Tolley. The Poetry of the Forties. Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1985. Informative, even if one doesn’t always agree with Tolley’s opinions. Useful lists of magazines and anthologies.

Wrey Gardiner. The Dark Thorn. Grey Walls Press, London, 1946.

Wrey Gardiner.  The Flowering Moment. Grey Walls Press, London, 1949.

Dachine Rainer. The Uncomfortable Inn. Mayflower-Dell, London, 1967. Originally published by  Abelard-Schuman, New York, 1960. Rainer co-edited the anarchist magazine, Retort, with Holley Cantine in the late-1940s and early-1950s.   Among the writers it published were Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Robert Duncan, George Woodcock, and Saul Bellow. 

George Woodcock. Letter to the Past: An Autobiography. Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd, Ontario, 1982.  A useful source of information about NOW, and its contributors.

Kenneth Rexroth, editor. The New British Poets. Granger Books, Miami, 1976. Originally published by New Directions, New York, 1949. Includes poets published in Poetry Quarterly.

James Keery, editor. Apocalypse: An Anthology. Carcanet Press, Manchester, 2020. Includes British poets published in Poetry Quarterly.

Information about little magazines is not always easy to obtain, but a good guide is British Poetry Magazines 1914-2000, edited by David Miller and Richard Price, published by the British Library and Oak Knoll Press, 2006. 

There is an interesting article, Wrey Gardiner and Poetry Quarterly,by Mark Valentine, to be found on Wild Court, an on-line magazine from the English Department of King’s College, London.